I’m investigating WooCommerce as a potential e-commerce solution, however my immediate concern (which I haven’t been able to find information on) is the number of products.
The proposed store needs the ability to house ~30,000 different products.
- Is there any technical limitation on the number of products that WooCommerce can handle?
- Would the limit simply be the same as the number of posts I could safely/practically handle in WordPress?
- Are there other issues that would make managing something like this just a bad idea? (experiences with WooCommerce)
I hate to mention this on WordPress.Stackexchange, but I would go with using Magento in place of WordPress. I love WordPress and use it on almost every website that I build, but it was not specifically made for e-commerce. Magento handles just about everything better in regards to e-commerce.
I only tend to use WordPress for e-commerce when the products and store are fairly simple. Magento will take more work to build the site initially, but I believe it would give you the best results with the number of products that you have.
The limitations of WooCommerce are tied to the limitations of WordPress ( products in WooCom are simply “posts” in the database), which in turn is tied to the limitations of your hosting platform.
Magento is a resource hog compared to WordPress, which requires far less overhead. I am migrating a customer off of Magento and into WooCommerce simply because he’s having to spend too much money on his hosting due to the resource requirements of Magento.
There’s no problem at all have 30,000 posts in WordPress or WooCommerce. What matters is how much traffic your site will receive since that governs how much database activity takes place in loading pages on the site.
I work on a social networking site right now that uses WordPress and WooCommerce. The site has well over 250,000 posts in the database. The site runs fine on its own dedicated server.
I would tend to agree that you should be able to get performance out of woocommerce suitable for your clients needs. If they have 30,000+ products, they will be happy to spend, say, $300 per month of a fairly chunky dedicated box. You’d probably do that for Magento in any case. Cache everything cachable, and you’ll be alright!
I have a woocomemrce site that has 50k products and gets 50k hits a month on a dedicated server and runs fine, woocommerce can handle what your host has.
you can look at vip.wordpress.com and see what it can do
Bottom Line Comparison. Magento vs. WooCommerce | WordPress
Price for development: WordPress wins. WordPress devs are a dime a dozen, it’s open source down to the core so there are many more free extensions & paid extensions.
Ease of Use: WooCommerce wins. I’ve used Magento now for 2 years. I’ve discovered WooCommerce, tried it out and what I did in WooCommerce would have taken me 4 times longer in Magento. Not to mention, you can teach your secretary/pet hampster how to add products in WooCommerce. In Magento, if you have a clothing store, you have to add color swatches in a totally different page, then go to your product and select it on your simple product drop down.
Creating products with colors & sizes: WooCommerce wins!!!! NO DOUBT. It will create the size and color combinations automatically, for Magento it’s an extension that costs $100. I would stay away from Magento unless you have some deep pockets and many long hours…
If you have those two things… have at it! Adding 400 products in Magento typically takes 2-3 weeks to do it right. There is an import script called Magmi, which I’ve used extensively. It will work, but you have to create CSV sheets perfectly. If someone misstyped, it will not tell you that the product was not imported properly… you’ll find out on the front end of the website…
As a leading jewelry and Diamond ecommerce store developers we regularly receive enquires on how to integrate more than 1,50,000 diamond data from Diamond trading platforms like Rapnet/ IDEX into woocommerce based stores.
We had to undertake a completely out-of-box approach to achieve this Technical details on how we achieved it is available on my blog post:
Demo woocommerce store hosting about 40,000 diamonds is available on
http://woocommerce.transpacific-software.com/?post_type=loosediamonds)
Rather than Magento, I’d recommend considering cs-cart.com. The $295 pro version is amazing value having all of Magento’s features and is far easier and quicker to set up and will have no problems with your 30k products.
However, I do have two client stores using WooCommerce that have over 2,000 products in 50+ categories with no performance or reliability issues. With the Yoast SEO plugin, SEO seems superior to Magento as well. I think with the right selection of Woo extensions, WooCommerce works as reliably as most high-end systems for shops with up to say 5,000 products. It also doesn’t require a costly host server like Magento and others. Like any e-commerce shop, you need to watch security though and ensure the WordPress install in hardened.