About WooCommerce
The open-source ecommerce plugin that lives inside WordPress.
WooCommerce launched on 27 September 2011 as a fork of Jigoshop, built by Mike Jolley and James Koster at WooThemes. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired WooThemes in May 2015 and has owned the plugin ever since. It is distributed under the GPL, runs on any WordPress site and charges no transaction fee. Woo reports more than four million stores built on the plugin, and third-party trackers such as Store Leads put it at roughly a third of the top one million ecommerce sites.
That reach comes with a specific shape. WooCommerce is a plugin, not a hosted platform, so the merchant owns the hosting, the database, the updates and the stack of extensions that fill in anything the core plugin does not do (subscriptions, memberships, bookings, bundles, multi-currency, the payment gateway). The WooCommerce REST API exposes the core objects (orders, products, customers, coupons, refunds, tax rates, shipping zones, webhooks) but paid extensions each add their own tables and their own endpoints. Native reports handle gross sales and top sellers. Anything that crosses the boundary to marketing spend, fulfilment cost, accounting or support tickets has to be answered outside the admin.
The warehouse makes that outside-the-admin view normal. Orders, line items, refunds and customers land next to the data from Google Ads, Exact Online, Klaviyo and HubSpot, and the extensions that matter (subscriptions, bookings, memberships) get pulled in with their own tables rather than flattened into a custom column.