WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform implemented as a plugin for WordPress. It adds product catalogs, carts, checkout, orders, customer accounts, taxes, shipping, payment integrations, and administrative commerce workflows to a WordPress site. Its core is extended through WordPress plugins, themes, hooks, REST APIs, and a large marketplace of extensions. It is commonly used for stores that need WordPress's content-management capabilities alongside commerce, from small catalogs to more customized storefronts.

WooCommerce began as a free, open-source WordPress ecommerce plugin created by WooThemes and monetized through commercial extensions and themes and later became part of Automattic after Automattic acquired WooThemes. Its development has followed the WordPress ecosystem closely: early usage centered on classic PHP templates, shortcodes, and WordPress administration screens, while later work added API-oriented capabilities, more structured internal data handling, block-based storefront and checkout experiences, and newer administrative interfaces. The project remains actively maintained as open-source software, with commercial extensions and hosted services also available around it.

Migration planning must account for both WooCommerce core data and the surrounding WordPress installation. Products, variations, attributes, categories, customers, orders, coupons, reviews, media, tax settings, shipping zones, and payment configuration may be stored across WordPress posts, metadata, taxonomy tables, dedicated WooCommerce tables, and extension-specific tables. The exact schema and data paths vary with store age, enabled features, and whether newer order-storage mechanisms have been adopted. Extensions often introduce their own order metadata, custom product fields, subscriptions, bookings, memberships, licenses, fulfillment records, or accounting integrations, making a core-only export incomplete. Custom themes and plugins may also depend on WooCommerce hooks, template overrides, shortcodes, custom endpoints, and assumptions about session or cart behavior. When migrating into WooCommerce, data mapping is usually needed for product variants, inventory rules, customer passwords, historical orders, tax treatment, shipping methods, and payment-token handling. When migrating away, preserving order history, downloadable-product entitlements, subscription schedules, customer account access, redirects, SEO metadata, and integrations can be harder than moving the catalog itself. Payment credentials generally cannot be transferred directly and commonly require customers to reauthorize payment methods. A discovery phase should inventory plugins, custom code, template overrides, APIs, background jobs, webhooks, analytics, and external systems before selecting an import/export path. Testing should include representative historic orders, refunds, discounts, taxes, shipping, variable products, and any recurring or entitlement-based products.