Shopware 6 vs WooCommerce: when a WordPress plugin is not enough

What WooCommerce gets right

If your business is content first and commerce second — a magazine, a community, a brand with a big blog — WooCommerce puts the shop inside the thing people already come for. It is cheap, the ecosystem is vast, and any WordPress freelancer on earth can help you. For a 60-product shop that is a genuinely excellent answer.

The plugin-stack problem

WooCommerce is a plugin, and everything serious you need is another plugin: B2B pricing, roles, ERP sync, tax, performance. Fourteen plugins from eleven vendors, each updating on its own schedule, all of them touching the cart. This is not a theoretical risk — it is the single most common reason we get called into a broken WooCommerce shop.

Where it breaks in B2B

Twelve thousand SKUs with variants, customer-specific prices per article, live stock from an ERP, and a filtered listing that must respond in under a second. WordPress's data model was designed for posts, and at that scale you feel it in every query. You can fix it — with caching layers, custom tables and a lot of money.

The honest switching signal

You are not ready to leave WooCommerce because someone said so. You are ready when a routine change requires testing fourteen plugins, when your listing page needs a cache to be usable, or when your B2B customers ask for something no plugin sells. Until then, stay and save your money.