eCommerce Development in New York

The economics and the ownership. Hosted platforms charge a monthly subscription plus, on lower tiers, a percentage of each sale, and those percentages scale with your revenue indefinitely. WooCommerce is open source with no platform fee and no transaction cut, so your recurring cost is hosting — typically around $25 a month. You also hold the store, catalogue, and customer list on infrastructure you control. The honest trade-off is that you are responsible for hosting, updates, and backups, which is why those are part of what we set up.

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.

A variable product has attributes — size, colour, material — and each combination becomes a variation with its own SKU, price, stock level, and image. The complication is combinatorial: four sizes across six colours across three materials is 72 variations to manage. Past a few dozen, the admin becomes slow and the front-end selector becomes hard to use. At that point it's usually better to split into separate products or reduce the attribute set than to push the variation count higher.

Abandonment is heavily driven by things visible at checkout: unexpected shipping cost, a forced account registration, too many steps, and slow page transitions. Technically that means showing shipping estimates before the final step, offering guest checkout, collapsing checkout to a single page where possible, and making sure the checkout pages aren't the slowest on the site — they frequently are, because caching is hardest to apply there. Recovery emails to logged-in users who abandon are worth adding once the basics are handled.

Each product page should carry Product structured data with name, image, description, SKU, brand, and an Offer containing price, currency, and availability. Where genuine customer reviews exist, AggregateRating can be included — but only if those reviews are visible on the page, since claiming ratings that aren't shown violates Google's rich-results policy and risks a manual action. Correct Product markup is what makes price and stock status appear directly in search results.