From all the ecommerce options, WooCommerce might be the worst. Yet, it holds 65% of the market share and has its use cases. I am going to give you a ton of reasons not to use WooCommerce and one reason to use it. Because to be fair, WooCommerce only has one use case.

For those who don't know, WooCommerce is the #1 ecommerce platform on the planet as we speak.

Market Share

When something is being used by the majority of the world, it must be good, right? Well, no. WooCommerce is popular primarily because WordPress launched in 2003 and was a monopoly at the time. It's similar to why COBOL still exists. It's an old and flawed language, but its legacy-code is so significant that you can't just stop using it, and it's almost in every banking system.

Migrating from WooCommerce to something else is not that hard, but it is not free either. Especially for stores that are more than 10 years old. Also, keep in mind that there are close to 5 million stores built with WooCommerce.

Agencies

If you live in the West where everyone is using React, Node, and a lot of modern technologies, you might not notice how big WooCommerce is.

However, in Eastern Europe, with a population of over 250 million, where countries like Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania are still economically challenged, agencies are still using PHP and WordPress as their primary solution for their customers.

To help you better understand the scale, over 80% of ecommerce stores in Eastern Europe are built with WooCommerce.

As someone who has worked for multiple agencies here in Greece, people still support WooCommerce and truly believe that it is the best solution out there. Yet this is because of there incompetence as developers and not because it is truly a good software.

Native

WooCommerce is not native software; what I mean by that is, WordPress is the primary software. WooCommerce is like putting Figma inside Shopify as an app.

That way, you get all the unnecessary code WordPress has, which is a blogging software, and convert it to your own mix of technologies. WooCommerce could have easily been its own platform without any connection to WordPress.

That makes it slow and not scalable. Because scaling WordPress is a challenge by itself. You can't horizontally scale it; you have to get a bigger server each time.

The uptime of WooCommerce is actually really bad. For that, it is not only the scalability factor but also the plugins WordPress has. On many occasions, if you update a WordPress plugin, it can easily break your whole website.

The One Positive

The only reason I could possibly imagine using WooCommerce is if you want to stay matrix-free. If you don't want to deal with any major company because you are banned from everywhere like Andrew Tate, let's say you need something that is completely open-source and customizable, and even then, you will choose WooCommerce if you want more than an e-commerce store.

Blogging features, live chat, newsletter etc. Then and only then you will go with WooCommerce because you have alternatives like OpenCart or PrestaShop as well.

Customizable

WooCommerce is not customizable; in Shopify, it is a lot easier to add new features. If you want to customize anything in WooCommerce, you have to first be careful not to destroy or break your website. You need to understand WordPress and then read all the WooCommerce documentation available on the internet, and then it still might not work because some other developer could have made changes.

This is because WooCommerce lacks a folder structure or a specific way of doing things.

Alternatives

Of course, Shopify is your go-to when we are talking about ecommerce, but there are other platforms as well, like Kajabi if you want to sell courses or commercetools.

If you want to go completely custom, just don't choose Magento. If you go there, you can build your own backend like a lot of companies out there.

Final Words

In summary, while WooCommerce dominates the market largely due to its legacy ties with WordPress and its widespread adoption in regions like Eastern Europe, it faces significant criticism for its performance issues, lack of scalability, and dependency on WordPress.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found this article helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at kourouklis@pm.me, and I will respond.

You can also keep up with my latest updates by checking out my X here: x.com/sotergreco