Preface

Up until just a few years ago, building your own e-commerce site was remarkably difficult. You had to install complex software, host it yourself, and hope that, whenever you made a change, nothing broke. That's very different from where we are now.

WooCommerce was released in September 2011 and, since then, it's taken the e-commerce world by storm. As of 2015, there are nearly 400,000 sites that run WooCommerce; that is approximately 18 percent of all e-commerce sites on the Internet and bigger than every other competitor by a wide margin (source: BuiltWith.com).

Part of the success of WooCommerce is because it's built on top of the incredibly popular WordPress platform. With just a few clicks, you can install the WooCommerce plugin and turn your WordPress site into an online store. With over 300 official extensions to customize your store, you no longer need a developer. You can add thousands of free plugins and themes to customize the rest of your WordPress site and the options are nearly limitless.

There are hosting companies that only host WordPress sites, services that maintain your WordPress sites for you, and professional products that handle every aspect of your site from creating contact forms to image optimization. The list goes on. What you need to know is that WordPress is huge and still growing. As WordPress grows, so will WooCommerce.

WooCommerce isn't only built on top of WordPress. It's also built on top of the WooThemes brand. WooThemes was one of the first companies to start building commercial themes and plugins for WordPress, and over the years they've perfected their techniques and poured it all into WooCommerce. Having to swap your e-commerce software would be a nightmare. That's part of the reason that WooCommerce has taken off so fast. It's backed by one of the biggest brands in the entire WordPress space. People know that they won't disappear any time soon.

In short, you can rest easy. WooCommerce is built on top of both a growing platform and a trusted brand.

Let's get started building your e-commerce site.