WordPress.com adds partners to lower the barrier to eCommerce

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Written By Brian Krogsgard

4 thoughts on “WordPress.com adds partners to lower the barrier to eCommerce”

  1. We tried creating a hosted solution of Woo in 2012. Called QikCommerce.

    As much of a no brainer as it may seem the challenges are huge. Especially the onboarding process and the illusion of a one click solution.

    Unfortunately it didn’t fail because of the tech but instead because of the corporate culture which it was born out of.

    I’m pretty sure someone will eventually launch such a thing but I can tell you it won’t be Obox 🙂 the mountain is too high and since we don’t own any of the tech you’re at the mercy of two giants in the game.

  2. I can’t believe someone hasn’t put together a full out hosted version of WooCommerce.

    I’ve heard there are actually a number of sites that have tried to do it.

    The amazing thing is, I’m deeply involved in the WooCommerce community but have never heard the name of any of them (except from WooThemes employees when I asking if they were going to do it).

    The fact that Automattic partnered only with hosted solutions shows there is a good opportunity for a hosted WooCommerce (and EDD, Exchange or WP e-Commerce for that matter).

    However, I do suspect it’s not quite the opportunity most people think it is. Much of WooCommerce’s appeal and the reason for its popularity stems from the freedom to do anything with it. The majority of sites at the moment are different to every other site – different theme, different extensions, usually custom code mixed in.

    That freedom doesn’t exist with a hosted service.

    Back to the news at hand, my suspicion is that Automattic are using this to test the demand for eCommerce on WordPress.com. If it proves popular enough, then they may invest in offering integrated plugins and then WordPress.com becomes “the hosted WooCommerce”. Afterall, the single greatest selling point of WooCommerce (and every other eCommerce plugin) is the integrated experience.

    • See my comment on Chris Lema’s post in response to yours. You’ll never see Automattic roll out WooCommerce or EDD as options on WordPress.com. They’re philosophy is SaaS is the way to go and that is why ecommerce has been implemented the way it has. What you will see is additional SaaS partners added. I have more details in my other comment as to why this is. But anyone who knows Automattic’s philosophy on this subject, as well as their extremely strict rules as to data architecture for anything offered on WordPress.com, you’d know that SaaS is the only way to implement things to get around these policies and it’s why they have an entire developer API specifically for creating WordPress.com “apps” which are SaaS services integrated via API.

  3. As with all ecommerce projects God ( or if you prefer – the devil) is in the details. Having worked with a number of ecommerce vendors for many years – every project is different and except for simple scenarios where payment gateway and shipping is straightforward it is never easy.

    A few years ago I built a mine EC site for a client who was using the wp.com for his main site. We just got the same domain in another mode and linked the 2 sites. The ec site runs Woocommerce and I try not to look at it really.

    It is more simple than say WP ECommerce but it has still had some major re-writes in the past 3 years.

    Keeping a EC site up to date is a major job and not for the faint hearted. Server speed and reliability is also crucial so will be interested to see what happens.

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