Ecommerce is very mature and stable thanks to WooCommerce, which is now owned by Automattic. Granted, most implementations include customizations that make maintenance and bug fixing a headache, but that isn't the fault of WP or WC, it's the fault of the developers who hack away without documentation or regard for maintainability.

WooCommerce significantly slows down Wordpress such that I have a hard time describing it as mature or stable. Take, for instance, the latest Kinsta benchmarks which show a plain Wordpress installation running PHP 7.3 going from ~250 RPS [1] to under 70 [2] after installing the latest WooCommerce.

[1]: https://kinsta.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/wordpress-5.0-... [2]: https://kinsta.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/wordpress-5.0-...

The more nightmare WP/WC implementations I have to deal with the further it pushes me to recommend something like Shopify. Only if the client needs extensive customizations do I recommend WP/WC, and only if they agree to regular maintenance.

Falling 2, or even 1 release behind makes maintenance a nightmare.

I also explain to people that even though WP and WC are free, and very easy to install/setup, you're essentially running your own ecommerce software platform, and are on the hook for maintenance and any problems (security/scaling etc.) whereas hosted platforms like Shopify take a lot of that off your plate.

I worked for a Wordpress host I won't name, and I can tell you that 99% of our installs that had WooCommerce installed also had zero products for sale. The install base is huge, but the number of people meaningfully using the software is a small minority of that huge value.

My experience with WooCommerce is that it's probably the best of a poor bunch if you need a somewhat customised ecommerce site but don't have the funds/resources/expertise to build one on something like Magento.

Because as questionable as it may be resources wise, well it compares pretty well to the likes of OpenCart or OS Commerce, and significantly better than other WordPress shop plugins I've seen in the past (like Shopp). At least you can take your WordPress development knowledge and apply it to templates/plugins, have some decent documentation lying around to fall back on, and don't have plugin developers trying to nickle and dime you for every little thing.

There's probably a market in there somewhere, if someone wanted to actually create a decent ecommerce system that doesn't require a ton of resources, doesn't rely on another system to function and whose community actually knows what the hell they're doing.

WooCommerce sounds like a good concept (built on top of WP) but its a terrible platform. You can't scale and you need to be more than a pro to use it effectively.

I've seen many customers struggle with it and move to Hybris or Magento.

Having to choose between WooCommerce and Magento is like asking which leg you'd like to be burned off.

I agree a 100%. Magento used to be not so bad but after the Adobe acquisition its tended to be terrible in terms of implementation and pricing.

Hybris has a very good comprehensive and stable and extendable ecommerce solution. The only downside is its from SAP and not open source, which might not be bad for a medium sized to big ecommerce shop.

> Ecommerce is very mature and stable thanks to WooCommerce

Unless you have a very large set of products, in which case Wordpress grinds to a halt.

Unless, of course, you find the magic plugins that don't update product counts on every update... or figure out how to hook into the system and override it myself.

I meant to write up a blog post about this, but honestly, once the problem was solved, I had very little interest into peeling up that particular bandage to poke around underneath.

> it's the fault of the developers who hack away without documentation or regard for maintainability.

but... that seems to be any WP tool that is popular. Many of the WP ecosystem stuff I've seen is popular precisely because it's not maintainable.

No doubt that's the reason, but WordPress doesn't make it hard to write plugins badly, so it's not exactly helping.