WooCommerce is a flexible, open-source commerce solution built on WordPress. The company started in 2008 as WooThemes and in 2017 decided to focus exclusively on ecommerce.
Today, Woo empowers small and medium businesses to sell online by building exactly the store they want. Our legacy as an all-remote company endures, growing from three founders in Norway, the United Kingdom, and South Africa to 330+ team members in over 32 countries.
Our mission
WooCommerce is committed to democratizing commerce and putting you in control of your own livelihood. Our core platform is free and open source, empowering anyone to sell anything, anywhere.
The origin story
In November 2007, Mark Forrester, Magnus Jepson, and Adii Pienaar teamed up online to build a new theme for WordPress. After a few months of selling themes together, they decided to make their working relationship official and jointly launch WooThemes.
WooThemes was born as a globally distributed company with a small IRL presence in Cape Town. While growing a large portfolio of commercial themes, it became clear that our customers required more functionality. We decided to try something new, venturing into the world of plugin development.
Our first plugin, WooCommerce, saw the light of day in 2011, enabling users to transform their WordPress site into a professional ecommerce storefront.
From themes to carts
By pivoting from commercial themes to ecommerce, Woo quickly became the fastest-growing ecommerce platform on the internet. After passing seven million downloads and hosting the first-ever WooConf in San Francisco for 320 attendees, there was an appetite to go even further.
We wanted to join forces with someone who shared our values, culture, and work ethic — a partner who could also help us grow our team and market share.
Joining Automattic
WooThemes was acquired by Automattic, the company best-known for WordPress.com and Jetpack, in 2015. Rebranded as WooCommerce and bolstered by a passionate community of partners, developers, and business leaders, we’ve continued our efforts to develop and democratize commerce.
