WooCommerce, the widely used e-commerce platform , has taken a significant step in its brand evolution: WooCommerce becomes Woo. This shorter and more playful version of the company name is already used by many customers. Automattic , the company behind WordPress.com, acquired WooCommerce in 2015, along with WooThemes. Since then, the open source commerce platform has grown rapidly and now powers more than 4.4 million active websites, including 33% of the top 1 million online stores.

Comprehensive brand WooCommerce becomes Woo

The rebranding doesn’t just affect the company’s name, but extends to all areas of the Woo experience. This includes the Woo Marketplace, the WooExperts program and many other aspects. The domain was also migrated from WooCommerce.com to woo.com .

Standardization of product and service names

The WooCommerce becomes Woo also allows for standardization and streamlining of product and service names. For example, WooCommerce Payments has already been renamed WooPayments. Other product names will be gradually changed to support this simplified naming system and to provide a better connection between the core software, the extensions and the programs.

However, Callaway emphasized that Woo denotes the brand and the company, while WooCommerce remains the open source e-commerce platform for WordPress, i.e. Woo’s core product.

Woo Express: A new product with the shorter name

Woo Express is another recently launched product that already has the shorter name. It is an all-in-one Woo plan hosted on WordPress.com infrastructure. Free trials began in April 2023, and by July 2023, Woo Express already had more than 1,000 customers. It offers a new onboarding flow and store personalization experience for merchants, including a setup guide and a recommendation engine powered by an AI-driven assistant.

What does this mean for customers?

Woo’s customers will not be affected by the name change. However, merchants may see a note about this on their dashboard or in emails. No action is required from the shop owners. WooCommerce currently remains open source and has not yet had a name change. Fundamentally, the naming will not change for externally hosted customers. Woo will probably only encounter these when searching and finding plugins.