What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce: definition and origin

WooCommerce was released in 2011 and has belonged to Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, since 2015. As a plugin, it builds on WordPress: the store and editorial content such as a blog, guides or company pages live in one system maintained by the same editors. The software is open source and free of license fees. Costs arise mainly for hosting, setup, design and extensions, not for the plugin itself.

That makes WooCommerce one of the most widely used store systems in the world. It suits small to mid-sized stores and can be tailored to many requirements with extensions—from digital products and subscriptions to bookings. The data lives on a server of your choice.

How a WooCommerce store works

After installation, WooCommerce creates pages for the shop, cart and checkout. You manage products, variants, prices and tax rates in the WordPress backend, and payment methods such as PayPal, credit card or purchase on invoice are added through extensions from the payment providers. Orders are stored in dedicated database tables (High-Performance Order Storage), which improves speed with many orders.

• Manage products, variants and inventory
• Add payment and shipping methods through extensions
• Configure taxes, discounts and vouchers
• Connect interfaces to inventory management, shipping carriers and accounting
• Customize the design with themes and the block editor

Real-world example: a store for a regional delicatessen

A delicatessen already runs a WordPress website with tasting dates and a blog. With WooCommerce, it adds a store where customers order specialties, gift boxes and gift vouchers. Content, guides and sales sit in one system that the team already knows, and the store can be expanded step by step.

With a growing range or several sales channels, topics such as performance, database size and interfaces come into play. A clean technical foundation then pays off: a lean theme, a few vetted extensions, caching and powerful hosting. Anyone who invests in quality early avoids expensive rebuilds when order volumes rise.

Legal aspects, maintenance and imple­menta­tion

Anyone selling to consumers in Germany must, among other things, implement price indications, shipping costs, withdrawal information and the order button correctly. Since June 19, 2026, online stores selling to consumers must also offer an electronic withdrawal function, the so-called withdrawal button (Widerrufsbutton). The implementation in the store should be reviewed legally.

Nano Concepts builds WooCommerce stores, custom extensions and interfaces and, if you wish, takes over maintenance, updates and hardening so that the store keeps running reliably after launch. Before go-live, we test ordering, payment, emails and legal texts together with you.

• Apply updates for WooCommerce, WordPress and all extensions promptly
• Have legal texts and mandatory information, including the withdrawal function, reviewed
• Create backups of the database and files and test restoring them
• Use only maintained extensions and limit the number of plugins
• Test the ordering process and payment page regularly