WooCommerce has launched Woo Express, an all-in-one managed solution for eCommerce businesses. WooCommerce announced a hosted WooCommerce solution at WooSesh last year after GoDaddy and Bluehost announced their WooCommerce hosting offerings. Woo Express was actually soft-launched in early March with a small selection of visitors.  Is it going to be the perfect Shopify alternative?

Woo Express

Woo Express is an all-in-one WooCommerce plan that includes everything you need to launch your online store and build a successful business. Beau Lebens, Head of Engineering at WooCommerce, compared Woo Express to what WordPress.com is to open-source WordPress. 

It comes with a selection of handpicked WooCommerce extensions and tools to help you get started fast, sell more types of products, and grow your business. With every managed WordPress.com environment, you get access to a native GitHub integration, run WP-CLI commands, check server logs, access DBs directly and set up your workflows through SSH and SFTP.

The Game Changer in WooCommerce Vs Shopify Battle

Currently, WooCommerce rules the eCommerce roost with 23% of the top 1 Million sites, followed by Shopify with 21%. Website owners who are reluctant to deal with the technical side of things, including hosting, prefer Shopify over WooCommerce. Having to maintain the hosting and WooCommerce could be a real hassle when the store grows. But Shopify takes care of security, performance, maintenance, updates and uptime justifying its high price.

With the launch of Woo Express, Shopify will lose this edge. Woo Express also provides SSL certificate and security like Shopify. Take into account the better SEO, impressive extensions, power of WordPress and WooCommerce offered by Woo Express, the game has gone up to another level.

Woo Express Pricing

There’s a free trial period of 14 days after which you have to upgrade to either the Essential or Performance plan. The Essential plan costs $40/month whereas the Performance plan costs $70/month.

Woo Express and the Site Editor

WooCommerce COO Warren Holmes said,

“One of our goals for Woo Express is to give new merchants the best of everything WordPress offers — the site editor and the blocks we’ve built for WooCommerce mean you can create a beautiful site to express your brand without coding knowledge. Woo Express ships with Tsubaki as the default, a modern, commerce-focused, block-based theme. We’ve made it easier for new merchants to get started with this theme by creating default content powered by our blocks. That includes the new cart and checkout blocks, which provides a more delightful experience for shoppers and better conversions for merchants.”

The Verdict

With WooCommerce being the most used open-source e-commerce software, Woo Express looks to have a bright future ahead. It promises all the goodness of WooCommerce and WordPress without the worries of hosting, security, backup and maintenance.