WooCommerce - Wordpress Ecommerce Sites

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 free base product.

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 August 2014, WooCommerce powered 381,187 sites (or 17.77% of e-commerce sites online).

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.

Usage

WooCommerce has been adopted by over 380,000 online retailers. It is used by a number of high-traffic websites, among them are Internet Systems Consortium and 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.

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