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If you do a quick google search “woocommerce market share or e-commerce market share “, you’ll see that WooCommerce is the the second most popular e-commerce platform on the web.

Then if you look look at WooCommerce market growth. You’ll see that it’s having a 103% growth in the market. Why? Well it’s directly proportional to the growth of WordPress: “The Most Popular CMS” currently on the web. But today lets not talk about the open source behemoth that is WordPress lets go in a different direction. The Woo-direction.

There are many other E-commerce solutions for wordpress like Jigoshop, WP E-commerce, Easy Digital downloads from the top of my head, but the most popular and trusted is Woocommerce. And now with the acquisition of Woothemes the powerhouse behind WooCommerce : the only way it seems is up.

I’ve been working with WooCommerce for the past 2 years now and i’d like to give a small insight into the inner workings if you will. I couldn’t possibly cover everything in one article and there’s a possibiliy but I’ll give it the old college try and see if I can at least fit in most important parts.

Part 1: The Freemium Model

The Word freemium doesn’t exist in any dictionary(not yet) but anyone familiar with the world of WordPress will know it. It’s the combination of Free and Premium really. WooCommerce also operates on the same principle. The basic WooCommerce (script, software, plugin) is free and anyone can use, modify and re-distribute it as they please. This is possible because WooCommerce is licensed under GPL. What do you get with the initial WooCommerce package? Quite a lot actually: basically if you have the most recent WordPress theme and WooCommerce you’re ready to go with your own little e-commerce shop. You could sell a variety of product types are covered, stock inventory for those products, discount price, coupons, shipping rates, tax rates and paypal standard payment gateway all come with the initial bundle. You’d have to spend some time and resources exploring options but when the concern in money I think I would be wise if you did, don’t you?

I’ve already wrote a lot here(I think) and may have lead my readers to think WooCommerce as the complete package, well it’s not but it’s a great base. What Woo excels at more than any other solution is the number of add-ons(extensions). What are add-ons? Well add-ons are in this context plugins that on their own pretty much useless but when used in conjunction with a base plugin adds functionalities and features.

A great example is the number of payment gateway woocommerce supports all via add-ons. But it doesn’t stop there, there are add-ons for almost anything and if there isn’t one i’m sure someone out there is already thinking of a way to do it. ;). And as a developer i’ve had the pleasure and the pain of having to learn what and how many add-ons work.

I will attempt to do a brief how WooCommerce works post in the next blog post. If you guys have any preferences, please do tell me. I will try to incorporate all suggestions.