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.

That would be cool to see.

Yeah. Well, we got a couple of independent events popping up, which is interesting. We've just had WordCamp affiliated e-commerce day for WordPress in Porto, which James and I both spoke at, and then we've got Checkout Summit in Sicily in April. So, it's interesting to see that community interest is growing in the e-commerce side of things, and Checkout Summit is specifically WooCommerce rather than e-commerce as well. I am liking that direction.

Yeah. And we got a comment from Brent.

If it's a platform and there's hundreds of plugins in the directory on top of it, I think that sort of it's a spectrum, but that's where it makes it a little bit more okay, I would say, to talk about a specific plugin or solution.

Yeah.

That is a really good question. And Ian, I'll say that it's very pressured with this idea of intelligence being on tap with AI agents. We're seeing if you're listening to this and you haven't tried Claude Code yet, take some time. Nothing else from this podcast. Take some time, go through some tutorials, install Claude Code. By the way, it's not just for code. You can use it for other files on your computer. You can use it with your notes. You can use it with so much. I saw some crazy stuff with it being hooked up to Playground and Beeper today. You can do some really, really neat things. And that kind of is an unlimited developer resource in some ways that we haven't seen. And it is the 1.0 version, and the capabilities that are coming out this year as the new Nvidia chips come online, all the new data centers you heard about get built, especially some of the Elon Musk stuff which is moving very quickly, but also the investments from Google, Meta, everyone like Anthropic. We're going to see some, if you thought last year was exciting from an AI point of view, I think this will actually be the year that is a little more jaw-dropping. So, January 14th, mark my words there.

James, I feel like we should point to a WooCommerce blog post or something here. Is there an official resource? I don't want to. I mean, Bo actually published, I believe it was late last year, and I'm sure Brent in the comments will be able to drop a link in, but his vision for 2026 for WooCommerce is something that we're really sticking to. Quality is high on the list, performance is high on the list, builder experience is high on the list, as well as merchant experience which is always high on the list. Also, evolving with the AI ecosystem as it moves and adapting to that, integrating things like the Stripe Agentic Commerce protocol and the new Google UCP protocol, and just really working and refining those experiences are always top of mind. Hopefully Brent can drop in a link to the relevant blog post from Bo. But yeah, that should be sufficient.

No, it sounds good. I apologize. I am not the biggest WooCommerce expert in the world, which is funny. Thank you for having me start your show. I think about it a lot more from the broader ecosystem and the strategy. Those are things I can speak to probably a little more, or the future of development and computing. But for a specific question like that, I think James is a much better person to answer, or Bo if he was here.

Yeah, I think it's just really great to hear what you envision e-commerce or WooCommerce could be. I think we've touched on that quite a lot. I did see a few questions come in about UCP. So I'll speak to that. Someone was like, 'Why weren't you part of the announcement?' Any update on UCP, which Google recently launched? How will WooCommerce move forward with this? So, without speaking specifically to UCP, I will say that it is funny given how much bigger and more money they have that Shopify is kind of scared of WooCommerce. So often they will negotiate to be an exclusive day of launch announcement. If you notice with the Stripe stuff, we were there on day one, but it didn't get announced a few days later. Or they negotiated for us to find out about it when everyone else does. It'll come really quickly. So don't worry about that. It'll all be supported. The second thing I'll say is that there was an article in The Information about this a few days ago, is that these things are not being used at all. It's very telling that almost a year after some of the stuff was first announced, there have been almost no one talking about how many transactions have gone through this. It was a headline feature at the Stripe conference and the Shopify thing. The CEOs are there and it's moving the stock prices. It's very interesting. This happens in software kind of frequently. Occasionally there's something that everyone thinks is the best idea ever and it gets a ton of hype, but once it lands in the world, users are like, 'Nope, doesn't fit,' or there's something missing. I'm not saying that agentic commerce 10 years from now won't be a double-digit percentage of commerce. We'll probably figure this out, but it might also be the Google Glass of these things. You can put a bajillion dollars into it and it seems like the coolest idea, but when it meets the reality of the real world, there's something about it that just doesn't make it gel.

I would say Anthropic is the worst at that actually. Perplexity and Gemini Google have gotten really good at linking the sites. I think we'll see that evolve over time, but part of that experience is reading the reviews yourself. Like Katie was saying, comparing free shipping costs and getting discount codes and all that kind of stuff. So it's definitely a challenge, but something I'm looking forward to seeing how that shapes up this year. And I think it's going to shape up pretty quickly at the rate things are going. We have a question from Tommy on X. He says, 'Are there any plans to bring back Woo Express? It was an easy way to onboard less technical clients that don't know what hosting is, but still want the flexibility of Woo and the scalability of WordPress.com.' Oh, what I will say is that just like every other WordPress host in the world, on WordPress.com we're making a ton of investment into making things easier and that onboarding. One thing people don't realize is now every paid plan on WordPress.com supports full plugins and themes. So even the four bucks a month one, you get the full WordPress.com scalability, the platform of WP Cloud, on every single paid plan. So there's not the two tiers of paid plans anymore, which kind of puts us in a similar category to every other web host in the world. You pay for it, you get full WordPress. Now that capability and our very deep technical investments to make that scalable, performant, secure, everything. WordPress.com sites basically never get hacked. You don't have to worry about security in the same way that you might on a host that does not invest as much in security. Those sorts of things are available, and we're very much thinking about tailored experiences, not just for WooCommerce but also other plugins. Anything on WordPress.com, I want it to be one-click easy. In fact, just like those blueprints for Playgrounds where you can preconfigure something, I think we're going to start to see that become more common in preconfiguring a hosting setup as well.

Well, no, I think it's something that still might be needed.

Oh yeah. Well, to get the scalability and everything, you don't need it anymore. Scalability, security, upgrades, everything. The onboarding experience I think can definitely still be very much improved. So that is something I still do think is needed.

And when you put it like that, I almost feel like it should just be a setting in the plugin, right?

Woo is a minor thing for some sites, for some sites it's the whole thing. I know it's tricky because a lot of plugins fight for real estate in the standard Chrome of WordPress. But I think with user control, it might be aggressive to do this by default, but in the plugin, having it be so people know what they're doing, they can switch it on and off. For a plugin with the sort of surface area of Woo, putting things at top level navigation, I think, is okay. You can imagine something where it does become a bit more primary. That said, don't completely hide the WordPress stuff. People still are going to have pages and blogs and everything like that. And it's nice to have the dashboard where they see the news and get involved with the community.

Let's wrap it up with one more question about the future, which feels like a good ending. So let's go to Robin's question: 'Long-term, what does WooCommerce look like in three plus years?' Oh. So, things I'm certain of: it'll be faster, make a ton of investments in performance. Updates will be seamless. I deal with a lot of things in the world. So, despite people's perceptions of me, it actually takes a lot to get me truly riled up. But the one thing that will do that without fail is when an update breaks a site. To me, that is the worst thing you could ever do as software. It makes me furious. It is totally unacceptable, and it needs to happen zero times. And it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. I think not just Woo, but every WordPress plugin developer has a responsibility to really put in the work to make updates as seamless as possible. Otherwise, once you lose that trust in updates, it's gone. So updates will be frequent and seamless, and the interface will be much more modern in the sense that it'll feel a lot more like a modern app. By the way, WordPress is going to evolve alongside that. So we're doing some fun stuff to spruce up the WordPress admin a bit as well. And so we will both benefit from that and build on top of it.

That's a good question. I think there's work at every level, sort of like defense in depth. This is the idea in security: you don't just want one layer of security, you want multiple things because one of them's probably going to fail inevitably. So then you have all these other layers in place that still make sure the bad thing doesn't happen, the fatal thing doesn't happen. So I do really appreciate at the hosting level the investments people make into auto rollbacks or some even do it with visual testing on the front end. And of course, providing an ability for users to do that on demand is that undo button. Beautiful. That's very important as a last resort. I think the other important thing, and this is also getting easier with AI, is testing and having a great beta program, getting things out there in the world, doing automated testing on various setups. Since you can get feedback from your users on what the most common things they use WooCommerce with, how are you testing that? If you're a developer, are you testing the beta versions of both WordPress and WooCommerce? Finding any changes that might either you need to update for or that maybe the core platform needs to be informed that they messed something up because they missed some edge case or some API you were using. It's going to take a village, but we've done it with WordPress for many, many years of a very smooth update process for hundreds of millions or billions of times for plugins and themes as well. Core has become, I think rightly so, very trusted for upgrades.

I really appreciate it and congrats on this new format, new show, everything. I will definitely be a listener and watcher and can't wait to see what you all do.

Thank you.