WooCommerce makes demands on WordPress hosting. Even with only four products the WooCommerce shop on this website was a bit slow. I started to wonder about making a leap from WooCommerce to Surecart.
WooCommerce was too resource-hungry for the rather cheap shared hosting I use. I have seen advice that WooCommerce should run in a devoted WordPress install in a subdomain. But that was impossible for me because of my single-site hosting contract.
Also, to make WooCommerce work, I installed additional plug-ins, which increased the burden. Amusingly, the WooCommerce strapline is ‘The platform that grows with you’. If you need it to do more, it certainly does, as does the cost of the plugins.
Surecart takes the strain
So alternatively there is Surecart. Surecart offers more out-of-the-box. And it takes the strain off my WordPress site by hosting its backend on Surecart’s servers. This seems to be pretty seamless. I haven’t noticed where my website ends and the action of the Surecart servers begins.
I also found certain things easier to set up. For instance, shipping and product variations. However, some of Surecart’s simplicity is not wanted. I am selling technical products and a detailed explanation is sometimes needed for the shopper to be reassured. But in Surecart there is no room for longer descriptions and explanations.
So I have moved these longer explanations to product support articles. But even with this simple adjustment, I have to tweak the product page code to enable a link from each product to its support article. Fortunately, I already had the Real-Time Find and Replace plug-in to replace text and code on my site, so tweaking things was easy.
Even with only four products, I wanted to migrate them from WooCommerce to Surecart using an efficient export and import process. This would save time and anyone with a shop with many products should investigate such a feature. Unfortunately, although both platforms can export and import, the basic CSV file system employed is not up to the job, with a scant amount of information migrated. I imagine the feature was originally intended for moving data from one WooCommerce shop to another rather than from WooCommerce to Surecart. This post on the Surecart website had got my hopes up, but ultimately it wasn’t great.
So I did it manually. Now I feel ready to add some more products! I shall be adding further utility disks, system installation disks for Linux systems and for slimmed-down versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11, as well as Live Systems that run from a USB disk.
As I gain experience running this Surecart-based shop, if I learn things that I think might be of use, I shall post them here.