WooCommerce to Go Hosted Platform?

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February 7, 2013

8 Comments

This morning many people were greeted with an interesting question posed by Adii of WooThemes:

We’re toying with the idea of building a hosted version of WooCommerce, which has all the benefits of a downloadable product (flexible, customizable templating) along with the benefits of a 1-click setup experience.

So we’d essentially take care of all the work & you’d just start with the customization and implementation of your project’s goals. Instead of once-off costs (which is the case with WooCommerce themes & extensions now), we’ll have different monthly pricing plans which will include access to various themes & extensions.

Direct from their morning newsletter the idea is fairly simple: Would you pay for having your eCommerce solution powered by WooCommerce for advanced features, themes, extensions and more?

Adii continued to pose a few more questions in their Survey to get even more feedback:

How are you hosting your WordPress + WooCommerce websites today? Who is your provider of choice?
Can you describe your existing setup & development process for setting up a new WooCommerce website?
Do you think that the service described above would make your life easier / simplify your current workflow when setting up a new WooCommerce website? Why?
How much are you willing to pay for such a monthly service?

Adii invited people to respond directly to him as well as ping WooThemes about their thoughts.

This is a pretty big move for WooThemes that has historically build an incredible financial business on WordPress Themes and moving into the paid premium plugins plus hosted provided is an interesting play. Adii and his team have experimented in the past and I imagine that this will be considered very much an experiment until it proves its worth and if the market is interested in it.

If anything, they’ve done a stellar job of providing value for their customers and if it gets off the ground I’m sure it’ll shake things up, especially for the few other hosted eCommerce solutions that are present, like Shopp:

What are your thoughts? Savvy move by WooThemes or not?

[Thanks Joshua Withers for the tip!]

There are 8 comments

February 7, 2013 #

Shane Gowland

I remember thinking a few years ago (when Woo first started building app themes and WooCommerce) that hosted solutions were the next logical step for them.

If they can do it right, in terms of making it as easy as possible to deploy, they could be sitting on a potential gold mine. Good luck, Adii!
February 8, 2013 #

Ignatius Vermaak

Thanks for the post. I find the prospect very exciting. Could you please point me to the conversation that Adii started? I’m very interested to see the response and more of what came out of that conversation.
- February 8, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  it was a newsletter update.
February 18, 2013 #

Kyle

As a developer I’d be against the idea. I make a great living off of template websites, and setting them up for clients. I do custom work as well, but there is more profit and quicker turn around with templates. One of the biggest selling features of what I do is the personalized support.

I could see this type of service definitely changing who your dominant end user would be. You’d end up having more business owners than you would developer/designers, and you’d also have to provide much more personalized support. I think a lot of theme companies stay away from this because the additional support becomes a lot more work.

I’m not sure long term if this would work out better or worse for WooThemes or not,but it would definitely have a negative effect on current WooThemes customers like myself.

I guess the reality of it, is I’ll just have to go back to the drawing board again and figure out a new business model.
- March 6, 2013 #
  
  Kanon
  
  Kyle – I would presume the option of listing “certified” WooCommerce developers on their website isn’t far off.
August 17, 2013 #

shahrukh

where we are now with hosted platform? I am waiting for it since months now! please update me.
August 31, 2013 #

manuilov

Any news on it?
January 15, 2015 #

Fahad M Rafiq

WooCommerce is definitely amongst the favorite choice of building ecommerce stores.

But optimizing WooCommerce for speed has been a pain for the community.

The best options that the Woo community started to explore is advance caching systems like Varnish, that caches the HTTP requests and improves response rates for the concurrent visitors. But setting Varnish up is very complicated and less technical users will get overwhelmed with its settings.

Luckily there are platforms like Cloudways, that have setup Varnish compatible WooCommerce on a single click that have enabled even less technical users to take advantage of fully optimized Woo stores.
Here is some more details: http://www.cloudways.com/blog/varnish-compatible-woocommerce/

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