Do you want to sell online and everywhere you hear the same word: WooCommerce. Some people recommend it as a "free store," while others warn that it is "just a blog plugin." The truth is somewhere in between. In this guide, we explain what WooCommerce is, what it really costs to run a store like this, how it differs from Shopify and PrestaShop, and then show you step by step how to launch a working store in about 30 minutes, with Polish currency, payments, and shipping.
Table of contents
- What is WooCommerce?
- What does a WooCommerce store look like inside?
- How much does a WooCommerce store cost?
- WooCommerce, Shopify or PrestaShop?
- What hosting does WooCommerce need?
- How to launch a WooCommerce store in 30 minutes?
- Which plugins does a store in Poland need?
- How to make sure your store is fast and secure?
- Already have a store with another provider?
- FAQ
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress that turns a regular website into an online store. Once you enable it, products, a cart, orders, customers, discount coupons, inventory, taxes, and shipping methods appear in the WordPress dashboard. It is developed by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress.com.
According to the official WordPress plugin directory, WooCommerce has more than 5 million active installations. It is the most popular store platform built on WordPress and one of the most popular in the world.
The most important thing to understand right from the start: WooCommerce is not a service, but software. You do not pay a subscription to a company that runs the store for you. You install it on your own hosting, and you decide where customer data is stored, which plugins you add, and how the store looks. This freedom is both its biggest advantage and its only real responsibility: someone has to take care of the server and updates.
What does a WooCommerce store look like under the hood?
A WooCommerce store has four layers that are worth distinguishing, because each one costs money and requires attention:
- WordPress, which is the content management system. It provides the admin panel, subpages, a blog, and users.
- WooCommerce, which is the store itself: products, cart, checkout, and orders.
- The theme, which determines the appearance. Free themes, such as Storefront or Astra, are perfectly sufficient to get started.
- Additional plugins: payment gateway, courier integration, invoices, RODO consents, and SEO.
Store data, including products, orders, and customer accounts, is stored in a MySQL or MariaDB database. Product images are kept as files on disk. Every time a customer visits the site, PHP runs, retrieves data from the database, and assembles the page. This means that a store is more demanding than a simple business card site: the cart and checkout cannot be fully cached, because they look different for every customer.
How much does a WooCommerce store cost?
The plugin itself is free, but a "free store" is a simplification. The real annual costs of a small store look roughly like this:
| Item | Typical cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress and WooCommerce | $0 | Open source, no license fees |
| Hosting | From several hundred dollars a year | Depends on traffic and the number of products |
| .pl domain | Several dozen dollars a year | Renewal can cost more than registration |
| SSL certificate | $0 | Included with most hosting providers, including Saplo |
| Theme | $0 to approximately $73 | A free one is enough to get started |
| Payment gateway | Transaction fee | No subscription, you pay a percentage of sales |
| Paid plugins | $0 to several hundred dollars a year | Only if the free ones are not enough |
The key difference from subscription-based platforms: WooCommerce does not take a commission from your sales. You only pay the payment processor, and you incur that cost in every store anyway.
WooCommerce, Shopify or PrestaShop?
These are the three most commonly compared solutions. Each one makes sense, just in a different situation.
| Feature | WooCommerce | Shopify | PrestaShop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | WordPress plugin, open source | Subscription service | Standalone open source engine |
| Software cost | $0 | Monthly subscription | $0 |
| Platform fee | None | Additional when using an external payment gateway | None |
| Data ownership | Yours, on your server | With the provider | Yours, on your server |
| Blog and content | The strongest (it's WordPress) | Basic | Basic |
| Polish payments and couriers | Ready-made plugins | Some through apps | Ready-made modules |
| Large catalog with variants | Good, with a more powerful server | Good | Very good |
| Who handles the server | You or a hosting provider | The provider | You or a hosting provider |
Shopify's basic plan costs $29 per month in the USA when paid annually, or $39 when paid monthly. With an external payment provider, it adds 0.6% to 2% per transaction. In Poland, prices are converted locally, so it's worth checking the current price list on the Shopify website.
When should you choose Shopify? When you don't want to deal with servers or updates, you mainly sell abroad, and the subscription cost isn't an issue at your revenue level.
When PrestaShop? When you have thousands of products with multiple variants, several languages and currencies, and the blog is a secondary concern. We covered this in our guide on how to set up PrestaShop on Saplo.
When WooCommerce? When you're just starting out, sell in Poland, want to combine your store with a blog and SEO-focused content, or already have a WordPress site. It's the simplest route to your first sale.
What kind of hosting does WooCommerce need?
WooCommerce works on any hosting with PHP and MySQL, but “works” and “works fast during peak season” are two different things. Here is what to pay attention to:
- Up-to-date PHP. WooCommerce requires a recent version of PHP. On Saplo, you choose a version from 7.4 to 8.5 during installation, with 8.3 as the default.
- RAM dedicated to you. On shared hosting, your store competes for resources with hundreds of other sites. When a neighbor gets a traffic spike, your checkout slows down just in time for Black Friday.
- Object cache. The cart and store admin panel query the database heavily, while the object cache (Redis) significantly reduces the server load.
- SSL certificate. Without HTTPS, browsers mark the site as “Not Secure”, and payment gateways will not work at all.
- Off-server backups. A store contains orders and customer data. Losing them is not just a nuisance, but also a legal issue.
On Saplo, every Box is a separate container with dedicated RAM and disk space. For a store, we recommend Box M (2 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD, $69 per year, with key-based SSH access). A small brochure site will fit in Box S (1 GB RAM, $29 per year), but a store with a cart, checkout, and seasonal traffic needs some headroom. As the store grows, you can move up to Box L (6 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD, $149 per year) without having to move anything, and your sites stay where they are. The first-year price is the same as the renewal price. You can find a full comparison of the plans in the price list. We explain exactly what a store gets with Box (PHP, Redis, SSL, backups) on the WooCommerce hosting page.
How to launch a WooCommerce store in 30 minutes?
Here is how it works on Saplo, where the control panel installs the server, database, WordPress, and WooCommerce for you. On another host, steps 3 and 4 are done manually, but the store configuration from step 5 onward is exactly the same.
Step 1. Create an account and choose Box
Go to WordPress on Saplo and create an account. For 7 days, you can test Box without entering your card details, so you can set up a store before paying anything.
Step 2. Click “Add page” and select “Online store”
The setup wizard asks what you need, not about the technology. Select “Online store”, and for the second question, “What should the store run on?”, leave the recommended WooCommerce selected. The second option is PrestaShop.
Step 3. Enter the name and address
You can start with a free temporary address in the saploapp.pl domain and connect your own domain later, or purchase a domain straight away in the same setup wizard. The SSL certificate for each domain and subdomain is installed and renewed automatically.
Step 4. Run it and wait about 3 minutes
The panel installs WordPress in Polish, installs and enables WooCommerce with a Polish translation, sets the store country to Poland and the currency to dollars, and connects a Redis cache. You log in to the WordPress dashboard with one click from the Saplo panel, without a separate password.
Step 5. Complete the store details
In the WordPress dashboard, go to WooCommerce > Settings and check:
- store address (needed for taxes and shipping),
- sales and shipping locations (usually just Poland to start),
- prices with or without VAT, depending on your business structure,
- customer emails: sender, footer, logo.
Step 6. Add your first products
Products > Add new: name, description, price, image, category, stock status. A product with sizes or colors is a “product with variants”. To start, add three or four products and test the entire purchasing process.
Step 7. Enable payments and shipping
Install the plugin for your chosen payment provider and enter the keys from its dashboard. Then, in WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping, add the “Poland” zone and shipping methods with prices. More details in the next section.
Step 8. Complete the legal pages and make a test purchase
A store's terms and conditions, privacy policy, and information on returns and withdrawal from the contract are required in Poland. Finally, place a test order from start to finish: cart, checkout, payment in test mode, and a confirmation email. Only then switch payments to live mode.
Which plugins do you need in a Polish store?
The rule is simple: every plugin is code that needs updating and a potential drag on performance. Install only what you really need. In a typical Polish store, you need:
- Payments: official plugins for Przelewy24, PayU, Tpay or imoje. Each one supports BLIK, instant transfers and cards. Choose one by comparing the fees.
- Shipping: the official InPost plugin for parcel lockers or integrators such as Furgonetka or Apaczka, which handle multiple couriers at once and print labels.
- Invoices: an integration with the invoicing software you already use (for example Fakturownia, wFirma, inFakt). Since KSeF was introduced, business invoices are issued through a KSeF-compliant system anyway.
- Omnibus Directive: during promotions, you have to display the lowest price from the last 30 days. There are free plugins for this.
- Consent and cookies: a consent banner compliant with RODO and Consent Mode if you use Google Analytics or run ads.
- SEO: one plugin, for example Yoast or Rank Math. Not both.
How to improve your store's speed and security?
A slow store loses customers at checkout. We've described the most common causes and how to fix them in our guide Is WordPress running slowly? 9 causes and how to fix them. In short, for your store:
- Compress product images before uploading them or use a plugin to do it, preferably converting them to WebP.
- Exclude the cart, checkout, and “My account” from the cache. Good cache plugins do this automatically with WooCommerce, but it's still worth checking.
- Don't install three plugins for the same task.
- Regularly update WordPress, WooCommerce, and plugins. Before a major WooCommerce update, make a backup and check the checkout after the change.
- Use strong passwords and two-factor authentication for the admin panel.
With Saplo, the store runs in an isolated container, and a daily encrypted backup of every Box is sent to a separate data center. Starting with Box L, you also get backups that you can restore with one click in the panel (7 days back in Box L, 14 in Box XL, 30 in Box XXL).
Do you already have a store with another provider?
You don't have to start from scratch. If your store runs on WooCommerce with another hosting provider, the easiest way to migrate it is with our Saplo Migrate plugin. In the Saplo dashboard, you install WordPress on Box, click “Move site here” and generate a migration key. You upload the plugin to the old site, paste the key under Tools > Saplo Migrate and click “Start migration”. No FTP and no manual database export.
All files (themes, plugins, product photos) and the entire database are transferred: products, orders, customer accounts together with passwords, and settings. Addresses in the database are rewritten automatically. The old store stays fully operational, so you can check the new one using a test Box address before switching the domain. Email is migrated separately using the email migration wizard in the dashboard.
Third-party plugins, such as All-in-One WP Migration or Duplicator, can also migrate a store, but they require downloading a package and uploading it manually, and with large stores they often run into size limits. We described the entire process, including preserving your Google rankings, in our guide to how to move WordPress to a new host without losing SEO.
Would you rather have someone do it for you? Migration to Saplo is free, including during the trial period. We transfer the files, database and email. Find out more on the Migration page.
FAQ
Is WooCommerce really free?
Yes, the plugin itself is free and open source, with no license fees and no sales commissions. You pay for hosting, a domain, payment processor fees, and any paid plugins.
Is WordPress required for WooCommerce?
Yes. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress and does not work without it. On Saplo, you can install both together using a single wizard in about 3 minutes.
How many products can a WooCommerce store hold?
The plugin has no fixed limit. Server resources are the main constraint: Box M is enough for hundreds of products, while Box L works better for thousands of products with variants and high traffic. You can upgrade your plan in the panel without any migration.
Can a WooCommerce store support BLIK and parcel lockers?
Yes. BLIK is supported by a payment operator plugin (Przelewy24, PayU, Tpay, imoje), while parcel lockers are supported by the official InPost plugin or a courier integrator.
WooCommerce or PrestaShop to get started?
When you start selling in Poland and have a catalog of up to a few hundred products, WooCommerce is simpler. Choose PrestaShop if you plan a very large catalog with many variants, languages and currencies from the outset. On Saplo, you can set up both using the same "Online store" wizard.
Want to test it in practice? Set up a store with WordPress with WooCommerce on Saplo and test it for 7 days without a card.
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