@Christina Warren -

I researched on a lot of ecommerce solutions before I decided to focus on WooCommerce early this year. I have implemented OsCommerce, Zen-Cart, Interspire Shopping Cart (currently know as BigCommerce) and even building my own ecommerce solution in .NET in my 15 years in the IT industry.

To put together a commercial grade ecommerce solution in WooCommerce, one would need a generic set of about 10 extensions (I bought 22, some 5-site license and mostly unlimited site-license). That setup would cost about $1,000 (assuming each extension costs $99 which seems to be the average price point now). With the revised pricing, assuming an annual renewal fee at 50%, the on-going running cost per year is now $500 / year, in order to keep the solution updated and secure. All is cool and fine, but in the country that I operate in, the customer segment that I am serving are the small business owners, they do not care that the solution that I provided previously now cost $500 / year to operate. They might be willing to pay upwards of $500 / years as retainer/service fee to me to maintain their ecommerce solution, but that will leave me with nothing, all the $500 / year will now go to Woo.

Therefore I have no choice but to look for alternatives for this segment of customers. Case to point, the stand-alone ecommerce solution cs-cart (www.cs-cart.com) cost a set-up fee of $395 and a ongoing maintenance cost of $110 / year. So its a no-brainer now what I would recommend for this particular segment of customers of mine. Hence to me, WooCommerce is now no longer as ACCESSIBLE as before. WordPress is popular primarily because it is ACCESSIBLE to bother bloggers and coders.

What about the other customer segments, the medium and big size businesses, who are willing to pay? Well for them, either Magento or proprietary or custom developed solutions would be a more viable (sometimes its political viability) solution for them or selling to them would have a much longer sales cycle. These are the segment of customers better served by the bigger Agencies. Perhaps this is the customer segment Woo thought their solution should be recommended to.

So to me for now, WooCommerce is definitely not the first choice when it comes to recommending to small businesses.