I’m at WooConf right now, watching my friend Daniel present on using the WooCommerce REST API. I have a few takeaways from this conference so far that I thought would be fun to share.
- This conference is extremely well produced. My personal estimate is the event budget could easily top $350,000, despite there being “only” 400 attendees. I understand it’s been close to a break-even event. Not many organizations could take a risk this big with a conference, but the big budget has allowed for an exceptionally produced conference. It’s the fanciest venue and production I’ve seen.
- It’s easy to see how WooCommerce has created its own community, with folks from both the WordPress world but also the broader eCommerce space. From sponsors to speakers to attendees, it’s easy to see WooCommerce has a different audience — with some overlap but not a ton — from WordPress.
- There are some pretty amazing WooCommerce stores out in the world. The most talked about “at scale” store is probably ColourPop, which on Black Friday peaked at 2,000 add to cart actions per minute. Stores like these are really helping put WooCommerce to the test and helping the platform grow.
- While WooCommerce can boast 37% of all eCommerce stores running on it, that number goes down as you filter the list of sites that run it by size, to 8% of the top 10,000 websites. As more big sites and at-scale projects use WooCommerce, it can better evolve to handle all the crazy stuff that can come with that.
- There’s a lot of opportunity, both in the product and consulting space, for monetizing WooCommerce. I talked to some of the new “Woo Experts” and it seems to have been a good lead generator for the agencies that are in that list.
I’ll have more to come from my coverage of WooConf, but this is a good start.
