Why You Should Not Use WooCommerce

Sadly WooCommerce is the most used eCommerce platform in the world. WooCommerce has its purpose, but we here at Trellis believe that purpose and use case should be much more specific and limited to a very specific set of use cases. Here is why you should not use WooCommerce:

• WooCommerce is a plugin to WordPress.
• WordPress is not an eCommerce platform
• WooCommerce out of the box has very little functionality
• WooCommerce requires many plugins to be competitive with other eCommerce functionality
• Many WordPress plugins can lead to many conflicts, site speed issues, and high maintenance costs
• WooCommerce is not well designed for large catalogs and order volume scale because of its simplistic database architecture
• It is not as easy to use like a SaaS solution Shopify or BigCommerce and doesn’t scale like Magento

Very few large eCommerce websites are on WooCommerce. Almost all large eCommerce sites are either completely custom, on an enterprise platform like Salesforce Commerce Cloud or are on other platforms like Shopify and Magento. It would be one thing if WooCommerce was easier to use than other platforms, but Shopify and BigCommerce have completely changed the game there. BigCommerce and Shopify are both SaaS based and auto update so you don’t have to worry about paying a developer to manually update plugins and WordPress to stay up to date on your software. Additionally the ease of use of BigCommerce and Shopify are really much higher than any other eCommerce platform, eliminating the top argument for WooCommerce which is ease of use.
We believe that in almost all uses cases Magento, Shopify, or BigCommerce are a better fit for companies running WooCommerce stores. However, here are the use cases where we think WooCommerce might make sense:

• A content heavy site with a few products that are secondary to the content focused site
• A content focused site with something like donations or a small piece that requires checkout / payment
• A site that needs to tightly integrate content and products together and focuses more on content than eCommerce

If you disagree or have comments please post them!