WooCommerce is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

plugin for

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

. It is designed for small to large-sized online

merchants A merchant is a person who trades in goods produced by other people, especially one who trades with foreign countries. Merchants have been known for as long as humans have engaged in trade and commerce. Merchants and merchant networks operated i ...

using WordPress. Launched on September 27, 2011, the plugin quickly became popular for its simplicity to install and customize and for the market position of the base product as freeware (even though many of its optional extensions are paid and proprietary). WooCommerce is developed and supported by Woo and includes contributions from a global community of developers.

History

WooCommerce was first developed by WordPress theme developer WooThemes, who hired Mike Jolley and James Koster, developers at Jigowatt, to work on a fork of Jigoshop that became WooCommerce. In January 2020, it was estimated that WooCommerce is used by around 3.9 million websites. In November 2014, the first WooConf, a conference focusing on

eCommerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile comm ...

using WooCommerce, was held in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. It attracted 300 attendees. In May 2015, WooThemes and WooCommerce were acquired by

Automattic Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company most notable for WordPress.com and its contributions to the WordPress system. The company was founded in 2005. Automattic's brands and products include WordPress.com, Akismet, Gra ...

, operator of WordPress.com and core contributor to the WordPress software. In December 2020, WooCommerce acquired MailPoet, a popular WordPress newsletter management plugin. Subsequently, WooCommerce launched the WooCommerce Mobile App for

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

and Android. The app lets WooCommerce store owners view and manage their stores from mobile devices. On October 31, 2023, WooCommerce changed its branding to Woo. Woo is how

starts referring to the brand/company, while WooCommerce is the open-source e-commerce platform for WordPress — Woo's core product.

Usage

WooCommerce is used by a number of high-traffic websites such as WP Configurator site ( What is WooCommerce). For the 3rd week of September 2015, Trends indicated that WooCommerce ran on 30% of e-commerce sites and millions of active installs. According to W3Techs, WooCommerce is used by 9.2% of all websites in October 2024. Since Automattic's acquisition WooCommerce has kept gaining market share to become one of the leading

E-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

platforms on the Internet.

Extensions

WooCommerce has attracted significant popularity because the base product, in addition to many extensions and plugins, is free and

. WooCommerce has hundreds of extensions and over 1,000 plugins. In addition, there are thousands of paid add-ons for fixed prices. Many Premium Themes now offer capability with WooCommerce as well as plugins that make a theme framework compatible.

WooExpert Partner program

Instead of a certification program WooCommerce uses an official partnership program. WooCommerce recommends users to use these WooExperts for their WooCommerce projects. Suppliers can apply to become a partner and by doing so will undergo a multi-stage application process that includes skill evaluation and an interview. Throughout the process WooCommerce aim to assess familiarity with WooCommerce core and extensions. The partnership program had either a Gold, Silver or Bronze level until late 2017, when it moved to a flat "verified WooExpert" system.

Revenues

A study conducted in 2017 by Todd Wilkins, Head of WooCommerce, suggests that WooCommerce stores would collectively account for nearly $10 billion in sales.

References

External links

* {{Automattic Inc. Free e-commerce software Free software programmed in PHP Online payments WordPress Companies of South Africa