A WooCommerce Developer in the Philippines Who Also Runs the Server

Usually, and the crossover is order volume. WooCommerce charges nothing per sale, so your running cost is hosting — free with us for the first year, then from ₱499 a month — plus maintenance. Shopify charges a monthly plan in US dollars plus an extra platform fee on third-party gateways, and both scale with how much you sell. At a few orders a week the difference is small. At a few hundred a month it is not. We model your real numbers first.

Fewer than you have been sold. Every plugin is another update to test, another security surface and another thing that can conflict at checkout, and paid ones renew annually whether you use them or not. We audit what is installed, remove overlap, and write one small custom plugin where three paid ones were doing one job. Stores we maintain typically run a fraction of the plugin count they arrived with, and break far less often.

It is slow when nobody manages it, and that is fixable. The usual culprits are shared hosting, uncompressed images, a bloated theme, too many plugins and uncached product queries. We host on VenderIT Cloud, add object and page caching that knows to skip cart and checkout, generate proper image sizes, prune the database and clean up the queries. You get a before-and-after load time measured on mobile data, not a lab score.

Yes, and often the answer is repair rather than rebuild. We need admin access and hosting or server access, then we run an audit covering plugins, theme edits, PHP version, backups, security and speed, and come back with a written verdict and a price. If the store is sound underneath, fixing it costs a fraction of ₱99,000. If it is held together by twenty plugins and edited core files, we will say so.

Through a gateway plugin — PayMongo, Dragonpay or Maya Business — which puts GCash, Maya, cards, online banking and over-the-counter into your checkout. You apply for a merchant account with your DTI or SEC registration, BIR certificate, mayor's permit and bank details; we handle the technical requirements the gateway checks and the integration itself. The gateway's per-transaction fee is charged by them and never passes through us.

We do, for your first year, and it is included rather than billed per incident. Updates go onto staging first, get clicked through on the checkout path, then go live — which is how you avoid the classic story of a plugin update taking payments down overnight. Daily backups and uptime monitoring run alongside. After year one it continues under a maintenance plan, or you can take it in-house with the documentation we hand over.

Yes to both. The theme, any custom plugins we write, your content and your database are yours, and WooCommerce itself is open source, so there is no licence tied to us. If you ever want to leave VenderIT Cloud we export the site and hand it over. We would rather earn the renewal than hold your store hostage for it.