WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the world's most widely used open-source e-commerce platform, built as a WordPress plugin. It transforms any self-hosted WordPress installation into a fully functional online store, supporting physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, memberships, and bookings. Because it runs on your own server, you retain complete ownership of your store data, code, and configuration — there is no platform lock-in and no transaction fees imposed by WooCommerce itself. The plugin integrates deeply with the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) for drag-and-drop store design, while hundreds of official and third-party extensions cover payments (WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal), shipping carriers, CRM integrations, marketing, and more. WooCommerce requires a WordPress hosting environment with PHP and a MySQL or MariaDB database, making it fundamentally different from fully managed platforms like Shopify or Squarespace — the self-hosted architecture gives far more flexibility and control, but also places the responsibility for hosting, updates, backups, and security on the store owner. Maintained by Automattic and backed by a massive global developer community, WooCommerce powers an estimated 30–40% of all online stores worldwide.