Many are considering it this most important acquisition of the year - Automattic, the parent company behind WordPress, has announced the acquisition of WooCommerce, an ecommerce platform for the WordPress environment.
Just to give you a sense of how significant the acquisition is, consider this: there are over 1 million active installations of the WooCommerce plugin (and it's been downloaded more than 7.6 million times total). What's more, BuiltWith's survey of ecommerce platforms shows Woo passing up Magento among the top 1 million websites (although it still lags when looking at the top 100,000 and 10,000 sites). It's estimated that WooCommerce currently powers upward of 650,000 storefronts.
"For years, we've been working on democratizing publishing, and today more people have independent sites built on open source software than ever before in the history of the web," said Automattic co-founder Matt Mullenweg. "Now, we want to make it easy for anyone to sell online independently, without being locked into closed, centralized services - to enable freedom of livelihood along with freedom of expression."
WordPress currently powers about 23 percent of the Web. As we work our way toward 51 percent, WooCommerce joining Automattic is a big step opening WordPress up to an entirely new audience.
