Way back in February 2014 (that’s right, 2 months ago), WooThemes published a post summarising data from BuiltWith, showing that WooCommerce had 10.8% global market share for online stores. A nice #1 ranking (with Magento a close #2).
Now Practical eCommerce have published a detailed post comparing WooCommerce to Magento using current BuiltWith stats, showing WooCommerce (>259,000 sites) clearly overtaking all versions of Magento (>213,000 sites combined) in popularity. Links to both articles below.
WooCommerce has shown phenomenal growth – 452% over the last 12 months. Practical eCommerce suggest this could be due to the underlying popularity of WordPress. And I agree that is a big factor.
But there is another very important factor at play here, that has allowed WooCommerce to grow so fast in terms of functionality – WooCommerce Extensions
The Extensions marketplace has driven a lot of R&D for WooCommerce, with a huge variety of niche integrations/features being made available. WooThemes and third party developers (like us, we have developed two WooCommerce extensions) share in the revenue stream from premium extensions, and this provides a strong incentive for the development of high quality plugins. There are now hundreds of WooCommerce Extensions that integrate to other systems or add features to the WooCommerce core.
Connection with other systems is vitally important in allowing WooCommerce to grow fast without bloating the core codebase. And the Extensions model means there is great support available for users of the WooCommerce extensions.
The Extensions marketplace was a masterstroke that has contributed to the rapid growth in WooCommerce that is now being observed.
Woo and Practical eCommerce articles:
- WooThemes: Monitoring WooCommerce Growth
- Practical eCommerce: WooCommerce Leads Ecommerce Platform Pack in April 2014