Woocommerce Pricing: How Much Does It Cost To Run A Store?

Planning and building an online business is interesting. While starting an online business is relatively easy nowadays, generating a great income and adopting the latest trends have been a challenging factor. Unfortunately, very few stores get through the first year of operations due to reasons such as lack of motivation, inaccurate market research, weak product lineup, and incompetency in operations. One of the most prevalent reasons why many e-commerce storefronts fail to go beyond the basic online presence is the concern about the actual cost of launching the store.

Having a detailed understanding of the various costs involved helps you plan accordingly and prevent any unexpected costs. Being a powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress, WooCommerce lets users manage and develop online stores. Though it doesn’t demand expert-level coding, advanced customisation requires technical expertise. Using drag-and-drop page builders, you can design your WooCommerce store without having to code. WordPress also helps with modifications and updates for WooCommerce store designs with page builders and themes.

According to the BuiltWith report, 14,986,693 websites are powered by WooCommerce, out of which 6,118,558 are live. The article doesn’t cover the entire WooCommerce cost to perform business online but addresses various costs involved in running a WooCommerce-powered store. Let’s dive in to learn about WooCommerce pricing in detail.

Launched in 2011, WooCommerce is an ecommerce plugin, designed particularly for WordPress. It offers a flexible solution to run an ecommerce store and integrates effortlessly with WordPress, the well-known CMS that enables website and business management.

As it is open-sourced, you can change any business feature and include new extensions. WooCommerce is widely accepted due to its ease of use, reliable functionality and a range of customisation options. But it is essential as it lets you utilise WordPress, the most remarkable CMS globally, to run and manage your online business. If you already own a WordPress website and would like to have more control over your business, WooCommerce is an ideal choice.

With WooCommerce, you can ensure selling almost everything online ranging from physical goods to digital products or services. It also offers an array of high-quality plugins that make online store management easier. Above that, WooCommerce is SEO-friendly with in-built SEO features and plugins. The open-source nature of WooCommerce gives it high customisability and gives merchants full-fledged control over the functionality and store appearance. 

Since WooCommerce is relatively easy to implement, many website owners feel curious about the platform. Here are four straightforward steps towards learning how to set up WooCommerce.

1. Navigate to the WordPress dashboard
2. Choose ‘Plugin Options’
3. Find WooCommerce
4. Install & Activate the WooCommerce plugin for your WordPress website

With the help of Setup Wizard, you can easily and quickly finish setting up your online store. 

As WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that is free to use, you can start a WooCommerce store at $0 if you have a place to host it and an array of products ready to sell. However, things aren’t that easy in this marketplace. While running a WooCommerce store, you need to keep in mind certain other costs that are significant in running a profitable business.  

WooCommerce Cost Breakdown

**The prices mentioned above are for reference and are subject to change.  

Essential Plugins 

 **The prices mentioned above are for reference and are subject to change.

Marketing Tools  

Here are the tips you can follow to reduce WooCommerce costs and scale your investment:

• Go for a hosting provider that provides a free domain with plans. It saves you domain registration fees for the first year and makes it easy to manage services.
• Explore free trials and go for free WooCommerce extensions before you get committed to paid plugins.
• Consider all-in-one solutions to stop investing in various plugins that could slow down your website. For instance, JetPack offers security tools, backup features, and performance optimisation saving you from installing add-on plugins for those processes.
• If you have less budget for domain names, fetch different combinations of keywords and domain extensions to minimise costs. Opting for less common Top Level Domains (TLDs) can be generally an affordable alternative.
• Many companies provide discounts on web services at major sales events, so plan your purchases for these core sales events.
• Review subscriptions regularly and cancel subscriptions you no longer require, to avoid paying for unused services.
• Begin with free themes initially. As your business evolves and its needs expand, go for paid or custom-built themes. 

The all-new 9.6.0 version was released on 20th January 2025. Here are the specific features included in the updated version of WooCommerce. WooCommerce 9.6 makes finding quicker and much easier. The updated product filtering system lets the customers classify price, category, size, colour, etc; depending upon which options you provide in-store.

Refreshed product editor:

The classic product and coupon editors' designs have been updated with advanced UI updates incorporating CSS-specific changes. Based on this effort, the ‘Add New’ button and duplicate header were removed in a separate update enabling a dedicated testing and review process. This move ensures minimal disruption to merchants accustomed to the existing workflows and keeps it compatible with third-party extensions interacting with the editor header.

Advanced Payments Settings Interface:

WooCommerce 9.6 releases the initial phase of the recently declared modernised payments approach. By executing the reactify-classic-payments-settings feature in the WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin, you can preview the payments settings interface (React-based).

Store API Upgrades:

To enable protection against card testing and DoS (Denial of service) attacks, the new update has included a configurable rate-limiting system to the Store API. Merchants can enable this through WooCommerce-Settings-Advanced-Features.

Remote Logging UI:

Users can easily manage their privacy by adding UI control to facilitate a Remote logging feature irrespective of the usage tracking settings. This configuration can be done under WooCommerce- Settings-Advanced-Features.

Enhanced Measurement Unit Handling:

The measurement units get automatically updated with the change in store location while maintaining existing settings. Merchants can customise units in: WooCommerce-Settings-Products-Measurements, and developers can make relevant country-specific unit adjustments in ./i18n/locale-info.php to reference updated locale data.

Product Summary Block Additions:

The block supports text styling, truncation control and a ‘Read More’ link. It works with compatibility in various contexts, like All Products and Single Product templates, along with support for languages with the word definitions, while also adding to many improvements. Existing blocks don’t upgrade automatically, however, an upgrade path is accessible via Inspector Controls.

Enhancements in the REST API Product:

REST API/products endpoint in WooCommerce offers developers greater control over data retrieval with advanced filtering parameters that help you manage precise product queries. 

The WooCommerce plugin is free, however, it can’t take off without a hosting plan and a domain name. After these basics are covered, you can decide whether to spend your WooCommerce store or not. Even while there are various costs involved in WooCommerce, it is one of the most cost-effective solutions you can rely on to start your online business.

With the help of a WooCommerce development company, you can build a user-friendly e-commerce storefront to take care of your store, products and customers. At WAC, we have WooCommerce experts to offer you the most in-demand e-commerce solutions to increase the online presence of your store with advanced shopping features. To learn more about the WooCommerce development and other e-commerce development services we offer, reach out to our e-commerce experts now!