WooCommerce is a free and open-source customizable eCommerce platform. It helps businesses to easily set up an online storefront for selling their products. WooCommerce is well known for its extreme customizability. WooCommerce provides everything that is needed to set up and manage an online business in one place and is trusted by millions of small and medium businesses. It is built on top of WordPress – A very popular free and open-source content management system.
This means WooCommerce can take advantage of the already existing rich WordPress community and customizations on top of its own customization options. With a market share of almost one-third of the total eCommerce platform market, WooCommerce has become the defacto standard for small businesses with eCommerce ambitions. That said, it is not without its faults and there are other viable alternatives that may be better for specific use cases. If you are not someone who goes with the crowd and wants to explore the other side, here are the top ten WooCommerce alternatives.
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What is WooCommerce?
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WooCommerce is essentially an extension built on top of WordPress but optimized for setting up online storefronts. Other than the actual shopping website, WooCommerce provides numerous functionalities that aid in managing an online business. WooCommerce marketing helps in reaching the right audience and promoting your products. WooCommerce payments help in accepting payments via the most common payment methods based on a percentage commission model. WooCommerce Checkout helps in implementing simplified shopping cart flow. All activities related to shipping can be managed by WooCommerce Shipping. WooCommerce mobile app helps one to manage the orders and products on the go.
WooCommerce also provides numerous extensions and plugins that can enhance its functionality. It provides extensions to aid conversions, store content management, order management, customer service, etc. It also has a marketplace where partners upload their extensions that aids in integrating with various third-party software. WooCommerce theme store is well known for its large collection of themes optimized for industry domains. Now that we understand what WooCommerce is capable of, let’s explore the top ten alternatives for WooCommerce.
What is the Need for a WooCommerce Alternative?
While WooCommerce offers tons of features and endless customizability, it is not without its faults. Below are a few reasons why some organizations may think about WooCommerce alternatives.
- WooCommerce is completely free and open-source, but one needs to rely on third-party hosting. It does not provide a completely hosted solution at this moment. There are third-party partnerships to work around this limitation though.
- Since it is free, there are no support plans with strict SLAs. When you encounter some issues, you are mostly dependent on community support.
- WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress. While this is a big advantage from a support and maintenance perspective, some may want to move away from WordPress because of its ubiquity.
- While WooCommerce excels in customizability and has the ability to support virtually any eCommerce use case, it does have a steep learning curve compared to some other completely managed solutions.
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Hevo with its minimal learning curve can be set up in just a few minutes allowing the users to load data without having to compromise performance. Its strong integration with umpteenth sources allows users to bring in data of different kinds in a smooth fashion without having to code a single line.
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- Completely Automated: The Hevo platform can be set up in just a few minutes and requires minimal maintenance.
- Real-Time Data Transfer: Hevo provides real-time data migration, so you can have analysis-ready data always.
- Transformations: Hevo provides preload transformations through Python code. It also allows you to run transformation code for each event in the Data Pipelines you set up. You need to edit the event object’s properties received in the transform method as a parameter to carry out the transformation. Hevo also offers drag and drop transformations like Date and Control Functions, JSON, and Event Manipulation to name a few. These can be configured and tested before putting them to use.
- Connectors: Hevo supports 100+ Integrations to SaaS platforms such as WooCommerce, WordPress, files, databases, analytics, and BI tools. It supports various destinations including Amazon Redshift, Firebolt, Snowflake Data Warehouses; Databricks, Amazon S3 Data Lakes; and MySQL, SQL Server, TokuDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL databases to name a few.
- 100% Complete & Accurate Data Transfer: Hevo’s robust infrastructure ensures reliable data transfer with zero data loss.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100+ sources that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required.
- 24/7 Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to you through chat, email, and support calls.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
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Best WooCommerce Alternatives
Here are the best WooCommerce alternatives:
WooCommerce Alternatives: Shopify
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Shopify is a completely managed eCommerce website building service. Shopify offerings come with hosting and the user does not have to take any separate effort in deploying them. Shopify provides a drag and drop interface for creating rich storefronts. In case, you want more customization, it is also possible to use custom code to develop various features. The Shopify marketplace gives one access to thousands of add-ons for accomplishing specific features and integrating with third-party software services.
Shopify is free to try for the first 14 days. After that, the pricing starts at 29 USD/month. The basic plan comes with support for 2 staff accounts and up to 4 inventory locations. Reports are not supported in the basic version. Compared to WooCommerce, Shopify provides hosted solutions, has SLA-based support, and is independent of WordPress.
In case you want to take advantage of Shopify while staying with WordPress, there is a Shopify Cart plugin that can be used. It can integrate with your WordPress website and provide Shopify features.
WooCommerce Alternatives: Adobe Commerce
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Adobe Commerce is an eCommerce platform available as a completely managed service. It was formerly known as Magento and was later acquired by Adobe. It provides a drag and drop-based interface for creating aesthetic storefronts. Hosting is included by default and the business owners only need to manage their products and storefront content. It helps you manage multiple channels for sale and expand to multiple countries from the same platform. It provides options for inventory management, product recommendations. There is also a collection of extensions that can let you integrate with other services, but the support is not comprehensive when compared to others.
Adobe does not disclose the pricing upfront and potential customers have to connect with their sales team to understand its pricing. Adobe commerce is mostly suitable for medium businesses because of its enterprise focus and pricing.
WooCommerce Alternatives: BigCommerce
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BigCommerce is a fully hosted eCommerce platform that is operating based on a subscription-based model. Since it comes as a hosted service, there is no additional effort from the user to deploy and maintain it. It comes with all the features required to manage an online store including simplified storefront design, SEO, content management, multi-channel support, etc.
BigCommerce pricing starts at 29 $ per month with 24/7 customer support included. If you need customer analysis and segmentation, you have to go for the Plus plan that is priced at 79.9 $ per month.
BigCommerce also provides a plugin for WordPress in case you want to stay with WordPress or move your existing hosted BigCommerce solution to a WordPress one. Compared to WooCommerce, BigCommerce missed out on customizability and the large selection of add-ons.
WooCommerce Alternatives: ECwid
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ECwid is an omnichannel eCommerce platform that is offered based on subscription payments. It is a good choice for small and medium businesses because of extremely economical plans. ECWid does not try to do everything when compared to the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce. Rather they focus more on the selling part. It can help you start selling online, Google, Facebook, or Instagram in a matter of minutes. ECwid also has marketing features with support for Google Ads, Facebook, and Mailchimp.
If your only intention is to set up an online store, ECwid, allows you to do this free of cost for up to 10 products. But this comes without technical support and the ability to sell on platforms like Facebook. the venture plan that costs 10 $ USD per month comes with all the must-have features that one requires for setting up an eCommerce platform.
Compared to WooCommerce, the functionalities in ECwid are severely limited, but they are enough for your first online store. You may have some issues when you want to scale up though.
WooCommerce Alternatives: WP Easy Cart
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WP Easy cart is a WordPress plugin that is similar to WooCommerce. Easy Cart plugin makes it easy to set up an online store. Easy Cart is focused more on online storefront websites. It has extensions that allow one to integrate with Facebook, Instagram, etc. But it is generally not considered an omnichannel eCommerce platform. Where Easy cart differs from WooCommerce is in its ability to provide hosted solutions so that the customer does not have to take care of hosting and deployment.
Easy Cart is available for free if you do not need hosting. With hosting it is available at a minimum of 10$ per month. The free version does not include marketing features and extensions for social media websites. But it does support unlimited products and categories.
WooCommerce Alternatives: Open Cart
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Open Cart is a free and open-source eCommerce platform. It offers almost all the features offered by WooCommerce and is available based on a partner-based hosting program. This means, the responsibility of hosting and deployment is with the user, and Open Cart will also point us to partners that can help one do it. This is the same model followed by WooCommerce too. Unlike WooCommerce, Open Cart is not based on WordPress.
OpenCart supports extensions and themes to help you build rich storefront websites. The open cart provides an option for enterprise-grade support in case you need them. The support plans start at 120 $ per month. There is no cost involved if you do not need support and are comfortable with exploiting the features of OpenCart on your own.
Conclusion
WooCommerce is the most commonly used eCommerce platform out there because of its rich feature set and ability to handle virtually everything related to an eCommerce business. But because of its open-source nature and lack of dedicated support, some organizations may want to explore other options. The above list provides a credible set of alternatives in case you want to go down this path.
Whether you decide to go with WooCommerce or an alternative, you may want to exploit the data that is accumulated in this eCommerce platform for improving your business. While all of them provide basic customer segment analysis features, they are nowhere close to having access to a full data warehouse and analytics platform. You can consider Hevo in case you want to load the customer data from one of these sources to your analytics platform.
Extracting complex data from a diverse set of data sources such as WooCommerce can be a challenging task and this is where Hevo saves the day!
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Hevo Data offers a faster way to move data from WooCommerce and 100+ Data Sources (Including 40+ Free Data Sources), other SaaS applications, or Databases into your Data Warehouse to be visualized in a BI tool. Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code.
Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.