Comment by stackghost
7 hours ago
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
7 hours ago
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).
I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.
But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
You’re from the Matt “WordPress is 45% of websites” school of statistics. WooCommerce is nothing compared to Shopify, barely a blip, inconsequential. WooCommerce is “installed” on millions of websites but it processes perhaps 1% of the volume of Shopify.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/WooCommerce-Checkou...
https://trends.builtwith.com/shop
And keep in mind most major Shopify users are building out their own front ends so these BuiltWith numbers are underreporting on big Shopify customers, whereas WooCommerce is almost never used without a WordPress front end. These are the most favorable numbers to WooCommerce and they are still bad.
edit: it’s even worse than I thought. Woo’s own stats cite storeleads.app which lists the biggest Woo stores as… some blogs? Shopify has most of the top stores from brands we all recognize. Woo has zero. Woo’s involvement in actual commerce is pitiful, I think 1% of Shopify is optimistic.
edit edit: one of Woo’s most popular stores is billyparisi.com. A recipe website that sells a couple of t-shirts. A WordPress blog that drives all of the traffic and a WooCommerce tacked on for the sake of it. And that’s one of Woo’s best.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
[0] https://www.sanjaydey.com/shopify-vs-woocommerce-why-brands-...
The link that you provided largely confirms what parent said: it puts WooCommerce ahead of Shopify in terms of store count, with a number (4.34M live stores) which is consistent to the one mentioned by parent ("over four million stores").
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
1 reply →
I stand corrected!
I'm a fan of PocketCasts as my podcast app on Android. It was bought by Automattic in 2021.
TIL! Am I crazy or was it at one point partly owned by NPR?
You're not crazy.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
Not an enterprise product, but SimpleNote is great. I was happy that they bought it.
Matt famously used it himself and bought them the domain name (which was expensive) and gave it to them no-strings-attached.
A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.
All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.