European alternatives to WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress, owned and stewarded by Automattic in San Francisco. It adds a product catalog, cart, checkout and order management to a WordPress install that the merchant hosts themselves, on their own PHP and MySQL stack.

The core plugin charges no platform fee and takes no revenue share. Its own pricing page is a list of other people’s bills instead: hosting at roughly USD 25 to 350 a month depending on the store, paid extensions at USD 29 to 299 a year each, and payment processing at around 2.5 to 2.9 per cent plus a fixed fee. You supply the server, the backups and the TLS certificate.

The lock-in is WordPress itself. The store is not a separate product but a plugin inside a content site, sharing its theme, its admin, its user table and however many years of posts sit alongside it. Moving the shop usually means moving the site.