Ever since this site came to being, I’ve been upset with WooCommerce, as I tried to use it for my private online shop.
I’ve spend so much time on it that it pushed the deployment date of the site for months.
Being a software engineer, I thought that it should be something I will be able to manage without any huge issues, but on the same time I didn’t felt like potentially spending time on unnecessary coding and changes under the hood.
I rather spend that time building models.
I should’ve known that there is no such thing as free lunch and somewhere along the way you have to pay for something, or you can stay hungry.
In this case, it was the very limited feature set of WooCommerce’s free version that kept me hungry for more.
Things just don’t work well out of the box if one goes with the free version.
Managing multiple items…
variations…
delivery options…
promotions…
look & Feel…
etc…
It’s just too limited and not fun to manage the store.
Luckily I did create a shop on Etsy as well, which in turn is easy to handle and already made some sales on it.
I was reluctant at first as I knew how big of a cut they take and selling small 3D printed parts is really not something that would make huge amounts of money.
Not to mention how small the target audience is for my core products.
But, then I realized they are doing scummy limitations just to push people into a situation to pay extra.
Limited amount of variations…
Expensive fees…
Very limited design for the storefront…
etc…
So choosing from two evils, I chose the one that actually made some progress in terms of exposure.
Etsy Shop stays.
Not happy about it, but so far this worked at least.
This means that I removed the WooCommerce store for now, but don’t worry, the gallery and the blog stays with a link to my Etsy Shop.
I don’t know how I am going to move forwards,
making WooCommerce work…
stay with Etsy…
perhaps Shopify…?
Whatever my decision will be, I will keep you informed.