WooCommerce or custom: how we actually choose

Agencies tend to answer this question with whatever they prefer building. A WordPress shop will tell you WooCommerce handles everything. A development shop will tell you plugins are a liability. Both are selling.

We build both, which does not make us neutral, but it does mean we have had to decide properly several times. This is how that decision actually goes.

Start from the assumption that WooCommerce wins

For most stores it does, and that is not a compromise. It is mature, it is free, thousands of people have already solved the problems you are about to hit, and your team can learn to run it from a video rather than from us.

If your store looks like this, stop reading and use WooCommerce:

• Products are products — a name, a price, a few variants like size or colour
• Payments go through a gateway everyone supports
• Shipping is flat, weight-based, or handled by a courier integration that already exists
• Your catalogue is in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands
• Nothing about how you sell is unusual enough that you have to explain it twice

Two of the stores in our own portfolio are exactly this, and building them custom would have been us charging for work the customer did not need.

Where it stops

The trouble is never the shop itself. It is the thing beside the shop.

The catalogue does not behave like a catalogue

Generic medicine is the clearest example we have worked on. Buyers search by salt name as often as by brand, product names are long and nearly identical to each other, and getting a listing wrong is not a refund, it is a safety problem. That is not a theme choice. The structure of the catalogue and the way search works over it are the product, so we built them.

The process is the product

A booking is not a purchase. A taxi route has a pickup time, a vehicle class, a passenger count and a dispatcher who needs to see it before the customer has paid. You can force that into a cart, and people do. Then every change request for the next three years is a fight with the cart.

You are selling to businesses, not people

B2B breaks the model quietly. Different prices for different buyers, minimum order quantities, credit terms, a quote that becomes an order later, approval before anything ships. There are plugins for each of these. The problem is that you need five of them and they were written by five different people.

It has to talk to something you already run

An existing ERP, a stock system, an accounts package. One well-documented API is fine either way. Several systems, or one with no API at all, and the integration becomes the project — at which point the store is the easy part.

The cost nobody quotes you

WooCommerce is free. A real store is not, and the gap is made of plugins.

Count them honestly before you compare prices. A typical store ends up with a payment extension, a shipping extension, something for tax, something for subscriptions or bookings, a page builder, a backup tool and a security tool. Most are annual licences. Add them up and you have a recurring bill that nobody mentioned in the quote.

Then there is the part that costs more than money. Every plugin is code you did not write, updating on its own schedule, by an author who may lose interest. When two of them disagree after an update, the site breaks on a Saturday and nobody owns the problem.

How to tell which one you are

Four questions, and the answers are usually obvious once they are written down.

1. Describe how you sell to someone outside your industry. If it takes more than two minutes, you are probably custom.
2. Count the plugins a WooCommerce version would need. Past about eight, the maintenance argument has flipped.
3. Ask what you want to change in year two. If the answer is products and prices, WooCommerce. If it is how the thing works, custom.
4. Ask who maintains it. A team that knows WordPress and no PHP developer is a real constraint, and it is a legitimate reason to choose WooCommerce even when custom would fit better.

Starting on one and moving to the other

This is more common than either side admits, and it is not a failure. Launch on WooCommerce, find out what customers actually do, rebuild the parts that turned out to matter. You learn more from six months of real orders than from any amount of planning.

One thing makes that move survivable, and it is worth insisting on from day one: your product data, your customer records and your order history belong to you, in a format you can export. A store you cannot leave is a store you will be stuck with.

The short version

Use WooCommerce unless something about how you sell genuinely does not fit a shop. If it does not fit, no number of plugins will make it fit, and paying for them twice over is the expensive way to find that out.

If you are not sure which side of that line you are on, describe your order process to us and we will tell you — including when the answer is the cheaper one.