I run a small handmade candle business in the Netherlands called All Natural By Dorothy. We hand-pour soy candles, make luxury soaps, and sell ritual wellness products — but this post isn't about candles. It's about the practical, sometimes messy process of actually getting a small product-based business online using WordPress, for anyone else considering the same path.
Why WordPress Instead of a Hosted Platform
When I started, the obvious "easy" choice was a hosted e-commerce platform. I went with WordPress instead, mainly for three reasons:

Ownership of the stack. I wanted full control over hosting, themes and data rather than being locked into a single vendor's ecosystem.
WooCommerce flexibility. WordPress's e-commerce plugin ecosystem (primarily WooCommerce) let me build a store structure that matched how I actually think about my products — collections, variants, bundles — without fighting a rigid template.
Content + commerce in one place. Because a big part of growing this business is publishing blog content (gift guides, seasonal articles, product education), having WordPress's native blogging and SEO tooling built into the same platform as the store mattered more than I expected.

What the Setup Actually Looks Like
A few practical things that mattered more than I anticipated when setting this up:
Theme choice. I avoided heavily bloated "all-in-one" themes packed with builder plugins I didn't need. A lighter, e-commerce-focused theme paired with a page builder only where necessary kept load times more manageable.
Image optimization. Product photography is everything for a handmade goods business — but large, uncompressed product images were the single biggest performance killer early on. Compression plugins and proper image sizing made a real difference to load speed.
Collections structure. Organizing products into clear collections (gift sets, seasonal items, individual product lines) rather than one flat catalog made both navigation and internal linking for SEO significantly easier to manage.
Blog and store living together. Keeping the blog and store on the same WordPress install — rather than splitting them across separate platforms — made internal linking between articles and product pages straightforward, which has been genuinely useful for SEO over time.
What I'd Do Differently
If I were starting again, I'd plan the taxonomy (collections, tags, categories) before adding products, rather than restructuring it after the catalog had already grown. Retrofitting organization onto an existing product catalog took far longer than planning it upfront would have.
I'd also invest earlier in image optimization workflows rather than treating it as an afterthought — by the time I addressed it properly, I had hundreds of images to go back and compress.
Closing Thoughts
WordPress isn't the flashiest choice for e-commerce in 2026, but for a small, hands-on business where the owner wants direct control over both the store and the content around it, it's held up well. If you're a developer who's curious what the result looks like in practice, the site is live at https://www.allnaturalbydorothy.nl/
Happy to answer questions in the comments if anyone's weighing similar platform decisions for a small product-based business.