WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Installing it turns a standard WordPress site into a complete online store: product catalogs, shopping cart, checkout, payments, shipping, taxes, and order management. About 4 million live stores run on it worldwide, more than on Shopify, according to Store Leads.
The core plugin is free. Costs come from hosting, a theme or builder, and extensions for specific needs: subscriptions, bookings, wholesale pricing, or advanced shipping. Because it’s open source, a WooCommerce store has no platform fees, no transaction cuts beyond your payment processor’s, and no rules about what you’re allowed to sell beyond the law itself, which is why supplement, CBD, and other restricted-category brands often migrate there from hosted platforms.
The tradeoff versus a hosted platform like Shopify is responsibility: you own the stack, so hosting quality, updates, and security are yours to manage (or your agency’s). In exchange you get unlimited customization: the checkout, the product logic, and the integrations can be whatever the business needs.
