The State of WooCommerce, 2021-2026

Based on 1,828,720 WooCommerce storefronts tracked continuously from January 2021, of which 592,039 were still trading in April 2026.

Executive summary

Two thirds of WooCommerce storefronts did not survive five years. Of 1,828,720 stores tracked in January 2021, 592,039 were still trading by April 2026 - a survival rate of 32.4%, meaning 1,236,681 storefronts stopped trading.

Where a store was based mattered more than how big it was. Greek, Hungarian and Polish merchants survived at 41-48%. American merchants survived at 30.6%. That gap is not a size effect: it holds inside every tenth of the size distribution, and the American cohort was better ranked at the start than the Hungarian or Polish one.

Among the survivors, the business got bigger. Median catalogue went from 29 to 35 products and median estimated annual sales from $2.47M to $3.52M - +43% - between 2023 and 2026.

WooCommerce is the larger platform. Our index tracks 4.69M live WooCommerce storefronts against 4.16M Shopify. It is also the less examined one, which is most of why this report exists.

Survival, 2021 to 2026

A store counts as alive at a date if it appears in any snapshot at or after it. The cohort is fixed at January 2021 and never added to, so the curve cannot be flattered by new stores entering the index.

Attrition is steady rather than cliff-edged: roughly a fifth of the surviving population goes each year, with no single year standing out.

Where the store was based

Survival for markets with at least 10,000 stores in the 2021 cohort.

The United States is the largest cohort by a factor of five and the weakest of the large Western markets - below Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. It is not the lowest overall; India, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey are lower.

This is not a size effect, and we checked before publishing it. Larger stores do survive better, so a market weighted toward small stores would look worse for that reason alone. The American cohort is not weighted that way - its mean size decile is 5.0, against 6.7 for Hungary and 6.5 for Poland, so if anything composition should flatter it. Comparing markets within each tenth of the size distribution, the ordering is unchanged at every level:

The largest American stores survived at 41.0% - close to the rate for mid-sized Greek and Hungarian ones.

We are not able to say from this data why. Market maturity, competitive density, and how much of each market's long tail is hobby storefronts are all plausible and none is measured here.

Size at the start

Bigger stores survived better, but less sharply than the geography split. Stores in the top tenth of the 2021 index by rank survived at 39.7%; those in the bottom tenth at 22.0%.

The middle of that distribution is not clean - the deciles do not fall monotonically - so we report the ends rather than draw a ten-step curve the data does not support. The index rank is computed across all platforms, so WooCommerce deciles interleave with other platforms' stores, which we think explains some of the noise.

What the survivors did

Measured on the surviving cohort only, from 2023 - see the method note on why this series cannot start in 2021.

The stores that lasted grew. That is a statement about survivors, not about the platform: the same three years removed a third of the cohort.

What this report does not say

Nothing about pricing. The WooCommerce records in our index carry no price data at all - the field is empty for every store, in every snapshot. The equivalent Shopify report leads on a matched-cohort price finding; there is no honest way to produce one here, so we do not.

Nothing about themes, plugins or page builders. The obvious question - do stores on Astra outlast stores on Divi? - is unanswerable with this data, and it is worth being precise about why. We know the theme of stores that exist today. We do not know the theme of the 1.24M stores that stopped trading. Any league table built that way would rank builders by how well we can still see their customers.

Iran is excluded. Its 2021 cohort of 34,417 stores shows 6.5% survival, three times worse than any other market, from a cohort with the best size composition in the dataset. A near-total collapse of a well-ranked cohort is not a commercial finding; the likeliest explanation is loss of access to Western hosting, CDNs and payment infrastructure across 2021-22. We exclude it rather than report it as merchant behaviour.

Method and limitations →

Companion report: The State of DTC Commerce, 2020-2026 covers 688,243 Shopify storefronts over six years, including the matched-cohort pricing analysis this report cannot provide.