Today marks the beginning of the next exciting chapter in our journey as WooThemes. The short and sweet of it – we are joining the Automattic family! Read more about this from WooThemes co-founders, Mark and Magnus and from Matt Mullenweg of Automattic.
What does this mean for our customers? If you’re using WooThemes products (extensions, themes, or other) your subscriptions and experience will continue as before and there is no reason to worry. In the coming weeks and months you can expect business as usual from WooThemes, now with the added power of Automattic behind everything we do. For support, continue to reach out to us in the same way you always have done.
What does this mean for our team? The Woo ninjas are not going anywhere! They’ll continue working all around the world, with exciting opportunities for learning and growth through the cross-pollination of Automattic’s and our engineering, support and marketing teams.
In 2008, as three strangers in three countries, we set out on a quest to pioneer WordPress commercial theming, never dreaming of the rocket-propelled voyage into the self-hosted eCommerce unknown that lay ahead. It’s been an incredible ride, backed by a unique community, and here we find ourselves powering over 24% of online stores with our flagship product, WooCommerce. In addition we have several hundred WooCommerce extensions, a catalog of beautiful themes, and other plugins. We’re helping our customers launch their online businesses from every corner of the world.
WooThemes is a unique company, very proudly bootstrapped, consisting of 55 smart and committed team members distributed across over 20 countries. Our laser focus has been to ensure that our growth model aligns with our open source nature and active entrepreneurial community.
Over the past year, in response to the growing and more sophisticated requirements of the WooCommerce community, we have been exploring ways to accelerate our growth to be an even more accessible, easier to use, and enabling platform for our customers. We’ve met some very powerful and influential companies and potential investors, but none more ambitious and aligned with our values than the team at Automattic.
Since late last year we’ve been talking with Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, and his bridge team about what we could build together. Our plan is to leverage our combined wealth of knowledge, skills, vibrant community and joint infrastructure platform to reach new eCommerce heights.
We will work hard to ensure our growing teams integrate smoothly, are provided with fantastic opportunities, and enrich our collective culture.
To our partners, whether third party developers, designers, hosting companies, eCommerce service providers, or educational trainers: know that this ecosystem will grow even bigger and be loaded with even more opportunities. Our continued success hinges on the success of our customers and community.
To our WordPress friends, with many successful competing products and services: the fact that all of our businesses continue to co-exist with room for all and more is what makes the WordPress community so special. We trust the ripples of our new partnership with Automattic will grow into some powerful opportunities for you, as we work together to help WordPress further its staggering 23% market dominance.
Against the backdrop of an ever-changing, innovating and growing eCommerce industry, we are confident this is the right move at the right time and our team is all aboard and excited for the opportunity to create something truly significant.
Thank you for your continued support and being part of our journey.
Onwards and upwards!
Mark & Magnus
P.S Reach out to us on [email protected] with any concerns, comments or questions and – even if it takes a little while – we will answer each of you.
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Interesting to see how this merger can (hopefully) consolidate and make the all the WooCommerce options affordable and more bundled to the newcomer eCommerce WordPress website owner.
I’m confident I speak for everyone when I say we’re excited to see what the future holds. Stay tuned 🙂 Thanks Travis!
As Travis Pflanz said, I hope that the Woocomerce options becomes affordable. Now they aren’t.
Maybe they will bundle the lot of the plugins into $59/year for 1 site, $129/year for 3 sites, and a developer option of $159 for all of the current bundled extensions for one year for up to 10 websites. That would be a positive revenue source, show their commitment to the support of all of the various add-ons and how they integrate, and give them an affordable price point that most developers who use WooCommerce could wrap their hands around. Win win
Something like this I could understand and buy. The current plans are just way too expensive. I hope that Automattic will bring some sense to the pricing.
Maybe support will improve?
As others have reiterated, i just hope the extensions become more affordable.
Yeah, this is my #1 wish too. I believe that WooCommerce would gain even bigger market share, if the extensions were more affordable.
Congratulations on the merger! You guys have contributed to WP, and the community and this news is very cool! Also, I agree with Travis. With a 24% market share, there should be a large enough customer base to make WooCommerce plugins more affordable – perhaps offering bundles. They’re currently too expensive for the small business startups.
Yes to that! I had to leave the Woocommerce platform as each new feature I needed aded to my yearly subscription renewal rate… It adds up QUICK!
Congratulations on the next phase of WooThemes development.
At first look, the WooCommerce extensions appear expensive, but when you consider the level of support needed to be factored into the sell price; and also that renewals of a license are 50% discount for every year after the first purchase the pricing is very fair.
If a startup can’t afford to pay a few hundred dollars to setup their online shop they need a different business model.
Congratulations!
You have driven our clients online businesses for years now and can not shout out enough about your products! You helped us as a company build a business around your products and I really hope joining Automattic will drive your business on!
Great stuff!
Scott.
So glad to hear Scott! Thanks for being part of it 🙂
This sums up my feelings as well.
Agreed with all the comments here about making the extensions more affordable. I also hope that Automattic can help with all of the WooCommerce flaky problems.
Yeah, let’s all hang on and wait until the announcement that WordPress will no longer be free. That sounds a lot more likely than any expectation that WooCommerce prices will go down.
Should be interesting.
Wow. What can I say? WooThemes, especially Mark, Magnus and the people I’ve worked with when I was still part of WooThemes: CONGRATULATIONS! This is so well deserved and I’m confident that this will allow you guys to grow even further. Cheers! 😀
Cheers Coen, thanks for your ongoing support! 🙂
Thanks for being part of the journey Coen!
Not sure anyone saw this coming. Congrats… I think.
We’ve been in discussions for about six months, but the news is definitely a surprise for many. We’re all excited for what the future will bring 🙂
It’s been amazing to see this company grow and wishing all my friends an incredible future.
Automattic has just acquired some of best I know.
Congrats everyone!
Thanks for your support Scott!
Congrats. Let the games begin.
Thanks, John!
The biggest acquisition in the WordPress world thus far. Congratulations to all those involved. Hard work pays off. Woo is a great company and a seemingly great fit for Automattic.
Thank you Devin!
Whoah!!! Congrats, guys. As an early adopter of Woo, I look forward to seeing where this goes for you. Let your journey resume.
Many thanks for your ongoing support Jesse, cheers 😀
Hey congrats on that!
This sounds very promising and great news, looks like there will be a huge number of opportunities arising from this union in the eCommerce sector.
Cheers
Wow huge news, good work guys!
Cheers Andy!
Everyone: congratulations! Very impressive and this promises a great new time ahead!
That’s the idea, great times ahead for all 🙂 Thanks for your support David-Andrew!
Congrats all the way around. I can’t say I saw this coming.
Thank you for the support Vinny 🙂
I was quite surprised as well. But it makes a lot of sense now.
Congrats guys! This couldn’t have happened to a better group 🙂 Excellent and well done for the Woo Team!
Our team thanks you for the kind words Mason 😀 Cheers!
Congrats and I look forward to what is to come via this merger. Onward and upward!
Thanks very much Joshua, onward and upward indeed 🙂
Congratulations, these are great and quite surprising news! I firmly believe Automattic + WooThemes will push WordPress global usage over 30% in near future. Looking forward to the great times 🙂
Many thanks Rastislav, we’re looking forward to growing the market share together 🙂
I hope prices drop down, plugins were so expensive!
This is awesome but I hope you guys can keep up with the security updates. Congrats!
It will be business as usual for the foreseeable future Adam, and we’re certainly aiming to keep up with those important patches 🙂 Cheers!
Sounds very promising the the WP commerce community. Big question: can this partnership speed up WooCommerce and reduce the huge amount of server resource required to maintain a quick, search engine-friendly website shop?
If yes, then awesome!
We are working every day at it… The next version will have considerable improvements for those who work with variations.
Thank Goodness! Been waiting for the product variations issues to be tackled for a while now. Will there be a bulk variation editor included in core now? all the add-on premium plugins are lacking. This should be core in WooCommerce.
That’s awesome news!!!
This sounds awesome!
I have a very small shoppe with only 6 products – however 85 variations in total. Could use some improvements.
Especially backend bulk handling.
BTT:
Congratulations to these exciting news! Jetpackize WC and your market share will hit 40%!
Vote for better and more direct backend without three to four clicks per product, per order, per customer to reach desired infos or bulk edit things.
Backend needs huge improvements!
Looking forward to what the future holds for WOO!
Congrats to the team. It is a nice vote of confidence to the Woocommerce team and community.
It is indeed Adam! Cheers!
Amazing news and congratulations!
Thank you Emil 🙂
This is definitely a interesting, in an exciting way, news. Congrats to Automattic and WooThemes.
We’re all most appreciative of your support Nile!
Wow! What amazing news! Congratulations to the WooThemes team – y’all have certainly earned it 😉
We thank you Alex, it’s amazing news indeed 🙂 Cheers!
Congratulations guys.
I look forward to see where this takes Woocommerce!
Thank you! We’re all very excited for what the future holds 🙂
Congrats!
Thanks Amir 😀
Congratulations to all involved. Look forward to seeing where this takes WordPress and WooCommerce.
Many thanks Bradley!
This is very interesting and exciting. The woocommerce aspect particularly… Does this ultimately mean the woocommerce will soon be a premium upgrade option on wordpress.com as well as shopify cart? The possibilities are endless.
Hey Kevin! Right now we’ve got no immediate plans to add WooCommerce for .com users, but we’ll certainly keep everyone posted. It’s certainly exciting news (and opens up many possibilities for everyone) and we appreciate your enthusiasm! 🙂
Wow Woo! Onwards and upwards. Big congrats to the whole team!!
We appreciate your support Elliot 😀
Woocommerce is going to remain free right?
Good question Shane! We have no plans to change this right now, so for the foreseeable future, WooCommerce will remain free.
Hm, that was totally non-committal. Prepare to grab your wallets.
Ha, sorry to be vague, wasn’t at all my intention 🙂 To re-iterate, as of right now we have no plans to charge for WooCommerce.
Big congratulations, and keep up the awesome work
Many thanks Jens 🙂
Wow, great news! Congrats guys, curious about the next steps!
Thanks Frano! We’ll keep everyone posted on what comes next 🙂
Wow, congratulations to the entire Woo team – and community, because this will benefit everyone who themes on Woo! Great news 🙂
Yes, that’s a great way to look at it 😀 Thank you Gregg!
Hi guys,
Congrats…looking forward to see what the future holds.
Will there be any impact on customer service requests & an increase in your response times?
Any impact on existing pricing structures?
Best wishes for the future, looking forward to the ever improving WooCommerce!
Simon 🙂
Great questions Simon, happy to tackle those for you.
We don’t expect support to be impacted negatively by this. We’re always looking for ways to improve the support experience for our customers (including rolling out some major improvements to our ticketing system, which has also just happened!). With more resources and the support of the full Automattic team, we can continue to make critical improvements and cut down on response times even more.
As for pricing, at the moment we have no plans to change this. If anything does change along these lines we’ll communicate it to everyone as quickly and efficiently as we can.
Thanks very much for your support and please do let us know if there’s anything else you’re wondering about 🙂
Hey Simon! Thanks for the congrats and well wishes!
We are in a all hands on deck mode in support over here. We launched our new Support Ticket forms today too so hopefully this will ensure questions get routed to the right channel to avoid any Support delays.
There are currently no plans to update the pricing structure or change any details of your account downloads or license terms. 🙂
I’m glad you are working with Mullenweg. I hope this means your developers will get a stronger voice with the development of the wordpress platform.
The intelectual property you are creating is a treasure trove… if it isn’t hurt by how new updates and a possible new direction of dev…
Super duper guys! Just wrote a small post with my point of view, but looks astonishing to move into that direction. https://dmaillard.com/automattic-acquires-woocommerce/
Thanks for your thumbs up in that post David, we’re stoked. Glad you like the “WooMattic” handle/URL too, the team started using it last week when the news broke internally and it just stuck! Cheers 🙂
Haha, that’s leaked news, smells like a rebrand 🙂
Hehe 🙂 Well in all seriousness we’re not planning on changing our name (or the name of our products) in the foreseeable future, but we can’t help but think WooMattic is a catchy way to refer to the happenings of the day!
Are you guys going to get back to making and releasing themes now?
Hey Jesse! We just recently released a child theme for Storefront called Deli, which you can find here: http://woocommerce.com/products/deli/ And we’ve got Canvas 6 in the works as well.
We’re very excited to continue growing both WooCommerce and our other offerings (including themes and plugins like Sensei) along side of Automattic. If there’s a particular theme update or feature you’re waiting on or would like to see, do let us know so we can look into that 🙂 Cheers!
Multisite Network ecommerce would be awesome!
WPMUDEV’s MarketPress v4 is seeming like vaporware…
It’d be great to see WooMattic flex some serious multisite muscle and come out with something elegant and amazing =)
Congratulations WooTeam. As a longtime customer and avid believer in your solid code base I hope this means greater things lie ahead. It’s been a great ride and those who have watched and participated, even if only from the periphery, have enjoyed it. Cheers!
We’re so glad you’ve enjoyed the journey with us so far Tony — we believe great things are on the horizon for us all and would love it if you came along with us. 🙂 Cheers!
wow , a phenomenon …
This is huge! You’re now part of the people behind WordPress!! I can’t wait for whatever is coming, but I believe really good stuff.
Congratulations to all the people at WooThemes, we love you <3
That’s very kind of you Abdullah! We love you too. <3
Congratulations to Woothemes team and Automattic!
Thank you 🙂
Congrats! This is a positive for the whole WP ecommerce community.