The North Commerce Way

We’re obsessed with improving ecommerce

The North Commerce team has been building with WordPress for over 10 years. We love  WordPress because of how the ecosystem has grown and nurtured the community and the WordPress project.

We want people to build, grow and thrive inside of the WordPress ecosystem.

We all are currently experiencing one of the biggest changes in WordPress history as we see new releases of Gutenberg. We need a completely new philosophy for ecommerce. North Commerce has it. With an easy to use interface, simple checkout and tools to give you full control over your store without having to know how to code, North Commerce helps you solve ecommerce.

The North Commerce Manifesto

Below you’ll find a list of things we hold dear. And the premises we reject. North Commerce is built on these foundational ideas. While there have been innovations in compartments of the ecommerce world, North Commerce has a clear point of view, a complete feature set, helping you create an online store as great as your products.

Choice & Open Source

We believe competition empowers people and companies to innovate, but instead of trying to conquer competitors we want to meet them where they are, set new standards and collectively elevate the entire ecosystem. We believe the world is big and there are plenty of users to serve. What interests us the most is giving those users a choice. We want to give users options to choose from things that may improve their experience building with WordPress and stay in the ecosystem, forever.

With our fresh take and clear point of view we have brought technical innovation with North Commerce, we hope to inspire other plugin developers in the ecosystem to take extra time creating innovative plugins that can help users in the ecosystem. As well as freely adopt some of our ideas and use them for their own products/plugins to help improve the experience everyone has inside of WordPress.

Speed — Tools to increase conversion

If North Commerce can be 4x faster than your current online store, what would that mean for your business? People’s first instinct when it comes to website speed is to try to cache or minimize other functionality to prevent things from slowing the site down. We believe there is a lot of things we — the plugin developers can do to speed things up without you having to do any extra work.

With ecommerce, every millisecond counts, so we build to save you milliseconds and earn more $$$.

WordPress core is no stranger to speed, durability and scale. Contrary to popular belief you can have all 3 of these things right out of the box with WordPress. Our goal is to create an ecommerce plugin that utilizes these same technologies in a way that enables faster speeds, reliability at scale, directly out-of-the-box

Uniform Extendibility

We want other developers to build successful add-ons and designs for North Commerce so everyone can benefit.

We believe if you are building add-ons for a specific platform there should be a set of standards that everyone follows when developing. These standards should:

1. Foster a simple developer experience so you can spend time iterating and designing your add-on instead of studying documentation, troubleshooting and debugging random issues along the way.
2. Set a standard of code quality and implementation so that anyone in the WordPress ecosystem using your add-on and others won’t run into plugin conflicts.
3. All the add-ons should play nicely together and integrate seamlessly into North Commerce no matter what theme or builder people use.

We have architected North Commerce in a way that makes creating add-ons simple.

You can hook into our custom tables and automatically inherit all of our filtering rules, security and you get your very own REST API endpoints right out of the box.

You can use our templating actions, hooks and filters to update, add to, or modify existing North Commerce templates both on the admin side and public side.

All-in-One — Core Features That Empower Your Business

If you talk to other ecommerce store owners or are one yourself you may have had to search for a plugin or add-on to provide some core functionality that you may have thought would be included on the platform. This could include: selling subscriptions, collecting & automating reviews, advanced coupons, & payment plans just to name a few.

While we celebrate and support add-ons being created for North Commerce there is core features we believe should be included in an ecommerce platform that will give you all the tools you need to create a beautiful ecommerce website, test different types of product offers, collect and manage reviews, award certain types of customers with advanced coupons and discounts, offer in house financing with payment plans. All of these core features of North Commerce liberate you to create or upgrade your business.

We don’t believe you should be charged an additional monthly fee for core features nor should you have to pay additional processing fees for adding subscriptions. All of these features are included with North Commerce core.

With a commitment to WordPress, our experience with ecommerce and full independence, we’re here for the long haul. We’ll do right by you.