What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a plugin that adds a complete online store to a WordPress website. The free core plugin sells physical products and digital downloads. Selling appointments, reservations, or other bookings requires a paid extension such as WooCommerce Bookings, one of the add-ons sold on the official WooCommerce Marketplace.

After you install the free plugin, the Setup Wizard walks you through your store's industry, products, and location. Free and paid themes control how the storefront looks, WooCommerce blocks display products on your pages, and you can connect payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Amazon Pay. WooCommerce's WordPress.org plugin listing counts support for 100+ payment gateways (August 2026). For the full walkthrough, follow our step-by-step installation guide, then our getting started with WooCommerce guide to build out the store.

The real cost of running WooCommerce

The plugin itself costs nothing. The core download is free, the code is open source, and there's no license fee or monthly platform charge. A running store isn't $0, though. You'll pay for hosting, a domain name, any paid extensions and themes from the WooCommerce Marketplace, and the per-transaction processing fees your payment gateway charges. Marketplace extensions and themes are sold as subscriptions, and prices change, so check the current listing on woocommerce.com before you build a paid feature into your plan. Budget for the whole stack, not just the plugin.

Requirements to run WooCommerce

WooCommerce runs on any WordPress site that can install plugins. That covers self-hosted WordPress, meaning the free software from WordPress.org on hosting you control, and, as of July 2026, every paid WordPress.com plan. Free WordPress.com sites block plugin installs. Choose hosting sized for a store, since every product search and checkout hits the database, and add an SSL/TLS certificate so checkout runs over HTTPS before you take a payment. DreamHost's Online Store option installs WooCommerce or Ecwid from the panel; for WooCommerce, we pair it with a premium plan like DreamPress rather than an entry-level tier.

WooCommerce vs. hosted platforms

WooCommerce and hosted platforms like Shopify solve the same problem with opposite trade-offs. The decision rule:

• Choose WooCommerce when you already run WordPress (or want to) and you want full ownership of your data, checkout, and customization. You control your core store data and can change hosts, though extension-specific data and third-party integrations may need separate migration work.
• Choose a hosted platform when you'd rather pay a predictable monthly fee and let the vendor handle maintenance, security, and updates for you.

For a detailed side-by-side, read our WooCommerce vs. Shopify comparison.

The maintenance trade-off

Ownership cuts both ways. With WooCommerce, you are responsible for updates, extension compatibility, backups, security, and performance as your catalog and traffic grow; no platform vendor does that work for you. A typical failure mode: an extension update conflicts with your theme or with WooCommerce core, and checkout breaks until you roll it back. Test updates on a staging copy of your site, and keep current backups so a bad update costs you minutes instead of sales.

The company behind WooCommerce

WooCommerce is developed and supported by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com and Jetpack, and the code is open source, so anyone can inspect, modify, or extend it. Store Leads data published on woocommerce.com (August 2026) counts more than 4 million online stores built with WooCommerce and puts it on 31% of the top 1 million ecommerce sites.