Today we are announcing that we are ceasing all development and maintenance of our WP eCommerce plugins. This announcement coincides with the release of a new version of each plugin today. The new version is a compatibility upgrade with:
* WP eCommerce version 3.12.2
* WordPress version 4.8.0
* PHP 7.0
It is the final version that we will release. Going forward where there was a Premium and Free version we have upgraded the Free version to the fully feature Pro version and the source code is full open source and available on the wordpress.org repo.
We have done this for these reasons:
* So the source code is available on a public repo
* So that all users have access to a public support forum
* So that another developer can easily take over the development and maintenance of the plugin.
History of Development
In 2012 we publicly released the WP eCommerce plugins that we had developed for using with our website clients. At that time WP eCommerce was our WordPress ecommerce plugin of choice as it was the best ecommerce available and had upwards of 1 million users at that time.
The a Free Lite version of most plugins was released on wordpress.org with a Premium upgrade available for purchase from a3rev.com. Below is a table with the history of the 10 WP eCommerce plugins we built – 6 of those had Free Lite versions.
| Premium Version | Release Date | Free Light Version |
| WP eCommerce Product Reviews | 1st August 2011 | No |
| WP eCommerce Wholesale Pricing, Views, Access | 7th November 2011 | No |
| WP eCommerce Compare Products | 28th February 2012 | FREE VERSION |
| WP eCommerce Dynamic Gallery | 18th July 2012 | FREE VERSION |
| WP eCommerce Grid View | 23rd July 2012 | FREE VERSION |
| WP eCommerce Predictive Search | 30th July 2012 | FREE VERSION |
| WP eCommerce Catalog Visibility and Email Inquiry | 23rd August 2012 | FREE VERSION |
| WP eCommerce Rewards Points | 28th November 2012 | No |
| WP eCommerce Widget Product Slideshow | 8th May 2013 | No |
| WP eCommerce Product Quick View | 5th August 2013 | FREE VERSION |
WooCommerce
We first got involved with the WooCommerce plugin just a few months after its first release in mid 2012. WooCommerce has grown since its release 5 years ago from zero users to over 3 million users today. In that same period of time WP eCommerce has lost its way and today has just 40,000 active installs with only 21% of those using the current version 3.12.
In effect we stopped developing new features to all of our WP eCommerce plugins in early 2014 and have since that time done maintenance only upgrades.
We do not use WP eCommerce in our client development work and have not done so since Early 2013.
Whats Next
As of June 2017 all the a3rev WP eCommerce plugins are compatible with the latest version of WP eCommerce (v 3.12.2), WordPress (v 4.8.0) and PHP 7.0
We would like to thanks all of our clients who have used one or more of our WP e-Commerce plugins. Time and technology wait for no one. WooCommerce is today the most popular ecommerce platform in the world (not just WordPress but all platforms). We are going with the WooCommerce superior technology and are continuing to develop our existing stable of WooCommerce and WordPress plugins whilst adding new ones.
We recommend that the few WP eCommerce plugin clients that still have an active WP eCommerce store upgrade to WooCommerce for now and the future. After this upgrade your a3rev WP eCommerce plugin will work without issue for a time, but eventually it will break down as new versions of WordPress and WP eCommerce are released.
If you want to stay with WP eCommerce then at some stage in the future you will need to find a maintained plugin that will replace the a3rev WP eCommerce plugin that you are using.
We have made this decision because it is obvious that WP eCommerce will never recapture the market from Woocommerce. Ourselves and 569 other developers are now contributing to the Woocommerce plugin development whilst just 58 developers are contributing to the WP eCommerce development. That is 10 times the number of contributors and the code quality of WooCommerce is now just streets ahead of WP eCommerce.