The WordPress CMS (content management system) is compatible with the e-commerce plugin WooCommerce (CMS). Although WordPress and WooCommerce are free and open-source software, this does not imply that you can use WooCommerce to create an online store for nothing. This simple article will help you with the clear understanding how much does it cost to open a virtual store with WooCommerce

The basic version of WooCommerce is free because it lacks many components, like web hosting and domain registration, to operate an online store. So, by now, the question “How much does it cost to open a virtual store with WooCommerce in 2024?” must be of peak interest.

Let’s dive straight in without wasting any further time.

How much does it cost to open a virtual store with WooCommerce?

How much does a WooCommmerce web hosting cost?

When building your WooCommerce e-commerce store, web hosting is the first expense you should consider. Nowadays, many e-commerce platforms are offered as SaaS (software as a service) products. In addition to providing hosting on their infrastructure, the platform provider will also enable your online store to be accessible via the Internet.

However, Woo is an open-source program and does not include native hosting. This means that for you to operate your online store, you, as a user, must set up your hosting environment after which you can open a virtual store with Woocommerce.

With Nestify, you get to see two tailored WooCommerce hosting plans, namely, offers the “Managed WooCommerce Hosting” and “High Traffic WooCommerce Hosting” solutions for the ones that use the WooCommerce plugin for setting up and running their eCommerce website(s).

Some prominent features of the Nestify web hosting are:

• Uptime guarantee
• Scalability
• Optimization
• Low-latency CDN
• Prime security tailored to your e-commerce store
• Robust 24/7 support to address even the slightest inconveniences quickly.

A money-back guarantee is best when you’re just starting, and with Nestify, you get it, too, with everything else mentioned above.

Do you need a domain name? How much will it cost to open a virtual store with WooCommerce?

People use a domain name to find your website on the Internet (in this case, the WooCommerce store). You must first register and claim a domain name for yourself with a domain registry before you can use it.

Like a street address, each domain is distinct, and a domain name cannot exist in multiple versions. As a result, the domain you’ve chosen for your online store likely won’t be available forever, unless you’re lucky!

Depending on the specific name you want to register, the cost of a domain name can vary substantially. For instance, “.com” domains are typically a little more expensive. The annual base price typically falls between $15 and $25.

More valuable domains are frequently regarded as premium names and come with a hefty one-time payment in addition to the regular costs.

Several popular sites for buying domains are Namecheap, Bluehost, Godaddy, and SiteGround.

How much does a theme cost?

WooCommerce’s Storefront theme is a great place to start since it is free and provides many customization options. However, the free themes also lack assistance if you encounter problems creating your store.

However, purchasing a premium WooCommerce theme might be worthwhile if you plan to grow your online business or guarantee that the design of your website is of the highest caliber.

You can purchase a more powerful, customized version of the basic Storefront model through WooCommerce, as they sell customized themes based on the Storefront template. These templates are available for a one-time payment ranging from $39 to $128. The best free 

WooCommerce theme options are Hestia, Storefront, Astra, OceanWP, Zakra, and Shopping Cart.

There are a lot of reasons to think about purchasing a premium theme:

• Greater personalization makes your store more distinctive and more aligned with your branding.
• Enhanced functionality facilitates the expansion of your online store.
• For themes that are purchased, customer support is more tailored.

How Much Does The WooCommerce Security Cost?

Like web hosting, maintaining security for your online store is essential, if not more. With WooCommerce, you must take care of many security features, whereas hosted solutions like Shopify do that for you.

Below are the primary security features that your online store must have, along with an estimate of how much they will cost.

SSL Certificate

Your e-commerce store’s security starts with an SSL (secure socket layer) certificate. Encrypting the data between a client’s PC and your website is beneficial.

If your website has an SSL certificate, you can quickly identify it because the web address will show a lock symbol next to it, and the web address, aka URL, will begin with HTTPS rather than HTTP. 

Many hosting companies include a free, high-quality SSL certificate with their hosting packages. Free SSL certificates are also accessible, but they frequently don’t offer your online store the complete degree of security you desire.

The price of an SSL from a reputable supplier can range from $9 to $150 or more.

Anti-Malware Tools

If you want to open a virtual store with WooCommerce, SSL certificates are only the first step in protecting your web business. You must take additional security measures, like anti-malware software, to enhance your protection level.

Anti-malware solutions are a feature that some web hosts include in their packages. SiteLock is among the most widely used anti-malware programs. There are three monthly plans available:$15, $30, and $50.

• The most costly plan offered by SiteLock has the following features:
• Scanning at the file level
• Plugin Inspection
• Google’s monitoring of blacklists
• Report on Weekly Scan
• Guarding against XSS scripting
• Safeguard against SQL injection

Web Application Firewall

By filtering and tracking website traffic, a web application firewall (WAF) contributes to the security of your website. Cloudflare is the most widely utilized WAF for WooCommerce websites. It helps ensure your store complies with PCI standards and easily integrates with WordPress.

Additionally, it has a global CDN that will speed up loading your store’s pages everywhere. While Cloudflare’s CDN is free, you must have at least the $20/month Pro plan to access the WAF.

Their most costly plan, which costs $200 a month, offers more significant performance benefits. The projected monthly security expenses range from $20 to $250. Considering a firewall before you go on to open a virtual store with WooCommerce is a wise move.

How much do the Woocommerce plugins cost?

An eCommerce platform just cannot incorporate every feature you’ll need into a single piece of software. Things would become disorganized, and the software would become demanding, even if they tried.

Most eCommerce software is designed using modular designs to address this issue. This makes it possible to expand the leading software with add-ons and applications. This mainly benefits novice users as they stay calm at the start.

Users can expand their functionality and add new features to their eCommerce website with these add-ons or extensions. Purchasing them will raise the price of creating an eCommerce website because many are paid. Hence, the price metric slightly differs for everyone.

The following are the prices of some popular plugins, such as RankMath, Yoast SEO, and WP Rocket:

Also for many WooCommerce store owners, shipping can be one of the biggest challenges logistically. Not only is it technically difficult to set up, but it also affects your overall customer experience. However, you can combat the issue by installing one of the shipping plugins for WooCommerce.

Plugins can be a game changer for you WooCommerce store and hence you must consider them on of the cornerstones when you want to open a virtual store with WooCommerce.

WP Rocket

You can use the performance and caching plugin WP Rocket to shorten the time your web pages load. For your WooCommerce store, a caching plugin is essential if you want your website to load quickly.

WP Rocket’s primary advantage is its simplicity of setup and usage. However, this differs from other caching plugins, as many demand technical know-how to ensure your settings are configured correctly without interfering with your pages.

The following are a few of WP Rocket’s primary features:

• CDN incorporation
• Minification
• GZIP compression
• Preloading the cache
• Caching in browsers
• Delay JS loading 
• Lazyloading

The premium plugin WP Rocket can be bought for $49 for a single website. 

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is probably something you have heard of if you are familiar with WordPress. It is the most commonly used SEO plugin, so anyone can effortlessly optimize their website for search engines.

Yoast SEO makes it simple to avoid duplicate content no-index pages, and build a sitemap. Additionally, it lets you designate a target keyword for every post and web page and offers advice on optimizing your content for that keyword.

Yoast is available in paid and free versions. Many features are available in the free version, but some helpful features—like the redirect manager and internal linking suggestions—are exclusive to the premium edition.

Yoast SEO Premium is $89 for each site annually.

RankMath

Many website owners believe that RankMath, a new SEO plugin, is superior to Yoast SEO. Since Yoast SEO premium offers many of the same features as its free version, RankMath is becoming increasingly popular.

Recently, it released its paid version, which has many additional features besides the extensive feature set in the free version.

• Sophisticated Google Analytics integration
• Tracker for keyword ranks
• The most sophisticated schema generator
• Integration of Google Trends
• WooCommerce SEO Expert

An unlimited number of websites can be used with RankMath Pro for $59 annually.

Also read: 30 Best WooCommerce Plugins, Find Your Fit!

Does WooCommerce Need Third-Party Extensions?

Email Hosting

You will require a business email address that contains your domain name if you are an online business owner. There are certain disadvantages to using your WordPress host for your emails, even though you might be able to.

Using your WordPress host for email purposes can, first of all, cause deliverability problems. It may also deplete server resources, harming your website’s performance. You must set up a third-party email provider to host your email accounts to prevent this.

The top choices for email account management for your WooCommerce store are listed below.

Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite)

You can use your business email addresses with the same interface as Gmail when you set up G Suite as your email service provider for your company. This brings with it all the reliability and user-friendliness of the platform. Google Workspace comes at a $12 per user starting price.

Keep in mind that you can only have one email address per user. As a result, each additional email address you wish to use for support, orders, newsletters, your name, etc., will require a separate user account, which will cost an additional $12 a month.

Want to open a virtual store with WooCommerce? Google Workspace can help you reinforce it with its popular contemporary functionalities.

Zoho

For managing your business, Zoho offers an extensive product suite. A feature-rich email hosting interface is one of them.

There are three options available with Zoho Mail:

• $1 per user per month (billed annually) for Mail Lite
• Mail Premium: $4 monthly per user, paid yearly
• Workplace: Monthly fees for each user start at $3 (billed annually).

Users are only permitted to have one email address, just like Google.

Email Marketing

With the highest annual average return on investment of any marketing channel, email marketing is essential for any kind of business. It is even more crucial for e-commerce businesses since it allows you to send subscribers highly targeted campaigns.

WooCommerce does not let you easily create, send, and manage email marketing campaigns, even though it offers native support for transactional emails like order confirmations and tracking information.

You’ll need a third-party email marketing service for that. There are lots of options available. These two offer all the necessary features, integrate seamlessly, and kickstart your journey to open a virtual store with WooCommerce.

You Might Like: Best Email Marketing Plugins For WooCommerce Every Ecommerce Business Should Make Use Of

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is probably the first company you will find if you are looking for solutions because it is a well-known email marketing service. With Mailchimp’s generous free plan, you can have an email list of around 2,000 subscribers and send up to 10,000 emails monthly.

In addition, the price increases with the number of subscribers you have, starting at $29.99 per month.

Also read: How to connect Mailchimp to WooCommerce?

Klaviyo

A more recent email marketing tool made especially for e-commerce sites is called Klaviyo. It provides customers with more individualized experiences and has many helpful features like SMS marketing, email automation, and list segmentation.

It has multiple email campaigns pre-configured, which you can easily activate from your dashboard.

Among them are: 

• the abandoned cart campaign
• campaign for pre-purchase
• after-purchase marketing
• Recover campaign

You can effortlessly add products to your email messages by syncing your product catalog with your Klaviyo account, and the platform easily integrates with WooCommerce.

Up to 250 users can use Klaviyo for free. After that, monthly fees begin at $20 and go up depending on the size of your email list. Third-party extensions are expected to cost between $1 and $42 monthly.

How Much Does It Cost To Provide Customer Support?

You will probably require assistance with customer service if you have a sizable product catalog and sell many goods to a sizable customer base. This entails investing in support personnel who can handle client inquiries on your behalf.

Investing in chatbots can also enable you to offer users round-the-clock support. This is where expenses can mount up quickly. A committed support staff on hand will cost thousands of dollars monthly. Fortunately, this will be fine unless you’re already selling many products.

Conclusion: Open a virtual store with WooCommerce

The entire anticipated monthly cost of WooCommerce is $25 to $370 or more. Remember that this only pays for the costs of providing the essential features of a top-notch online store.

Web Hosting: $4 to $50 per month (approx.)

Domain name: from free to $2 a month (approx.)

Theme: $0 to $8 a month (approx.)

Security: $20 to $250 a month (approx.)

Plugins: monthly fees of $0 to $18 (approx.)

Extensions for third parties: $1 to $42 a month (approx.)

Monthly customer support fees: $0 to $ 1,000 (approx.)

This will cost more if you want extra features like wish lists, subscriptions, memberships, multilingual support, upselling, cross-selling, and other features. Additionally, you must consider the processing fees associated with various payment gateways, even though they are on all e-commerce platforms.

FAQs: Open a virtual store with WooCommerce

Does utilizing WooCommerce for online sales come with transaction fees?

Transaction costs are not imposed by WooCommerce itself. Payment gateways, however, might impose transaction fees. Well-known payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe usually charge a percentage of the transaction amount.

Are there extra fees for WooCommerce essential plugins?

Although WooCommerce has several basic features, some users might prefer upgrading to a premium plugin to increase functionality. Premium plugins come with various prices, from one-time purchases to yearly subscriptions.

Does my WooCommerce store require ongoing maintenance, and should I budget for it?

Yes, it’s wise to set aside money for regular maintenance, which includes security updates, plugin renewals, and updates. Although maintenance expenses might differ, they are necessary for a safe and functional online store.

Is there anything extra I should know about hidden fees when using WooCommerce?

Although the essential WooCommerce plugin is free, users should keep in mind that premium themes, plugins, and hosting plans with extra features may have additional costs. Payment gateway transaction fees should also be taken into account. These all can add up to the costs of your endeavor to open a virtual store with WooCommerce.