Last week, Automattic announced that it acquired Prospress to jointly develop WooCommerce Subscriptions, an ecommerce recurring payment solution, to make it a more unified subscriptions experience. If you havent heard of Automattic, you have likely heard of some of their products and services including WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Akismet, Longreads, Simplenote. Jetpack and Gravatar. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Prospress founder Brent Shepherd will lead the transition.
In a WooCommerce blog post, Paul Maiorana said that existing users wont see any changes. The companies are initially focusing on onboarding and integration, followed by collaboration for whats next. Shepherd shared a bit of his vision.
I was never building Prospress with a view to acquisition, but the more we began talking about what a future with Automattic would look like, the more it made sense and the more excitement around unique opportunities that could only come from this move took hold of my imagination, said Shepherd.
He outlined what the future will look like for WooCommerce Subscriptions specifically:
In the immediate term, little will change. The same team will be developing and supporting the same codebase.
In the longer term, Im excited to explore how subscriptions can be integrated with unique resources at Automattic to create world-class products only possible with us all working on the same team.
In more specific terms, that could mean looking at closer relationships with how payments are handled, or integrations with other platforms such as WordPress.com. There are also a couple of things to solve both in WooCommerce and subscriptions to help them scale better. Interestingly, these challenges are almost identical for the two codebases. By working more closely to solve them than we ever could apart, I hope we can do a better job of implementing solutions and in a shorter time frame.
Im quietly confident we can achieve every MBAs dream of some synergy between subscriptions and existing Automattic resources to deliver more value to everyone., Shepherd said.
WooCommerce Subscriptions work hand-in-hand with WordPress.com sites. The premium WooCommerce extension allows business owners to sell products and services with a recurring payment structure. The extension works with different payment gateways with various features including auto renewal, suspend/cancel/reactivate, modify total and/or payment date and change the payment date.
You can learn more about WooCommerce Subscriptions in this brief video:
WooCommerce Subscriptions – Sell recurring products & services beautifully
The documentation for this tool is pretty impressive, complete with videos, step-by-step instructions, a developers guide, and a store managers guide to explain how to sell subscription products and services.
Insider Take:
This is a great example of two companies working together to make their subscription technology better. Individually, the companies offer great tools for business owners, but the synergy of the combined companies makes for exciting possibilities! Based on the comments on the blog post, it seems their users agree.