Probably it is not a secret that WooCommerce is the fastest growing shopping cart in the world. July’s article at WooThemes blog stated (referring to BuiltWith) there are over 50 000 of web stores built with their platform. For now this number skyrocketed to 155 000+ shops. Moreover, we took a short look at our stats and were surprised to find out the number of migrations to WooCommerce has increased up to 10% of all switches in this year. So we decided to find out what were the reasons that pushed a brand new solution from nowhere to a market leader in less than two years.
1. WordPress Plugin
Here comes a simple fact: WordPress is the most used CMS in the world. According to different sources from 12 to 60 million of websites are built with WordPress. Huge number of site owners who use WP sooner or later reach a moment when they want to sell something to their audience. In this case there are basically two options:
- Use an independent shopping cart like Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart etc. It means spending time on learning how everything works which honestly may become a serious issue. Merchants would also need to find appropriate hosting environment since some platforms are quite resource-consuming.
- Use a native WordPress plugin for e-Commerce. It can be easily installed into WP admin panel and doesn’t require too much time to get acquainted with. It totally looks and feels as WordPress.
In most cases the choice is obvious. But why exactly merchants choose WooCommerce over other e-Commerce plugins?
2. Stable and Bugless
Straight after initial release in September 2011 WooCommerce gained a reputation of a stable and comparingly bugless solution. First versions couldn’t boast strong out-of-the-box functionality. However, it was more than enough to create a small online business. And even more inspiring was that WooCommerce Development Team didn't seem to sleep at all...
3. New Versions, Fixes and Extensions
WooCommerce GitHub page counts 69 different releases in a bit more than 2 years. Impressive, isn’t it? Developers Team did their best to:
- Provide new features that Woo Community really needed.
- Quickly and effectively fix reported bugs.
- Improve cart usability and user-friendliness.
Add an intuitive admin interface, several hundreds of extensions, open source code and all the beautiful templates from parent WooThemes company. All together it makes WooCommerce a preferable solution not only for WordPress users but for all e-merchants.
4. Well Supported
Unlike a huge part of open source solutions that fail to deliver strong support for their product WooCommerce did all their best to help users cope with any kind of issues:
- Documentation
- FAQs
- Video Tutorials
- Community Forum
- HelpDesk
As a result a merchant who faces a problem can easily fix it by himself or get professional help from Support Team.
5. Price.
And yes, we almost forgot - WooCommerce is totally free.
Why Numbers May Lie
Installing a WooCommerce plugin at WordPress site doesn’t always mean the site owner will use it. Users may simply play with a new extension and find out how things work or, for business reasons, after test driving WooCommerce, go to another solution, etc.
However, even taking this into consideration, the WooCommerce success story is still a remarkable example of how to create, launch and maintain a great e-Commerce solution.
P.S.: in case you are interested in WooCommerce migration (from any most popular shopping carts, such as migration from Magento) check this page for more info on how to make your data transfer simple and effective.
October 30, 2024 
