Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.

About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.

Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.

It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.

It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.

If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.

It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.

Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).

I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.

But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.