14 DAY TRIAL // Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the open source WordPress CMS, has announced its acquisition of WooCommerce, an e-commerce plugin for its free platform, along with the team that helped develop it.
WooCommerce is currently the most successful of all of WordPress' e-commerce toolkits, with over one million active installs and a solid ecosystem of themes and add-ons for the original platform. Developed by WooThemes, this plugin was forked from the Jigoshop e-commerce plugin in 2011 and was spearheaded by two former Jigowatt employees, the company behind Jigoshop.
Why did Automattic buy WooCommerce?
While still unconfirmed by Automatic, the obvious purpose of this acquisition is to help the company add e-commerce support for their WordPress.com platform, a feature in which it has been lagging behind other cloud-hosted website building services like Squarespace or Wix, and especially Shopify.
Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's founder & current CEO has introduced this acquisition via an online video, in which a special emphasis has been put on the place of e-commerce in today's website building market by sharing a story from an older WordCamp presentation. You can watch the video at the end of this article.
What about the people?
Automattic will not only get their hands on WooCommerce's source code, but they'll be also able to control how the plugin's development will go on for future years. Even more important, the company also made sure WooTheme's entire development team will now join their ranks as well.
WooThemes, while primarily a WordPress themes foundry, is currently staffed with 55 employees, which are based all around the Globe, providing development of new themes, plugins, and providing support for existing products.
Since Automattic also employs personnel from 16 different countries, working habits and the daily routine of both teams won't be affected by this move all that much.
Answering questions on this topic for WPTavern.com, Matt Mullenweg has also assured that WooThemes as a business and theme foundry won't be discontinued any time soon, probably because of the sheer number of clients the company has managed to obtain across an illustrious career in creating and selling WordPress themes of the highest quality.
A much better solution than starting everything in-house, buying WooCommerce can prove to be a very wise decision in the long run, allowing WordPress.com to not only have support for online stores in a very short time, but also benefit from WooThemes' brand as one of the leading WordPress-based development companies.
Financial details about Automattic's acquisition have not been made public, but the operation is expected to close in around one month.
