Developer Glossary
WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that transforms any WordPress website into a fully functional online store. By market share, WooCommerce powers more online stores than any other platform, estimates put it at roughly 36-39% of all e-commerce sites on the internet, largely because WordPress itself powers over 40% of all websites. WooCommerce handles product listings, shopping cart, checkout, payment processing (supporting dozens of gateways including Stripe, PayPal, and Square), tax calculation, shipping, and inventory management. For custom web application development, WooCommerce integration typically involves connecting an existing WooCommerce store to external systems: syncing orders into an ERP or fulfillment platform, pulling product and inventory data into a custom management dashboard, building custom reporting tools, or creating headless storefronts that use the WooCommerce REST API as a backend while rendering the frontend with React or Next.js. The WooCommerce REST API is comprehensive, covering products, orders, customers, coupons, shipping, and taxes.
WooCommerce has an unusual origin. It started as WooThemes, a premium WordPress theme company founded in 2008 by Mark Forrester, Magnus Jepson, and Adii Pienaar, three developers who were spread across South Africa and Norway and had never met in person when they started the company. WooThemes became one of the most successful WordPress theme shops, and in 2011 they hired Mike Jolley and Jay Koster to build an e-commerce plugin. The result was WooCommerce, which launched in September 2011. Within two years, WooCommerce had been downloaded over 4 million times and was rapidly becoming the default way to add e-commerce to WordPress. In 2015, Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com, founded by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg) acquired WooThemes and WooCommerce for approximately $30 million. Under Automattic's stewardship, WooCommerce continued to grow and now processes a significant percentage of all online commerce worldwide.
When Automattic acquired WooThemes, the three co-founders had still never all been in the same room at the same time. The acquisition price of $30 million is now widely considered one of the best acquisitions in WordPress history.
Despite being completely free to download and use, WooCommerce generates enormous revenue through its ecosystem. The WooCommerce Marketplace sells premium extensions, payment gateways, shipping integrations, subscription tools, booking systems, that range from $49 to $299 per year each. A typical WooCommerce store running a serious e-commerce operation might spend $500-2,000 per year on premium extensions alone. This extension marketplace model mirrors WordPress's broader plugin economy and has created thousands of businesses that exist solely to build and sell WooCommerce add-ons. Also, when Automattic acquired WooThemes, the three co-founders had still never all been in the same room at the same time, the entire company had been run remotely from the start, which was unusual in 2008 but now looks prescient. The acquisition price of $30 million seemed modest at the time, but given that WooCommerce now underpins hundreds of billions of dollars in annual commerce, it's widely considered one of the best acquisitions in WordPress history.
Visit: woocommerce.com