WooCommerce has unveiled its roadmap for the future, focusing on fostering two-way communication with the developer ecosystem to improve the experiences of developers, merchants, and customers.
WooCommerce spotlighted seven key areas for innovation and identified six specific enhancement areas aimed at refining the developer and merchant experiences.
1. Stronger WooCommerce and Developer Communication
WooCommerce recently launched a newsletter aimed at keeping developers informed with the latest updates, offering previews of new features, tutorials, and other valuable insights.
The newsletter offers three main benefits:
- Exclusive Insights: Access behind-the-scenes knowledge and tips to enhance your development skills.
- Latest Content: Stay engaged with new blog posts and documentation, showcasing the latest releases, resources, advisories, and more.
- Feature Updates and Announcements: Keep your projects up-to-date with the latest changes in WooCommerce.
2. Upgrading the WooCommerce Blog and Documentation
WooCommerce plans to improve its official blog as a reliable resource for developers. Additionally, they are committed to enhancing their documentation with more guides, step-by-step tutorials, best practices, and an improved navigation system to make finding information easier.
The roadmap explains:
“Our goal is to fill crucial knowledge gaps in areas such as extensibility, block development, and theme customization, empowering developers to start and thrive on our platform.”
One developer’s reaction on X (formerly Twitter) highlighted the need for improved documentation:
“Coincidentally, I saw this immediately after reading about my developers’ frustrations with the documentation for the new product editor in our internal discussions – it’s promising to see that improving this is on the roadmap.”
3. Improvements to REST API V3
Top priority is given to improving REST API v3, focusing on backward compatibility, reducing the backlog of issues and new feature requests, and improving API performance.
Additionally, they will focus on:
“…upgrading API documentation, error handling, and debugging capabilities.”
4. Improve Feedback Loop on Extensibility
Enhancing the feedback loop between WooCommerce and developers is key to creating a superior product tailored to developer and merchant needs. Extensibility, or the flexibility of WooCommerce to be extended, is a vital aspect. The roadmap aims to ensure WooCommerce remains adaptable for developers.
WooCommerce commented:
“As we introduce new features, we are creating space for collaboration with our developer community to refine these features, incorporate feedback, and gradually move toward full adoption.”
5. WooCommerce is Committed to a Block-Based Future
As part of its vision to make WooCommerce more user-friendly for non-coders, they committed to a 100% block-based development model. This also aims to create a more adaptable shopping platform. WooCommerce encourages moving away from older solutions like shortcodes and legacy APIs.
The statement read:
“If your solutions still rely on shortcodes or other legacy APIs, it’s time to embrace blocks and modernize your approach.”
Steps taken to assist in this transition include:
- Adding more resources to the WooCommerce Developer Documentation
- Increasing communication frequency on the WooCommerce blog
- Introducing new feature tutorials
- Focusing on creating video tutorials
6. Streamlined Onboarding
WooCommerce aims to further simplify the store setup process, improving the workflow for developers setting up stores for merchants. Their efforts have led to a roughly 60% increase in completion rates.
7. Modern Store Customization
WooCommerce is exploring how to integrate WordPress customization options and create commerce-optimized themes specifically for WooCommerce.
They write:
“While ensuring compatibility with all block-based themes in the WordPress ecosystem, we’re also exploring providing our own fully block-based, commerce-optimized theme out of the box.”
Six Specific Areas for Future Improvements
- Flexible product management
- Optimized order management and fulfillment
- Revamped merchant analytics
- Accessible stores
- Evolving checkout experience
- Better integration of order confirmation with summary and shipping information
WooCommerce Roadmap Leans on Community
The roadmap underscores WooCommerce’s commitment to its user community, focusing on building a stronger product based on developer feedback. By enhancing documentation and creating more tutorials, WooCommerce aims to support the WordPress developer community and maintain its position as the leading ecommerce platform.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
