WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress, launched in 2011 by WooThemes and owned by Automattic since 2015.
Industry: E-commerce software | Founded: 2011
About WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that lets merchants run online stores. The base product is free under the GNU General Public License, while many extensions are paid and proprietary. It is developed by Woo, which operates as part of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and Jetpack.
The origins lie in WooThemes. According to Woo's about page, Mark Forrester, Magnus Jepson and Adii Pienaar began building a WordPress theme together in November 2007 and later launched WooThemes. WooCommerce was released on 27 September 2011, built by developers Mike Jolley and James Koster, whom WooThemes hired from Jigowatt to work on a fork of the Jigoshop plugin. Woo says it moved exclusively into e-commerce in 2017.
Woo's product line includes WooCommerce itself, WooPayments, a mobile app, extensions, themes and shipping, checkout and marketing offerings. WooPayments is a payment service integrated with WooCommerce; its product page names Stripe as the payment partner, lists 38 supported countries and states that it is PCI compliant. Developer documentation refers to the REST and Store APIs and to WooCommerce Blocks, and notes that WooCommerce 11.6 will require PHP 8.1 or later.
Woo reports that it passed seven million downloads and held its first WooConf in San Francisco, with 320 attendees, in 2014. Automattic acquired WooThemes and WooCommerce in 2015; Wikipedia dates the deal to May 2015. The sources read did not disclose the terms. Wikipedia cites W3Techs as showing WooCommerce used by 9.2 percent of all websites in October 2024.
Woo describes itself as an all-remote company with hundreds of team members worldwide and names no physical offices. On 23 January 2025 Beau Lebens announced that he would lead Woo permanently as Artistic Director after a three-month interim period, succeeding Paul Maiorana, who had led Woo for six years. Woo refreshed its logo and colour palette in early 2025. TechScoop's September 2026 coverage of Keep Converting lists WooCommerce among the platforms that start-up's tool connects to. No funding rounds or financial results for Woo were found, since it is part of Automattic.
Leadership
- Mark Forrester, Co-founder, WooThemes
- Magnus Jepson, Co-founder, WooThemes
- Adii Pienaar, Co-founder, WooThemes
- Beau Lebens, Head of Woo (Artistic Director)