Senior WooCommerce developers. Custom stores and plugins. 60–70% less than US agencies.

WooCommerce the plugin is free and open source. Your costs come from hosting ($15–$100/month for a WooCommerce-appropriate server), your domain ($12–$20/year), a theme ($50–$300 one-time, or free custom-built), and any premium plugins you need ($50–$300/year each). A basic WooCommerce store can run on $200–$400/year in infrastructure. A professionally built store with custom development and good hosting costs $3,000–$10,000 upfront, then $200–$600/year to run.

WooCommerce runs on WordPress — you control your hosting, your data, and your code. There are no platform transaction fees, and customization is unlimited. Shopify is a hosted SaaS platform — lower technical overhead, but you pay monthly fees ($79–$399/month) plus transaction fees, and customization has hard limits. WooCommerce has a higher ceiling but requires more technical management. Shopify is simpler but has ongoing platform costs. FactoryJet builds on both — we'll help you choose the right platform on the discovery call.

WooCommerce needs more server resources than a standard WordPress blog — at minimum, 2GB RAM and a PHP 8.1+ environment with OPcache enabled. For most stores, we recommend managed WordPress hosting: WP Engine ($25–$95/month), Kinsta ($35–$100/month), or SiteGround ($25–$80/month). For high-volume stores, a VPS with Redis, Nginx, and object cache is more appropriate. Shared hosting from GoDaddy or Bluehost is almost never appropriate for WooCommerce — it will be slow.

Yes — WooCommerce Subscriptions (a premium plugin by Woo) adds subscription product types, recurring billing, subscription management for customers and admins, and prorated upgrades/downgrades. It works with Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net for recurring payments. Custom subscription logic (custom billing intervals, usage-based billing, hybrid one-time + recurring products) can be built as a custom plugin. This is a common FactoryJet engagement — we've built custom subscription systems for SaaS companies, membership sites, and product subscription boxes.

WooCommerce handles B2B use cases well with the right plugins and custom development. B2B WooCommerce setups typically include: wholesale pricing by user role, hidden retail pricing for wholesale accounts, minimum order quantities, purchase order / net payment terms, quote request instead of immediate checkout, and company account management. FactoryJet builds custom B2B WooCommerce solutions using a combination of plugins and custom code — we don't assume a premium plugin covers your exact requirements, we build what you actually need.

A custom WooCommerce plugin extends or modifies WooCommerce functionality without editing core files. Custom plugins can add new product types, modify checkout behavior, add admin reports, create custom pricing rules, build custom shipping rate calculators, integrate third-party APIs, or modify the order management workflow. They use WooCommerce's hooks (actions and filters) to modify behavior safely — meaning your customizations survive WooCommerce updates, unlike modifications to template files or core code.

Yes — WooCommerce ERP and accounting integrations are a significant part of our development work. Common integrations include: QuickBooks Online (order sync, customer sync, tax handling), Xero, NetSuite, Sage, and custom ERP systems. These integrations typically sync orders from WooCommerce to the ERP, inventory and pricing from the ERP back to WooCommerce, and customer account data in both directions. We build direct API integrations as well as middleware-based integrations depending on your ERP's capabilities.

Yes — WooCommerce checkout customization is one of the most common requests. Common customizations include: removing unnecessary checkout fields (which reduces friction and improves conversion), adding custom fields (delivery notes, purchase order numbers, custom product options), reordering checkout steps, adding upsell or cross-sell offers in checkout, integrating buy-now-pay-later options (Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay), and custom thank-you page logic. All customizations use WooCommerce hooks — no core file editing.

Yes — variable products (products with multiple variants like size, color, or material) are standard WooCommerce functionality. For complex variant setups (hundreds of combinations, conditional variant availability, variant-specific pricing tiers, custom attribute types), we extend WooCommerce's native variable product system with custom code. This is especially common for apparel, furniture, and custom-manufactured products where the default WooCommerce variant UI doesn't quite fit the product.

Yes — adding wholesale or B2B pricing to an existing WooCommerce store is a common engagement. The implementation depends on your requirements: if you need simple user-role-based pricing, a combination of plugins handles it. If you need customer-specific pricing, negotiated prices by account, tiered volume pricing, or quote-based purchasing, custom plugin development is needed. We audit your existing store and requirements before proposing an approach — there's a wide range of complexity here.

WooCommerce stores are slow for a few common reasons: inadequate hosting (shared hosting doesn't have the RAM for WooCommerce), no caching setup (WooCommerce disables standard WordPress page cache for logged-in users and cart pages, requiring a dedicated WooCommerce caching solution), unoptimized images, too many plugins making excessive database queries, or a bloated theme loading unnecessary scripts. FactoryJet's performance audit identifies the root causes and fixes them — typically a combination of hosting upgrade, caching configuration, and query optimization.

WooCommerce has solid SEO foundations: clean URLs, product schema markup support, category and tag pages, and native XML sitemap generation. WordPress's content ecosystem (blog posts, guides) is one of the strongest SEO advantages of WooCommerce over Shopify. Where WooCommerce SEO requires attention: proper configuration of Yoast or RankMath for product and category meta, canonical tag management for variable products (to avoid duplicate content), and pagination handling for large category pages. FactoryJet sets up all of this as part of every store build.

Yes — Core Web Vitals optimization on WooCommerce is a common engagement. The biggest issues on WooCommerce stores are typically: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) caused by unoptimized product images or render-blocking scripts, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) caused by elements loading asynchronously without reserved space, and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) caused by excessive JavaScript from page builders or poorly coded plugins. We audit the specific failures on your store, prioritize by impact, and fix them — with before/after Lighthouse scores to verify improvement.

Elementor (and similar page builders like Divi or WPBakery) are popular but notorious for adding significant JavaScript and CSS weight to WooCommerce stores, which slows page load and hurts Core Web Vitals. For stores where design flexibility matters more than raw performance, Elementor is workable when configured carefully. For stores where performance is the priority, we recommend purpose-built WooCommerce themes or a custom theme that loads only what's needed. FactoryJet builds custom themes when performance is a hard requirement.

WooCommerce development typically costs slightly less than equivalent Shopify development because there are fewer licensing constraints and the platform is more open. A custom WooCommerce store from FactoryJet starts at $2,999 vs. a comparable Shopify store starting at $2,999 — similar upfront. The ongoing cost difference is more significant: WooCommerce hosting costs $200–$600/year; Shopify charges $948–$4,788/year in platform fees alone. For businesses with high GMV, WooCommerce's lower ongoing cost often justifies the slightly higher technical management burden.

The plugins you need depend on your store's requirements. Core plugins most stores need: a payment gateway plugin (Stripe for WooCommerce is free), a shipping plugin (WooCommerce Shipping is free; carrier-specific rate plugins run $80–$200/year), and an SEO plugin (Yoast or RankMath, $99–$199/year). Optional premium plugins: WooCommerce Subscriptions ($249/year if you need subscriptions), WooCommerce Bookings ($249/year for appointment booking), and various marketing integrations. FactoryJet factors plugin costs into the project scope and recommends only what you actually need.

The upfront development cost is similar. WooCommerce and Shopify stores built to the same quality level cost roughly the same to develop — FactoryJet starts both at $2,999. The difference shows up in ongoing costs: WooCommerce has no platform fees (you pay hosting), while Shopify charges $79–$399/month plus 0.5–2% transaction fees if you don't use Shopify Payments. For a store doing $1M/year in revenue, that's $5,000–$15,000/year in Shopify fees that WooCommerce doesn't charge.

Both. A significant portion of FactoryJet's WooCommerce work is extending, optimizing, or fixing existing stores — adding functionality, improving performance, migrating to better hosting, fixing broken plugins, or adding payment and shipping integrations. For existing store work, we start with a technical audit and provide a fixed-price proposal for the specific changes you need. We don't bill by the hour for discovery — you get a clear scope and price before committing.

Yes — Shopify to WooCommerce migration is a common engagement. We migrate products (with variants, images, and metadata), customer accounts, order history, and redirect all Shopify URLs to WooCommerce equivalents to preserve SEO. The main considerations are: your Shopify theme needs to be rebuilt on WooCommerce (themes don't transfer), and any Shopify-specific apps need WooCommerce equivalents or custom plugins. We audit your Shopify store first and scope the full migration cost before you commit.

Yes — WooCommerce's admin dashboard is designed to be manageable by non-technical store owners. You can add products, update inventory, process orders, issue refunds, manage coupons, and publish blog posts without any development knowledge. We also provide a training session after launch so you're comfortable with the specific setup of your store. For ongoing technical work (plugin updates, new features, performance monitoring), we offer monthly maintenance retainers.

Yes — FactoryJet offers monthly WooCommerce maintenance retainers starting at $399/month. These cover: WordPress and WooCommerce core updates, plugin updates with compatibility testing, daily backups with tested restore capability, uptime monitoring, security scanning, and a defined allocation of development hours for small changes and fixes. All project engagements include 30 days of free post-launch support regardless of whether you're on a retainer.

Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We'll discuss your store requirements, your timeline, your budget, and the technical approach that makes sense for your situation. For existing stores, we'll do a quick technical audit before providing a quote. For new builds, we'll scope the project on the call and follow up with a fixed-price proposal within 24–48 hours. No obligation to move forward, and no sales pressure on the call — we focus on figuring out if we're the right fit.