eCommerce Development in California

You connect a gateway — Stripe, PayPal, Square, or Authorize.net are the common choices — and pay that processor's rate, typically around 2.9% plus a fixed amount per transaction. That processor fee exists on every platform, because someone has to move the money. What WooCommerce removes is the second cut some hosted platforms take on top of the processor's fee for not using their own payment product. Card data never touches your server; the gateway handles it, which is also what keeps your PCI compliance scope small.

Tens of thousands, provided the database and hosting are set up for it. Performance problems at scale almost always come from specific causes rather than the product count itself: unindexed attribute lookups, faceted filtering that runs expensive queries on every request, or caching that can't be applied because pages are personalised. Those are architectural decisions made when the store is built, which is why catalogue size is one of the first things we ask about.

WooCommerce tracks stock at the product or variation level and can decrement on order, hold stock during checkout, and hide or flag items at zero. Keeping it aligned with a point-of-sale system or warehouse means an integration — either a purpose-built connector or the REST API — that syncs on a schedule or on change. The failure mode to design against is overselling during the gap between syncs, which is usually handled with a safety buffer on stock levels.

Shipping can be flat rate, free above a threshold, weight or class based, or live rates pulled from a carrier's API using the customer's address and the parcel's dimensions. Live rates are more accurate but add a request to checkout, so they need caching. Tax in the US means destination-based sales tax across thousands of jurisdictions with economic nexus rules per state — that's normally handled by an automated service rather than manual tax tables, because the rates change constantly.

Core, theme, plugin, and PHP updates applied on staging first; automated off-site backups of both files and the database, tested by actually restoring one; monitoring that checkout still completes after each update, since that's the path that costs money when it breaks; and watching for gateway API changes. A store has a higher maintenance floor than a brochure site because a silent checkout failure is invisible until you notice orders stopped arriving.

Manufacturer copy is used verbatim by every other retailer selling the item, so those pages compete as near-duplicates and typically lose to the largest domain. Original descriptions are what let a product page rank on its own merits, and they're also where you answer the questions that actually close the sale — fit, compatibility, what's in the box. If writing unique copy for a large catalogue isn't realistic, prioritise the products that drive revenue and let the long tail rank through category pages.