The Shopify App Founder’s Guide to Expanding into WordPress and WooCommerce
Thinking of turning your Shopify app into a WordPress plugin? This guide covers what WordPress and WooCommerce are, how open source licensing works, where to sell, and what to expect from the market.
As a WordPress and WooCommerce plugin company founder, I’ve recently expanded my business – Barn2 – into selling Shopify apps. At Shopify’s DotDev conference in Toronto this year, and at the Brightwork event that followed it, several app founders told me they’re interested in expanding into WordPress and WooCommerce plugins, and asked for my advice on how to get started. After living and breathing WordPress for the past 16 years, I was surprised that most of them had absolutely no understanding of what WordPress is, how it relates to WooCommerce, or what self-hosted software means for a product business.
That’s no criticism of the founders I spoke to. The Shopify world is self-contained, and you can build a successful app company without ever needing to look outside it. However, if you’re going to sell to WordPress users then you need to understand how differently things work over here.
So I decided to write this guide. Everything in it is based on a question that a real Shopify app founder asked me in Toronto.
What’s the difference between WordPress and WooCommerce?
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers the overall website. It handles the pages, the blog, the menus, etc.
You may be surprised to learn that WordPress is far more widely used than Shopify. WordPress powers over 40% of all websites, while Shopify is on under 5%. Here’s a summary of the latest stats from BuiltWith:
- WordPress is used on 40,384,108 websites
- Shopify is used on 7,284,464 websites
I keep an updated summary of the numbers in Barn2’s WordPress market share report.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an ecommerce plugin that you add to a WordPress site. It turns the site into an online store, with products, a cart and a checkout. You can’t use WooCommerce without WordPress.
WooCommerce was more widely used than Shopify for most of ecommerce history. By many metrics, Shopify has now taken over – particularly among high-traffic, high-volume stores. BuiltWith claims that Shopify is the market leader, but Store Leads says that more sites use WooCommerce. (There’s a full breakdown in Barn2’s WooCommerce statistics report).
Either way, if you’re looking to expand beyond Shopify then WooCommerce is the next biggest player by far.
WooCommerce is owned by Automattic, which was founded by WordPress’s co-creator and is the biggest commercial company in the WordPress world. Both WordPress and WooCommerce are free to use. (If you’re wondering how that’s possible, Automattic makes its money in other ways, including taking a cut of payment processing fees from stores using its official payment gateways, selling its own premium plugins, revenue share from plugins sold in the WooCommerce Marketplace, and its own hosting companies including WordPress.com.)
Should you build a WordPress plugin or a WooCommerce extension?
Several of the app founders I met told me they were considering expanding into WooCommerce, but when I asked what their app was, it turned out not to be specific to ecommerce at all.
Understanding the difference between WordPress and WooCommerce is important because it affects whether you build a plugin for WooCommerce specifically, or for WordPress more widely.
- If your idea is specific to ecommerce, for example something that affects pricing or shipping, then you should build a WooCommerce extension. It will only ever run on WooCommerce stores.
- However, if it offers broader features like SEO or fancy menus, then you can build it as a WordPress plugin that works on any type of website including WooCommerce. That opens it up to a much wider market than ecommerce alone.
A WordPress plugin and a WooCommerce plugin are the same thing, from a technical perspective. This is more an issue of positioning, naming, and distribution (which I’ll get to in a minute).
Get the terminology right
One thing I didn’t expect about expanding from WordPress to Shopify was that you almost have to learn a new language when speaking about the platform. This will also apply to you when you do the journey in reverse. WordPress and WooCommerce have their own vocabulary, and it maps surprisingly neatly onto the Shopify concepts you already know:
| Shopify term | WordPress/WooCommerce term |
|---|---|
| Apps | Plugins (or sometimes Extensions) |
| Collections | Categories |
| Variants | Variations |
| Metafields | Attributes |
This matters more than it sounds. When you’re researching gaps in the market, features, pain points or competitors, you need to search using the words that WordPress people use. If you research “product variants” then you’ll miss most of what WooCommerce store owners are saying, because they call them variations. I constantly have to check myself and make sure I’m using the correct terms for each platform!
It’s also worth knowing what is the difference between “WooCommerce” and “Woo”, as you’ll hear both. “WooCommerce” is the software and “Woo” is the company behind it.
Installing plugins works differently
Installing a premium WordPress plugin isn’t as slick as installing a Shopify app.
Free plugins are easy – users find them in the plugin directory within their WordPress admin, click ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate’, and they’re done.
Premium plugins are clunkier. The customer purchases the plugin, downloads a zip file (yes, seriously – Shopify people are often shocked when I tell them this), and uploads it via their WordPress admin. They then enter a license key.
After that, onboarding is entirely up to you. You decide what happens when the plugin is activated, for example whether to auto-open a setup wizard. I recommend doing that, and it’s what we do at Barn2.
The tech stack
WordPress runs on PHP, with React used for the admin interfaces and the block editor. You extend WordPress and WooCommerce through hooks and filters, which let your code change how things behave without touching anyone else’s code. There’s also a REST API for both.
The golden rule is that you must never modify the WordPress or WooCommerce files directly. Your plugin sits alongside them and interacts through the official extension points, otherwise your changes are lost when the user updates.
If PHP feels unfamiliar, don’t panic. With AI coding tools, you don’t necessarily need to learn these technologies yourself. You just need to make sure that whoever (or whatever) writes the code follows WordPress conventions, because the platform has strong opinions about security, data storage etc.
WordPress sites are self-hosted
Unlike Shopify, where every store runs on Shopify’s own infrastructure, WordPress sites are self-hosted. Each website owner chooses a hosting company to run the WordPress software for them. (There’s also a hosted version at WordPress.com, but that’s essentially just a hosting company, so let’s not get into that.)
Self-hosting has some big implications for you as a plugin developer. Your plugin has to work across a huge range of hosting environments, PHP versions and theme combinations, and customers choose when to install your updates. You should publish the minimum versions that you’re willing to support. (At Barn2, we tend to support the same minimum versions as WooCommerce and WooCommerce themselves – there’s no point reinventing the wheel here.)
Everything is open source under the GPL
All WordPress plugins must be released under the GPL license (or a compatible one), because WordPress itself is GPL. This applies to premium plugins too, which shocked some of the Shopify people I talked to.
In practice, the GPL means:
- Customers can legally keep using your plugin after their license expires. Renewals buy updates and support, rather than the right to keep running the code.
- Anyone can legally strip out your licensing code and redistribute your plugin.
- “Nulled” plugin marketplaces exist, selling unlicensed copies of premium plugins.
Some people believe you can’t build a successful business with open source software. That’s simply not true. Just look at the success of Automattic, and the many thriving businesses across the WordPress world (including my own company, Barn2). It just requires a different mindset – you’re selling things like the ability to activate and update your plugins, plus the support that comes with them, rather than the code itself.
One way around this is for part or all of your product to have a hosted SaaS component, which prevents people from using unlicensed versions of your software. But don’t worry about it too much. It’s a fact of life in the WordPress plugin world, and the types of people who use your software without paying generally aren’t real potential customers who would ever have paid for it anyway.
Where to sell your WordPress plugin
Shopify app sellers often assume that WordPress or WooCommerce have their own version of the App Store, and are surprised when I tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
The Shopify App Store is pretty much the only place worth selling a Shopify app. While WordPress and WooCommerce both have marketplaces (which I’ll discuss in a minute), these are in no way equivalent to the Shopify App Store and aren’t necessarily the best places to distribute your plugins. Instead, you have more choices of where to sell.
1. WordPress.org
The official plugin directory is for free plugins only. Discoverability comes from the WordPress.org website and from the ‘Add Plugins’ screen inside the admin of every WordPress site in the world, so there’s less need to do your own marketing.
The classic model here is freemium: A free core plugin on WordPress.org which generates leads for a premium version that you sell elsewhere.
You can (and should) mention your premium version on your wordpress.org listing page to encourage people to upgrade. However, my free plugins get far more conversions from upsell links on the settings pages. I like to grey out premium-only functionality so that people can see what they’re missing.
Remember to use UTM codes to track the installs from each source.
2. The WooCommerce Marketplace
WooCommerce.com has its own marketplace for extensions, and you pay 30% of all earnings to Woo. (There’s no generous $1,000,000 commission-free tier like you get with Shopify 😔) Don’t expect it to be like the App Store, because it’s nowhere near as good. The search algorithm and review system are far less developed, and it won’t find customers for you in the same way. While some customers do search for plugins on the WooCommerce marketplace, it’s not a one-stop-shop like the App Store and they’re more likely to search elsewhere such as Google, AI, or wordpress.org.
That said, it’s worth doing if you’re not confident in your own marketing abilities, or as an extra channel alongside your own website.
3. Your own website
This is how we sell plugins at Barn2. By selling on your own website, you keep everything you earn apart from your payment provider’s fees, and you own the entire customer relationship. In return, you need to be good at marketing because you have to generate your own traffic.
One thing I like about selling on my own website is that we can add as much content as you like. After all, I can create absolutely any layout I like, unlikely Shopify App Store listings which are incredibly restrictive. Check out the product page for my WooCommerce Product Options plugin as an example of how much more detail you can add.
To sell licenses from your own site, you can use an ecommerce plugin like WooCommerce with a software licensing extension such as Kestrel’s, or Easy Digital Downloads with its Software Licensing extension (which is what we use at Barn2). But for an easier option, I strongly recommend Freemius. This is excellent for newcomers because it acts as the merchant of record and handles the checkout, licensing and taxes for you. If you’re coming from the Shopify world then this is a nice bridge compared to doing everything yourself, and frees you up to focus on growing your app business rather than building an ecommerce site.
How to market a WordPress plugin
Without a single all-encompassing marketplace to find your users for you, you should take some responsibility for marketing a WordPress plugin even if you’re on one of the marketplaces.
Google organic search still works, although not as well as it did before AI Overviews were introduced. YouTube is good, whether that’s your own channel or paying influencers to review your plugin (although again, views are down compared to the pre-AI days). Agency partnerships are a good idea too, just like in the Shopify world – check out our previous episode of WP Product Talk with Shopify’s very own Prakhar Shrivastav from FoxSell 🤩
Here’s a chart showing where the sales of my Barn2 plugins have come from so far in 2026 – no marketplaces in sight!
Cross-promotions with established WordPress companies are another route worth exploring. Lots of companies like Barn2 have high-authority blogs, YouTube channels and established customer bases, and might be interested in cross-promotion if your plugin attracts a similar audience without directly competing. For example, you can promote each other’s products to your respective customers, or produce content about each other’s products.
Expect smaller stores and smaller budgets
All the evidence I’ve seen says that the average WooCommerce store is smaller than the average Shopify store. Expect to be working with smaller budgets as a result.
Pricing works differently. The industry norm is annual billing rather than monthly (it’s not compulsory, but it’s what customers expect), and prices are generally slightly lower than you charge for your Shopify apps. Look at what competitors are charging before you set yours.
Relax! You are not a slave to reviews ☺️
Certain things are more relaxed in the WordPress world. You are not a slave to reviews. I repeat: You are not a slave to reviews. Sure, they’re important, and it helps to be on places like G2 and Trustpilot as well as collecting reviews on WordPress.org or WooCommerce.com if you’re on those marketplaces. However, a bad review isn’t such a disaster, and reviews don’t make or break a WordPress product to the same extent as in Shopify. Merchants won’t hold you to ransom in the same way either, demanding that you implement their requests for fear of a 1* review.
Support expectations are lower too. People don’t expect 24/7 live chat, they don’t insist on phone calls, and onboarding doesn’t have to be so perfect.
However, I’m not actually suggesting that you become complacent. As a Shopify app seller, you’re used to providing high levels of excellence that will make you truly stand out in the WordPress world. Maintain your usual standards and you’ll have a much better chance of beating the competition and building a loyal customer base.
Resources to help you succeed
If you decide to branch out into selling WordPress plugins, there are lots of resources to help you succeed.
Subscribe to WP Product Talk on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or go through our back catalog. We discuss a wide range of topics about how to build successful WordPress products with guests who have done it themselves.
One of my WP Product Talk co-hosts, Matt Cromwell ,also helps people to succeed with their WordPress products through Roots & Fruit, where he works with product teams as a fractional growth leader.
And if you were one of the founders who asked me these questions in Toronto, thank you for the inspiration. The WordPress market is bigger and messier than the one you’re used to, but it rewards the companies who take the time to understand it. I hope this guide gives you a head start.
