WooCommerce.com Marketplace

Co-led the React rebuild of the WooCommerce.com Marketplace, which is still the live marketplace today.

The WooCommerce Marketplace inside a store's WordPress dashboard: curated extensions shown as cards with icons, prices and star ratings.

The problem

The WooCommerce.com Marketplace is where store owners find and buy extensions and themes for WooCommerce. It was built on an older inflexible WordPress Admin system and needed rebuilding to provide more control, better features and to dog-food more modern WordPress and WooCommerce Admin features.

Constraints

  • A team of 5 people.
  • WooCommerce.com Marketplace extensions had to continue to be features in the new system. These were fed directly by WooCommerce.com APIs and needed to stay perfomant on any WordPress site regardless of hosting.
  • The in-app marketplace is part of a plugin installed on WordPress/WooCommerce sites. These sites had to continue to perform in all hosting situations out of our control.
  • Privacy in a self-hosted WordPress site had to be respected, while still collecting useful and privacy-respecting data.
  • The marketplace listings and pinned sponsored listing were powered by Algolia. The same pinning and ordering rules needed to continue to work.

What I built

I co-led the React rebuild of the Marketplace and architected two parts of it:

  • Modular product-card components, so the same building blocks could be reused across the Marketplace.
  • Interaction tracking, so the team could see how people actually used it.
  • WooCommerce.com user account linking and controls were integrated for convenience.

It’s still the live Marketplace today.

WooCommerce.com Marketplace front endStore owners browse the Marketplace, a React front end built from modular product-card components. Interaction tracking records how people use it. Product data comes from WooCommerce.com, which runs on WordPress and PHP.product dataStore ownersbrowsing extensionsProduct cardsmodular componentsMarketplaceReact + TypeScriptInteraction trackingusage eventsWooCommerce.comWordPress + PHP
Store owners browse the Marketplace, a React front end built from modular product-card components. Interaction tracking records how people use it. Product data comes from WooCommerce.com, which runs on WordPress and PHP.
  • An AI proxy integration used across WooCommerce.com, so AI features shipped one consistent way, with prompt-level control, usage tracking and cost reporting.
  • A CLI tool that removed 40%+ of plugin-based redirects by moving them to NGINX.

Stack

React and TypeScript for the Marketplace front end, PHP and WordPress behind it, NGINX for redirects, and Algolia.

Results

  • The rebuilt Marketplace is still the live Marketplace in WooCommerce installs.
  • 40%+ of plugin-based redirects moved out of PHP and into NGINX (WordPress VIP).

What I’d do differently

  • This project required a lot of exploratory work and research spikes to figure out the best path forward. Due to time constraints we opted to run these alongside the rest of the work. I would likely advocate for more up front research time.