Are you deciding between WooCommerce and Shopify and want to compare costs? WooCommerce itself is free, but running a WooCommerce store is not!
In this article, we’ll break down the actual costs of running a small-to-medium sized WooCommerce store, based on research from 5,000 real WooCommerce sites and current market pricing.
Essential costs
Every WooCommerce site needs a few essentials to get up & running before you even think about configuring your store:
- A domain name is the actual web address of your store (
yourawesomeproducts.com) and typically costs around $12 per year. - A web host is the server that keeps your site online. A host that understands WooCommerce will start at around $30 per month (see Kinsta or Rocket.net). If your store is small and doesn’t expect a lot of traffic, you can find cheaper options (for example Pressable at $21/mo). On the other hand, if you expect high traffic, the price will increase.
- A good WooCommerce-focused theme ranges from $59 – $99 per year. There are free themes available, but they often miss important e-commerce features, so we highly recommend investing in a paid theme.
Total cost so far: $451 per year.
The cost of plugins
WooCommerce does a lot out-of-the-box, but there’s a good chance you’ll need additional plugins to cover extra features.
In a separate post, we analyzed 5,000 WooCommerce sites to determine how many—and which—plugins they use. We found that stores run an average of 30 active plugins: 21 free plugins, 7 paid plugins, and 2 from other categories (like companion plugins included with the theme).
We also analyzed the WooCommerce marketplace — which currently lists 1,366 plugins — to determine the average price of paid plugins:
- Across 1,166 paid entries, the average cost of a plugin is $65.2 USD per year.
- Many plugins on the marketplace have no adoption, so averaging all plugins gives a misleading picture. Looking only at the 150 most popular plugins (which is 11% of the total marketplace), the average price rises to $88.73 USD per year.
- Plugins listed on the WooCommerce marketplace tend to be more expensive than those sold outside it. Looking at the 50 most popular paid plugins outside any marketplace, the average cost drops to $73.80 USD per year.
Combining those prices, we get an average of $75.91 per year for a plugin. Multiplied by 7, the total plugin cost is about $531 per year.
Total cost so far $451 + $531 = $982 USD per year.
Alternatives to lower plugin costs
The great thing about WordPress and WooCommerce is the huge ecosystem of available plugins. If these costs feel high, you can often replace tools or plugins with more affordable alternatives!
As mentioned earlier, plugins sold through the WooCommerce marketplace are often more expensive than comparable options outside the marketplace. For example, our own WooCommerce plugins are priced well below the market average.
There are also a few plugins we wouldn’t recommend replacing, like WooCommerce Subscriptions. It’s the “gold standard” for selling subscriptions with WooCommerce. While it’s quite expensive, it offers the best compatibility with themes and third-party plugins due to its widespread adoption.
The cost of email
As your store grows, you may need to invest in email-sending tools. There are 2 types of emails that could incur additional costs.
Transactional emails
Transactional emails are sent through your WordPress site and triggered by user actions, such as password reset emails or admin notifications about your WordPress’ health.
Most hosts will handle these emails on your behalf behind the scenes, but often with limits or a “fair use” policy. For example, Kinsta’s cheapest hosting plan allows a site to send up to 150 emails per day, which is usually enough.
But, a hosting server isn’t really meant to be an email server, so if you are sending a lot of emails through your website, their deliverability will be impacted. To solve this, you can use an email service. It moves email delivery to a specialized server.
This typically involves 2 steps:
- First, install an SMTP plugin in WordPress to connect your site to an external email server. These plugins are free.
- Second, configure the SMTP plugin with an email-sending service such as Amazon SES, Gmail, or SendGrid. Some of these providers offer free tiers or low-cost pricing. For example, Amazon SES allows up to 3,000 emails per month for free, followed by $0.10 per 1,000 emails thereafter. It’s fiddly to set up (you have to “state your case” and be approved by Amazon before you can use it), but it works well! We use it to power our support forms and help desk.
Total cost to send 10,000 emails per month: $9 per year.
Marketing emails
Marketing emails are used for campaigns such as abandoned cart recovery or promotional offers. This cost isn’t specific to WooCommerce—you’d incur it on any e-commerce platform!
You can use 3rd-party professional email marketing software that isn’t part of WordPress, like Mailjet or Omnisend. Such tools usually come with a free tier of up to 500 contacts. Mailjet isn’t the sexiest tool, but works well and is among the cheapest. Their lowest, unbranded tier is $17 per month.
These tools often allow you to send both types of emails (transactional and marketing), so you can solve both with a single solution!
Total cost: $204 per year.
If you’re just starting out, you can begin collecting email addresses (for example through newsletter signups) without worrying too much about email infrastructure yet. Your hosting provider will usually cover your initial needs.
In other words, this is typically a delayed cost that only becomes necessary as your store grows.
Operational costs
There are additional operational costs such as payment processing fees, shipping, fulfillment, and order handling. These apply regardless of the platform you choose and should be factored into your product pricing, so we exclude them here.
The total cost
Given everything above, the total cost to run a WooCommerce store for 1 year comes to approximately $982 (excl email marketing) or $1,186 (incl email marketing).
To get to this figure, we analyzed real plugin usage across 5,000 WooCommerce stores and looked at the average prices of more than 1,000 popular paid plugins. So, it’s a well-researched baseline, but it should still be taken with a grain of salt.
The actual cost will depend on your store’s specific needs and the type of products you sell. For example, your store may require fewer paid plugins than the average 7, while others with more complex or specialized requirements may need more.
Treat this as a helpful estimate rather than a fixed benchmark.
Hungry for more data insights?
Read our insights from analyzing 15,000 WooCommerce stores.
Read our plugin insights from analyzing plugins on 5,000 stores.
There are plenty of ways to reduce the cost of these breakdowns. For example, most transactional email providers have free tiers for under 3000 subs. A savvy business owner can find lots more ways to reduce costs and bring these high estimates down.
I agree! You can find different services and different plugins that do the same, but cost less. It takes some research, but definitely doable!