WooCommerce and WordPress.com

  • Unknown's avatar
    oddlyactive · Member ·

    Hi –
    I want to add a shop to our website and am trying to work out the most cost-effective and efficient way of doing this. Looking at the options, upgrading my account to ‘business’ to access plugins and installing WooCommerce seemed the logical route, but having now read a few forum topics I’m confused as to whether the plugin is actually supported on a ‘wordpress.com’ account?

    So 3 questions:

    1) does wordpress.com business plan support WooCommerce plugin, or are the e-commerce features listed ‘bundled’? If bundled, can these be expanded by installing WooCommerce or would I have to migrate to wordpress.org?

    2) if WooCommerce is supported, is the hosting (for the plugin) included in the price of the business plan, or is additional hosting required with further charges incurred?

    3) looking at the .com pricing plans it appears that advanced e-commerce features (international shipping etc) are ‘disabled’. Is this absolute, or does it just mean that (e.g.) overseas postage rates etc have to be manually administered?

    Any help greatly appreciated, ‘cos getting a very simple shop with a cart for low volume/low cost items as a ‘service’ is causing me more headaches than anything else on my site, and I want to get it right from the outset.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    1) does wordpress.com business plan support WooCommerce plugin

    Yes, you can use WooCommerce, along with most other WordPress plugins on our Business Plan. Because WooCommerce belongs to the same company as WordPress.com, the Business Plan also includes full tech support should you run into any problems with the WooCommerce plugin.

    2) if WooCommerce is supported, is the hosting (for the plugin) included in the price of the business plan, or is additional hosting required with further charges incurred?

    Plugins don’t require hosting. Only sites do, and hosting on WordPress.com is free. Paid plans on WordPress.com pay for additional features and support, not for hosting. One of the features the Business Plan includes is the ability to install any WordPress plugin, provided it’s not incompatible with our hosting setup.

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/incompatible-plugins/

    As for further charges, that would depend on exactly what plugins you want to use. No premium add-ons for WooCommerce, or any other premium plugins, are included in the Business Plan. And if you use payment gateway plugins for WooCommerce that use third party services like PayPal or Stripe to process payments for you, or, for example, shipping rate plugins that integrate with third party services, there may be additional charges levied by those services themselves on a subscription or per transaction basis. Those charges are directly between you and the service in question, and has nothing to do with the plan you buy from us.

    3) looking at the .com pricing plans it appears that advanced e-commerce features (international shipping etc) are ‘disabled’. Is this absolute, or does it just mean that (e.g.) overseas postage rates etc have to be manually administered?

    Where are you seeing that? I don’t see anything showing as disabled at either https://wordpress.com/plans or https://wordpress.com/pricing.

    The eCommerce plan has additional features on top of the Business Plan’s, as that plan comes with WooCommerce and a number of payment and shipping plugins, including some premium plugins, pre-installed. But you’re able to install exactly the same plugins manually on the Business Plan, and none of the core WooCommerce functionality is restricted on either plan.

    You can see detailed information on what’s included in those to plans at these links:

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/business-plan/

    https://en.support.wordpress.com/ecommerce-plan/

    Let us know if you have any more questions about this.

  • Unknown's avatar
    oddlyactive · Member ·

    Thanks for comprehensive and prompt reply – very helpful :D

    I think we’ll probably take the business plan route initially, and see what woo commerce plugin delivers. We’re only talking low volume / ‘service’ sales so can probably work around international sales fairly simply, but we’ll see. Either way, Woo Commerce seems a lot less fannying about than a separate shopify (or whatever) channel.

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