WooCommerce has been the world’s largest e-commerce platform for a couple of years. Within a few months, WooCommerce will also become the most popular among the world’s ten thousand largest online stores.
Over 1.6 million or 39% of the world’s online stores currently use the WordPress plugin WooCommerce as their e-commerce platform. This compares to 234,996 installations of Magento on October 31, according to analyst service Built With.
Open source platforms are becoming increasingly important in e-commerce. WooCommerce continues to grow strongly and today has 1.6 million stores, according to the analyst service Built With, it is only among the ten thousand largest online stores that a larger proportion prefers the open source competitor Magento (12 percent) instead of WooCommerce (10 percent). But the trend is clear – WooCommerce will overtake Magento in a few months even among the world’s largest stores.
WooCommerce gained more traction after Automattic bought WooThemes, the company behind the e-commerce platform, for $30 million last May. Automattic is behind the blogging tool wordpress.com, which provides hosted WordPress installations for free or for a small amount of money. When Automattic bought WooCommerce, the e-commerce platform became part of a much larger company with a similar philosophy and business model. Since the purchase, the WooCommerce development team has grown by 40 percent and the number of core developers has quintupled, according to WP Tavern.
At Angry Creative, we see the huge potential of WooCommerce and we also became the first Nordic company to be accepted into WooExperts, the official partner program for WooCommerce experts.
WooCommerce has become the world’s most popular e-commerce platform in just a few years. The WordPress plugin WooCommerce has been the open source platform of choice for individuals and small businesses, while larger companies have preferred more mature systems like Magento.
Developers tend to highlight a number of reasons for choosing WooCommerce:
- No license costs
- Lots of documentation available
- High security
- Good API that facilitates integrations
- Fast development
- Flexible design
Today, there are ready-made integrations to Swedish payment solutions and transport administration systems for WooCommerce and many design templates, making it both easy and inexpensive to create professional online stores with WooCommerce.
Slow WooCommerce stores are often due to poor hosting and/or poor server-level configurations. It’s also important to pay close attention to security when installing WordPress for a WooCommerce installation.
There’s no shortage of cheap simple ecommerce platforms, but the WordPress plugin WooCommerce has the potential to become the platform that digitizes the world’s small businesses.
Just as WordPress took over the publishing tools market, the WooCommerce WordPress plugin could become the standard for small and medium-sized ecommerce ventures. The pros of WooCommerce are:
- The price (free)
- The flexibility (A system to grow in)
- The ecosystem of WooCommerce providers (Growing)
The openness and flexibility of the open source model allows WooCommerce to go from a startup phase to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. New packaged solutions make it easy for ordinary entrepreneurs to get started, then grow the platform if the project is a big success.