I’ve been working with WooCommerce for a very, very long time. Because 10+ years in online is probably the equivalent of at least 50 regular years.
Anyway, long enough to remember when it was still called WooThemes’ WooCommerce, long enough to have built and maintained more WooCommerce sites than I can remember, and long enough to know where its bodies are buried, lol.
And lately, I’ve found myself asking existential questions. Like: Is it still worth using WooCommerce? Should I switch to Squarespace/Shopify? What’s the meaning of life?
The reason these questions is that, after all these years, I’m starting to think that *maybe*, it’s time we did this simpler, cleaner, easier.
What’s my beef with WooCommerce?
It’s not one particular thing. It’s more a collection of things accumulated over time – some small, some more annoying. Like:
WooCommerce user experience is a little … lacking
Just to start with the obvious one.
I know WooCommerce has never been particularly famous for beautiful, frictionless shopping experiences out of the box. And sure, you can absolutely build a good-looking store with it. But it needs a lot of tuning to get to that stage, it doesn’t just happen by default.
Especially the checkout experience can require a good amount of work (or $149 to $499/year worth of plugins) – that is if you’re into user-friendly UX and you want something that feels easy to use and inviting instead of making the user go through 3 pages with forms just to give you the money.
Everything needs another plugin
Subscriptions? You need a plugin.
Memberships? Another plugin.
Better checkout functionality? Another one.
Installment payments, order bumps, upsells, more sophisticated pricing and discounts, licensing, affiliates, whatever? You guessed it, another plugin (or several) for each.
And that’s both WooCommerce’s greatest strength and one of its most annoying aspects. The ecosystem is huge and you can build (or assemble) almost anything.
But even though WooCommerce itself is free, a lot of its plugin are not. And these days, everything comes with a yearly subscription. So once you start adding commercial plugins, the annual cost can climb surprisingly quickly. For example, WooCommerce Subscriptions is currently $279/year per store. CartFlows (for a better checkout experience) costs from $149 to $499/year. Pixel tracking plugins start from $199/year and can get to $699/year.
And then you have to maintain all of those plugins, make sure they play nicely together, keep them updated, troubleshoot conflicts…
You know where this is going.
Then there’s the database and performance overhead
This is the part developers tend to notice more than store owners. And when store owners do notice it, there’s a big developer invoice coming.
Because a WooCommerce site can easily become a fairly complicated piece of machinery once you add subscriptions, payment gateways, memberships, email automation, webhooks, analytics, marketing tools and whatever else the business needs.
And this is where schedule tasks and countless calls to admin-ajax can make a website sluggish – or barely load at all. For context: WooCommerce uses Action Scheduler to handle background jobs such as subscription renewals, emails and other scheduled tasks. That’s a useful system, but on busy (i.e. lots of traffic) or heavily extended sites (i.e. lots of plugins), scheduled actions and logs can grow into something you actually have to keep an eye on. WooCommerce has even included in their documentation how to deal with large Action Scheduler queues – that’s how common it is.
And I have seen a sites become unusable because the Action Scheduler table log had accumulated over 1 million entries, even though the log was supposed to get cleared automatically. What should happen in theory can be quite different from what actually happens in reality.
I’ve also seen sites where the database gets increasingly busy, a lot of requests are being made to admin-ajax, the dashboard and any admin actions become painfully slow and you’re suddenly investigating why something that should take a fraction of a second is taking minutes.
At which point you remember that all you wanted to do was sell *this thing* online.
Then there are the carding attempts and spam attacks
This has become increasingly annoying in the last couple of years, with the rise of AI.
I’ve had several busy periods where clients’ WooCommerce stores were hit with dozens or hundreds of fake orders. And I’m not talking about the occasional spam order that you delete and go on with your life – or business.
I’m talking about attacks where someone is actively and consistently trying different ways of getting orders through the store, sometimes from a constantly changing collection of IP addresses and with patterns that keep changing.
Which made me spend a fair amount of time putting Cloudflare rules, CAPTCHA, rate limiting and other measures in place. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.
I’ve written about one particularly stubborn case in detail if you’re interested in the technical details: Getting Hundreds of Fake Orders Per Day? How I Stopped WooCommerce Spam →
None of this means that WooCommerce is particularly insecure while the other platforms are safe. Any ecommerce system is going to attract bots and payment fraud attempts.
But when you’re dealing with a self hosted ecommerce (and not all hosts are equally secure), using a very popular AND open source (meaning its easier to identify and exploit vulnerabilities) piece of software like WooCommerce, and then you add to the mix a bunch of different plugins (some built responsibly, other not so much) – it’s understanding why WooCommerce has become a predilect target for attackers.
My first encounter with SureCart
Exasperated by dealing with all the spam attack and the performance troubleshooting, I started looking into other platforms: Squarespace, Shopify, Wix. This would take the security and troubleshooting off your plate, but you’re giving up the flexibility that comes with WC.
Accidentally, I ran into SureCart. I was searching for something else and ended up on a website where I liked the checkout experience.
So, naturally, I did what developers do. I looked at what they were using and I saw it was SureCart. That got my attention.
The first thing I liked was – sorry for sounding shallow here – that it just looked good. The whole checkout flow was so much smoother and nicer. The second thing was seeing that so many features that in WC require additional plugins, in SureCart were built in. But let me go through the differences step by step.
How does SureCart work and how is it different from Woocommerce
It’s a cloud-based ecommerce platform that integrates with WordPress through a plugin
SureCart has a WordPress plugin that connects your site to their cloud-based ecommerce platform. The platform is where products, orders, customers and store configuration are stored. Unlike WooCommerce, where all that data in kept in your WordPress database. And until not long ago, in the same tables with the rest of your content – posts, images, custom post types.
Depending on your focus, this can be a pro (because it takes a lot of the load off your server) or a con (your data is on a third party platform).
No additional plugins necessary
As someone working with WooCommerce, that sounds like music to my years.
SureCart has built-in a lot of functionality that, in a WooCommerce store, requires additional extensions.
Subscriptions? Included.
Installment payments? Included.
Affiliate management and licensing? Included.
Donations? Included.
Cart abandonment recovery, order bumps, and upsells? Also included.
That’s a very different philosophy from “Here’s your free ecommerce plugin. Now go shopping for extensions.“
And yes, I realize the irony of a WordPress developer getting excited about having less work to do on a website. What can I say? I contain multitudes. 😀
Best part (for me): The integrations
This is where it gets even more interesting, especially for people selling courses or memberships.
SureCart integrates with LMS plugins like LearnDash, LifterLMS, TutorLMS, Masteriyo, as well as a decent range of many others. Like membership plugins (MemberPress and SureMember), tracking (Facebook pixel and Google Analytics), automation tools.
And in some cases, the integration means you don’t necessarily need to buy the paid version of that plugin just because you need ecommerce functionality. For example, if you’re using an LMS that has a free version, you may be able to use SureCart to handle the payments and connect the purchase to the course access.
That can potentially change the economics a bit for a site owner.
Instead of paid LMS (for the ecommerce add-on) + subscription plugin + membership plugin + payment plugin + integration plugin…
you have: WordPress + free LMS + SureCart.
Obviously, the exact setup depends on what you’re selling and which integrations you need. I’m not suggesting SureCart magically eliminates every plugin from your site.
But the direction is pretty appealing.
Ok, but is SureCart free?
Well, no.
SureCart’s free plan charges a 2.9% platform transaction fee. So you get the plugin for free, but they take a commission if you get sales.
Their Pro plans remove that fee. The current annual Pro pricing starts at $199/year for one store, although pricing and plan details can change. Just a few months ago, their pro plan was $99/year, while the transaction fee for the free plan was 1.9%. Things are changing, prices seem to keep going up.
Obviously, all that is in addition to your payment processor’s fees (Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net or whichever you are using will also take a commission).
So, if you want to figure out what option is best for you, you need to do some “math-ing”, taking into account all the fees and your projected revenue from online sales. If you’re selling a handful of low-priced products, paying a percentage may be perfectly reasonable to get you started.
If you’re getting a lot of revenue (fingers crossed!), the annual Pro plan may make more sense.
For instance: If you sell $1,000/month, a 2.9% transaction fee is about $29/month, or $348/year. At that point, the $199/year Pro plan is obviously worth looking at.
Basically, $572 is the magic number, the monthly sales revenue where the 2 options are equal. Under that, you’re better off with the free plan that charges you a transaction fee, over that, you’re better off with the Pro plan.
Just one of those situations where five minutes with a calculator is more useful than another 47 WordPress blog posts arguing about which platform is “best”. 🙂
So, who wins the SureCart vs. WooCommerce debate?
Whoever can ask the better question 🙂 Because, to be honest (and as objective as possible), there are use cases where I can still see WooCommerce as a preferred option and use cases where SureCart would be a better fit.
When is WooCommerce a better option?
WooCommerce is incredibly flexible, mature and widely supported. If you need a highly customized ecommerce system, it may still be the right tool.
Also when you need to have full control over your customer and purchases data. Since SureCart runs on a third party platform and servers, the data is on their servers, not yours.
So WooCommerce probably still makes more sense if you need:
- complex physical product catalogs
- sophisticated inventory
- complex shipping
- unusual product configurations
- niche/local payment gateways
- extensive third-party integrations
- complete control over ecommerce data and infrastructure
When should you consider SureCart
SureCart is a good contender if you’re a small business looking for an easy, lean, all-in-one option for selling:
- courses
- memberships
- subscriptions
- digital products
- coaching / services
- downloads
- relatively simple physical products
Basically, it lets you do what you need with less. Less plugins, less troubleshooting, less customizations…
And let me tell you, after 20+ years of building all things WordPress, I find that surprisingly appealing.
To sum it up:
| WooCommerce | SureCart | |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress integration | Native | Plugin + cloud platform |
| Ecommerce data | Your WP database | SureCart infrastructure |
| Core price | Free | Free + transaction fee / paid plans |
| Subscriptions | Extension | Built in |
| Upsells / order bumps | Extensions | Built in |
| LMS integrations | Many | Several native integrations |
| Payment gateways | Huge ecosystem | Smaller selection |
| Customization | Extremely high | More opinionated |
| Best for | Complex/custom stores | Courses, memberships, subscriptions, digital products, services |
Questions worth thinking about
Where does SureCart store my customer and order data?
In WooCommerce, your customer and order data is saved in your WP database which lives on your server. In SureCart, this data lives in SureCart’s cloud infrastructure. WordPress still powers the frontend of your website, but all the ecommerce processing happens on SureCart’s servers. This reduces the ecommerce workload on your server, AND also introducing a dependency on a third-party service.
This can be both a benefit and vulnerability. And definitely something worth considering.
Can I migrate from WooCommerce to SureCart?
Yes, but it’s not a one-click replacement for everything in WooCommerce. SureCart now has a tool for importing WooCommerce products, including one-time, installment and subscription products. Customers and historical orders aren’t imported as part of that product import, though, so the migration needs some planning. Also, importing subscriptions only works for the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, other product types in WooCommerce will be skipped during import.
Does SureCart affect my website speed?
Yes, but in a good way. Because in SureCart the ecommerce data and most of the processing happens on their servers, it doesn’t affect the performance of the website the same way WooCommerce does. Obviously, if the platform would experience timeouts or downtime, it would affect the ecommerce functionality of your website.
What are the downsides of migrating to SureCart?
Obviously, there are pros and cons for each option, and it’s always worth considering all aspects before making a decision. Here are some of the downsides:
- the dependency on SureCart’s platform
- a smaller ecosystem than WooCommerce
- fewer payment gateways (more might be added as the platform gains popularity, but you’re stuck to what they offer)
- less freedom for a highly custom ecommerce shop
- you can’t currently import historical data – customers and order data
- the difficulty of migrating data from SureCart back to WooCommerce – you can export your SureCart data as CSV but there isn’t an easy way to import it back into WooCommerce, you’ll need some tweaking or custom solution.
