WooCommerce started as a fork of Jigoshop, developed by WooThemes in 2011. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired WooThemes in 2015 for around $30 million, bringing WooCommerce into the WordPress ecosystem officially.
Today, WooCommerce powers roughly 36% of all online stores on the web, making it the single most-used e-commerce platform by market share. It’s a free, open-source WordPress plugin that turns any WordPress site into a fully functional online store. The plugin itself is free, but the ecosystem of paid extensions, themes, and hosting services generates significant revenue.
WooCommerce’s strength lies in its flexibility. Because it’s built on WordPress, store owners have access to tens of thousands of plugins, themes, and developer resources. You can sell physical goods, digital downloads, subscriptions, memberships, and bookings. Payment gateways include Stripe, PayPal, Square, and dozens of regional options.
The extension marketplace offers hundreds of add-ons for shipping calculators, tax automation, abandoned cart recovery, and more. WooCommerce Payments, built in partnership with Stripe, provides an integrated payment solution that doesn’t require third-party gateway setup.
WooCommerce’s main tradeoff is that it requires self-hosting and technical knowledge to manage properly. Unlike Shopify, you’re responsible for hosting, security patches, and performance optimization. This makes WooCommerce more popular among developers and technically-minded merchants who want full control. The platform has a massive developer community, regular updates, and detailed documentation maintained by Automattic.
