Prodigy Commerce Launches a Powerful Alternative to WooCommerce for Building Stores with WordPress

Prodigy Commerce releases an eCommerce platform for the WordPress community to build beautiful, secure, fully functional stores.

Prodigy Commerce, the only hosted eCommerce platform for WordPress that’s free at any scale, has commercially launched its unique solution. Prodigy brings together the benefits of the world’s most popular content management system, WordPress, which powers over 40% of the web, and a hosted eCommerce platform.

WooCommerce has been the incumbent dominant WordPress eCommerce solution since its inception in 2011 and currently has a market share of ca. 95% with nearly 4 million stores running on its plugin and extension architecture.

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Seeing as Prodigy’s founding vision was that the WordPress community of developers, designers, and agencies should have more choices for their clients, the team at Prodigy ensured that the platform’s unique solution seamlessly blends WordPress’s superior CMS with a powerful platform to create a viable alternative to WooCommerce.

Prodigy’s solution requires only one free open-source plugin which reduces the complexity of building stores and their ongoing maintenance. Furthermore, it also maximizes site speed and security, a key concern for developers. In this light, Prodigy Commerce has solid infrastructure and security, which is hosted on AWS, and the checkout is PCI-compliant. Every store is also provided with a free SSL/TLS certificate so users are ensured that their site is sufficiently encrypted and protected.

The hosted platform has no subscription fees, or any other hidden fees, whatsoever for the professionals who build stores or their store owner clients. There are also no limits on the number of products, orders processed, sales generated, bandwidth or storage used, staff seats, or API requests.

Users have complete storefront design flexibility, and the plugin was built using WordPress conventions and standards. Templates can also be overridden to create unique designs or popular themes and page builders, like Elementor Pro, can be used. This way, users are in complete control of what their site looks like. This allows for the site to be configured as easily or as complex as the developers and users want or need it to be.

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Prodigy Commerce has a Shopify-like backend experience where store owners manage their products and orders on the platform, which is beautifully designed, intuitive, and easy to work with. WordPress is only used to manage content and create the storefront.

The company provides multi-channel customer service with free phone, email, and online chat support from California for professionals and store owners. Should something be unclear, extensive documentation and user guides are available as well. In the development process, there are often unexpected obstacles which pop up at the most inopportune times. As such, this level of support means that no valuable time is lost. This is especially important when wasted time has significant financial implications.

Prodigy’s solution eliminates the complexity, security risks, and costs of WooCommerce’s plugin and extension architecture by tightly integrating all essential functionality, and natively building premium features, into the platform. Integration partners include ShipEngine, TaxJar, MaxMind minFraud, a handful of high-quality payment processors, Google Analytics, and Facebook Pixel. Natively built premium features currently include abandoned cart recovery and the ability to sell products and services on a subscription basis. No third-party services are needed to build fully functional stores.

Prodigy’s business model is based solely upon revenue sharing agreements with the payment processors integrated into its platform, similar to Shopify’s exclusive relationship with payments’ facilitator Stripe. Prodigy, however, does not charge a subscription or app fees; it really is free. Payment processing rates start at the standard 2.9% + $0.30. For high-volume stores, Prodigy helps store owners negotiate lower rates and fees. Prodigy is perfectly aligned with a store owner’s primary goal, generating sales.

Prodigy Commerce was founded in 2018, released an alpha version in 2019, a beta version in 2021, and commercially launched in 2022. To learn more about Prodigy Commerce, visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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