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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

plugin for

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

. It is designed for small to large-sized online

merchants A merchant is a person who trades in commodities produced by other people, especially one who trades with foreign countries. Historically, a merchant is anyone who is involved in business or trade. Merchants have operated for as long as industry ...

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).

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) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain managemen ...

using WooCommerce, was held in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

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

Automattic Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com (a freemium blogging service), as well as its contributions to WordPress (an open source blogging software). The co ...

, operator of

WordPress.com WordPress.com is a platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of WordPress software. This website provides free blog hosting for regis ...

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

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

and Android. The app lets WooCommerce store owners view and manage their stores from mobile devices.

Usage

WooCommerce is used by a number of high-traffic websites such as

Small Press Expo The Small Press Expo (SPX) is an American alternative comics convention. A registered 501(c)(3) that was created in 1994, every year since its inception, SPX has put on a festival, known as The Expo, that provides a forum for artists, writers and ...

. For the 3rd week of September 2015, Trends indicated that WooCommerce ran on 30% of e-commerce sites and millions of active installs. Ecommerce is rapidly growing worldwide and WooCommerce has over 39 million downloads as a plugin and is currently active on more than three million websites and is the most popular eCommerce platform in 2018. WooCommerce serves approximately 4% of the top million HTML pages. In 2015, statistics show that the percentage of online stores that utilize WooCommerce through Wordpress.org's plugin is more than 30% of all stores. The current 2021 market share for WooCommerce is 29% of the top 1 million sites using eCommerce technologies. Since Automattic's acquisition WooCommerce has kept gaining market share to become one of the leading

E-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

platforms on the Internet.

Themes

With many WooCommerce-ready themes sold on third party websites, it makes it difficult to exactly estimate how many themes can be associated with this WordPress plugin, but here are some WooCommerce stats for the bigger theme providers. * There are 1,300 WooCommerce themes on ThemeForest. * The WordPress.org theme directory has 1122 WooCommerce themes.

Extensions

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

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

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. Notable WooCommerce extensions include: * WooCommerce Bookings: Which allows users to sell blocks of time as appointments. * WooCommerce Memberships: which allows the user to restrict access to certain parts of their WordPress website, and sell access to these parts of the website.

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