WordPress : WordPress.com :: WooCommerce : WooHoo.com

WooCommerce is to online selling what WordPress is to online publishing: an open, neutral platform with a wide community of plugin and theme developers providing deeper functionality.

WordPress.com provides a high-quality, tightly-integrated, Automattic-flavoured implementation of WordPress.

WooCommerce needs a similar high-quality, tightly-integrated, Automattic-flavoured, pre-hosted product that users can plug and play into their websites1. Let’s call it WooHoo.com.

Why?

WooCommerce aims to serve store builders, website builders, developers, and hands-on tinkerers. It is great at serving this group.

It is not designed to serve sellers who want to build a business before hiring a website builder. These sellers currently go to Shopify, Etsy, or eBay. WooHoo.com is Automattic’s offering to woo them back.

WooHoo.com

Integrated, hosted, ready-to-use commerce solution for all websites

Key features

  1. Automattic-hosted WooCommerce, offered as a SaaS

  2. Pre-integrated with own/partner extensions for all core functions—payments, subscriptions, postage, social, and more. Pick and use, no installation and minimal setup required.

  3. Integrates everywhere

    • with a WordPress.com site
    • with a self-hosted WordPress site
    • as a stand-alone store
    • as a ‘store.’ subdomain on any non-WordPress websites
    • as purchase buttons in newsletters, apps, and elsewhere
    • into Social Media platforms

  4. Multiple product options

    • Basic product screens and purchase buttons to embed in other pages and apps
    • Complete store with optional mapping to other domains
    • Complete websites with stores included (WordPress.com site bundled, invisible to user)

Setup UX transition

Setting up just a store with WooCommerce (current UX)

  1. Get hosting, domain, SSL certificates
  2. Install and configure WordPress with plugins
  3. Install and configure WooCommerce plugin
  4. Find, install, sign-up, and configure relevant WooCommerce extensions
  5. Upload products
  6. Test each step along the way Sell.

 

Setting up just a store with WooHoo.com (target UX)

  1. Sign up on WooHoo.com
  2. Add domain and select features
  3. Upload products Sell.

 

More WooHoo.com features

Universal import
Free, import tool to import products from Shopify, Etsy, eBay, Squarespace and others, apart from CSV or spreadsheet uploads.

Free white-label apps for Android & iOS.
Pre-configured and built in the cloud, ready for store owners to upload to their Play Store or App Store accounts.

Etsy.com for WooHoo.com
Unified marketplace where store owners can choose to list their products—single front-end for all hosted stores.

Where do we start?

A small start to test the hypothesis: Place a wrapper website (or landing pages) around WordPress.com’s eCommerce product. Test them in search and marketing as stand-alone, hosted store solutions.

If the initial tests confirm the hypothesis, we could start replacing the WordPress.com backend. The initial setup could be a dedicated WordPress multisite network with WooCommerce integrated into each WordPress site. This would be the beginning for WooHoo.com

All opinion notes:

  1. We need to do something about the WordPress.com Reader
  2. Jetpack: the Automattic experience for WordPress
  3. WooHoo.com—a hosted, tightly-integrated version of WooCommerce
  4. Woo Two — More ideas for WooCommerce
  5. Earn with WordPress
  6. Pricing—more and less
  7. TBC: A publishing platform for today’s content formats

  1. WordPress.com already has an eCommerce plan. This plan (GBP 36 / mo, ~ USD 44 / mo) is more expensive than Shopify’s full hosted solution (USD 29/mo). It is vastly more expensive than Shopify’s solution for WordPress — ‘Buy button’ for WordPress for USD 9 / mo. It is also not as full-featured or targeted as the competitors.
    A hosted WooCommerce product can be featured, priced and marketed competitively against other store products, while also being available as an upgrade on WordPress.com.

    ↩