Looking Back at WooCommerce in 2022 and What’s Ahead in 2023 with the WooCommerce CEO

Jonathan: Robert, how are you doing?

Robert: It’s a new year, Jonathan. This is fantastic.

Jonathan: It’s a new year, another episode of Do the Woo, and we have a fantastic guest with us today.

Robert: I wonder who that might be.

Jonathan: We have Paul Maiorana, the CEO of WooCommerce. Paul, welcome. It’s good to have you.

Paul: Happy New Year, guys. Thanks for having me. Excited to be doing the Woo together here in 2023.

12 releases in 2022

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s fun to look back at the highs. We were looking at some of the notes from WooSesh. And just looking at the stats, there’s been a lot of growth, a lot of good things that have been happening. And in today’s episode we want to take a look back and talk about some of those highlights, look ahead to 2023. And it’s hard to believe it’s all already here, especially with this holiday break. Let’s just jump into it. One of the things that’s been fun to watch is just the ramping cadence of WooCommerce releases. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to pull that off. And by my count, we managed 12 new releases this past year.

Paul: That’s right.

Jonathan: There’s a lot that goes on to pull that off consistently, so it was impressive to look back and see. And I’m curious if you have any thoughts on how that’s going, any insights that you can share, because we know it’s not trivial to pull that off. What’s that been like?

Paul: Yeah, it is, I think, a major change for us, and it’s something that we started, I guess it was back in maybe 2021, to move to a monthly release cycle. When I first started working on the WooCommerce team, I guess it was about six years ago, we did roughly three releases a year, I think roughly quarterly, but we’d avoid Q4, just it’s the crazy season. Everybody’s selling. Nobody really wants to do a major upgrade, especially if it’s been months since the previous upgrade. Just bigger releases, potentially a little riskier to do. And as someone who is responsible for helping make this software and really deliver new features and capabilities and improvements to our customers, really frustrating for me to have to essentially, we can only deliver a few times a year some improvements to our customers.

So we moved to this monthly release schedule, and now releases are smaller as a result, such that it should be much more risk-free, I guess, to update. We’ve also invested a lot in our just compatibility testing and QA and the process by which they’re just the tooling around releasing WooCommerce, such that it is much more automated and predictable. So anyway, so the goal being to just get new features, improvements and capabilities in the hands of our customers really as quickly as we can. And we have some separate plugins that are things like the WooCommerce blocks that enable us to move at an even faster pace for folks who be a little closer to the leading edge. But things getting into WooCommerce should be fully baked and something that, again, our customers can leverage and start to build with.

Anyway, so it’s been, I think, largely positive. We have heard some feedback from folks who are a little … maybe too fast of a pace for them. And I think the reality is, and certainly wouldn’t encourage this, and we always want people running the latest and greatest versions of WooCommerce, but you also need to make the best decisions for your own store. And if you want to bypass a release or two and catch up on more of that quarterly schedule, that’s obviously totally fine as well.

Jonathan: That’s one of those benefits of open source. You’re having a clear recommendation. You’re putting in the work to give them the best, but they can also choose whether they want to take advantage of it or not.

Paul: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And we’ve also been trying to really improve our communication around the release schedules, what’s in each release. And again, just to deliver that much more confidence for folks who are maybe a little more reticent to update on that kind of schedule. And I’ll say, I think part of, again, this investment in tooling and testing has been really critical to that. We want people to have confidence and to trust that when they upgrade WooCommerce, that everything will just work right. And frankly, we haven’t done the best job. We’ve had a couple of point releases, fixed releases, and so that’s a journey and something that we’re continuing to invest in, but we take that responsibility really seriously.

Robert: Was that a decision of Woo specifically, or were you getting feedback from users, customers, implementers of WooCommerce to actually speed up the cycle?

Paul: It was really a decision from within Woo. I think everything we do, it’s not without understanding the community needs and reaction and preferences. And I wouldn’t say that there was a direct ask or an overwhelming majority of folks asking for a faster release cycle, but certainly a lot of feedback we’ve been getting. And this is where I personally have been spending a lot of my time is just improving the WooCommerce platform and delivering. I think we maybe a few years ago lost our footing a little bit, and we’re not developing and adding new features at the pace that our community needs us to and the pace that our business needs us to. So we’ve got a ton of things. We talked about it a little bit earlier last year in WooSesh, but just a ton of, I think, critical improvements that have been coming to WooCommerce core and are still coming. They’re in various phases of development, but everything from work-around scalability to the checkout experience and everything in between.

Jonathan: Well, and from my perspective, when you compare this to the world of SaaS, when you have this long cadence, the stakes just go up a lot more, where it tends to look towards a bifurcation between releases, which is really problematic when you look at the ecosystem as a whole. If you have builders trying to build into it, you don’t want them having to think about a bunch of different versions. So I imagine for folks who’ve been in Woo a long time, that change can be challenging because they’re used to maybe we’re going to upgrade once a year and deal with all of this. But for folks who are newer to the space, at least from what I’ve been seeing and what I’ve been hearing, they’re like, this is just what you expect.

Paul: That’s right.

Jonathan: So there’s a transition that’s a challenge in that, especially for folks who’ve been here a long time.

Robert: Well, I think Jonathan stole a little of my thunder there. I was going to say there’s a whole generation of implementers that were raised on apps which update, I don’t know, every other day. And that’s not scary to folks. So I could definitely see how projects like Woo will, or actually almost hope more smaller quickie easy updates that take one problem at a time as opposed to the whole truckload.

Paul: Yes. And one of the interesting things about being part of Automattic, where we do have some distributed software projects that we make like WooCommerce, and then we have SaaS products like wordpress.com where we ship. It’s been a little while since I’ve worked closely with the wordpress.com team dozens of times a day at least, probably maybe hundreds of times a day. They’re just constantly deploying new improvements, fixes, performance optimization, security stuff, whatever it is.

And so a lot of the work we’re doing with Woo on WordPress.com is all related to this. It enables us to practice that continuous deployment type of approach on WordPress.com. And as we dial in, this is the best experience or work out bugs or whatever it might be in some of the newer things that we’re building, we can launch and iterate quickly in this SaaS environment that we have access to. And then also as those things become, again, more fully baked, bring those into the WooCommerce core where we do need to be a bit more deliberate and just move a little bit more slowly, but just carefully.

Release schedules, outreach and hosting companies

Robert: When you say SaaS, I hear hosting companies in the background. And over the last year, it feels like there’s been more of an outreach to hosting companies. And to tie completely back into the release schedule, how does that affect those discussions with hosting companies? Are they like, yay, give us more work to do every time you update?

Paul: So that’s a great question. I can’t say that I’ve gotten a lot of direct feedback from web hosts about the release cycle. I think many have adapted to and their own tooling to adjust at this point. But I think the conversations that we are having is very much related in the sense of how can we dramatically improve the overall product experience of WooCommerce. And again, we have a lot of these projects in flight at various stages of development. And as they each independently become ready, say, as we brought the cart checkout blocks into WooCommerce core 6.9 or the high performance order storage project in, I think, 7.1 relatively recently, we don’t have to wait three, four months again to be able to deploy those changes. So these efforts dovetail.

Robert: And what does that outreach to hosts look like? Is there a, this is what we need as a baseline for all WooCommerce customers to be happy with? Or what does that look like to you?

Paul: It’s a lot of that. We know that for WooCommerce to compete, it can’t just be us working in a silo trying to improve just the core WooCommerce experience. We’re part of an ecosystem. We need to be working with third-party developers who build complimentary solutions for WooCommerce, extensions, themes, et cetera. We need to be working with agencies and freelancers who bring new WooCommerce stores online, and we want them to always be building and leveraging the latest and greatest features that we’re building. And certainly from hosts, again, the conversation is very much about how we can work together to simplify the overall product experience for Woo. And so the outreach today is very much about, or those conversations I guess I would say, are really understanding what we think is the best product experience for WooCommerce. And that’s still a perspective that we’re developing.

I mentioned at WooSesh we shared that we were developing this more turnkey approach to WooCommerce and that launching that first on WordPress.com in February, so we’re just rapidly racing towards that date. And then taking those learnings and bringing out the web host. So we’re a little too early to be able to say, confidently, this is the best experience for WooCommerce. And of course, that depends on, are you talking about merchants in the United States or in Europe or selling physical goods or appointments or tickets or whatever. So the best experience is going to depend on the needs of those merchants. And where we’re starting, the primary focus is on stores selling physical goods. So having a really strong perspective on what are the needs of those stores. And again, working to get feedback from the web hosts now as well. What is your perspective on what the best eCommerce or WooCommerce experience is based on what they’re hearing from their customers?

Churn and attracting people from proprietary platforms and keeping them

Jonathan: One of the things that stands out to me over the past year or two is I’ve spoken with more and more web hosts who are waking up to find that a lot of their folks are using WooCommerce. They didn’t necessarily set out to be doing WordPress to begin with, but look now, WordPress is dominating, and on top of that, WooCommerce is growing quickly. And so they’re in these moments of like, well, what do we do? Some are in the category of what do we do about this space? Others are like, hey, we want to expand, we want to do new things.

And what’s interesting, at least from my perspective, is they see the real threat, not as other hosts, but churn to proprietary platforms that they have no influence over and no interest in. And they’re in an interesting place where, because of the nature of the project, they are pretty dependent on what you, WooCommerce the business, does with the product, where they’re like, it’s essential to their business. They want to be involved. You have to think about the ecosystem as a whole though. So at least from what I’ve been hearing from hosts, it’s a really good sign to see that it’s great that WooCommerce is caring about this. Because they’re in this place where they want to grow, they want to serve their customers better, there is also not a whole lot they can really do to affect the product experience.

So I’m looking forward to seeing how your experiments with dot-com go. And I’m curious, if we take what we’re hearing from the hosting companies, they’re competing against the proprietary platforms. I’m curious how you’re thinking about that. You have to think about the ecosystem as a whole. How are you thinking about churn? What are the types of things that you can do to reduce that to make WooCommerce more attractive to draw people from the proprietary platforms and keep them?

Paul: So in addition to I mentioned the cart checkout blocks and the improved experience we’re delivering there and a better, more highly optimized checkout experience, WooPay coming soon if you’re a merchant that’s using WooCommerce payments. WooPay is our wallet that recognizes shoppers across the WooCommerce payments network and accelerates shoppers through the point of purchase by saving their card details on file. We have things like the store editing experience that leverages all of the great site editing functionality in WordPress to deliver a no code, customizable WooCommerce experience across everything.

But I guess the other thing that I would highlight that we’re focused on from a churn perspective is performance and scalability, and the high performance order storage project that landed in 7.1 is a big part of that. We know that peace of mind and running a scalable store is really critical, obviously, for higher volume and larger merchants. And we want everybody to be able to use WooCommerce, whether you’re just a hobbyist all the way up through the biggest companies selling online. So anyway, that’s another major initiative for us. It’s really directly related to churn amongst WooCommerce stores and, again, particularly at the higher volume end of stores.

Thanks to our Pod Friends OSTraining and Mindsize

WooCommerce and Enterprise

Jonathan: Let’s touch briefly on enterprise. Paul, you’ve got a long background in enterprise. You worked at VIP before Woo, so you know that space well. I was really happy to see that there’s an enterprise landing page now on WooCommerce. Anything you can say about that area of focus, any highlights from 2022 just on that general area of WooCommerce at scale, at the top end?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a really interesting area for me personally because it’s, I think, an area where historically we haven’t had a ton of direct connections to those stores or insights on what they would like to see coming from WooCommerce. And again, things like performance and scalability are relatively obvious. But what are some of the other capabilities or features or whatever that are important to them? And so, again, we built that customer success team over the last year and a sales organization to just better improve, again, our understanding of those customers and develop a stronger perspective on what the enterprises really care about from an eCommerce solution.

And again, a lot of it comes back to peace of mind. So you reference VIP, I’m biased of course, but a really great solution for WooCommerce stores because I think one of the challenges of not just WooCommerce, but WordPress is, I’ve referenced this many times over the years, but that the old Spider-Man quote, with great power comes great responsibility. We give people a lot of flexibility with this platform. And if you’re not following best practices, you can shoot yourselves in the foot.

And so I think what my colleagues at VIP do very well is prevent you from shooting yourselves in the foot, and ensuring that you’re following best practices from a development perspective, so you don’t get orphaned on an old version of WordPress or WooCommerce. Again, that you’re building things in a scalable way, and just really taking advantage of the best of these platforms. But I think there needs to be broader support out there in the ecosystem as well for larger stores. VIP may not be the best solution for everybody. So I think that’s one thing that I would like to see is actually a broader focus from the ecosystem on providing enterprise capabilities around WooCommerce.

Jonathan: I think that’s where a lot of the opportunity seems to be too, because VIP is a good model, it’s a good precedent, they’re going to have specific market focuses, et cetera. And if you look at hosting as a whole, there’s so much opportunity, from what I’m seeing out there, to compete effectively with the proprietary platforms who by design have to have much more of a one-size-fits-all approach. Whereas in our open source ecosystem, you can have a host who really can narrow in on their particular customer set, provide great support, provide whatever that customer needs, and then have a good relationship with WooCommerce, the business, on the product side of things. Robert, you know this space well. What are your thoughts?

Enterprise, developers and agencies, a new source of contributors

Robert: So I’m loving where this is going. This is my bread and butter here. Thanks, Paul, for mentioning the fact that enterprise does not like to be scared. They look for stability, consistency. They can’t have anything go down. And you mentioned my favorite F word of all time, flexibility, so that’s great. How does that tie into the open source nature? And I’m not going to take it just from the fact that the code is open source, but how can they contribute back to WooCommerce? I find that that’s a muddier experience than, say, WordPress.

Paul: So, sorry. How can larger stores contribute back to WooCommerce?

Robert: Enterprises, developers, agencies. How does that open up to new contributors? To make the question very simple and blunt.

Paul: Got it. So I think, well, one is just by some of the work that we’re doing by deploying, again, things like high performance order storage, I think, is a great way to contribute back to WooCommerce. We don’t host a lot of stores here. We don’t have direct access to a lot of the potential scalability issues around the platform. So getting, whether it’s agencies or in-house developers at large WooCommerce sites or other web hosts, working together as a community to share that is really critical feedback for us to have. And data, we just don’t have access to a lot of that today, and it comes through in bits and pieces. So that’s one of the first things that comes to mind to me.

And also why, again, I’m a bit biased, I think very highly of VIP, but also why it’s a priority for me. The more sites that we host here at Automatic, the more WooCommerce sites, high-scale WooCommerce sites, we host the better access we have to those insights. And it puts us in the critical path of supporting these folks and providing that high availability, where today we’re just a little bit outside of that, given our support model. And so I think we’ve learned a lot from hosting these sites, but also working with other web hosts and enterprises to just better understand where those break points are today.

Robert: I know I’m going to get myself in trouble for this one. Sorry, Jonathan. Sorry, Paul. That answer sounds to me like the best way to contribute to WooCommerce is to host on VIP.

Paul: No, not exclusively. I think we’ve talked a little bit, Robert, about working more closely together with Cloudways. That’s part of our interest in working and developing partnerships with other web hosts as well.

Robert: Got it. Just making sure. You nailed it. Thank you.

Paul: Again, I tend to cite VIP because I think there are not a significant number of web hosts that target higher or larger sites or stores, but certainly we’d be very interested in working with, say, folks like Pantheon and others as well.

Strong partnerships

Jonathan: And to one of the things, just because of the size of the ecosystem, this is something that’s often lost on folks is how many WooCommerce stores there are, that it’s still growing. To do this justice, to do it really well, you need strong partners who have different areas of expertise and focus, and it’s just been great to see Woo embracing that. You’ve had a strong partnership program for a long time. Of course, that’s a big part of your background, Paul. That’s been great to see that carrying out.

Paul: We’ve always had, I think, really great relationships with complimentary technology companies in the sense of integration partnerships of the Stripes and PayPals and the Mailchimps and ShipStations of the world. If you think of WooCommerce as an operating system, we are not going to do every single thing that every store needs. So having, again, really tight connections to key leaders in each of those categories is just critical, I think, to delivering a great product experience. And then we’ve also started to expand that to focus a bit more on folks in the ecosystem. So over the last year we’ve really developed our agency program, a couple hundred agencies in the program now and rapidly growing that, and just really looking to improve our understanding of agency and builder needs around the platform. And then, again, we’ve talked quite a bit already about the work that we’re doing with hosts. So we know that we are genuinely operating in an ecosystem centric capacity and ecosystem first.

Jonathan: I love that. Now as you’re thinking ahead to 2023, I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your plate, there’s a lot that you’re thinking about. Are there any particular areas of focus that stand out to you in this coming year?

Paul: Not to repeat myself too much, but a lot is really landing some of these core product improvements. I think that is the most important thing that we need to do is really dramatically improve the pace at which we are improving the core platform. So again, I was really excited to see some of these things like high performance order storage or the cart checkout blocks land in core, but they’re still off by default. So the idea being that people can enable them if the, say, set of extensions they’re using are compatible with each of those solutions. But we’re not yet quite at general availability. Or store editing, launched our first phase, which was just getting to a point of compatibility, and now really trying to make that sing and shine and make it a real bright spot of the WooCommerce product experience.

We’re working on big improvements to the experience around managing and listing products within WooCommerce. That’s actually a really interesting interface to work through and rethink, because we get very different feedback from folks depending on the size of the store or their own needs around more of a form or template-driven approach. If you’re a store that’s got hundreds of products, you’re certainly not going to leverage the visual editor to design every single one of those product landing pages. You want a bit more of a templated approach. Smaller stores or maybe a more boutique or bespoke WooCommerce store, does want a bit more of a visual editing experience to each of their products and product pages. So anyway, so been really interesting to engage with the community and get that feedback from merchants, from builders.

So that’s another big effort that we’re working on. But for me, I’m certainly forgetting a couple of other things as well. But those are at the core of where we’re making a lot of investments, and now we need to get them in the hands of our customers, as many customers as possible. So again, our focus is really on getting to general availability. And to do that, we need the entire ecosystem to work together. So if you’re a theme developer or a plugin or extension developer that, say, touches the checkout experience in WooCommerce, and you’d be looking at updating your product to be compatible with the new checkout blocks, and same idea for store editing and product listing. As we get a little bit further along and have some more definition there, we’re going to need the community to all work together so that we can improve WooCommerce at a faster pace.

Robert: So I hear that Woo is Gutenberg first.

Paul: In many parts of the experience, yes. I think there’s still a little some debate, again, around the product listing, but we certainly want visual editing to be a significant component of at least that experience in some ways, but we’re working through exactly how to approach that. But yes, very much embracing Gutenberg.

Thinking about Shopify

Jonathan: So as you’re thinking ahead to 2023, how do you think about Shopify? Do you see them as a competitor? Do you see them as just serving different needs? How do they fit into what they’re doing in their areas of focus to what you’re thinking about with WooCommerce?

Paul: Absolutely a competitor and a very good one. They built a really great platform, and I think they’re moving very quickly, but I think we are building for the merchants exclusively. For builders as well, but we are ultimately trying to meet the needs of merchants in our community. And I think that WooCommerce and WordPress offer a lot more flexibility, choice, whether that’s anything from, again, the capabilities of the software, but also pricing and who you’re sourcing your different solutions from. Is it payments? I think a very popular example around Shopify where it’s much more locked down as well as related parts of the experience like checkout. So very much a competitor, but a bit of a fan of what they’re doing. They’ve got a really great experience, but Woo is doing something different. We very much want to provide that optionality and flexibility and choice that’s core to what we do, and obviously ownership as well. I think there’s room for both.

The ecosystem, getting stronger and having a superpower

Jonathan: I remember in some of the conversations I’ve had with hosting companies, especially in underserved markets where Shopify is not winning, there’s almost this too much of that one-size-fits-all approach. And it was interesting to see how much opportunity there is with WooCommerce, with opensource on this WordPress platform to be able to create things that are really catered to the needs of particular markets and just to have a superior experience. So it’s been great to see. It’s always been there, that ecosystem emphasis, but it’s been great to see WooCommerce really leaning into that more and more, because at least from my perspective, it’s a real strength. The WooCommerce ecosystem is rich and complex. There’s a lot of vibrancy to it, a lot of resilience to it. And as the product itself improves, I think the ecosystem itself is only going to get stronger and healthier as a result. So I love that.

Paul: I would say it’s more than a strength. It’s a superpower. And I think particularly in a world where Amazon announced a number of layoffs today and Salesforce as well, and I think where budgets are tightening and we all need to be a little bit leaner and meaner in our operations, the idea that WooCommerce doesn’t need to be eight, nine, 10,000 people to compete directly with Shopify. But instead, that we, again, link arms as a community and ecosystem to meet the needs of our customers. Again, we can operate just a bit more lean and more nimbly as a result.

Robert: Oh boy, I love nimble. It’s the power of open source. You’d mentioned the payment opportunities and solutions and ecosystem. Almost two years ago, WooCommerce invested in PeachPay. I assume that’s the wallet aspect that you had mentioned earlier on.

Paul: So no, we have our own wallet component to WooCommerce payments called WooPay in late stages of development, alpha phase testing, so not widely deployed just yet. But over the next couple months or so, we’ll be sharing a bit more about what we’re up to with WooPay. But yes, we have also a bit of a relationship with the folks at PeachPay who are, I think, a small investor in as well as just friendly with. I spend some time with the team and actually was just chatting with Aaryaman just last week, no, sorry, last month. So really great team. I think they’re working on interesting things. And I think that’s one of the challenges of an ecosystem as well. There’s going to be a little bit of coop-etition. In some cases, we’re working in similar spaces as folks in the community, and that’s okay. We want to be able to offer choice to folks. So if WooPay, for whatever reason, is not the best solution for your store, there’s other solutions out there like PeachPay and others as well.

Robert: Well, Jonathan’s question and then about nascent markets or new markets and how buy now, pay later, so BNPL, works in different regions made me jump to that question.

Paul: Yeah, sure. No, and it makes sense. Again, I think that’s one of the great things about being part of this broader ecosystem and an open source ecosystem at that is that we don’t have to solve every problem ourselves, and we don’t have to be everything to everyone. If there’s something that WooCommerce is making that’s not the best fit for your store, then there’s probably at least a half a dozen other ways to skin that cat within the WordPress world.

Entering the ecosystems and finding partnerships

Jonathan: Paul, I love the ecosystem focus, and there’s just a lot of different things that you can draw on there. One of the things that’s been great for me to see over the past year or two is more and more interest in WooCommerce from outside. Whether it’s a SaaS, who maybe they’ve had a Shopify integration and they want to expand, they’re looking at WooCommerce. Whether it’s startups looking to where they can invest. You have this, again, rich background in partnerships. For folks who are new and listening to this and thinking about the WooCommerce space, do you have any broad guidance that you can offer them? What are you looking for in partnerships? Where should they start? What are some good ways to get into the WooCommerce ecosystem?

Paul: That’s a really great question. I think so one is, I’m forgetting the URL off the top of my head, but it’s probably woocommerce.com/partners or something. There’s a landing page and documentation. We have multiple ways of partnering, whether you’re selling within our marketplace, if you’re unfamiliar with the WooCommerce marketplace, it’s an app store for WooCommerce. Or whether you’re a larger company, we have a number of strategic partnerships with folks I mentioned a bunch earlier in payments or shipping or marketing, Facebook, Google. We work very closely with companies like that as well.
So I’d say we tend to want to cast a wide net around those types of integration partnerships. Just acknowledging the idea, again, that we want to be able to offer choices to folks and that there’s rarely one solution that just meets the needs of everybody. So I guess that’s how I would think about that just broadly is if you’re somebody who is making solutions in eCommerce, not even necessarily already for WooCommerce, let’s get in touch and see if we can work together in our marketplace or other ways to connect you more closely to the WooCommerce customer base.

Robert: And maybe folks can connect with Woo at WordCamp Asia.

Paul: That’s right. Yes, we will be there. I’m not sure if I will be there, but we will be there.

Robert: Oh, it’s only a 17-day journey. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got plenty of time to get there.

Jonathan: Actually, it’s been great to see WordCamps for those who haven’t been to a WordCamp yet. It’s a fantastic thing. I’ve been consistently impressed with what WooCommerce has been doing. WordCamp Europe, we had a great presence. There’s a lot of fantastic folks on the Woo team, but it’s been great to see that both embracing of the community and open source. And also what I would describe as ARKA professionalizing more and more, like how do you up the game, how do you bring more of that ecosystem thinking to what is becoming a much more mature platform. So WooCommerce, you’ve had a consistently great presence at WordCamps, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys do at WordCamp Asia.

Paul: Yeah, cool. And certainly we love being part of the WordPress community and representing there and getting to network and meet folks in the community. I think also beyond just the WordPress community, delivering or driving more awareness of WooCommerce externally as well. So having a presence at places like ShopTalk and other larger eCommerce industry events.

A final prediction for what’s coming this next year

Jonathan: Paul, thank you. Really appreciate all the insights and perspective that you’ve shared. Any final thoughts as you’re looking ahead to this next year? Any predictions? Anything that you want to give us before we snapshot this again a year from now?

Paul: I think an easy prediction is that AI will be a major force for really anybody working in software this year, but I think particularly in eCommerce and website publishing, the general WordPress and WooCommerce space, just the idea of augmenting what folks are already doing. Whether that’s on from customer support to generating product imagery, I think there’s an exciting wave and paradigm shift that we’ll see in 2023. But beyond that, I think what’s mostly on my mind is, again, really dramatically improving the pace at which we’re developing WooCommerce and getting to general availability with the number of these new innovations that we have coming. So that is my ask to everybody who is listening in who’s in the developer community around Woo. If you’re not already using some of these new things like blocks or store editing or integrating with high performance order storage, now is the time.

Robert: That’s fantastic. 8% of eCommerce, I would just like to throw 50 at this point. I gave up on the 40s of WordPress. You all carry a lot on your shoulders. And you mentioned much, much earlier about you don’t want to break the internet. So it really is great to hear that you have a measured, paced approach to satisfying everyone from the enterprise down to new open source developers. And really kudos to making that possible because that is an immense amount of work.

Paul: Thank you. Again, we take that responsibility really seriously and are just trying to do our part to help preserve a free and open internet, and a small part within all of that, but still an important part.

Jonathan: Excellent. Well, Paul, thank you for joining us. And for anyone who has any questions, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Paul: Yeah, I’m on Twitter at P-M-A-I-O-R-A-N-A, my first initial and last name, or pm@automatic.com if you want to get in touch over email. I started putting some of my AI image generations on Tumblr if you’re interested in that as well. So I’m reachable in most places. LinkedIn, Facebook. Anyway.

Robert: Oh my goodness. We didn’t even get to how WooCommerce powers all of Tumblr. I’m kidding.

Paul: It does power parts of Tumblr.

Robert: Brilliant.

Jonathan: That’s fantastic. Paul, thank you, as always, for joining us. Have a great 2023, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Paul: You too. Thanks, guys. Always a pleasure. Take care.

Robert: Thank you, Paul.