WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most widely used open-source e-commerce platform, built as a plugin for WordPress and maintained by Automattic. It turns a self-hosted WordPress site into a full online store for physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, memberships, and bookings. Woo reports more than four million stores and 31% of the top million e-commerce sites.

Because it runs on your own hosting, you own the store data and code outright. There is no platform subscription and WooCommerce itself takes no transaction fee; you pay only your host, your payment processor, and any paid extensions you choose.

Store pages are designed in the WordPress block editor, and the Woo Marketplace plus the wider WordPress plugin ecosystem cover payments (WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal), shipping carriers, tax, marketing, CRM, and marketplace sync with Google, Amazon, and social channels. Developers get the full PHP codebase, hooks, and a REST API.

The trade-off is responsibility. WooCommerce needs a WordPress host with PHP and MySQL or MariaDB, and the store owner handles updates, backups, security, and performance tuning; large catalogues need good hosting and caching. Plugin conflicts are a recurring maintenance cost, and support comes from extension vendors, hosts, and the community rather than one central team. Managed WooCommerce hosting from providers such as WordPress.com or Kinsta removes part of that work for a monthly fee.