2019 Predictions, Headless WooCommerce and In-store Pickup

Here’s the corrected version of the transcript:

---

Hey everyone, we are back in 2019 with Do the Woo. Brad decided he would hang around for a few more months with me; I guess I can’t get rid of him. Yeah, I’m glad Brad is back. And this is actually kind of cool because this is our first show with a guest. So, we thought we’d go through our Rolodex, blindly picked one out, and then we kept eliminating until we got to Corey. But hey, Corey Miller, how are you doing?

I was about to say, your Rolodex is messed up, man. I’m somewhere near the top.

Do we need to define Rolodex for the listeners, what that actually is? I’m thinking Google it.

Yeah, Google it. Thank you guys for inviting me on the podcast. It’s always good to talk to you two gentlemen, and we’ve got some good topics that we’re obviously going to talk about. So, I appreciate the invite.

We’re excited. I like this new year. New you, right, Bob? So, we got a guest now, and we’re back at it. And I imagine both of you contributed your part to the e-commerce economy during the holidays. Yes, probably too much, right?

It’s too easy.

Too easy, for sure. Well, I thought we’d start with having Corey tell us anything that’s going on new with him. If you don’t know Corey, most people do, but he is the founder of iThemes, and he’s been in the space for a while. So just tell us what’s going on with Corey these days.

Well, this is timely. This month iThemes and I celebrate 11 years in WordPress and specifically at iThemes. And this time of year is always special because I get to reflect back. It’s kind of a good reminder to think, 11 years! I can’t believe I’ve had one job for 11 years. It’s changed a little bit over time, but in 2019, iThemes has got some cool stuff in the works, and I’m really jazzed about where iThemes is, specifically in WordPress, with the amazing team we have here. And then, as you know, over the last year or a year ago, right about this time, we were acquired by Liquid Web. Transitions like this, I don’t think, are ever seamless or effortless, but this has gone as well as I possibly could have expected. The team is embedded within the Liquid Web family.

Most of our key products are now integrated into the managed WordPress hosting platform at Liquid Web. And that’s exciting. So, 2019 is going to be a really good year for iThemes. And then personally, I’ve got some news here shortly, probably near the end of the month, to share about what’s going on with me. But I don’t know about you guys; every time the New Year hits, it’s like, okay, do I do resolutions? And it always sneaks up on me. I’m like, oh my God, it’s already January 8th, 2019. And I’m like, man, time flies, as the cliché goes.

Oh yeah. Did you think 11 years ago, when you kicked off and kind of dove into this, did you have any idea that 11 years later you’d still be at iThemes, still growing, still excited and engaged, and doing what you love day in and day out?

Absolutely not. I was just telling my former business partner this morning, I said, I can’t believe 11 years have passed. When we first started talking about the company 11 and a half years ago, what would eventually become iThemes, I told him, I said, in my mind—I don’t know if I ever expressed this to them—but in my mind, I thought, I’m going to do this for five years. I’m going to focus in. And I got to the five-year mark and I was like, huh, I guess I better renew my contract in my mind with myself, I guess. And now we’re at 11, and it’s pretty amazing. But if 12 years ago, whatever, someone had come to me with a crystal ball and said, “Hey, in 2019, you’ve already sold this company that had grown and done all these things. And the business primarily makes its money from backups and security,” I’d have been like, “I don’t know anything about either of those, but it sounds cool. I mean, let’s go for it.” So no, it has been a meandering path for sure. And I talk frequently that if I were to ever write a book about my story and the iThemes story, it would be called Stumbling Successfully. Like progressing enough but not falling flat on our faces and really, truly failing—just stumbling forward, I guess. And the last year, specifically with the acquisition, has been a good reflective time. I’m just so thankful for the entire journey, the ups and downs, and the charmed life. I just couldn’t imagine. So, it’s been an amazing ride.

I mean, that’s really the thing with technology. Eleven years is a lifetime in terms of technology. Trying to predict what we’ll be doing and where we’ll be at 11 years or 10 years from today is impossible because it moves so quickly. So, I think the idea of pivoting and adjusting in conjunction with technology to build and grow a successful company is an amazing story because you can’t just say, “This is what we’re going to do on day one,” and 11 years later expect to be doing the same thing. If your business is wrapped around technology, you’ll get passed. So, it is an inspiring story. It’s cool to see the success that you and iThemes have had, and how you’ve kind of pivoted or adjusted throughout your history there with technology, with the market, with what was working versus maybe not working. So, I think there’s a good story that anyone can learn from.

Oh yeah. I mean, Brad, you and I go way, way back. I want to say way back 10 years.

Yeah, I mean, right around the time we were both starting, our companies were both fairly new at the time. We met, I think, in 2009. That sounds about right—10 years.

And to see your growth, personally and professionally, has been really incredible as your friend. But when you talk about technology, you’re absolutely right, and it just feels like it’s getting faster. People always used to say, “What’s your five-year plan?” And I’m like, I don’t know if you can do that in technology. How about a two to three-year plan? Before we started iThemes, the iPhone generation one had just come out, and maybe two years into that, it didn’t just change life. It didn’t just change this cool new technology—it changed the entire world. The smartphone-type technology, where we can’t go anywhere without being tethered to this amazing, powerful computer in our pocket. That changed our business two years in, and we still get the joke every now and then. It’s like, I tell people, “I’m sorry, 99.5% of our revenue comes from plugins.” And they’re like, “But you’re called iThemes! Why don’t you call yourself iPlugins?” It’s like, themes, man.

But that brings back a nostalgic moment for me, Corey, because I’ve shared this with you before. I think I got into WordPress in 2007, maybe it was 2008. Our prior business that we had before I took the brand of Bob WP had these horrible HTML sites that I tried to build for our marketing company. And my very first theme that I ever used for a WordPress site for our own company was, and I remember it was, the corporate theme.

Oh my gosh, Bob, that is awesome! I got set up and it was like, I thought, my God, I finally look professional on the web because all of the sites I’d done, I tried these little flash sites—they were just horrible—and it was like, God, that was so easy. And I knew then that that was kind of the pivotal moment, the light bulb, yeah, this is what I’m going to be doing with my clients. I’m not a developer. I want something that makes it easy just to get a business website up. And I had that up for a while, live with the corporate theme, and that was like, I can see the theme in my mind. What’s crazy is 11 years later, we still maintain those themes.

I was going to say, that’s impressive. I mean, a lot of those things go by the wayside. So to see it still supported, still working, especially as WordPress has evolved so much—I mean, it’s just night and day compared to 10 years ago with what WordPress was doing. That’s crazy. Well, excellent. Great to catch up on this and exciting times. Eleven years, that’s huge.

Thank you. In technology years, it’s kind of like dog years or cat years. Maybe that’s like 75 years in human years.

I’m going to work with that. I’m only 42, but I’ve been in business for 77 years.

As a business owner, that’s not too far off. When you run a business, you definitely age a little faster.

Oh man, isn’t that the truth? That’s why I shave my head so you can’t see my gray hairs coming in.

I’m close to shaving my head.

Between the business and the toddler, you can see it stays in some spots and leaves others.

Well, I thought since it was 2019 and we’re talking about the new year, I had WordCamp US, which I wasn’t able to snag either one of you, but I was able to get some predictions from about 23 different people, which is coming out next week on my other podcast. But I just thought we may have profound thoughts; we may have just thoughts as users or whatever. But I was wondering if you guys have any predictions. What do you think? Or it doesn’t have to even be WordPress or WooCommerce specific, more just in the e-commerce space in 2019. Anything exciting or something you maybe see around the bend? You got anything? Corey, do you want me to go?

No, I’m just going to defer to you. Dang it.

I have some thoughts. I want to riff on your thoughts.

Alright. And we have an article that we’re going to talk a little bit about, and my thoughts kind of line up with this article, which is one of the reasons I want to talk about it. But I think the idea and the keyword that we’re going to hear a lot this year is headless commerce. I like that. Headless commerce. Have you guys been hearing this term? It isn’t really a new thing per se, but I think formalizing the term and starting to see more of these larger companies with e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify really take off is kind of formalizing how we talk about it. So, headless commerce is really the idea of pairing any presentation layer, like any CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal, with a different backend commerce platform, like BigCommerce and WordPress or Shopify and Drupal.

Basically, you let the CMS do what it does best, which is manage content, and then you have a separate application that does what it does best, which is sell products or services. So, headless commerce, I truly believe that that is the big push. I feel like, and this brings up an interesting debate around WooCommerce and how that fits because that’s not what WooCommerce is. WooCommerce, as you know, you host it yourself, it integrates directly into your WordPress site, and your site is one big e-commerce platform that is powered by WordPress. So, that might be a side discussion, but I think the idea of using the tools as they’re meant to be used, and where they excel best, is what we’re going to continue to see growth in. The scalability of it makes a lot of sense. You can go from literally just a little coffee table startup selling a couple of things you make on the side to a hundred-million-dollar company that scales very easily with this approach. And I think that’s one of the big wins because you’re on a hosted platform, a SaaS service—that’s all they do—so it scales very naturally as your business grows. So, my prediction, again, part of this Forbes article we’ll talk about, but I definitely agree with is headless commerce is going to become a more common phrase and term that we hear, and I think a lot more people are going to be pushing in this direction for their stores.

If you’ve ever logged into Shopify, in five minutes you’re selling something online. It is so classically easy and great software, and then you don’t have to worry about some of the maintenance stuff. It’s a concern for me for WordPress in general. I threw up a side little hobby site around books, and it’s like, I just wanted a landing page, really. But Bob, when you’re talking about HTML pages, I kind of wonder—I started looking around, thinking, is Dreamweaver still around? Just if you want to have a simple one-page or two-page site. I know that’s a little bit off the headless commerce stuff, but Brad, it’s been overcomplicated, right, in some sense?

Yeah. And I think for a lot of users, they don’t want to have to worry about security and updates all the time. Even with that little site, I’m like, oh man, I’m using iThemes Sync to keep it updated, but it’s a target. WordPress is very secure, always getting better, but it’s still kind of big. Contrasting from the days we were talking about early WordPress, you logged in, the horizontal menu, wrote a post. You can do so much more with WordPress now. But yeah, I can totally see that too. Headless. Absolutely.

Yeah, and I kind of fall in the same category. I mean, as far as seeing what— and we’ll be talking about BigCommerce and what they’ve done with their plugin—just making—I think the options are opening up more. I mean, yeah, if you want to do WooCommerce, that’s cool. If you want to do something on a platform, that’s cool. But then the integration too, if some people want what WordPress may bring to it as far as, I don’t know, whether it’s self-hosting or the different parts it brings to the equation, then things like what BigCommerce is doing are putting them together. So, I’ve always been somebody that, even when I was working with clients, wanted as many options as possible. I don’t get just so focused on one thing. It’s like, what’s going to work for you? And I think more of those—and I think that’s the whole headless thing—is going to bring it into the mix here more and more.

And yeah, I think we’ll be seeing this, so it’ll be interesting to see where things go. Yeah, I mean WooCommerce I don’t think is in trouble by any means. I think it is, depending on your situation or your setup, just another question that people will need to ask themselves. It’s like when I have friends, we all have friends, and family come to us like, “Hey, I want to set up a store. I’ve been tinkering around with this thing I want to sell. Should I put it on WordPress?” And I’m usually like, “No.” For me to walk you through that, it’s not like I can just say, “Here, go here and sign up, and away you go.” No. I’m like, “Look, if you’re just tinkering around with it, go to something like Shopify. It’s 30 bucks a month, basic little store, kind of a proof of concept.” Now, if it starts to take off, then I think you need to start to ask yourself, “Is this the platform I want to stay on and grow? Do I want to move over and kind of own my own content, so to speak, on my own platform and move over to something like WooCommerce?” But just from the MVP approach, getting something out the door, to your point, Corey, it’s not as easy as I think a lot of us kind of think it is because we live and breathe this every single day. When your friend or family member comes and says, “Hey, I want a store,” would you tell them, “Yeah, go install WordPress, then install this WooCommerce plugin, and then you have to go through every single configuration page and make sure it’s how you want, and add these different extensions, and get your payment processing and shipping”? That’s not something most of us want to do for a friend or family member. But again, I’m not saying it’s dire straits for WooCommerce or anything. I think it’s just another option. And I think it’s more part of the question than maybe it was a few years ago. So, it’s all yet to be seen. And who knows? I’m still a big believer in owning your own content, so I think there’s a huge value in that. But you also have to factor your time into it or a developer’s time if you’re trying to customize, and what’s that value and how does that line up against some of these hosted solutions?

Yeah, so you’re talking about this kind of segueing right into this article you wanted to share. So, what else is it talking about here?

Yeah, so it’s a good article on Forbes, and we’ll have it in the show notes. It’s actually written by Jimmy Duvall, who’s the Chief Product Officer at BigCommerce. So, disclaimer, it’s written by someone up top. But that was one of their points, was headless commerce. The other one is direct-to-consumer brands will continue to flourish. So, Amazon is a marketplace; you can buy anything, and they have everything on Amazon. But I think the point here is that these direct-to-consumer brands—you go right to their websites, you have this kind of very tailored experience to that product or service, which is much more customized than just buying something off Amazon. Generally speaking, with Amazon, you just buy it and it shows up. This is more of maybe a subscription service, or maybe it’s just a really cool brand that you want to support, but the fact that they can kind of control their own brand on their own website, which is kind of going full circle, really. I mean, they’re back to where they started, back controlling their own brand, but there are just so many more options now, like WooCommerce, Shopify, or BigCommerce, that that’s going to continue to grow and flourish. I do think there will always be the Amazon factor. If you want to really have your footprint out there, you probably need to have your product on Amazon. But I’ve been more open to buying outside of sites like Amazon, even though Amazon makes it easy. Don’t get me wrong, you always have to jump through more hoops if you’re going to a new website to order something because you have to set up an account, all that stuff.

But I think that’s an interesting one. We will see because Amazon and some of these other players, even Target and Walmart, are so dominant, and people have such comfort levels with ordering from them. They understand the process, they know what to expect. There are great deals like Amazon Prime and all that stuff. So, we’ll see if direct-to-consumer brands continue to flourish or not.

And then the third one, of course, everything talking about e-commerce always has to mention Amazon, right? Because that’s kind of the gold standard. But it says Amazon will continue to raise the bar for consumer expectations, which is ultimately going to push all e-commerce to improve, which I completely agree with. And this is what we’ve seen for a decade plus now with Amazon. They’re really pushing the envelope. They’ve completely reinvented how shipping works and is thought about. To the point where a few years ago you probably wouldn’t have bought toothpaste on Amazon. It didn’t make sense. Now it’s like, yeah, toothpaste, toilet paper, everything—you check Amazon for it because they have it all, the shipping is relatively cheap or free. Their subscriptions with Amazon, so toothpaste will show up every month. So, they’ve really changed it, and we all know competition is good. So, they’ve raised the bar for everybody. Target, Walmart, and all these other retail stores and online experiences are all striving to be Amazon. So, it’s just a classic case of competition is very good for the consumer, and I think that’s a no-brainer. Amazon will continue to push the bar because they’re just light-years ahead of everybody on the technology side. So, those are the three biggies. What do you guys think? Are these accurate? Do you feel like you’re in agreement, maybe disagreement, or have different ideas for some 2019 predictions? Anything there, Corey?

I think the direct-to-consumer one is really interesting. I do agree. I agree with his outlook. The direct-to-consumer one is really interesting to me, and I think of niche-type markets. Just reading about some kind of—I’m sorry, I don’t have a name off the top of my head. I’ll get it to you for the show notes—but they just do bedsheets and stuff. And they were talking about their expertise in that particular thing and how they carved out this really—I want to say they’re at $10-20 million—just doing more luxurious but affordable bedsheets and things. And you’re like, that makes sense. I can see that specialized service where you’re able to do something above and beyond what maybe an Amazon or Target does—curated type content, selecting the finer materials. If I went to Target to find a bedsheet, I wouldn’t have even known a couple of years ago. Somebody taught me about thread count. I’m like, oh, watching Boom! But I think about niche markets. And you’re right, Amazon definitely is the leader in setting the curve on all of e-commerce. I can’t drive anywhere in Columbus, the city where I’m based, without seeing one of those gray Amazon Prime minivans now. And I’m just waiting for a drone to drop in my toilet paper.

The day I can order something with a drone, I don’t care if it’s toilet paper or toothpaste—I’ve got to do it. Whatever it is, I’m ordering it. The first day they had same-day delivery—I live outside of Philly in the suburbs—they had same-day delivery, and this has been a few years now. But I needed a corncob pipe for my Halloween costume—same-day delivery, three bucks. I was like, screw it, I want to see if it shows up. And sure enough, it did. By eight o’clock that night, I had my corncob pipe for my Popeye costume.

One of the things I think is interesting with the brand thing, and I’m going to actually jump to another article just because it kind of relates in a way, and it was one that was called, Retail: Amazon’s Antidote—Buy Online, Pickup In-Store. And they’re talking about how Walmart and Target are able to now—they’ve kind of found that sweet spot to compete with Amazon. As far as you get online, you find something, you say, “Hey, I want to pick it up,” and they have it ready. You can just drop by on the way to pick up the kids or whatever. When we’re talking about brand as far as dealing more with the brands, I’m wondering if that’s really going to trickle down to—and I think it should—even the smaller online stores. I mean, people might even actually have an incentive to get online and put some of their products online versus, “Oh, I don’t want to deal with shipping.” But hey, if I can put my products on there, somebody five miles away can say, “Hey, I want to come by and pick this up. Will it be ready for me? I don’t want to mess around.” So, I’m thinking that almost plays into that trend as far as giving a little bit more strength to the brand and taking advantage of online.

Yeah, I mean, it comes down to giving your customers as many possible options in how they want to buy. If they can find the option that they’re most comfortable with, maybe it’s ordering online, maybe they like to go to the store and walk through the aisles and see the various products, or maybe they know what they want and they need to get it that day, and they order it online and pick it up in the store. I mean, we did all three of those this holiday season, and in our regular shopping, that’s how we do it. It’s all three of those, and it’s all based on what it is we need, how quickly we need it, and where we can get it. But the idea of ordering online and picking up in-store is absolutely great. Especially having a toddler, Corey, you can relate—if you have your kid or kids with you, the idea of going into a store sometimes can be a chore, right?

Exactly.

Taking a kid into a grocery store, a toddler especially, generally doesn’t end well, right? What’s the old joke? They say, “You’re not really truly a parent until you’ve carried your toddler out surfboard style, having a complete meltdown, from a grocery store.” We’ve all been there, right? “No, you can’t have everything you grab!” So, the idea that I just pull up in my car and they throw it in the trunk and away I go—they got their money, I got my product—it’s genius. And in this day and age, I guess the last point I’ll make is everybody wants what they want as quickly as possible, whether it’s products or media, whatever. Everything is geared toward, “I need this; I want it when I want it.” The problem with shipping is, even at its best, same-day shipping is still going to be hours away. So, what if you need it like, “Oh, I forgot to buy somebody a birthday present, and I’m on my way to the party?” Put online ordering, pick it up in-store, grab it on the way out, and go.

When the drone comes down and puts it at the door.

The drone will be a game-changer when that happens.

But think about this too: we’re talking about Amazon being the gold standard and the leader. But think about this: Brad and I with kids, and young kids—Amazon is literally training the next generation on their expectations for buying goods. So, we’ve got an Amazon Echo Show, and Callaway—my son—knows how to use it. He’s six. He was looking up something; I can’t remember. Lindsay and he were talking it through. Then, a couple of weeks later, we get an Amazon delivery of ice cream cones. We’re like, what happened? He bought his first e-commerce purchase at five. He was five at the time—on Amazon. That’s the expectation. They’re going, “This is what I expect.” And so, they really do. When it transfers down to other businesses, like you were saying earlier, Bob, they are training the next generation of expectations about buying goods.

That could have ended up much worse than just ice cream cones.

It’s the now economy or the now generation or whatever. Everybody’s like that now. But great point, because if you try to explain to a toddler why they can’t watch a show on an airplane because you don’t have internet, they don’t get it. They just assume you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want. And that’s obviously not always the case. Now, in a few years it probably will be, but right now it isn’t. So, it’s the same idea with products. It’s, “When I want it, I want it right now.” And for better or worse, that is where we’re going, and there’s no stopping it. So, we have to understand how to work with that. We have to understand how to teach our children about that and do the best we can, because it’s only going to get more immediate, which isn’t really a bad thing. It’s just a change. It’s a change in how we’ve always done everything.

And I think that being able to pick up in-store does give the opportunity. I know before the show, I was talking a little bit to Corey about it. And for us, we’re considered rural because we live right on the coast in Washington state. So, it’s not always the big brands I can drive to and pick up. But if the smaller shops started doing that—and I know there’s a place in Seattle that has been doing this

for a long time. It’s a donut shop or a cupcake shop—Cupcake Royale, it’s called. I had them on my other podcast, and they’ve been using WooCommerce to actually do this for, I don’t know how many years, where the majority of people that order online come by and pick it up. They want to pick up three or four dozen cupcakes for their office. They do it, they go by, they’re ready. Bam! They’re gone. So, yeah, again, it’ll be just interesting. And even in, I think again, that looks at the smaller shops and gives them the opportunity in the smaller communities to take advantage of that little bit of online, even though a five-minute drive isn’t that big of a deal to do it online, but just to have everything prepared and ready for you to go and not have to mess around.

Especially, it just comes down to making it easier. I would much rather buy from a local business if they have what I need than on Amazon all day long. But at the end of the day, as of today, it’s not easier. It’s more work. It’s more hoops to jump through. It doesn’t mean I don’t try to support local businesses as much as I can, but nine times out of 10, I’m getting my toothpaste from Amazon because I don’t have to go anywhere, and it just shows up. So, you’re right, they have to kind of up their game if they want to compete in this space. And it doesn’t mean small businesses are going to go away if they don’t do it, but they’re losing out on some clients and some customers.

A new opportunity for services that offer Amazon-esque type things. I mean, I know dropshipping, for instance, is a service you can purchase for your e-commerce business, but it’s an opportunity to say, for instance, we’re talking about drones, but what if the local pharmacy that’s not owned by CVS or Walgreens or a national chain wants to be able to do drone delivery? So, that’s kind of interesting to think through. How could they keep up? But it might be an opportunity for a startup or business to provide some services.

If they start flying drugs around with drones, we’re going to have a very new problem on our hands of people shooting down the drones trying to get to those meds.

Definitely think about that. Drone jacking.

Drone jacking.

I mean, that’s the thing—I’ve heard talk of it. Obviously, they’re not really doing deliveries other than maybe testing, but that will be a thing someday, right? Boxes are flying through the air. What’s to stop someone from trying to pull one down? It’s no different than someone stealing a box off your front porch—just a new technological way of doing it. Hell, maybe they’ll have drones that attack other drones. I mean, this would be fun to watch, I guess if it wasn’t my package. But drone wars, I like it.

The other thing I wanted to touch on real quick was what happened earlier in December, which we talked about, or I mentioned it briefly, was BigCommerce—you’d written an article—is a plugin that they had released. And just again talking about the headless thing, I don’t know if either one of you have had experience. I know that I actually set up a BigCommerce shop, and it was kind of a demo shop—I think it had a dozen products. And I put the plugin on a WordPress site and I basically imported it in and had everything set up in probably less than five minutes. All the categories, all the descriptions from the products were in there. And I was able to, yeah, it was pretty impressive. I’m going to actually do a post on it and a video, but I am sure there are things that are going to need to be worked out. And I found a couple of tiny little hiccups, but it just came out. So, I think it’s going to become a potential player in the field. I really do.

Yeah, I haven’t actually built a store on BigCommerce, but I have been following it. They’ve definitely been making a bigger push into the WordPress space in the past year or so. I see them—you probably both see them too—at WordCamps. At WordCamp US, they had a big display, big sponsor. They have this seemingly really cool WordPress integration. What’s interesting to me is I look at BigCommerce and I look at Shopify, and they’re obviously competing, right? They’re kind of in that space of hosted e-commerce solutions and how they integrate with WordPress. They have very different approaches. I think we might’ve even talked about this on the show last year where Shopify had a WordPress plugin—I know because my company built it and released it for them on WordPress.org—but then they actually decided to remove it, and now they basically want everybody to manage their site directly on Shopify, and they have little embed buttons they can use, but there’s no real tight integration. Where BigCommerce has taken the exact opposite approach, and they want really tight integration between the two platforms. So, they’re really pushing hard for this headless commerce strategy, which in my opinion, is the better strategy. Rather than try to force people onto your platform, figure out ways that you can work more closely and tightly with existing platforms that already dominate the market, like WordPress or Drupal or whatever. So, I think this is a good strategy. I know Modern Tribe is the company behind this WordPress integration. They’re a great company; they do solid work. So, I am sure that by and large, this is a really, really great system. Definitely something I intend to play with and try out soon, so I can talk a little bit more specifically about it. But on the surface, it looks really nice. I’m really excited to see this and to see where it goes.

Yeah, I talked to Topher, who is their point person for WordPress evangelism at BigCommerce, and it’s really interesting when a new player like this gets into the community, emerges into the community, and the response to it. It seems like it’s a need. It’s uncovering a big need that was there, which is another option. You’ve got WooCommerce, which can do, I mean, almost literally anything you want. You’ve got Shopify as kind of a SaaS solution, and then you’ve got BigCommerce. So, I’m really interested to see their movement into WordPress even more because I think it signals some shifts and really uncovers some needs and things. The response—just us talking about it on this podcast—is really interesting to me.

And I know that I’ve been talking to BigCommerce, and I’ve even talked to Shopify, and I’ve had discussions with people on both ends and stuff. And as far as partnerships go, I guess partnership—I hate to use that term—but as far as getting a little bit more involved in it and helping them promote their stuff, BigCommerce, obviously because of the integration, has been much more receptive. It is really a different—I can’t really describe it—but it’s a different feel with both of them, having talked with both of them, having just a few conversations. And BigCommerce seems like they’re pulling in—I think with Topher and the people there, it’s just going to be a little bit more of a natural fit for them to segue into WordPress and become an option for WordPress. So, I’m kind of excited about this, to see where it goes and stuff. So, yeah, we’ll see.

Well, let’s see here. I think that wraps up our topics. Usually, we do our little Woo Tools at the end. I thought I’d keep them. And then I am going to go ahead and go in order here and have Brad start with his Woo Tool. I don’t have a fancy little Woo Tool music yet. I’ll leave that up to you, Brad, for a future show.

Yeah, so mine’s actually a service built specifically for WooCommerce called Robot Ninja, and it is by Brent Shepherd and the team over at Prospress. And I think we’re working to line up Brent for a future show. Great guy. He’s actually responsible for the Subscriptions extension, which is, I think, one of—if not the most—popular WooCommerce extensions that you can purchase. But basically, Robot Ninja is an automated way of testing your WooCommerce website. So, it does automated testing. A good example would be if you ran a WordPress update—or WooCommerce update—rather than going through, adding a product to your cart, going through the whole checkout process, purchasing that product, and making sure that everything works the way you expect. Because the last thing you want is to run an update and have your checkout process be broken and not realize it. This automatically runs all those checks for you. So, it’s really nice. I mean, honestly, the price point—it’s $9 a month per store. So, if you have any store that you care about on WooCommerce, you should be paying for this service. It’s $9 a month. It just gives you that peace of mind, like, “Hey, if we do any changes to our site, we can run our tests, make sure everything passes in real time,” and it’ll just help you sleep at night. You don’t want to lose a whole day or a whole week of sales because there was a little bug that you didn’t realize until somebody decided to tell you about it. Because more than likely, the first few people that experience that bug probably won’t contact you—they’ll just move on. So, check it out: robotninja.com.

And mine is—only because of what we were talking about—it’s called Order Delivery Date Pro for

WooCommerce plugin. I’ll just leave a link to the post; I won’t need to tell you much about it. But not only does it let you set up, and have your customers set up, delivery, it also allows for pickup. So, we were talking about that, and there are options out there for people to integrate it into their WooCommerce site. So, I think that somebody, especially smaller shops, looking into that may want to check out that plugin. Corey.

Yeah, so you guys might’ve mentioned this on a previous show, but my background—I’m not a developer—but building iThemes over the last 11 years, we’ve driven it through marketing and specifically email marketing. And so, the tool we use at iThemes.com and that I highly recommend is OptinMonster by my good friends Thomas and Syed. OptinMonster— a lot of people have aversions about pop-up forms and things like that, but there are tasteful ways to do that too, if you prefer. But I know when we first installed OptinMonster, the result was huge. And we’ve built our business on email, and having a pop-up with a good lead magnet type thing on your e-commerce store—and you can’t go on any physical goods store, particularly Gap or any kind of clothing store, without a pop-up coming up first thing. And there’s a very good demonstrated reason why—it’s because you get the email address. Email might feel old school and everything, but it’s still email. And so, having that email address where you can ping customers is huge. And a testament to the business we built at iThemes is being able to build it through our email database, and that is absolutely huge, being of course appropriate with it. But OptinMonster is a fantastic tool for really grabbing those, actively being proactive about grabbing and getting those email addresses so you can market to your customers and prospects.

Excellent. Good tools. Alright, well, it was an honor to have you here, Corey.

I’ve had fun.

Our very first guest, I think we set the bar now.

Set the bar high. Yeah, it’s like pressure’s on now for all the others down the road.

Thank you guys for having me on.

Yeah, thanks for coming on, Corey. And thank you, everybody, for tuning in.