WooCommerce in 2024 and beyond: Roadmap update

Welcome to a special edition post, brought to you by Beau Lebens, Head of Engineering for Woo.

Last week on our Developer Blog, I shared an updated roadmap and vision for the future of WooCommerce, and I wanted to share it here, too. That post gets a bit technical, so I thought I’d offer a quick synopsis for what it means for WooCommerce merchants. 

We’re excited to bring you this next phase of WooCommerce. It aligns with our open source roots, bringing in more features and extensibility to the core WooCommerce product, and it focuses on block-based page building and site customization to provide a better user experience.

If you have questions, please drop them in the comments and our team will get back to you. Here’s what I think is most relevant for store owners and employees.

Block-based page building is the future of WordPress and WooCommerce, and we’re continuing to lean into it. Blocks make it simple for non-coders to build and edit pages, meaning you’ll control your own destiny when it comes to managing content, layout, and merchandising on your site. 

Unlike many cloud-based ecommerce platforms, WooCommerce even lets you intuitively edit your shopping cart and checkout pages using Cart and Checkout blocks. 

We’re working on even more improvements to blocks that will make it simpler to manage your site, and we’re also asking developers to ensure that whatever they work on is compatible with blocks. 

We’ve recently introduced a number of initiatives and features to help improve the way you use WooCommerce, from starting up a new store, to day-to-day management, to measuring your success. 

• Streamlined onboarding: We’ve significantly reduced the number of steps it takes to start a store on WooCommerce. If you’re looking to create a new store, you’ll be able to do it quickly and more efficiently. 
• Improved store customization: We’re continuing to better integrate WordPress’s native site customization tools to make it easier than ever to adapt your store to fit your brand, edit page layouts, and more. While this is an ongoing process, you can check out our new built-in store designer by going to WooCommerce > Home and clicking the “Start customizing” button.
• Better product management: Our new product editor is faster and more intuitive, meaning it’ll take you fewer clicks and less time to add and edit products.  
• Revamped analytics: We’re rethinking how to help you understand what’s happening in your store and how to make your business more successful. We’re starting with improvements to the basic analytics functions available in WooCommerce. Longer term, we’re looking at how to build a more robust solution.

We’re also hard at work making WooCommerce better for shoppers. These improvements are intended to help you increase your conversion by offering the best possible experience to your site visitors. 

• More accessible stores: We’re investing in improving WooCommerce’s storefront accessibility, ensuring your store is usable by as many people as possible.
• An unbeatable checkout: We’re continuing to evolve our block-based checkout to reduce cart abandonment, boost mobile conversion, and simplify the overall experience. We’ve especially emphasized improving performance, and so far the new checkout has a conversion rate that’s a few points above the classic one. We’re hoping to move that even higher with upcoming features and enhancements.
• Better checkout options: We’ve combined and simplified local pickup options, improved the shopper account creation options, and created an integration allowing for custom checkout fields for more complex needs.
• Improved order confirmation: The order confirmation screen now has an improved design for displaying the shipping details and order summary, as well as an option for shoppers to create an account after paying for an order. 

We’re excited to bring this next phase of WooCommerce to you and your shoppers. Please check out the full post on the developer blog for details, and stay tuned for more updates in the coming months. 

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Beau Lebens