The Future of WooCommerce - A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg

Sure. So, gosh, yes, as you said, I'm the CEO of Automattic and WooCommerce is one of the products of Automattic. So I work really closely with Bo Leens who leads, he's the artistic director of the WooCommerce maison. We have some funny titles inside of Automattic. How it started was, I always have thought about WordPress as an operating system, and so I wanted to study previously successful operating systems. I read a lot of computer history books and studied the history of Microsoft, and I felt like WordPress was our Windows. We had the platform but we hadn't yet found the killer app on top of it, the thing that there's a ton of demand for and also elevates the platform itself. So that was Microsoft Office for Windows. When Office came along, that blew up Windows. So I just started really digging into the tens of thousands of plugins and themes that were out there, looking for trends, seeing what people were using, and listening to the community at WordCamps. Commerce as a category started to stand out, and within that category, WooCommerce really started to be something. I'd known about it and Automattic had actually looked at it before, but I started to take it pretty seriously. In 2015, we reached an agreement with the Woo founders to acquire them and have their team join. I think there were 43 people at the time, but the team was only a few developers, only like three developers. Some of the code wasn't as performant or scalable, but I was like, okay, Automattic has some of the best engineers in the world, so we can definitely fix all the engineering stuff. Woo has nailed the community, the branding, and the user experience, which is actually harder. So let's bring the best of what we've learned from building WordPress, WordPress.com, everything we've done at Automattic, and apply that playbook to Woo. That was 2015, so a little over 10 years ago. It's been an exciting ride. We don't talk about the Woo stat as much, but I think it's something like 8% of all websites in the world now run WooCommerce.

Which is huge. Yeah, I remember the 10 year anniversary. I guess it was last year now in 2025. A surprising number of the people who came over with that acquisition are still thriving and working on WooCommerce and in other areas of Automattic as well, which was nice to see.

And the community has grown so much. It's been very exciting to be a part of. It was also humbling, much in the same way I was humbled by Tumblr. With Woo, I was like, we've been doing this for a while, how hard could commerce be? But commerce has a multifactorial complexity, especially as you go international with payments, shipping, inventory, and returns. There's so much because it bridges the physical and the digital world for some stores.

No two are alike.

Hmm, this is a good question. With a product at the scale of WooCommerce, they're never actually killed by competitors. So I would say the biggest threat is internal. When products like that fail, it's always because of execution. People think it's competitors, but it's not. So I would say the biggest risk is our ability to execute against what we're hearing from the community and what we know the software needs and the roadmap. The competitive landscape is interesting. Certainly, with a company like Shopify and a product like Shopify, it forces us to really bring our best stuff because Shopify is really good. They're quite impressive and they're six or seven thousand people with a bajillion dollars. Some people might look at that and say, 'WooCommerce has no chance.' But actually, this David versus Goliath thing is exactly where WordPress was in 2008, 2009. If money was all you needed to create great software, we'd all be using Windows on our phone. But software built for love, not just money, and the community approach of something like WooCommerce can be very compelling. In 2026, the first question you have to ask yourself when choosing anything is, 'Am I choosing software which increases my freedom or decreases my freedom?' Which is the question, 'Am I choosing open source or not?' So really, before you look at any features, I think you need to choose how you'd like your freedom scale to balance and what direction you want to go. Open source is what differentiates WooCommerce from others in the market, other great e-commerce things out there like Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify. It increases your freedom, and especially in the age of AI, feature differentiations are going to start to fade a little bit. Shopify has a feature that WooCommerce doesn't have. Before, you'd have to wait for the Woo team to build it or someone to make a plugin. But now that cost is going down. If you're pretty good with code, you could probably whip something up yourself. There are thousands of other developers out there using it. So I think we're going to start to see the feature differentiations between things start to fade. So really, what you're choosing is a community, a platform, and that freedom stance.

So, I'm going to repeat it. Biggest competitive advantage is freedom. If you care about freedom, if you want more liberty, autonomy, if you want sovereign software, Woo is the best e-commerce platform in the world to provide that. The second is Woo's open and infinitely extensible nature. We're in an interesting period right now where because you can one-shot generate software, you get this incredible rush. If you've done this with AI and you tell it to make something, you're like, 'What just happened? I just created Doom from some words I typed in a box.' That is very exciting. However, while there will be applications of that, I do feel like the plurality of usage in commerce and interaction is going to be with malleable software. I apologize, this isn't a term I came up with. I saw some designers say it, I'm forgetting their name, but this idea of malleable versus generated software. You take something that is already there, built by humans with craft, security, and all the things that come from decades of investment, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of person hours built into the engineering, craft, security, and platform of Woo. Then you create malleable software on top of that so you can customize it. This is what makes WordPress great and WooCommerce as well. With hooks, filters, and actions, you can modify pretty much everything, for better and worse. It creates complexity, but ultimately that freedom and creativity allows for faster evolution. For Shopify to get better, Toby has to have a good idea. I'm saying Toby as a stand-in for everyone at Shopify. I can't ship a new feature to Shopify. They have a platform as well, but it's more limited. For WooCommerce to get better, I could be the biggest idiot in the world. In fact, I am. The beauty is that not just the WooCommerce developers, but everyone in the community can make it better or just make it better for them. That personalization is the advantage. There are reasons to rent an apartment versus own a house. Sometimes it's convenient to use something off the rack, and if you fit into it, more power to you. One of my great blessings in life is I am very much a men's medium. I can walk into a store and pick up a suit. I had to the other day for a funeral, and it fit quite well. I have other friends with different proportions. If they don't get something tailored, it looks ridiculous. If you can get the off-the-rack, that's cool. Off-the-rack software can be fun, but the moment you need any personalization or want it to be better fit to you and tailored, that's when open source really starts to shine and a platform like WooCommerce gets there. What we need to get better at, and maybe this is the existential threat, is education. I think one of the biggest opportunities for WordPress and WooCommerce is education. That's why I'm so excited about the WordPress education credits program. I'm calling 2026 the year of the meetup. We're going to be doing a ton to enable meetups, make meetups better, get meetup organizers better material and support. Media mediates the ladder into WordCamps, which are part of the magic of the WordPress community. Fundamentally, when you think about how something spreads, it's usually see, do, teach. You see something exciting, a store or someone making something. You're like, 'I could do that.' This is how I got started blogging. There were all these blogs out there. I was like, 'This is just a normal dude like me. I could blog.' I thought to have a website or to publish, you had to be a journalist or have certifications. In the early 2000s, it was an innovative idea that anyone could start a blog. Having people see what they can do with WooCommerce is really important. That's why the showcase and demos are great. Then you do it yourself, that's the next level. You learn from what you saw and you do it yourself. The final level, where you reach ultimate status, is when you teach someone else to do it, when you pass it on. WordPress and WooCommerce haven't grown because we spent billions of dollars on marketing. They've grown because of that see, do, teach cycle, which is word of mouth. Many people listening can imagine their introduction to WordPress or WooCommerce. You might have just come across the website and figured it out yourself. But for a lot of people, you probably had a friend or an influencer online who said, 'Hey, look at this. Check this out.' That was your entree into the community.

Oh, well, the beauty of that is they can also exchange code. They can use WooCommerce code and WooCommerce could use their code. So I think being able to be inspired and share between products is part of what accelerates the cycle of innovation. I don't have anything specific to say about any of those particular products except that I'm really glad they exist.

It's Meisner, not Mizner. Meisner.

Ah, that's a good question. The first fork in the road would be do it myself versus do it for me. Hopefully at WooCommerce.com, they get excited about the possibilities of the platform and see examples of stores like them that are very successful or increased their business or conversions by utilizing some of the things on there. So either they go the direction of going to one of the partner web hosts, which are not just Automattic ones, we point to others, and get signed up with WooCommerce configured and they can start to go through the configuring WooCommerce process. I'll be the first to admit that that's a bit heavier than the WordPress process. Someone will have to have some motivation. I'll also say that AI is raising people's ability to make it through these things. They just put a ChatGPT window next to it and say, 'I'm stuck. What do I do?' Or even now, we're having browsers with AI agents built in, which I talked about at WordCamp US and State of the Word. You can actually have the AI just watch it and do stuff for you. You can say, 'Build me this,' and it'll start to navigate WooCommerce and do it, and then you can see it do it, which is making that do-it-yourself path way more accessible. Pre-AI, I would have said probably 95% of the time they go to a developer or consultant. We link to some great things there. We have agency partners, great platforms like Codeable, and of course the big ones like Upwork. One of the great things about the WordPress and WooCommerce community is there are so many people who are fluent in it. You can really find someone who's a great match for you, whether that's in your language or in your country, or they have a portfolio that matches what you want to build. There's a great two-sided marketplace ecosystem. That percentage is probably going to come down in terms of total numbers, but I think the total demand for third-party developers is going to go up. Let's say AI makes it so only half of people can do it themselves versus hiring a developer. If there were a finite number of Woo stores being created, that would mean less work for third-party developers. But actually, there will be more demand for stores being created in general. There might be some dips and valleys, but ultimately, if I go out 10 years, there's going to be way more Woo jobs than there are today.

Oh, I think it looks like what Woo has done for the past 10 years and before even the acquisition. I always say this for WordPress, but I think it applies to Woo equally well. Its success has been predicated on how closely it has that collaboration with the community. There are so many examples. I talk about Wapuu. I would have never approved Wapuu, and how amazing is Wapuu for the WordPress community? That is something that comes up from the community. The cool thing about open source is that community happens whether you want it to or not, because people just publish plugins or fork the software. One thing I love about open source is that it forces you, if you're the steward of the software, to keep you honest. It's very natural market forces. Unless you're the most stubborn person in the world or blind, you'll just wake up one day and be like, 'Okay, everyone's using this plugin, we should just build it in.' Or every time I go to WordCamp, 10 people tell me something. So what that looks like in the future is, if I had to say something I'd like to see more of this year in terms of collaboration, I'd love to see more talks at WordCamps around WooCommerce. I'd love to see more dedicated WooCommerce meetups, which WooCommerce does have its own meetup.com thing, or topics like how we teach broader WordPress developers how they can learn Woo and how that increases their economic value in the marketplace. One nice thing about working in the e-commerce world, like we said there's a store making $5 million a year, they're going to feel comfortable investing in that. If you think of what that threshold is versus someone building a website for a coffee shop, they're making most of the money from people coming through the door. The website is nice to have, but of their revenue, how much will they spend? Half a percent, 1% on the website. For an e-commerce store, the revenue might be higher, but also the percent they're willing to reinvest into their infrastructure, website, development, and customization is probably much higher. They'll want to pay for more performant hosting and invest in those things. We track 30-something billion of GMV happening through WooCommerce, and actual numbers are higher than that because we're not able to track everything. So when you imagine the economic opportunity for doing things in the WordPress ecosystem, it's pretty huge. I would say bigger than WordPress actually.

Oh, 'should' is relative. If people want it, they will be. So I would say, be the change you want to see in the world. If you want more WooCommerce at WordCamps, if you are listening to this podcast, you probably could be a speaker. So make the pitch. If you're helping to organize a WordCamp, understand your audience, look at who's coming. With almost a quarter of all WordPress websites using WooCommerce, maybe something like a quarter of sessions at WordCamp should be about WooCommerce or commerce more broadly. There are other solutions as well. As long as things are open source, they're welcome at WordCamps.

Well, Katie, your story is really good. So, [laughter]

Okay. Well, [laughter] then don't submit it and just submit the e-commerce or submit it and then do a little bait and switch when it's like my story actually turn it into an e-commerce talk.

Well, and I'll keep that in mind. You know, the WordCamp I'm most active in choosing the content for is WordCamp US. So, as that comes around and I look at things, I'll keep that in mind.

Awesome.

Merchants, product builders, and agencies. Yes, there are goals tied to each one of those. How are they prioritized? Off the dome, not certain right now. James might be able to answer this better, but those are some of the big personas that as we build things in Woo, you try to address. Often when we build things, it addresses all of them, but as we make it more usable, that benefits everyone. But there's definitely been some more specific outreach around growing the agency program or other things like that. I also saw feedback that WordCamps might not want pitches for a specific product. I think I agree, and I would say that once a product also becomes a platform itself, like WordPress, and if you go to the WordPress plugins directory, there's hundreds or thousands of WooCommerce plugins. It's okay once it becomes not just about itself but actually something that a lot of people can build on.

Yeah, exactly.

Often a product does. Yeah.