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	Shopify
Pricing & Plans	-Essentials @ $25/mo -Performance @ 45/mo	-Basic @ $39/mo -Shopify @ $105/mo -Advanced @ $399/mo
Basic Features	-Open-source -Secure hosting from WordPress.com -Customer support via live chat and email -Unlimited staff accounts -50GB storage -Custom domain and SSL certificate – Woo Mobile App- Built-in payment processing -Very good SEO -Thousands of plugins & extensions	-Closed source -Secure hosting -Customer support via live chat, phone and email -2 Staff accounts -Unlimited storage -SSL certificate & subdomain -Shopify Mobile App -Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe) -Decent SEO -Decent app store

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.

	Plans & Pricing	Basic Features
GoDaddy	-Essentials @$20.99/mo -Flex @ $99.99/mo -Expand $149.99/mo	-Unlimited products & online store orders -250 GB of bandwidth -GoDaddy Payments integrated -Automated daily backups
Bluehost	-Online Store @ $9.95/mo -Online Store+Marketplace @ $12.95/mo	-Online store website -Website analytics -100 GB SSD Storage -Free Domain (1st Year) & free SSL -Powered by YITH Jetpack -Daily backups
Woo Express	-Essentials @ $40/mo -Performance @ 70/mo	-Built-in payment processing Premium themes -Customer support via live chat and email -Custom domain and SSL certificate -50GB storage for product images & media

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.