WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin that powers more than 4.4 million eCommerce stores globally. You can install this plugin to transform your site into an eCommerce store.
WooCommerce and WordPress are both free and open-source software. But there are a few other things you will need to spend money on to start a WooCommerce store.
If you are new to WooCommerce and WordPress, you might not be aware of these prices, and it can be a real headache to search for them.
Business owners should plan and know how much they need to put aside for an online store's launch. Knowing how much work is involved in implementing these features will help you plan your budget appropriately.
So In today’s article, I’ll discuss the cost of making a WooCommerce online store. This article will discuss some of the costs associated with operating a WooCommerce online store.
So without any further ado, let’s jump into it.
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Is WooCommerce Free?
As mentioned above, WooCommerce itself is completely free, but you need to spend on a few things to run an online WooCommerce store.
The free means you can download and install it on your site. It will help you to set up a basic eCommerce store with necessary features like payment methods, shipping methods, etc.
You can also use other free extensions available in the WordPress repository to enhance the features of WooCommerce and get more than standard features.
However, if you want advanced features, there are some premium plugins that you can use, but you’ll have to spend extra on them to use their features.
With that being said, let’s have a quick overview of the things that you will need to spend on to start an online WooCommerce store. So, let’s dive into it.
WooCommerce Pricing Summary
First, I’ll give a quick overview of the hidden prices required to run a WooCommerce store, and then I’ll expand on each factor.
| Necessary or not? | Average Pricing | |
| Domain Name | Necessary | $12 per year |
| Hosting | Necessary | $10-$50 per month |
| WooCommerce Theme | Optional | $30 to $170 |
| Page Builder(Elementor) | Optional | $49 per year |
| Security | Necessary | $20 per year for an SSL certificate.$200 per year for a security plugin. |
| SEO Plugin | Necessary | $79 per year |
| Shipping Services | Necessary for physical products | $79 per year |
| Payment Processing | Necessary | 2.9 percent plus $0.30 per transaction |
| Marketing Tools | Optional | $89 per year |
| Developer Cost | Optional | $10-$150 per hour |
How Much Does a WooCommerce Website Cost?
Now, let’s explore each factor a bit more so you can better understand each factor's pricing. This will help you to plan your budget to start a WooCommerce store accordingly.
Domain Name Cost
Domains are web addresses that are easily memorable and relevant to the nature of your business. This will be the online address of your store, and users will write it in the search bar to reach your store.
It will be like YourStoreName.com. For example, aovup.com.
It is always a unique name, and remember, two websites/stores cannot have the same domain name. They may have the same name, but they cannot have the same domain extension if they have the same domain name.
With domain extension, I mean .com, .net, .uk, etc.
The domain name cost isn’t directly related to WooCommerce, but it is necessary to have it before starting a WooCommerce store.
The price of the domain name will mainly depend on the extension and the uniqueness of the domain. Typically, a domain name with a .com extension costs around $10.
Here’s the pricing for some of the popular domain extensions.
| TLD Domain Extension | Registration Price | Renewal Price |
| .com | $9.99 per year | $19.99 per year |
| .online | $5.99 per year | $29.99 per year |
| .store | $9.99 per year | $49.99 per year |
| .tech | $6.99 per year | $44.99 per year |
| .info | $3.99 per year | $21.99 per year |
Hosting Cost
Once you have the domain name, you’ll need a place to host your site and store all of its files so your customers can easily visit your store and shop. This place is called hosting.
Hosting can be of different types. A few WooCommerce dedicated hosting services are available that are fast and secure.
Its pricing depends on various factors like the number of visitors per month, storage, server, etc.
You can expect to pay anywhere from $10 to $50 monthly for a basic WordPress hosting plan, depending on your hosting provider and the features you require.
It's important to remember that as your site's number of visitors grows, so too might your hosting fees, though by that time, hopefully, your business is doing well enough to cover them.
Store Design
After you have the hosting, you need to set up your WooCommerce store and focus on designing it. So let’s take a closer look at it.
1. Themes and Plugins
Your store needs to be well-designed and reflect your brand. To design your store, you’ll need a theme.
However, despite the importance of visual appeal, a WooCommerce theme must also be functional and provide easy access to all the features that customers will require for effortless shopping.
Themes can be free or premium, but it completely depends on you. Premium themes definitely have the upper hand and give you several advanced features that you may not get with free themes.
If you want to go with a premium theme, it may cost somewhere around $30 to $170. The final cost of the theme is also influenced by a number of factors, including licensing, support, add-ons, and renewals.
Almost every WooCommerce theme comes with built-in designs, but the plugins like Elementor can help you build your store in a drag-and-drop method.
It has pre-built widgets that you can simply drag and drop to make the front end of your store more admirable. It also helps to keep your site responsive. It will cost you around $49 per year for a single site.
These are optional to start an online store, but you can use these to create a stunning front-end design for your store that will attract more customers.
2. Developer
It is also an optional thing and can come in handy if you don’t want to mess around with the design and other features you want. You can hire a developer that will take care of everything.
It depends on what you want from the developer. If you want a custom feature on your site, the pricing will be different, but if you want a complete store built, the pricing can vary.
Similarly, if you want to hire a developer for store maintenance, then the pricing is different. Typically a developer will cost around $10-$150 per hour.
Essential Plugins
Once you have the storefront of your store, you need to focus on a few essential things like SEO, Security, and other eCommerce features. So let’s dive into it.
1. SEO
You might be aware of the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It helps you rank on Google and other browsers to get organic traffic.
Fortunately, WordPress is SEO optimized, but you will need to focus on your site's on-page and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO means backlinks, marketing, etc.
While on-page SEO is something you can control, and it is the most important part of SEO. The plugins like All-in-One SEO will help you improve the on-page SEO score.
Its pricing starts from $79 per year. It also has a free version with some basic features.
2. Security
Next thing to focus on is the security of your store. Every site needs security, but eCommerce (where people trust you with their money) requires it essentially. Some website security aspects may cost money.
SSL(Secure Socket Layer) is one of the first things that will help users trust your site for making any transaction. SSL certificate lets secured sites communicate with each other.
It is also essential to enable HTTPS(Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) as it protects your customers' data.
SSL certificates are cheap. Some hosts offer free SSL certificates with domain registration; some hostings will make you buy one for $20 per year when you buy your domain.
You may also want to add a security suite to your site beyond the SSL certificate. WordPress security plugins offer malware scanning, removal, and firewalls. Sucuri security costs $200 annually for the basic package.
3. WooCommerce Quick View
It’s another essential plugin for running an eCommerce store that uses WooCmmerce plugin and WordPress.
Users who visit an online store may want to view the product without navigating to the product’s page. WooCommerce Quick View is specifically developed to increase your store’s conversion rate by allowing your customers to view the products from a single page quickly.
It will add a quick-view model window to your WooCommerce store, reducing the number of clicks back and forth to product pages.
4. Wholesale Suite
Wholesale suite can help you maximize your store’s potential. It is a pack of important plugins that will help you capture wholesale leads, create different pricing without duplicating existing products, create quick wholesale order forms, and more.
It has 14 different plugins, all are unique, and each has excellent features.
It is also very helpful if you want to expand your business and jump into the wholesale market. You can sell to B2B and B2C customers using this suite from a single site.
Recommended Guide
Conversion focus plugins
Starting an online WooCommerce store isn’t enough. You need to spend on a few conversion-focused plugins to get more conversions and sales. So let’s see a few good conversion-focused plugins.
1. Dynamic Pricing & Discount Rules
Dynamic Pricing & Discount Rules plugins will help you increase conversions by creating different types of discounts. It is a very advanced plugin that will help you to create discounts at the product and global levels.
Following are a few discount types that you can create with this plugin to increase your conversions.
- Storewide Discounts
- Percentage Discounts
- Bundled Discounts
- User Role Based Discounts
- Category Discounts
- Shipping Discounts, and more.
This plugin will cost you $8.25 per month for a basic package.
2. WooCommerce Request a Quote
This plugin is essential to allow your customers to get a custom quote for the pricing. It will help you to add a ‘Request a Quote’ form on the product page so your customers can request a quote for pricing.
You can add buttons for specific products or user-role.
You can use it if you sell in bulk or sell items that require special pricing. This plugin will cost you $5.75 per month.
Recommended Tutorial
Shipping and logistics
When running a WooCommerce store, shipping costs must be considered if you sell physical products. There are two types of expenses: those associated with the services you employ and those related to transport.
Prices for shipping an item can vary greatly depending on its size, weight, and destination, so we'll ignore this and concentrate on the service itself.
When you install the free WooCommerce plugin, you don't get any specific shipping service. But you can set a flat rate for a particular country or region as shipping fees and then ship the product to your customers by whatever service you want.
However, if you want to integrate shipping services such as UPS or FedEx, you need to buy an extension from the WooCommerce store.
You can use Royal Mail shipping services as more than 20K WooCommerce stores are using it to ship their products to their customers. This plugin will cost you $79 per year.
You can also use an additional plugin like Conditional Shipping & Payments to add advanced features like
- Postcode Shipping Restrictions
- Disable Shipping for Certain Products
- Restrict Shipping by State
- Shipping by User Role
- Shipping Discounts, and more.
The Conditional Shipping & Payments plugin will cost you $7 per month for the basic package.
Payments
All of the most well-known payment processors, like Stripe and PayPal, charge some sort of transaction fee. The fees for payment gateways range from a flat monthly or annual rate to a per-transaction basis.
For example, the transaction fees for using Stripe or PayPal are 2.9% plus $0.30 per sale. You won't have to pay a single penny every month or yearly for either.
How to Create a WooCommerce Store?
Now that you know the actual cost of making an online store, you should also know how to create one. So don’t worry, I got you here.
I have created a guide that will help you to check the essential things to start a successful online store.
You can simply follow that guide and start an online store.
Final Thoughts
It's hard to find a better e-commerce solution than WooCommerce. You can have your own online shop up and running in no time at all with the help of its many convenient features.
Although the plugin is without cost, operating an online business is not. It's not cheap to set up and maintain an online store.
It's important to know what you're getting into with a WooCommerce online store, as they can be costly between hosting, security, site design, WooCommerce extensions, and marketing.
