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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.
| Criterion | Shopware 6 | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Core purpose | Commerce platform | Shop plugin for a CMS |
| Content marketing | Good (CMS blocks) | Excellent |
| Catalogue scale | 100k+ SKUs | Struggles past ~5k |
| B2B pricing | Native | Paid plugins |
| Cost to start | High | Very low |
| Cost to scale | Predictable | Escalating |
- Content-first with a small catalogue → stay on WooCommerce.
- Fourteen plugins in the cart is a risk, not an architecture.
- WordPress's data model was built for posts, not 12,000 SKUs.
Frequently asked questions
For light B2B — a handful of trade customers in a discount group — yes, and you should not pay for more. It stops being enough at customer-specific prices per article, live ERP stock, roles and approvals. Each of those arrives as another plugin from another vendor, all of them touching the cart. That plugin stack, not WordPress itself, is what usually breaks.
For a small B2C catalogue, yes — clearly, and we will not pretend otherwise. Cheap hosting, a free core, and any WordPress freelancer on earth can help you. The cost structures only cross later: Woo's bill grows in paid plugins, licence renewals and the hours spent regression-testing them against each other. Below a few hundred products with standard pricing, Woo stays cheaper.
It can be made to. WordPress's data model was designed for posts, and at that scale you feel it in every listing query and every filter. The fix is caching layers, custom tables and specialist hours — real engineering, paid for repeatedly. If you are heading for that catalogue size with faceted search that must respond instantly, you are buying a platform's core job as a custom project.
Not because someone told you it does not scale. Three real signals: a routine change means regression-testing fourteen plugins, your listing page needs a cache layer just to be usable, and your B2B customers keep asking for things no plugin sells. Until at least two of those are true, stay where you are and spend the money on marketing instead.
We do this for a living — Shopware, Node.js, React, ERP integration and automation for B2B.
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