Woo Year In Review 2016 -

Hello, Howdy, G'Day, etc,

Hello, I'm Todd Wilkens, the new Director of . It's been a wonderful year here with Woo and I'd like to share some of my thoughts and observations regarding our team, along with the fantastic community that you're a member of. Prior to anything else we'd like to be sure to send a massive thank you.

For every customer, user and Open Source community contributor out who has a spot for your thanks and appreciation. Thanks to you, the best-rated eCommerce platform available for WordPress as well as the most used eCommerce platform is in existence. We are grateful!

The year's end is near, and it's a moment to reflect. Explore the following article for ideas on what's transpired in the past. How things went, and what didn't, as well as what we're looking forward to in 2017.

What's the difference between

Million of users have taken advantage from the power and flexibility of to start, grow and sustain their online business. We've been able to do this with a team and constantly improving our service thanks to our open source heritage.

We admit that we're a bit over-whelmed by the size of our company and the diverse clients we serviced this year. It created challenges having to please everyone with everything we offered in the marketing and product lines as well as support. Also, we probably spent an excessive amount of attention and time at our competitors, which prevented us from interacting with our customers and the core of what is really our strength.

Was never intended to be a tool to create very basic websites, with just a hint of functionality for stores, but our primary goal was always putting the potential, flexibility and freedom to choose to anybody with an idea of how to run the creation of an online business.

We think that WordPress as well as the community of amazing users that it has built is the best platform to help entrepreneurs succeed by providing an open-source platform for making your ideas a realisation. In addition, there are all the themes, extensions and services (paid in addition to premium) which make your ideas come to life.

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

The photo was posted on Twitter by (@) on Sep 16th in 2016 at 9:23 PM PDT.

This year was by far the best year of profit we have ever had with regards to the expansion of our customer base as well as the evolution of the platform. Highlights of the year are:

• There were two releases to Core: 2.5 " Dashing Dolphin" and 2.6 " Zipping Zebra" (plus 2.7 beta that was just released!)
• The store has been upgraded by a variety of major improvements for customers, including the introduction of a new tax rates interface as well as shipping zones. The store also features an interactive "My account" screen as well as the cart's AJAX user experience, and a host of other performance enhancements.
• Our developers are pleased to announce that we've introduced CLI along with a completely fresh session database table as well as moved into our API (WC-API) for the purpose of being able to use WPAPI's infrastructure.
• We introduced the Bundles 5.0 Product Bundles 5.0 with improved pricing, shipping and stock reportage, to name a few.
• We have introduced the Subscriptions 2.1 with improvements in the reports, recovery/retrying of payments as well as new subscription emails and other functions.
• Auto-renewals make it simpler to make sure that .com subscriptions are active (for support and upgrades)
• The Woo team has grown to 90 employees, with 50% of them being helping users.

We are passionate about small-scale businesses and Open Source

Small - to mid-sized enterprises are the mainstay of the global economy. They're better at getting people out of society's poverty and providing an improved life to the children of a person far more than any other single government or aid group ever.

We're dedicated to empowering small enterprises to establish to grow, expand, and thrive. This model of business gives people hope and freedom, and we'd like to assist them achieve entrepreneurs to achieve this.

Our desire to be completely free, flexible and flexibility has resulted in us falling completely in love of Open Source. It's the same reason our collaboration with Automattic has been so successful, as the goals and core values of our teams perfectly match.

"Our main goal is to make publishing more accessible as well as commerce, so that anybody with a story or a vision to tell or business idea that needs to be launched can be able to create whatever they want, regardless of gender, politics, language or even where they live in the world. We strongly believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our content is accessible under GPL. GPL." Automattic Year in Review 2016

Discover more about what Automattic overall has been doing.

This year, we're super excited for 2017.

This is a peek at some of the projects we're currently working on for 2017:

• The shipping service we offer, which has just been launched is the first in several cloud-based SaaS services to be offered in the future.
• The new and modern UI based on Calypso which is accessible for all websites via Jetpack.
• We are working in conjunction with WordPress.com for hosting and controlled version of .
• Our 3rd WooConf is pegged for the third quarter of 2013, which is geared towards serving the needs of store builders as well as developers.
• Be on the lookout for HTML0 2.7, the new Shipping service and updated developer experience are being revealed in the initial quarter of.

Then, there are some techniques we'll use to improve our practices over the course of the year

• More focus on our users experience across everything that we do, starting with .com through our main platform through APIs and the developer experience.
• Our long-standing expertise in Theming to offer a simpler and faster ramp-up to a simple, stunning online storefront.
• Facilitating the marketplace for extensions and faster to get access.
• Chatting with more people! One of the most popular people you've met.

Ideas for closing

I'm happy to be on board of directors alongside . This team is amazing and we're committed to supporting online business people of all kinds. We thank you for being part of our community and giving us the opportunity to help you in the coming year, and we hope, for many years to come.

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