A WooCommerce store isn’t installed—it’s set up. Product types, tax rates and tax classes, shipping zones, payment providers, order statuses, and the automated emails sent to your customers are configured for your store instead of remaining at their default values. Otherwise, errors—especially regarding taxes and shipping—can occur that aren’t noticed until the store is up and running and then affect every order. We set up order management on HPOS from the very beginning so that the store remains fast even as order volume grows, and we create a staging environment where we test changes before they go live. The setup also includes a handover: We’ll show your team how to create products, process orders, and issue refunds. After that, you’ll be able to handle day-to-day operations on your own and only call us for anything beyond that. As a WooCommerce agency, we dedicate most of our time to this setup.

Migrating from Shopify, Shopware, Magento, or a custom-built store is entirely feasible if it’s planned properly. We’ll transfer products—including variants and images—as well as categories, customer accounts, and order history. The critical part isn’t the data, but the URLs: Every old product and category page needs a redirect to its new destination; otherwise, you’ll lose the very rankings you’ve worked so hard to build over the years. We set up the redirects before the migration and thoroughly test them afterward. Before going live, the new store runs on a staging environment where you can test orders, payments, and emails under live conditions. The migration itself then takes place during a time window when your site has low traffic. You can find detailed information on how such a migration works on our Website Relaunch page.

In B2B, different rules apply than in retail. Prices depend on the customer, not the product. We set up customer groups with their own price lists, add tiered pricing and minimum order quantities, and switch the display to net prices as soon as a business customer logs in. This includes purchase on account, credit limits, and verification of VAT identification numbers for shipments to other EU countries. Often, the store is not meant to be publicly accessible: In such cases, we restrict access to the product range or prices behind a login and grant access to specific sections only for certain customer groups. For recurring orders, we set up quick entry using item numbers and the ability to repeat previous orders. This is where WooCommerce is clearly superior to hosted platforms, because any pricing rule can be implemented.

Off-the-shelf store themes come with hundreds of settings, only ten of which you’ll actually need. The rest still load anyway. Instead, we develop a custom theme based on our starter theme: only the templates your store actually uses, and only the code necessary for them. Product detail pages, category overviews with filters, shopping carts, and checkout pages are created as separate templates and designed specifically for mobile and desktop. We build special features like configurators, size charts, or product comparisons directly into the theme instead of relying on an additional plugin. The side effect: When WooCommerce receives a major update, we only need to check our own templates and don’t have to wait for a theme provider to respond.

There’s a WooCommerce plugin for almost every need. That’s the system’s greatest strength—and at the same time, its most common flaw. Every additional plugin means longer load times, more updates, more potential for conflicts, and, in most cases, an annual license fee. For every requirement, we first check whether it can be solved using built-in features or a few lines of code in the theme, and only then do we turn to a plugin. When a plugin is used, we pay attention to its maintenance status, update frequency, and how easily we can remove it later. For existing stores, we clean things up: We review the installed extensions, show you what’s duplicated, what hasn’t been updated in years, and what you simply no longer use. The result is a list of current licensing costs and a recommendation on what to keep.

An online store processes addresses, order histories, and payment data. This makes it a more lucrative target than a corporate website and imposes additional legal requirements. Payment processing is always handled by the provider, so card data never reaches the online store, and you are not subject to the full scope of PCI DSS. The customer area is protected against automated attempts to guess login credentials, and the admin area is additionally secured with two-factor authentication. On the data protection page, we clarify which order data must be stored and for how long, as well as when it must be deleted, and we set up the information and deletion functions so that you can respond to requests without our assistance. Backups run more frequently for an online store than for a website, because every hour without a backup can result in lost orders.