Woo Year In Review 2016 -

Hello, Howdy, G'Day, etc,

I'm Todd Wilkens, the new Director of . It's been an amazing year for us here at Woo and I'd like to to talk about some of my thoughts and facts about our team as well as the wonderful community you're an integral part of. Before any other thing, I want to be sure to say a big thank you.

To every user, customer as well as Open Source community contributor out that there is a place for and thanks to you. Thanks to you, the top-rated eCommerce platform for WordPress and consequently, the most widely used eCommerce platform on the planet is in existence. Thank you!

The year's end is near, and it's a time for reflecting. Read on for thoughts on what's happened in the past What worked, and what did not, as well as what we're looking forward to in 2017.

What's the difference between

million of people have benefited of the flexibility and power of to start, grow and sustain their online business. We've been able to do this in a team, always better thanks to our open source roots.

To be honest, we felt a bit overwhelmed by our own growth and the diverse customers we served this last year. It created challenges having to satisfy everyone with all we did in terms of the marketing and product lines as well as assistance. We also probably spent an excessive amount of time and attention on our competitors and that kept us away from our customers and the core of what is really what we excel at.

was never meant to be a platform to create very basic websites, with just a hint of store functionality, our focus has always been putting the power, flexibility and the freedom to choose into the hands of anyone who has an idea of how to run the creation of an online company.

We believe that WordPress as well as the network of wonderful people that build it is the most ideal platform to help entrepreneurs succeed by providing an open source platform to making your ideas a realisation. In addition, there are all the themes, extensions and services (paid as well as premium) that make come alive.

   WordCamp Tokyo 2016, woo! ? ??? : @shohei_tanaka

A picture posted by (@) on     Sep 16th, 2016 at 9:23pm PDT

2016 has been the most profitable year we have had so far in terms of expansion of our customer base as well as the evolution of our platform. The major highlights of the year are:

• There were two releases to Core: 2.5 " Dashing Dolphin" and 2.6 " Zipping Zebra" (plus 2.7 beta which just arrived!)
• The store has been upgraded with a number of fundamental improvements for customers, including a brand new tax rates interface and shipping zones. It also has a tabbed "My Account" screen, the cart's AJAX powered experience and many other performance enhancements.
• To our developers, we have introduced CLI and a brand new session database table, as well as moved to the API (WC-API) in order to be powered by WP-API's infrastructure.
• We introduced the Product Bundles 5.0 with improved pricing, shipping and stock reporting, among other things.
• We introduced Subscriptions 2.1 with improvements in reports, recovery/retry of payment along with new email subscriptions as well as other features.
• Auto-renewals make it simpler to ensure that .com subscriptions active (for support and upgrades)
• And the Woo team has grown to 90 members and half of them being in support for users.

We are passionate about small businesses, and Open Source

Small to medium-sized businesses drive the global economy. They are more effective in lifting people out of poverty stabilizing societies and provide a better life for the children of an individual more than any one single government or aid group ever.

We are committed to empowering small businesses to start, grow, and flourish. The business model gives individuals hope and freedom, and we want to help them achieve entrepreneurs to achieve this.

The determination to be free, flexible and flexibility has meant that we're in love with Open Source. That's also the reason why our partnership with Automattic has been so successful, as the goals and values of our teams are perfectly aligned.

"Our primary aim is to make publishing more accessible and commerce so that anyone with a story to tell or a business to launch can be able to create it regardless of income, gender, politics, language or even where they are in the world. We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is freely available under the GPL." Automattic Year in Review 2016

Learn more about what Automattic overall has been doing.

We're excited about in 2017

This is a glimpse of some of the things we're working on already for 2017:

• Our shipping service, which we have just launched, is only the first of a variety of cloud-based, SaaS services to be offered in the future.
• A new, modern UI based on Calypso that is available for all sites through Jetpack.
• Working with WordPress.com for a hosting and managed version of .
• Our third WooConf is pegged for Q3, which will be focused on serving the needs of store builders and developers.
• Watch out for 2.7, the new Shipping service, and a new developer experience all being announced in the first quarter of.

And finally, some methods we'll use to improve our methods in the coming year

• More focus on our user experience throughout all we do from .com to our core platform to the APIs and developers experience.
• We are leveraging our long-standing strength in Theming to provide an easier and faster ramp-up to a simple, stunning online storefront.
• Making the extension marketplace simpler and more effective to access.
• Chatting with more people! The best you know.

Thoughts for closing

I'm thrilled to join the the board with . This team is amazing and we're determined to support online business people of all kinds. Thank you for joining our community and giving us the chance to assist you this year and, we hope, for many years in the future.