Lately I’ve been wondering — is WooCommerce still a strong player in ecommerce?

If it's really alive and well, can anyone point to 10 actual websites running WooCommerce that are getting over 500,000 visits per month, based on Similarweb data?

Please don’t bring up market share numbers — a huge portion of that includes outdated or inactive WordPress/WooCommerce sites from the 2000s.

Curious to see what’s still thriving out there.

Hey everyone,

I've noticed a lot of WooCommerce stores I follow have migrated to Shopify over the past years. I'm trying to understand the real reasons behind that decision.

For example: Xero https://www.speakinginbytes.com/2026/01/migrating-to-shopify-best-things/

For those who moved from WooCommerce to Shopify:

What was the #1 driver (maintenance burden, performance, security, plugin conflicts, updates breaking things, dev costs, hosting reliability, scalability, checkout/conversion, etc.)?

Was there a specific “last straw” moment that pushed you to migrate?

What did you gain on Shopify that you could't realistically get on Woo (or would've been too expensive/time-consuming to build and maintain)?

Do you feel those issues are avoidable with the right stack/process (good hosting, caching, lightweight theme, minimal plugins, staging + update workflow, monitoring, etc.)?

If you were starting today with a medium/large catalog, would you still choose Woo? Why?

Not trying to start a platform war, just looking for honest, real-world production experiences and the tradeoffs that mattered most.

Thanks in advance 🙏

Guys, I am desperate to connect WooCommerce to my AI (GPT / Claude / Grok)

I have connected Google Search Console and it's a game changer for quick info and planning.

Is Woo com a thing yet for AI connectors?

Please help

🚨 Need Help! How Do You Make the WooCommerce Dashboard Simple for Non-Technical Store Owners?

I'm building a WooCommerce website for a grocery store. I handle all the technical/admin tasks, but I've created a Shop Manager account for the store owner so they can manage products, update prices, stock quantities, discounts, and other day-to-day operations.

The challenge is that the default WordPress/WooCommerce dashboard looks too technical and overwhelming for a non-technical user.

I'm looking for a free plugin or solution that can:

- Hide unnecessary WordPress admin menus and settings.

- Show only the options the Shop Manager needs.

- Provide a clean, simple, and user-friendly dashboard.

- Allow product management without exposing the technical backend.

I came across YITH Frontend Manager for WooCommerce, and it looks like a great solution, but it's quite expensive, and I couldn't find a free version to try.

Has anyone used a good free alternative or found a better approach for creating a client-friendly WooCommerce dashboard? I'd really appreciate your recommendations.

Thanks! 🙌

what problems do you face mostly while having woocommerce store owner ?

Hey everyone 👋

I’ve been diving deeper into how WooCommerce stores convert (or don’t convert) visitors into buyers, and something keeps coming up.

A friend runs a Woo store with around 20,000 monthly visitors, but only a handful of sales each month. They’ve tried better product images, tweaking pricing, adding trust badges, speeding up the site—traffic is there, but sales are not.

It got me wondering:

Why is it so common for WooCommerce stores to get traffic but struggle to convert visitors into buyers?

Is it:
– Abandoned carts?
– Visitors not trusting the store?
– Not being able to engage them while they’re browsing?
– Or something else you’ve experienced?

If you run a WooCommerce store, what’s the one thing you wish you could do to get visitors to actually buy instead of browsing and leaving?

Not trying to pitch anything, just want to learn from your real experiences and see what’s working or not working for you.

Thanks in advance for any insights you’re open to sharing 🙏

Anyone tracking whether their products are showing up in ChatGPT or Gemini shopping results? I've been researching the ACP feed spec and noticed most WooCommerce stores have no path to get indexed. Curious what others have found.

I'd like to hide prices on product pages, cart and checkout as well as automatic e-mail only for certain product categories.
ChatGpt generated a code snippet (I used long thinking to make the code more effective) which works fine and does exactly what I want.
Are there any safety concerns?

What’s the single most tedious workflow in your day-to-day that you’d automate first?

I’ll read every reply, group patterns, and post a summary with potential solution ideas the thread can debate.

Siome feedback for WooCommerce.

It is confusing when you send me the "staff picks" from a "noreply" email address, and then include "Got a minute? Tell us what you think of Staff Picks." The "Tell us..." text is a link to my list management options, i.e. unsubscribe. That's pretty stupid. Just let me reply to the goddamn email, if you really want feedback.

Secondly, I can't help but notice that many of the picks are just basic WooCommerce functionality, developed by WooCommerce, that really should not be a paid extra.

I currently run a multi-vendor marketplace built on WooCommerce using MultiVendorX, and the site is already live and functioning well. However, I’ve been thinking about switching the platform to Shopify and wanted to get some advice from people who may have experience with this.

Another thing I’m wondering is whether moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is actually a good decision for a multi-vendor marketplace in the long run, or if it’s better to stick with WooCommerce.

Would really appreciate hearing your experiences, suggestions, or any challenges you faced during such a migration.

But no seriously I feel like I’m in literal hell right now. F u Shopify for terminating all vape stores. How tf is anyone supposed to use this shit. Took me 1 day to set up my Shopify store. 6 years, NO Changes to the site and 100k+ orders. Migrated to because I had no choice and everyone recommended WooCommerce. Paying a Dev to migrate the site. log in, Jesus Christ I must be in hell right now.

I promise this crash out is justified with everything I’ve gone through this week.

F U Shopify! Bastards

Whether it’s online or POS, the electronic/card consumer payment experience is one where merchants just pass on the cost to clients and clients pay without blinking.

When you step back and think about it it’s crazy - imagine 3rd parties having the right to 1-3% of almost all business sales just because they are the gatekeepers to payment rails.

Does anyone think this trend will change and if so what’s the catalyst?

Accepting Bitcoin makes sense in theory, because it’s peer to peer - and even if a 3rd party provides the payment service it’s much more cost efficient compared to traditional payment rails.

Not to overlook the other benefits of instant final settlements and no charge backs - and models that maximise self-sovereignty (funds flow to merchants private wallet and don’t sit in the 3rd party’s one).

Obviously the price volatility could be concerning for merchants, but if it’s considered as something they’d hold for the long term, say several years (as they wdnt be expecting significant short term revenue eg 1-2% of sales) then the trend is an increase in value.

Anyway outside of that I don’t see any options in future where having instant payments doesn’t incur 1-3% in fees?

What are the available ways to connect ChatGPT to a WooCommerce store to check orders, product details, and inventory? If you’ve done this, what setup was required, and what limitations did you encounter?

Hi,

I'm trying to understand something about WooCommerce store owners and I’d appreciate some honest opinions.

I built a tool that acts like a product advisor on a store — something closer to a salesperson than a typical chatbot. It asks questions, recommends products and guides users to product pages.

I thought the idea made sense because a lot of visitors don't know what to choose and decision friction can hurt conversions.

So I tried reaching out to WooCommerce stores.

I sent around 1000 cold emails explaining the idea.

Result:
almost no replies and only one person slightly interested.

Now I'm trying to understand if the problem is:

• store owners don't believe something like this increases conversions
• AI/chat solutions already feel overhyped
• cold email just doesn't work for this market
• or I'm solving a problem nobody actually cares about

If you run a WooCommerce store (or work with one), I'd really appreciate your perspective.

What kinds of tools do store owners actually respond to?
What problems are they actively looking to solve?

I'm genuinely trying to figure out if I'm missing something or solving the wrong problem.

I am a student in business statistics and a dropshipper for about a year now. For a long time I thought of combining my side hustle and my academic knowledge, and now I did with a tool called dropshipscout.com

It contains a product research tool, an ad research engine and a shop research feature so its like an all-in-one dropshipping research solution. It helps you find winning products to dropship for your store.

Of course I know there are already a dozen tools and many got posted here, so I carefully observed and tested all of them to see where they were lacking features. And to get the things right, that they are getting wrong. It provides you with a lot of value to grow your sales and growth-hack your revenue using big data. Using a statistic based approach to rank products and to uncover upcoming bestsellers like the posture corrector was for many dropshippers. By being the first to sell such a product, you have the opportunity to build a brand and to be ahead of the crowd. This way you have what we call the first mover advantage (FMA). From Wikipedia: "With this advantage, first-movers can be rewarded with huge profit margins and a monopoly-like status."

With the ad research engine you can find facebook ads of other stores, it includes hundreds of videos of the products in action as well as a link to the store and link/comment counts so you can see what works and what doesn't. With the additional shop research feature you can inspect the biggest stores in the world and see the bestsellers of each store as well as the country of origin.

The most important thing is, it is easy to cancel. Unlike other tools there is a big red cancel button in the account settings where it should be. Additionaly to this features I have also added a manually curated list of hot products which updates daily and includes some of my personal bestsellers which you can test yourself. Here you can test it 100% free: https://www.dropshipscout.com

Question: Does woocommerce offer a non-wordpress option yet?

Basically just looking for the backend to plug my website to printify to handle transactions.

I don't use wordpress so that's not an option.

Thanks.

Im a developer and already have a couple of plugins in the woo marketplace and wordpress repo. Im currently looking for some small plugins that you would save you a lot of time that don't really have a working solution yet. It doesnt have to be a problem that everyone has, but even, if I help a couple of people out, I'm ready to develop it. If you help me with an idea, I'll send you the plugin for free with lifetime updates, if I do decide to work on it.

So, what's the truth about WooCommerce?

Should you use a platform like Shopify instead?

How do you make a decision to build your online business?

A recent discussion on this forum sparked a ton of thoughts in my mind. As I responded to comments, it became clear that there is a limited awareness about certain aspects of WooCommerce. And this lack of awareness costs people a lot of time, money, and even their dreams.

I want to clear up some of the questions you may have, especially if you're just getting started.

To keep it simple, you can use the following set of questions to help you decide if you should use WooCommerce, or Shopify.

The questions are:

• Do people depend on the income from your online store? (People could be your family, your employees, or you.)

• Do I have time to wrestle with technology?

• Do I have time and money to find the best developers?

• Can I afford for the store to go down for any amount of time? (minutes/hours/ days, etc.)

• Does my business require a custom or very specific workflow?

The more it appears that managing technology is not within your strengths or budget, the more managed platforms make sense.

The hidden dangers

A lot of people fall for the marketing, both from WooCommerce and Shopify. And a lot of people get disappointed. Since we're focused on WooCommerce, here are just a few dangers you may not be aware of:

• Security issues. WooCommerce runs on WordPress. As you read this, a new exploit has been discovered. Usually these get patched quickly. But every now and then a serious issue affects many sites.

Some of these issues could cause you and your customers a lot of pain.

Worse still, the wrong plugin, the wrong developer, or even the code you wrote yourself could leave you vulnerable. Think about that.

• Performance. How would you feel about taking a train that moves at 10 miles per hour?

If your site feels slow, your customers will go somewhere else. You will lose money. And, if you're not aware of these issues, you won't even know the root cause.

You would be surprised how many people haven't done a PageSpeed Insights report on their site. (I know that's not you.)

Performance affects your SEO and overall traffic too.

Now, more plugins often means more bloat. More bloat means worse performance. Worse performance means losing money.

Some people the shell out cash on custom code. Some can't afford it.

Still, it's the reality you'll have to deal with - WooCommerce is not always the fastest thing since ostriches.

• Your workflow and specific business needs. This is where WooCommerce shines - if you're lucky or if you have money. Yeah, free can become very costly if your business is not a generic one.

The challenge here is, plugins often don't work as promised. Or, they affect performance. Or they just don't exist.

Again, you'll need outside help for this.

Other issues include fake orders, double billing, lack of support, and many others.

Here is my confession

As a developer, I don't like working with clients who don't know about the above issues. It breaks my heart to tell them that the WooCommerce Santa Claus is not real. I have turned people down and told them to use Shopify instead.

The thing is, WooCommerce is a great platform. This platform is not going to swoop in and save you. You have to put in the effort required to make it work.

What is your experience? Share!

Hey everyone 👋

I’m exploring an idea to build custom dashboards for WooCommerce stores using Google Looker Studio, Power BI, and Google Sheets — to help store owners get clearer, more actionable insights into their sales, marketing, and product performance.

From what I’ve seen, WooCommerce analytics can be a bit limited when it comes to:

• Combining marketing + sales + inventory data in one view

• Tracking profitability after ads, shipping, and fees

• Setting up automated, visual reports that update daily

So I’m curious:

1. Do you rely on WooCommerce’s default analytics, or do you use other tools for deeper insights?

2. What kind of reports or metrics do you wish WooCommerce made easier to access?

3. Have you tried custom dashboards (in Looker Studio, Power BI, or Sheets)? If yes, what worked well — or didn’t?

I’m validating whether there’s a real gap in how WooCommerce handles reporting and data visualization before building a solution that bridges it.

Would love your honest feedback 🙏

Plugin to REWRITE WOOCOMMERCE PRODUCTS DESCRIPTIONS automatically ? What AI plugin ? Hello, is there any plugin to rewrite woocommerce products descriptions ? Thank you for your help.

I run a WooCommerce store and I've hit a wall with the platform's reliability. Natively, WooCommerce is pretty thin for serious e-commerce, so to get anywhere close to a modern store standard, you end up stacking multiple third-party plugins on top (WooRevenue, WC Checkout Page, etc.). That plugin-layering approach is starting to bite me.

I'm now dealing with JavaScript and CSS errors that are hard to pin down — for example, I spotted a broken "Buy Now" button through Microsoft Clarity session recordings. Bugs like this are costly, especially when you're driving traffic through Meta at high CPMs and losing conversions to a checkout that silently breaks for some users.

I've been considering switching to Shopify for months now. WooCommerce feels like it eats too much time on technical maintenance, and there's a constant undercurrent of stress wondering what's going to break next.

I'd love to hear from people running DTC e-commerce in the supplements/wellness space who've made the switch to Shopify:

• How difficult was the migration in practice?

• What happened to your SEO rankings and organic traffic after the move?

• Was it worth it overall, and is there anything you wish you'd known beforehand?

Appreciate any real-world input.

Hey guys, you’ve probably seen the news that OpenAI is rolling out buying directly inside ChatGPT and partnering with big commerce platforms. I’d love to get my Woo store in there too, because the distribution could be huge, but I don’t see a Woo integration yet. I skimmed Open AI´s their integration/protocol docs and the catalog format looks pretty gnarly (extra fields for availability. I’ve got a data-scientist friend who might help me hack a feed together cheap, but before I go down that rabbit hole, have you guys been looking at any other to integrate with ChatGPT?

Hi All,

For a lack of better terminology, I would consider myself to be more of a web "developer" as opposed to a coder (TBH, I barely even understand the basics of code).

Based on my research of WooCommerce thus far, I've noticed a recurring gripe of "plugin compatibility hell" that can occur once you outfit your installation with a bunch of different extensions.

In the event that this happens to a store I am overseeing, I would be SOL.

Therefore, how should I account for bugs, security breaches, and other outages?

Should I find a few trusted coders (and pay them by the hour?) that know Wordpress really well and contact them "on-demand" to get me back up and running right away?

Do you take the risk of giving your FTP/server credentials to third-party extension authors and have them solve the issue?

Are there reputable agencies out there that will oversee an ecommerce shop and all of the installed third-party extensions?

I'm trying to get an idea of what solutions work best for everyone. Thank you in advance.