On 26 October the first store running on Orbit went live: ME LOANA, a Polish fashion label that had sold on WooCommerce since 2022. The shop is now ecommerce on a static site: plain pages on Cloudflare's network, with products, orders, stock and refunds run from Orbit, the CMS I built for my client sites.
In July I wrote that a busy WooCommerce shop is one of the cases where WordPress still wins. For a big, complex catalogue that is still true. For a brand with a few dozen products, I no longer think so, and this store is the reason.
Why a store does not need a server
A WooCommerce shop is the WordPress site with the most to lose. It holds customer data and takes payments, so every plugin update is one you cannot skip, and every slow page costs sales. Yet most of the shop barely changes.
Product pages change a few times a week. Stock changes every day. Only the stock needs to be live.
So Orbit renders the pages as HTML when something on them changes, and the CDN serves them. Stock and the basket are checked live against Orbit, so a sale never waits for a rebuild, and payments go through the store's own Stripe account.
What moved over from WooCommerce
- Every product, with its photos, sizes and descriptions
- Every customer and the full order history, with refunds, so past spend is right
- Order numbers, which carry on from the last WooCommerce order
- Every old URL, redirected one by one so the Google rankings carry over
- The Facebook and Instagram catalogue, now fed by Orbit every hour
What a Polish store needs on day one
On general-purpose platforms you assemble this from apps. In Orbit it is built in:
- BLIK, Przelewy24, cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay
- InPost lockers, Orlen and DPD pickup points and couriers, with labels bought through Furgonetka from the order screen
- The Omnibus line, "lowest price in the last 30 days", worked out from real price history
- The withdrawal form and returns form Polish consumer law expects
What the owner runs it from
Instead of wp-admin there is one portal: orders, stock, refunds sent back through Stripe or Przelewy24 with a credit note, returns with a reason for each, discount codes, a back-in-stock waitlist ranked by who is most likely to buy, and sales reports that compare one quarter with the last. If an order is cancelled before it ships, its stock goes back on the shelf by itself. Returns stay a manual restock, because every piece gets checked first. No plugin updates, no PHP to patch, no cache to tune.
What broke on launch day
One thing. Right after the domain switched over, the InPost locker map at checkout showed an "update required" notice. Furgonetka ties each map key to a list of domains, and the live domain was still on the old WooCommerce map. Moving it over took a few minutes and nothing in the store changed. It is now a line on my launch checklist: add the live domain to the map before the DNS switch, not after.
When WooCommerce still wins
Thousands of products with complex variants, B2B price lists, subscriptions, a multi-vendor marketplace, or a team that depends on one particular plugin. For those I would still build on WooCommerce and look after it properly. For a focused brand that wants a fast shop and less to look after, this is now what I recommend.
Running a WooCommerce store and tired of the upkeep? Tell me about your shop, or see the ecommerce add-on.