Comment by dofm

I am not from the “Matt school” of anything.

I did write a mangled sentence late at night and you are correct to object to it.

But you seem kind of angry and have decided something about me, and are now cherrypicking things off the woocommerce site to try to make me look foolish (as if that site’s gallery is necessarily authoritative?)

Did I explicitly say “shopify is more expensive”, for one thing? You are putting those words in my mouth.

However. I just looked at the numbers. Shopify starts at £19 per month. I could set up a speculative woocommerce store on good hosting for about £40 per year.

Several of the people I have set up stores for over the years have had no certainty that they would make a sale for months and yet needed customisations in their setup that no hosted e-commerce company could offer in their cheap plans.

I have written dynamic product functionality, installed weird extensions, even used Wordpress as the prototype storefront in a multi-vendor, multi-supplier fulfilment network demo.

Woocommerce exists. It functions. It can be rolled out for tiny, tiny money on hosting you control and can customise. It is OK. Not that fun to administer but it’s a complete open source store with a huge ecosystem. It’s exceptionally widely deployed. For people who want to run shoestring customised store experiments or sell on tiny margins or for charities, it’s clearly an option.