Earlier this summer a woman who sells loose-leaf tea asked us to quote her an online store. She already had two offers, both WooCommerce: a freelancer wanted 18,000 CZK, an agency 140,000. She asked whether one of them was joking. Neither was. Both quotes could be honest work - they just assumed completely different projects. That spread is exactly why the question of what a WooCommerce store costs has no single answer. It does have a fairly tidy table, though, and you'll find it below.
WooCommerce is free - you pay for everything around it. Realistically: build it yourself for the price of hosting and a theme, so under 10,000 CZK plus a lot of your evenings. A freelancer runs 20,000 to 60,000 CZK, an agency 35,000 to 150,000 depending on scope. On top of that, budget 2,000 to 40,000 CZK a year for running it: hosting, plugin licences, and maintenance. A rented platform like Shoptet costs a few hundred crowns a month and almost no worry, but the data, the features, and the growth ceiling belong to the platform, not to you. This article breaks down where those numbers come from, how WooCommerce compares to Shoptet and Shopify, and when it's the right call - and when you shouldn't buy it at all.
What WooCommerce Is and Why It's Everywhere
WooCommerce is an e-commerce plugin for WordPress. You install it on an ordinary WordPress site and the site becomes a store: products, cart, orders, customer emails. The code is open source and free, and according to W3Techs, roughly a third of stores with an identifiable platform run on WooCommerce. The reason is simple: every other developer knows WordPress, you pick your own hosting, and you pay no monthly plan and no percentage of your sales to anyone.
The same principle is also its weakness. It's your software on your hosting, so it's your responsibility too: updates, backups, security. On rented platforms the operator handles that for you. The whole decision between WooCommerce and the rest of the market comes down to this trade: freedom and ownership in exchange for responsibility.
What It Costs to Build a WooCommerce Store
Three routes, three very different budgets. Prices are from the Czech market in 2026 and apply to a store with up to a few hundred products.
| Route | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| DIY | 0 - 15,000 CZK + your time | A ready-made theme, basic plugins, and a lot of learning as you go. The result matches how many evenings you can stomach. |
| Freelancer | 20,000 - 60,000 CZK | A customised theme with payments and shipping set up. Quality varies person to person; check references. |
| Agency | 35,000 - 150,000 CZK | Design matched to your brand, invoicing and warehouse integrations, a tested checkout flow, and someone accountable for the result. |
The spread inside each row comes from four things: custom design versus a bought theme, the number of products and their variants, migrating data from an old solution, and integrations with surrounding systems - invoicing, warehouse, sometimes an ERP. A store with twenty products and a payment gateway is a different job than three thousand variants with order history to carry over. We covered the general anatomy of website pricing in how much a website costs in 2026, and you'll find concrete numbers for your case in our pricing.
Running Costs: The Numbers That Don't Make It into Quotes
This is where free stops being free. WooCommerce has no monthly plan, but a store in production costs something every year:
| Item | Per year | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | 1,200 - 6,000 CZK | Cheap shared hosting works at the start; with growing traffic you'll want managed WordPress hosting. |
| Domain | about 300 CZK | Register it in your own name, not your supplier's. |
| Paid plugins | 0 - 10,000 CZK | Licences renew yearly and are billed in euros or dollars. A Czech store usually needs two or three paid ones. |
| Maintenance and updates | 0 - 24,000 CZK | Zero if you update yourself and carry the risk. Otherwise a monthly retainer with an agency or an admin. |
| Total | 2,000 - 40,000 CZK | Depending on how much of it you do with your own hands. |
That last line tends to be contested, so let's be direct: WordPress with plugins needs updates every week, and an unmaintained store is the most common road to a hacked store. Either it's your recurring task, or someone watches it for a retainer - at our place that falls under project support. The one option that doesn't pay off is the third one: ignoring it and hoping.
WooCommerce vs. Shoptet vs. Shopify vs. Custom
The Czech classic: three platforms and one custom route. Here's how they line up:
| WooCommerce | Shoptet | Shopify | Custom | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Build cost | 0 - 150,000 CZK | from a few thousand | from a few thousand | from 150,000 CZK |
| Monthly | hundreds of CZK (hosting) | from about 500 CZK | from about 700 CZK + fees | hundreds of CZK (hosting) |
| You own data and code | yes | no | no | yes |
| Custom features | nearly unlimited | themes and add-ons | via apps | unlimited |
| Best for | content + commerce, specific needs | fast start on the Czech market | selling abroad | the store is the core of the business |
Shoptet is a great first store on the Czech market: you're selling within days and the platform worries about the tech. You hit its walls the day you want a feature it doesn't offer, or want to work with your data and customers your own way. Shopify solves the same thing globally and is strongest when you sell into several countries - we keep a detailed comparison on our Shopify vs. WooCommerce page. And a fully custom store makes sense once order volumes grow to where boxed solutions hold you back; we drew that line in WordPress or custom build. If you're not yet sure you need a store at all, start with e-shop or website.
When WooCommerce Pays Off
After ten years of building online stores, the pattern has settled. WooCommerce is the right choice when any of these hold:
- You already have a WordPress site. You're adding a store to a site that works instead of building a new one.
- Content is part of your strategy. Blog posts, guides, and SEO articles live in the same system as your products. For stores that want customers from Google instead of paid ads, this is the biggest weapon.
- You need something boxed platforms can't do. A product configurator, B2B price lists, a connection to your warehouse. In WooCommerce it can be programmed; on a rented platform you wait and hope it gets added.
- You want to own your data. Customers, orders, and code are yours. You can swap the hosting, the supplier, or the whole stack whenever you choose.
And When You Shouldn't Buy It
We build on WooCommerce, so this paragraph isn't fun to write, but it belongs here. Don't buy WooCommerce if you have a few dozen products, no technical person, and your main criterion is having no worries - a rented Shoptet is honestly the better choice there, and the price difference buys back your time. It doesn't fit the other extreme either: thousands of orders a day, warehouse peaks, your own logistics. There WordPress starts to creak under the load and a custom build ends up cheaper in total. And if you never want to hear the word updates and have nobody to do them, an unmaintained WooCommerce will sooner or later cost you more than years of a rented platform's fees.
Payments and Shipping: The Czech Market Is a Solved Problem
Good news for running a store in Czechia: everything essential has ready-made plugins. Comgate and GoPay both have free official integrations, Zásilkovna, Balíkovna, and PPL have add-ons for pickup points and labels, and invoicing connects through Fakturoid or iDoklad. Setting up payments and shipping takes us about a day. Which gateway to pick and what the fees add up to - we ran the numbers in our comparison of Czech payment gateways.
The Five-Minute Test: Is WooCommerce Right for You
Before you request quotes, walk through five questions. Pen, paper, five minutes.
- Count your products and variants. Up to a few hundred products, WooCommerce runs fine on ordinary hosting. Thousands of products with variants call for serious hosting and an experienced developer.
- List your integrations. Payment gateway, carriers, invoicing, warehouse, maybe a POS. One to three integrations is standard; five or more pushes the project into a higher price bracket on any platform.
- Decide who does the updates. You, every week, or an admin on a retainer. If the answer is nobody, cross WooCommerce off right away.
- Compare three years of costs. Add up the build plus three years of running WooCommerce, and next to it three years of a rented platform's fees. Small catalogues often favour renting; larger, more specific stores favour WooCommerce.
- Weigh the role of content. Planning a blog, guides, a knowledge base? WordPress at the core of your store works in your favour and shows up in search traffic.
Three or more answers pointing to WooCommerce and it makes sense to request quotes. If the test came out in favour of renting, trust it - a wrongly chosen platform is expensive to change.
How We Build WooCommerce Stores
At Kosmoweb we build online stores from 35,000 CZK with a fixed price up front and delivery in four to six weeks. That includes design matched to your brand, payments and shipping set up for the Czech market, an invoicing integration, and baseline SEO so Google can find you. After launch we can watch and update the store under project support, so you can skip the who-does-the-updates question entirely. If you're weighing the routes from the table above, write to us with what you sell and how many products you have - within two days we'll tell you straight whether WooCommerce, Shoptet, or something else fits, and what it would cost.