Automattic Inc., the company behind WordPress, has acquired WooCommerce, a WordPress related startup that sells WordPress e-commerce tools and themes.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed but was reported by Re/Code as being “more than $30 million” in a combination of cash and stock.

Founded in Cape Town, South Africa in 2008 initially as WooThemes, the company started out as a commercial seller of WordPress themes, one of the earlier startups operating in the “premium WordPress theme” space.

In 2010, it introduced WooCommerce, which is claimed by the company to be the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. The plugin is available for free and offers a variety of features that are said to perfectly integrate into a self-hosted WordPress website.

The WooCommerce plugin does have some impressive stats, with the company claiming 7.5 million downloads and over one million active installs.

“In the past few years, WooCommerce really distinguished itself in its field” Automattic Founder and Chief Executive Officer Matt Mullenweg said on his personal blog. “Just like WordPress as a whole, it developed a robust community around its software and its products meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.”

“WordPress currently powers about 23% of the web… as we work our way toward 51%, WooCommerce joining Automattic is a big step opening WordPress up to an entirely new audience.”

WooCommerce and WooTheme users were assured separately that their “licenses and experience will continue as before and there is no reason to worry.”

“In the coming weeks and months you can expect business as usual from WooThemes, now with the added power of Automattic behind everything we do” the post added.

Smart buy

The deal is a great buy from Automattic and Matt Mullenweg as the company approaches its tenth birthday.

WooCommerce is a great fit and as Mullenweg notes it may well help bring WordPress to a new, and larger audience.

Long-term observers of WordPress (including the author of this post) will always chuckle at Mullenweg’s conversion to capitalism given his once near totalitarian communist stance against companies who wanted to make money as part of the WordPress ecosystem in Automattic’s early days.

While he’s still a GNU General Public license purist to the point that the license must be branded on his body somewhere (possibly multiple times,) credit where due: his conversion to and later support of those working in and around the core WordPress code has served both WordPress, and Automattic itself, extremely well.