What is WooCommerce?
The WooCommerce plugin helps you to build an online store using WordPress. It takes the basic WordPress operating system and transforms it into a fully functioning eCommerce store.
WooCommerce makes it easy and affordable to sell any product and service on your website. It allows you to sell digital and physical products, take secure payments, manage inventory, and sort all your taxes automatically.
Most importantly, WooCommerce integrates seamlessly with WordPress since the same company, Automattic, owns wordpress.com.
Let’s look at the origins of WooCommerce.
Brief history of WooCommerce
The WooCommerce plugin started its life with a company called WooThemes. WooThemes was a premium WordPress theme company founded by Mark Forrester, Magnus Jepson, and Adii Pienaar.
Later on, two developers, James Koster and Mike Jolley were brought to the team to work on WooCommerce. They were working on an eCommerce software known as Jigoshop.
The first version of WooCommerce was launched in 2011 and became extremely popular. It achieved 1 million downloads within two years. In 2014 WooCommerce, hit 4 million downloads.
Automattic was impressed by the growth of this product and acquired it from WooThemes in 2015. Since they acquired this plugin, Automattic has become the leading developer of WooCommerce.
In the same year that Automattic purchased WooCommerce, the plugin surged to over 7 million downloads. It has powered more than 22% of the top 1m websites running on WooCommerce and 28% of all eCommerce stores online.
Why is WooCommerce so popular?
The main reason why WooCommerce is widely used is due to its ties to WordPress.
WooCommerce also has thousands of paid and free themes and thousands of plugins that let you extend to your store.
Here are some of the other reasons why WooCommerce is a popular way to build an online store:
- Both WooCommerce and WordPress are free
- WooCommerce is open-source, meaning that any developer can audit, modify, or extend the code
- WooCommerce is beginner-friendly, and you don’t need to become an expert developer to create a store.
- WooCommerce is flexible, as you can add all kinds of functionality using plugins. This does not need any coding skills
- WooCommerce is responsive and works well on all devices
- WooCommerce is secure
You can now see that WooCommerce is your best option to build a secure, flexible online store in WordPress. It is also worth mentioning that you can accomplish a lot with WooCommerce entirely for free. All you need to purchase is a domain name and hosting.
