WooCommerce - Technology Growth Award Winner

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This in the third post in our Technology Growth Awards series looking at some of the fastest growing web technologies online today. Using our own BuiltWith data, we've highlighted some of the companies who have seen continuous and significant growth over the last twelve months (or more in many cases). In the last post, we featured AdRoll. Today, it's time to take a closer look at WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is (in the words of the team behind it) "a Wordpress eCommerce toolkit that helps you sell anything, beautifully" and is the flagship product from WooThemes. WooCommerce has been seeing huge growth over the last year and has become one of the most popular eCommerce platforms online today. This isn't where it all began for WooThemes though, who had been up and running for a while before WooCommerce was launched. The company started out by producing custom themes for Wordpress with the aim of enhancing the appearance, functionality and usefulness of a Wordpress site. As they've grown, WooThemes has expanded beyond the scope of just Wordpress themes. The journey began way back in the early days of Wordpress. At the time, only a limited number of themes were available and late in 2007, the very first premium (paid for) Wordpress theme was released by Adii Pienaar. The theme turned out to be a hit and Adii was joined by Mark Forrester and Magnus Jepson around the start of 2008. The trio collaborated building themes for a few months and in July 2008, they decided to drop their other freelance work to focus their efforts on building the WooThemes business. The team worked remotely in different countries (which is still the setup the company uses today) and the founding trio didn't meet in person until April 2009 at a conference in London. Things went well and the company focussed mainly on Wordpress themes for the next few years. It wasn't until September 2011 that WooCommerce arrived on the scene. WooThemes worked with the developers of Jigoshop (a Wordpress eCommerce plugin) to branch their product and turn it to the first release of WooCommerce. The product proved to be a hit and gradually began gaining support and growing in popularity. That has stepped up significantly over the last year or so and WooCommerce is now in the top 5 most popular eCommerce platforms. As you can see from the chart below, the Builtwith usage data shows the trend is very clearly in an upwards direction, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

WooCommerce Growth in Top 1m Sites 2012-2014 WooCommerce allows users to launch attractive, high quality stores quickly and easily. The core product is free (users can buy add-ons to extend WooCommerce if needed) which almost certainly adds to its appeal. The company has a rich background in design which really shines through. WooCommerce isn't just about providing the right functionality for users. WooCommerce offers more than that. It's about the whole package. From analysing some of the BuiltWith data for WooCommerce, it was interesting to find that only a very small percentage of the websites using WooCommerce are also using other eCommerce plugins. The uptake of complimentary technologies (as shown in the middle section of the infographic above) is very low. This again points to the fact that WooCommerce offers something of a one-stop-shop for users looking to set up their own eCommerce store. With WooCommerce, there doesn't seem to be much need to run any additional eCommerce technology. Things look like they're going well for WooCommerce, and the trend looks set to continue well into 2014 and beyond. It'll be interesting to see whether WooCommerce can overtake one of its competitors to cement itself in the top 3 most popular eCommerce platforms. All of the usage data used in this post and the infographic above has been provided by BuiltWith. View WooCommerce Trends data here. To find out more about BuiltWith, the types of data on offer available and how you can use it, head over to BuiltWith Pro Features.