28/05/2015

WordPress acquires WooCommerce

The WordPress content manager Automattic, accounting for nearly one fourth of the CMS market, announces the acquisition of WooCommerce, a software solution with more than 600,000 paying users. WooCommerce is already present on close to a million sites driven by the WordPress platform, in the form of a plug-in.

More specifically, online sales plug-in vendor WooThemes was purchased for an amount that has not been officially disclosed, but which could total up to $300 million.

In January, WooCommerce exceeded Magento in terms of its number of installations. And yet Magento remains the uncontested leader on the top 100,000 e-commerce websites. The two solutions do not, in fact, target the same audience: Magento is a powerful, highly technical tool that supports critical ramp-ups whilst WooCommerce focuses on ease of rollout.

Although a merger of the WooCommerce and WordPress platforms is not on the agenda, it would appear that this acquisition will now make WordPress responsible for the plug-in’s maintenance and upgrades. This transformation of France’s e-commerce landscape could have a significant impact on the actors that currently dominate the market, such as PrestaShop for example, namely thanks to the natural referencing that WordPress’s websites enjoy from Google.

Source: www.zdnet.fr

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