The verdict in three sentences
Past 10,000 SKUs and 1,000 trade accounts with individual price lists, WooCommerce becomes a fragile stack of plugins that costs more to maintain than to replace. A B2B replatforming runs EUR 40,000 to 80,000 excluding VAT for a Dublin distributor, with a realistic timeline of 4 to 6 months. The return comes from three measurable levers: speed (from 6 s to under 2 s), the end of manual re-keying between store and ERP, and the share of orders placed online rather than by phone.
The signs that WooCommerce can no longer keep up
The IT director of a technical supplies distributor in Ballymount knows the story. The store launched in 2019 with 3,000 products. In 2026 it carries 18,000 SKUs, 1,500 trade accounts and a dozen plugins: customer pricing, quotes, 30-day terms, CSV import, caching, search. Every WordPress update breaks a module. Product search takes over 4 seconds, product pages take 6.
The issue is not WooCommerce itself but its data model: a generic metadata table never designed for net prices per customer, discounts per product family and multiple pack sizes. Beyond a certain volume, every price lookup scans thousands of rows.
| Metric | Current WooCommerce | Target after replatforming |
|---|---|---|
| Product page load time | 6.1 s | under 2 s |
| Search across 18,000 SKUs | 4.2 s | 0.3 s (dedicated engine) |
| Critical active plugins | 14 | 0 to 3 |
| ERP sync | nightly CSV export | real time or every 15 min |
| Customer-specific pricing | third-party plugin, 1,500 rules | native, computed from the ERP |
| Share of orders online | 31% | target 55 to 65% |
| Incidents after updates | 2 to 3 per quarter | close to zero |
The three replatforming options and their 2026 cost
Three paths exist for a distributor of this size. The choice depends mainly on pricing complexity and how deep the ERP integration must go (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage 200 and SAP Business One are the most common in Ireland).
| Option | Initial budget excl. VAT | Annual cost | Timeline | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Optimised WooCommerce (dedicated hosting, Algolia search, plugin clean-up) | EUR 14,000 to 22,000 | EUR 5,000 to 9,000 | 6 to 8 weeks | under 8,000 SKUs, simple pricing |
| B2B SaaS (Shopify Plus B2B, Sana, OroCommerce Cloud) | EUR 40,000 to 60,000 | EUR 20,000 to 45,000 in licences | 4 to 5 months | standard catalogue, compatible ERP |
| Custom headless platform (Next.js, PostgreSQL, ERP APIs) | EUR 50,000 to 80,000 | EUR 7,000 to 14,000 (hosting, maintenance) | 5 to 6 months | complex pricing, specific ERP flows |
| Magento / Adobe Commerce | EUR 70,000 to 130,000 | EUR 28,000 and up | 6 to 9 months | very large catalogues, in-house team |
For 18,000 SKUs and 1,500 accounts, a custom platform or a B2B SaaS are the two realistic options. Custom costs slightly more upfront but avoids annual licences that, over five years, often exceed EUR 110,000.
The budget typically splits as follows: 20% for scoping and buyer journey UX, 35% for the catalogue and pricing engine, 25% for ERP integration, 10% for data and URL migration (301 redirects to protect SEO), 10% for testing and go-live.
What the new platform must handle natively
A proper B2B store covers functions a B2C site ignores:
- Multi-user accounts: a buyer, an approver and an accountant per client company, with order limits.
- Net prices per customer pulled from the ERP, with family discounts and volume breaks.
- Payment on account at 30 or 45 days end of month, visible credit balance, automatic hold when exceeded.
- Quick order by SKU or file upload, reorder from history.
- Real availability per warehouse and estimated delivery date.
- Invoices and delivery notes downloadable from the customer area.
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Ciarán, IT director of a Dublin distributor with 90 staff (EUR 26M turnover, 31% online), chooses a custom platform at EUR 64,000 excluding VAT, integrated with Business Central. His first-year calculation:
- Manual keying of phone and email orders: 3 sales admin staff spend 40% of their time re-keying, about EUR 60,000 of payroll. Moving to 60% online orders saves roughly EUR 25,000 a year.
- End of plugin licences and corrective WooCommerce maintenance: EUR 10,000 a year.
- Conversion uplift from speed (cautious estimate of +0.4 points on EUR 1.2M of qualified traffic): about EUR 16,000 of extra margin.
Total: around EUR 51,000 of annual gains, for a payback of roughly 15 months, excluding maintenance of EUR 9,000 a year.
FAQ
Can we keep WooCommerce and just optimise it?
Yes if the catalogue stays under 8,000 SKUs and pricing is simple. Optimisation costs EUR 14,000 to 22,000 and often saves 2 to 3 seconds, but it does not remove the plugin dependency for customer pricing.
How long is the store offline during migration?
Ideally not at all: the new platform is built in parallel and cutover happens over a weekend. Plan 2 to 4 weeks of parallel running to check prices and credit balances.
Will we lose our Google rankings?
Not if 301 redirects are prepared for 100% of old URLs. This work is about 10% of the budget and is verified before launch.
Should we change ERP at the same time?
Rarely. It is better to connect the existing ERP via API or a connector, which accounts for 20 to 25% of the budget, than to stack two risky projects.
Who maintains the platform after delivery?
A maintenance contract of EUR 550 to 1,100 per month covers security updates, monitoring and 4 to 8 hours of improvements.
Let's scope your project. Send us your SKU count, number of trade accounts and ERP: we will price a replatforming scope between EUR 40,000 and 80,000 with a 4 to 6 month plan. Detailed quote within 48 h. WhatsApp +221 77 596 93 33.
Mohamed Bah
Fondateur, Kolonell
Passionate about digital and entrepreneurship in Africa, Mohamed has been helping Sénégalese businesses with their digital transformation since 2020. Founder of Kolonell, he believes every SME deserves a professional and accessible online présence.
