Until a few years ago setting up an online store was not something you could easily do yourself. Sure, there were solutions available on the market such as osCommerce and Virtuemart for Joomla, but they never offered the functionality and ease of use we were all waiting for.
Since 2009, this started to change. WordPress was becoming more and more popular and soon people started to use the platform for more than just a blog. We also saw several plugins passing by, which offered e-commerce functions for WordPress.