Overview
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed for small to large-sized online merchants using WordPress. Launched on September 27, 2011, the plugin quickly became popular for its simplicity to install and customize and for the market position of the base product as freeware (even though many of its optional extensions are paid and proprietary).
History
WooCommerce was first developed by WordPress theme developer WooThemes, who hired Mike Jolley and James Koster, developers at Jigowatt, to work on a fork of Jigoshop that became WooCommerce. In January 2020, it was estimated that WooCommerce is used by around 3.9 million websites.
In November 2014, the first WooConf, a conference focusing on eCommerce using WooCommerce, was held in San Francisco, California. It attracted 300 attendees.
In May 2015, WooThemes and WooCommerce were acquired by Automattic, operator of WordPress.com and core contributor to the WordPress software.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).