eCommerce Development in Washington

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.

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.

Yes. Products with their titles, descriptions, images, prices, variants, and categories migrate, as do order history and customer accounts. The store is built on a staging URL first so you can check the catalogue product by product before anything goes live. The part that needs planning is URL mapping — platforms structure product and category URLs differently, so every old URL needs a 301 to its new equivalent or the migration costs you the store's existing rankings.

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.

Far less than people expect, provided card details never reach your server. Using a hosted gateway field or redirect — which is how Stripe and PayPal integrate by default — keeps you in the simplest self-assessment category. What you are still responsible for is serving the whole site over HTTPS, keeping WordPress, the theme, and plugins patched, enforcing strong administrator credentials, and restricting who has admin access. Storing card numbers yourself moves you into a dramatically more demanding compliance regime, and there is almost never a reason to.

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.