WooCommerce
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2008Employees
201-500Funding
AcquiredProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.0/10Website
woocommerce.com/
Profile updated
About WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform built as a plugin for WordPress, allowing individuals and businesses to create and operate online stores. It was originally developed by WooThemes, founded in 2008 by Magnus Jepson and Adii Pienaar, and the WooCommerce plugin itself was first released in 2011. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired WooCommerce along with WooThemes in May 2015 for an undisclosed sum.
The platform supports product listings, payment processing, shipping configuration, and inventory management, and can be extended through a large library of plugins and themes. It is widely used by small and mid-sized merchants and powers a significant share of ecommerce sites globally. Because it runs on WordPress, it integrates with the broader WordPress ecosystem of themes, plugins, and hosting providers.
Following the 2015 acquisition, WooCommerce has operated as a division of Automattic, which is headquartered in San Francisco and employs a distributed global workforce. Automattic has raised over $1 billion in funding across multiple rounds, with investors including Salesforce Ventures and Blackstone. WooCommerce itself does not have a separate funding history or stock listing, as it operates under Automattic's corporate structure.
Specialties
Products by WooCommerce
All products by WooCommerce reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores WooCommerce
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed WooCommerce's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.4 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who WooCommerce competes with, and how they differ.
Shopify is a fully-hosted SaaS platform with built-in payments and a revenue-share/app-fee model on most plans; WooCommerce is a free, self-hosted open-source WordPress plugin with no revenue share and full code ownership, trading Shopify's managed simplicity for extensibility.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedAdobe Commerce targets large B2B/B2C enterprises with a costly licensed or cloud-service tier and built-in Sensei merchandising AI, while WooCommerce's core plugin is free and scales down to small merchants on standard WordPress hosting.
BigCommerce is a NASDAQ-listed hosted SaaS platform aimed at B2B and B2C retailers with headless-commerce APIs and enterprise SLAs; WooCommerce competes on cost and WordPress-native flexibility rather than managed infrastructure.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedPrestaShop is WooCommerce's closest architectural peer: free, open-source, self-hosted core software with 250,000+ live merchants, but it runs as its own standalone CMS/commerce stack rather than as a WordPress plugin.
Wix bundles e-commerce into an all-in-one hosted website builder aimed at non-technical users with drag-and-drop design; WooCommerce assumes a WordPress site already exists and targets store owners who want plugin-level control over checkout, shipping, and data.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedSquarespace sells e-commerce as an add-on to its subscription website-builder templates, prioritizing design polish over extensibility; WooCommerce's plugin marketplace gives merchants deeper control over payment gateways, taxes, and inventory logic at the cost of more setup work.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in WooCommerce's history, with sources.
- Milestone
WooCommerce brand renamed to "Woo"
The company consolidated its brand identity from WooCommerce to the shorter "Woo," migrating WooCommerce.com to Woo.com (later reverted to woocommerce.com in April 2024) and renaming WooCommerce Payments to WooPayments; the open-source plugin itself kept the WooCommerce name.
wptavern.com - Launch
WooCommerce Payments launches
WooCommerce introduced a native, Stripe-powered payments feature letting merchants view charges, issue refunds, and handle disputes directly in the WordPress dashboard without a separate Stripe account, at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
techcrunch.com - Acquisition
Automattic acquires Prospress, maker of WooCommerce Subscriptions
Automattic (WooCommerce's owner) acquired Prospress and its ~20-person team, bringing WooCommerce Subscriptions, AutomateWoo, and Robot Ninja in-house to be developed directly as part of the WooCommerce product line.
techcrunch.com - Acquisition
Automattic acquires WooThemes and WooCommerce
Automattic bought WooThemes (the WooCommerce plugin's maker, founded 2008 in Cape Town) for a reported $30M+ in cash and stock, its largest acquisition to date, bringing ~55 employees aboard. Automattic said it would retain and grow the WooCommerce brand rather than absorb it.
poststatus.com - Launch
WooCommerce 1.0 launches as a fork of Jigoshop
WooThemes released WooCommerce 1.0, an e-commerce plugin for WordPress built by developers Mike Jolley and Jay Koster after forking the Jigoshop codebase when talks to buy Jigoshop outright fell through.
woocommerce.com
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