Why you should never use WooCommerce

Lessons from a year building an ecommerce startup with the wrong tools

It has been a long year. We started a marketplace-type ecommerce site. For a variety of reasons, we decided to go with WooCommerce. As it turns out, it was a pretty big mistake, both from a technology and business perspective.

WooCommerce was written and is maintained by open-source contributors, and backed by a company that specializes in building blog services. Open source is a really amazing phenomenon, because people who solve problems for themselves open up that code to the world, free to be used by anyone else with similar problems.

WooCommerce lacks a basic understanding of how orders & ecommerce work:

• SKU generation tool allows you to have duplicate SKUs, and doesn’t bother generating SKUs for variations.
• It allows phantom variations, like {any size}, {any color}. A SKU needs to be explicitly defined, so you couldn’t possibly assign a SKU to a yet-unknown combination of attributes.
• Order numbering should always be sequential. You shouldn’t have to hack this functionality via a plugin. Most countries require invoices to be sequentially numbered, why would order numbers be any different.
• No basic functionality to add tracking numbers to orders, or to mark specific line items as fulfilled.

Not only that, since everything in WooCommerce is stored in the wp_postmeta table as keys & values, it’s impossible to search, and painfully slow.

By contrast, Shopify’s API reveals how much thought the Shopify team has put into thinking about how commerce works and modeling that in code.