2020 in numbers; a year we won’t easily forget

‘Health and prosperity’ continues to offer the best support and grow our business. These were some of the wishes that YITH’s family asked for on the last night of 2019, but we would have never imagined what would really happen later: each one working at home, without contact between us, living in continuous uncertainty and not being able to celebrate every success, toasting and hugging each other.

Reading the press, it has been a terrible year for many. But it has forced many businesses the rethink their strategy and also for YITH has been a year full of new ideas and transformations.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused people to stay at home making bread or any other previously unthinkable recipes, playing board games, living 24 hours a day with our partners and many, many used the Internet for more than making video calls, having fun on social networks or binge-watching tv series, many people got used to shopping online for everything, and many others decided to start and create new business models, 100% online.

The e-commerce trends hitting new records

Thousands of retail businesses closed their physical stores and launched themselves into the adventure of online sales, just as big companies were promoting this channel to which they already gave importance. Just to give you an idea, retail sales growth in Latin America increased by almost 37%, while in North America it was 31.8%, and in Central and Eastern Europe, it was just over 29%, according to Emarketer. In addition, the Christmas campaign, both BlackFriday, and CyberMonday, dates indicated in eCommerce, were key to this increase in Internet purchases. In fact, YITH managed to break its own historical sales record of one Black Friday, 60.3% more than in 2019.

And it has also been a great year for WordPress, the platform we use for all our products, as has been the case for some time now. This platform is currently used by 39.6% of all websites, which means a market share of 64.1% over existing CMS. Nobody comes close to their numbers, only Shopify with a 5.2% market share, according to W3techs. WordPress has been growing dizzying, with annual historical trends suggesting a 13.1% usage rate in 2011 and a triple increase in 2020.

The YITH family is growing

We have also noticed the positive effect on business from the pandemic and the family grew to better serve our customers. By the end of 2020, 38 members divided between Italy, Spain and the UK formed the heart of YITH. The total number of members increased as did the number of users using YITH products, over 2 million worldwide.

In this way, in 2020 we continue working to improve our plugins and update our PROTEO theme, with continuous improvements and integrations that allow us to have some of the best products on the market. This year, customers from 226 different countries trusted YITH and some of its 154 available plugins. In fact, we reached more than 800,000 active installations with a single plugin, while our developers didn’t stop for a minute to reach 36,000 commits in a single year, a record number again for us.

And, speaking about plugins, what have been the top of the year? On the one hand, the top 3 of our free plugins are YITH WooCommerce Wishlist, followed by YITH WooCommerce Compare and YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter. On the other hand, on the premium plugin podium, we find YITH WooCommerce Request a Quote, YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards and YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode.

Our website, yithemes.com, got a total of 1.9MM visits in 2020. Here our customers can, among other things, test the live demos of each of our plugins, as 340,000 users did last year, and search for content in our help and documentation center, with more than 260,000 inquiries in 2020.

As well, we are proud to know that, following the slogan of not offering one-time but caring for our customers day-by-day, our customer satisfaction was positioned at 97%. This success could not have been achieved without our customer service and support team. They have resolved over 29,000 tickets, with an average first response time of 5.67 hours, and completed 32,159 online chats.

We are also proud to know that we had more than 350 translator collaborators in the first year of the launch of translate.yithemes.com, a project that allows the translation of YITH plugins in any language.

We have also continued to shape our Youtube project with videos in three languages: Italian, Spanish and English. In the YITH ITALIA channel we have added 37 videos, followed by YITH ESPAÑA with 24 and YITH with 4, with a total of 65 new videos. On this platform, we share videos of interest to our customers explaining how to use and get the best of our different plugins such as YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards, YITH WooCommerce Subscription, or YITH WooCommerce Wishlist among others.

In this atypical year, the curious facts could not be missing either, at least for us, and which we wanted to share here: someone bought a plugin using Internet Explorer 7, we finally have a new client from the Faroe Islands and Nando, our CEO, has devoured another 22 books of all kinds.

2020 has been a complicated year for the world in general, but it has provided an unprecedented boost to the eCommerce sector and to YITH in particular. Now a high percentage of companies and enterprises who have created new online businesses, and of people who have immersed themselves in Internet shopping and have been able to experience the benefits that eCommerce offers, will not want to leave it. We don’t want to get away from you in this adventure either, so we close 2020 and start a new year focused on continuing to work to offer you the best and achieve new successes together in 2021.

The YITH Family wishes you a very happy and prosperous 2021.