WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed for small to large-sized online merchants 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 using WooCommerce, was held in San Francisco, California. It attracted 300 attendees.

In May 2015, WooThemes and WooCommerce were acquired by Automattic, 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 WooCommerce Mobile App for iOS 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 Automattic 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 Small Press Expo. For the 3rd week of September 2015, Trends indicated that WooCommerce ran on 30% of e-commerce sites and millions of active installs.

Since Automattic's acquisition WooCommerce has kept gaining market share to become one of the leading E-commerce platforms on the Internet.

Extensions
WooCommerce has attracted significant popularity because the base product, in addition to many extensions and plugins, is free and open-source. 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.