IconicWP, Prospress Joins Automattic, 7-Star Reviews and More

Brad:
And we are back with another episode of Do the Woo, podcast number 19. And on this episode, you don’t get to see our faces because we’re not doing video, right, Bob?

BobWP:
Right, right. We’re going to hide behind the, I guess hide behind the audio. That’s kind of a weird thing to say, but that’s what we’re doing.

Brad:
Nice. I don’t have to comb my hair, so Sure. Optional. I don’t know. Maybe not, but we’ll leave it to your imagination. But I’m excited to be back. We’ve got some fun topics to talk about. We also got a great guest on today, Mr. James Kemp. James, thanks for joining us.

James:
No problem. Excited to be here.

Brad:
Yeah. Why don’t you tell everyone, anyone that may not be familiar with who you are and what you do, why don’t you give everybody the quick rundown on you and what you do in regards to Woo.

James:
Cool. Yeah, so I run a plugin shop selling premium plugins for WooCommerce, the shop’s called Iconic, and I think currently we have 11 or 12 premium plugins all sold via the iconic wp.com website.

Brad:
Very cool. And I would imagine most people in the WooCommerce space are familiar with some of your products. They’re pretty popular and just kind of going through them, they seem really, they fill a good space, you know what I mean? They’re kind of like these ones, you’re like, of course there needs to be an extension that does that. I was just kind of going through your product listing, but I thought was interesting about your shop and your story, and it’s kind of where you came from when you started selling. And maybe you can kind of fill in some of the details, but I know at one point you’re selling on Code Canyon and was that your primary method of actually starting out to sell plugins or is that just it took off after you got going?

James:
Yeah, no, that’s right. So it was probably 2011. I was working at a company where I am in the UK kind of making WordPress sites, and we just started dabbling in the e-commerce side of things. We tended to use Magento quite a bit.
So at the time I made a plugin that integrated Magento into WordPress and I released it for free. And then I kind of wanted to explore that a bit more and I ended up releasing some premium for that, which yeah, like you say, I chose Code Canyon as the place to sell that because it kind of opened up this audience that I wouldn’t have if I went straight to my own website. And from there I left that company. We started a new company, ran my own agency where we were working with our own clients and kind of shifted more towards the WooCommerce side of things. We kind of progressed through Jigo shop into WooCommerce and picked it up fairly near the beginning of when WooCommerce was becoming a thing. And I just ended up building plugins out of the functionality that our customers were wanting at the time. And I kind of stuck to Code Canyon and I think I probably about half the plugins on my site that you can see now were available on Code Canyon. And I made that transition away from Code Canyon at the beginning of 2017, I think it was.

Brad:
So a couple of years ago.

James:
Yeah, a couple of years.

Brad:
It’s interesting path and one that I’ve actually heard quite a bit around WordPress products where they kind of organically came from client’s work, running an agency or freelancing and building products, plugins, extensions, whatever you want to call them to fill a client need, but then realizing that they’re not the only ones that need this, and many businesses in the product space and WordPress have really started that way.

James:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think it’s a great way to start because it kind of instantly validates the idea of that product. If one person or one business needs it, chances are there’s plenty of other businesses that need it as well.

Brad:
And I really look at that as a win-win, right? If you have an open conversation with your client about it and what you would like to do with that feature you’re building for them, there’s some wins on both sides. There’s wins for you. You have a product that you built for a client, but now you can go out and sell it. There’s wins for your client because more than likely you negotiate maybe a lower rate or give them a bit of a deal or something. But even if you don’t do that, there’s still the understanding that you’re going to sell this. So there’s going to be the expectation of support and keeping the client working even though the client isn’t going to continue to pay for it. So that’s a win on its own even if you’re not giving them a discount.

James:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean that’s how it was always framed. They always knew that I was going to go on to sell it as a premium plugin. And yeah, I mean some of them were happy to just go ahead on that basis. Some of them were given a discount on the understanding that I could sell it and yeah, like you say, they get the knowledge of the fact that this is going to be an ongoing thing. They’re not going to get handed a product and then have to maintain it

Brad:
Themselves.

James:
It is going to be constantly updated and you’re getting funded to

Brad:
Build it. Yeah,

James:
Exactly.

Brad:
I always recommend this for anyone in the agency space or even if you’re just freelancing, if you see some opportunities to build out a product, it’s an easy way to get a product out the door or easier. It’s never easy, especially version one, easier way to get a product out the door. You’ve got some money to back it up. You’ve got a client that you have to build it for anyways. Taking that a little bit extra step of something that’s ready for a client versus something that you want to release publicly. And there are, as you are aware, I’m sure there’s some additional steps to get it public facing and make it nice, presentable. So super cool. I do want to touch on what you mentioned about pulling off a Code Canyon. I had to imagine that was a pretty big decision. It

James:
Was daunting.

Brad:
It may be a tough one. So tell us a little bit about what went into that and where you’re at now if you, I’m hoping you made the right decision, but it looks like you did, but I’d like to hear this

James:
Stuff. Yeah, I mean, I’d been selling on Co Canyon for a good number of years. I guess was it five years or something like that? 2011 to 17. And yeah, it got to a point where I was an elite author, so I’d made a good amount of income from Kenyon, but it got to a point where the sales were kind of stagnating. I was stuck. It was around about three to $4,000 a month at the time. And it was tricky because it was stuck there for a good number of months, if not a year or so, and it was once converted into UK money, it’s just enough to go at it full time.
So there was a decision to be made whether I go all in on this and focus on iconic and get that income up so I can comfortably afford to pay myself or whether I keep it as a side project, which it always was earning a nice bit of side income, and I kind of took the decision to focus on it full time because it’s what I enjoy doing the most. And I felt at the time it was the most rewarding thing. I found it more rewarding than doing client projects because you’re helping hundreds of people with the same product rather than one person who you probably never speak to again.
So yeah, I thought in order to make that jump, I needed to have a few more features in terms of the platform I’m selling with. So obviously on Cove Canyon, the price points were a lot lower, especially back then a lot of my plugins were $16 12, I think 12 to 25 was the kind of range of them, and that was a one-time payment, so you’d pay that and you’d get it for life, which is great for the customer, but not so great for me because you can’t support a product on that price point for life. It’s just not viable. I mean, they did implement the kind of additional support fee that people would pay, but it would be about $3. I think you could extend your support period for six months for $3, which again was a step in the right direction, but it didn’t quite cover what we needed to make this work full time.
On top of that, like I say, the money was a one-time payment, and you’ll notice that a lot of the top plugins at the time were subscription based. It had kind of just started out being that way when I jumped over. And Co Canyon don’t offer a way to do that. It is just one time license and it is what it is. There’s another fact is that they could buy this license one time and they could basically use it on as many sites as they want. So if you’ve got a developer buying it, there’s nothing really stopping them from buying it for one client and then using it on every site they build thereafter. It is in the terms, but there’s nothing to actually stop that from happening.
In theory, it’s a single site license, but that’s not how it worked out most of the time. So I did a bit of research and looked into what I could switch to, how I could sell through my own site and come away from the marketplace. And my options were obviously WooCommerce, which I didn’t go with Easy Digital Downloads was an option, and which is who I did go with, were all kind of the front runners. I looked at FastSpring Paddle, see if you’ve heard of Paddle, which are kind of software fulfillment companies. But yeah, I ended up going with FIUs, and the core reason for that at the time was because they handled the payments. So when someone buys a plugin, freemium are the ones taking the money, which means that they’re the ones that charge VAT according to whichever country the customer’s in. And they also handle the VAT Moss, which is a UK thing or a Europe thing, I guess, where we have to charge VAT for the country that the customer is in within Europe and then pay that country the VAT that we’re charging, which is a bit of a nightmare to deal with.
And it was that particular reason, which led me away from WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads because with both of them, it’s me handling the payments and it’d be me dealing with all the VAT and that kind of stuff. Whereas with Freemiums, they do all the payments, they handle the subscription side of things, they handle the actual deployment of the plugins, the licensing of the plugins, so they’ll dish out the keys that ensure the plugin can be installed on X number of sites and they have great support as well. So that whole system is taken care of and it’s not something that I then have to focus on if something breaks, it’s not on me to fix it. And that takes away a lot of responsibility and frees up a lot of time for me to actually focus on delivering these plugins and making them as good as they can be.

Brad:
Yeah, that’s interesting. And correct me if I’m wrong, but you run iconic solely, it’s you, right? Is that right?

James:
Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. Development wise it’s me. I do have a girl called Gina who does the marketing, but yeah, anyone else that I use is kind of contracting. So I do have a team of two or three people who handle the frontline support, but in terms of developing the plugins and making new plugins and new features and stuff, that’s all me at the moment, although I am hiring. Yeah,

BobWP:
Go ahead, Bob. Oh, I was just going to say, not to divert it, but looking at your plugins, and I know them all too well because I think I’ve written about all of them, so I’ve experienced each one of them. And one of the things I was curious about was the plugins you have on variations, just because I know from how people react on my blog and stuff, variation is a huge pain point. I mean, people really struggle with that one. And I don’t see, I am sure on other platforms and marketplaces, but specifically on WooCommerce, I don’t see a lot of extensions for variations where at the same time it seems like there’s probably a lot of opportunity. I’m just wondering, was that kind of a sweet spot you found? Was that something through client work, you just discovered that you needed to do specific things with it? I am just a little bit more around that piece of it as far as is there a reason why maybe I don’t see as much in the extending variations as I’m sure there’s probably maybe things that have even been on touch but may not necessarily be possible. That makes sense at all?

James:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean a lot of the variation based plugins that I have come from a customer request. So when I was building websites, it’s something that they wanted and yeah, you’ve kind of touched on a good point there. My top selling plugin is WooCommerce show single variations, which is obviously something that people want. And what it does is if you’ve got a product, for example, a t-shirt that comes in red, blue, and green, you can install the plugin and you can tell it to display those individual variations in the catalog. Whereas normally you’d have your kind of core parent product, they’d call it in WooCommerce as one single listing in your catalog, which doesn’t really give your customer the best idea of what’s available. If they were looking for a red T-shirt and they’re presented with this picture of a black t-shirt, they’re probably going to ignore it and just assume that you don’t have that t-shirt in red. So the idea of this variations plugging is that you can kind of hide that parent product if you want to and display each of the variations in place of the parent products instead of one product, you’d have three, for example.
And that came about as a kind of client request. And there’s also a lot of requests for it on the ideas board on the WooCommerce site. And yeah, I think I’m the only one to have built that out, and I can see why, because it’s massively,

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s what I’m kind of thinking. It’s probably not for me, it’s always like, oh, that’d be cool if I do that, and then I pause and think. Yeah, yeah,

James:
Yeah, no, it’s definitely a popular thing. But yeah, I mean I’ve also got, well, I guess a few of my plugins kind of interact with variations. So you’ve got Woo thumbs, which enables multiple images for variations By default in WooCommerce, you can only have one image per variation. So that’s one of the features of that plugin, which is quite a popular feature, is probably one of the top reasons why people buy it alongside adding video to your products and stuff like that. We’ve got the swatches plugin, which turns dropdowns into more attractive select options. So you’ve got your image swatches and your color swatches, and then we’ve got the linked. Yeah, no, it is just got a new feature actually as well where you can add fees to each of the attribute values. So if you’re selling a watch that’s available in silver or gold alongside any other options you’ve got, rather than having to create a variation for each possible option just to change the price, you can say the base price of this product is a hundred dollars. If you choose gold, add $5 to the base price.
So it’s a nice way to ease the load of variations that you might need. And that was released last month actually and had quite a good bit of feedback on that. And then, yeah, I guess the last plugin I’ve got to do variations is my linked variations, which isn’t actually to do with variations at all. It’s quite hard to explain actually. It looks like variations to the customer, but it’s actually just a way of linking separate products together so you get a similar end result to show single variations. My other plugin in that your catalog consists of multiple different variations of a product. So you could have a red, yellow, and green, but they’re actually in the backend separate products. But then when you’re on the product page, you’ve got your links to these other products. It’s similar to how Amazon works in a way. When you click a product variation in Amazon, you get redirected to a different page. So that one is best used if your products have different descriptions to each other. If they’ve all got the same description, then you’re going to get flagged up for duplicate content, which is not ideal. But if they’ve got different enough descriptions, then yeah, that’s definitely the way to go.

BobWP:
The Do the Woo podcast is brought to you by Liquid Web, looking for a top-notch hosting for your WooCommerce site. They have a ton to offer. Plus you’ll get 69% off your first three months of any of their popular WooCommerce plans using the code. Bob WP 69. You can head on over to liquid web.com and a special thanks from Liquid Web as they help us do the move. Now back to the show.

Brad:
So the last question I’ll throw out there, which kind of segues into our topics this week, but when is Automatic going to acquire you?

James:
A couple of weeks, I hope after the first one.

Brad:
Well, you like that, Bob, you like that segue? Yeah. Yeah, that was good. Yeah,

BobWP:
Yeah, put him on the spot and we can still move right into it. Couple of weeks. We’re already

Brad:
Here first,

James:
We’ll see. We’ll see how that goes.

Brad:
Yeah. Yeah, it was definitely cool to hear how you started got into it and some of the decisions you made and see it become very successful. A lot of great products that support a lot of, like you said, a lot of users and a lot of stores and helps make WooCommerce as good as could possibly be. Right. So

James:
Thank you.

BobWP:
Yeah, so speaking of, yeah, we were talking about I’m waiting for Automatic to make an offer on my blog, but that doesn’t come either. So as James and I sit back and wait, one of the things we want to talk about or at least point out is that prosperous, I am sure we all know prosperous very well, does a subscriptions extension has automatic, which for me, hey, it’s great news. It doesn’t surprise me. I take everything with a grain of salt. But yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting to see where that goes. What do you think about it, James?

James:
I think it makes a lot of sense. As I was saying earlier, finding a system that offered subscriptions was a key thing for me, and I would say that is the core reason why they acquired the whole collection of plugins, I would say is purely for the subscription stuff, but then saying that the other products they do are also pretty valuable, but I imagine that their subscription customer base is pretty big. So yeah, looking forward to seeing where that goes. As I understand they’ve acquired the whole team as well.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. It looks like the whole team is going over. What’s your thoughts on it, Brad? Anything insightful?

Brad:
I agree. I think it’s a pretty obvious move. Subscriptions has been the number one WooCommerce extension forever. I don’t know, it feels like, I don’t know what was number one before that, but it’s been number one for as long as I know. So for automatic not to kind of own and control the number one extension, I’m sure they’ve been thinking about this since they first acquired Woo WooCommerce and Woo themes is how do we bring in the more popular extensions under the one roof, right? So it makes a lot of sense. I’ve known Brent for a number of years. I know a number of people on his team. I mean, they’re topnotch. They build topnotch products and services. I’ve always highly respected the stuff they put out. I love the automated testing suite that they have with Robot Ninja for our clients, especially on the support side, having an automated way to test the most important parts of your WooCommerce site. People can buy stuff and can log in. And to be able to do that in an automated fashion after you run an update, it just helps people sleep at night without having to go through that manually every single time you update anything on your site and wonder, did I break checkout? Did I break checkout? It just does it for you.

James:
Yeah, I’ve been meaning to dabble with that myself actually, because

Brad:
It’s super cool.

James:
Every time you do an update on a plugin, it’d be great to just test the different front end flows to check you haven’t knocked something else out.

Brad:
Yeah, it is pretty neat. And if you take your store seriously, that tool or something similar is one you should have just because of the amount of time it saves. Yeah, congrats little prosperous team. I’m looking forward to what’s in their future, but it’s pretty smart move I think on both sides.

BobWP:
And it seems to me, and I’ve never owned, I mean it’s always before this I had our marketing business, but I’ve never owned a larger agency or a company. And I always think that when it comes to acquisitions that even though there’s going to be the right one has to come along, but I can’t imagine, even though I’ve seen people say it, you never say never. I mean, that’s kind of how I’ve always thought is if that perfect opportunity comes along, I don’t think any company would, maybe the largest companies or whatever, but even them would never say, it’s never going to happen to me. And I’m always curious if running an agency like you read or James, and not to put you on the spot or anything, but it’s something you must think about if there was, even if it’s a 1% chance, if that 1% chance every did come along and it was a benefit for you and your team and for everybody around you that it seems like it’d be a no brainer. I dunno, I can’t speak to it because nobody’s tried to acquire me yet. So

James:
No, I definitely, I can see the value in it, especially the actual people behind the products that you rely on to run your business. Them offering to acquire you is a massive thing. You wouldn’t just say no to it because you get their whole knowledge of the whole market basically that can just be pushed into your products and ultimately is going to make them better.

BobWP:
Yeah. Well, cool. So yep, that’s good news. And I know that it’s well deserved for like Brad said, for Brent and his team. One of the things I wanted to, this is it came out, oh, I don’t know, maybe it was a month ago, I can’t remember. I’d have to actually look. Well, my post wouldn’t even reflect on exactly when it came out. A free plugin was put out by Liquid Web and I think Chris Lema tweeted about it once or twice called Better Reviews for WooCommerce. And what it does is a couple of different things extends, of course the basic WooCommerce reviews, but you can rate on product attributes, which I’ll put a link in there as far as that goes. But the other thing was instead of the five star rating, it’s Seven Star. And in the posts I kind of talked a little bit about, I heard a few people saying, oh, what’s with the seven stars? And I’m sure we’ll learn the deeper news from lema one of these days, but how do you look at that seven star approach versus a five star approach? Again, I’m not going to, I’ll put the link in and let people read what I had to say, but do you see any method behind the madness? Let’s put it that way, the madness of seven stars.

Brad:
I mean I guess maybe it’s eye catching, it’s different. My feeling on this is anytime you are, I like the plugin by the way, but anytime you’re trying to change what the norm that people are used to, it could get confusing, especially for novice users. Most people understand a five star rating system. But anything outside of that I think would be weird to the normal, the novice user, and I’m not saying they wouldn’t do it, but it’s like what I always tell clients when they want to do this really edgy state-of-the-art design on their store and I’m like, look, people know how to navigate an online store in a very traditional kind of fashion. Yes, you can push the envelope, but unless you’re someone that’s like a really big name or have a lot of money to experiment and do r and d and AB testing, it’s not necessarily the best idea to change up what people know. And I know this is a much kind of smaller scale than changed up online store navigation or something, but I don’t think it’s bad. I just think it could be confusing to some people.

James:
It could be. Yeah, I mean I think at first people would probably be a bit taken aback by it. You wouldn’t know where you kind of have in mind this rating that you want to give and you might not know where to then place your marker as it were. But then based on what Bob said, it does give you kind of a bit more flexibility. And I think you mentioned four stars is kind of above average, not amazing. It’s kind of in between the two, whereas you’ve got that kind of deeper level of saying it’s way more than above average, but still not the best. I do think it might, I am not sure how many people would give something seven Stars. I think you’d see a lot more six stars than if they were using the five star system. They’d probably give it five stars, but having that extra choice might encourage them to actually give it a lower rating.

Brad:
That’s interesting. Do you remember guys have Netflix when they switch from the five star rating to just a thumbs up or thumbs?

James:
I remember they had a rating

Brad:
And they got rid of it and now it’s just thumbs up or thumbs down, did you like it or not? And a lot of people speculated that the reason they did that was because they didn’t want shows that had a lower rating to turn people away just because, oh, that’s a two and a half or three star. I only watch four and five star stuff. Whereas it might be something they would actually like. But again, it’s speculation, but it does kind of make sense. So

James:
I mean that is how I kind of gauge what I watch on Netflix.

Brad:
I’ll

James:
Look at something and I’ll look up the rating on IMDB or whatever. And

Brad:
Ratings are powerful. I mean, I try not to do this, but I get in the habit of looking at movies and looking at, yeah, IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes or something. They’re like, oh, that’s a 45%, I don’t know about that. And then randomly I watch a movie without checking and be like, oh, I actually enjoyed that movie and I look and it had a terrible rating. And I’m like, I wouldn’t watch that if I knew the rating was that bad, but I enjoyed it. So

James:
Yeah, there’s a bit of psychology behind it as well. If you look on Amazon and there’s a product with full on five star ratings and there’s the same products or slightly different with 4.8 out of five, chances are you go with the 4.8 because it’s more realistic having a product that’s five stars just seems like fake reviews.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting what James was saying about people not doing the seven stars, where you think of the opposite end of things that you have those two stars between it’d be an average and really, really suck. And maybe people wouldn’t, I mean one star when you put one star on a seven star, I mean that’s really, that’s saying something to compared to just having the one star between the two. You have these two stars. You can have a little bit of leeway where it’s like, okay, it sucked, but I’ll give it this or whatever. So I’m going to give it a two star instead. But anyway, very interesting. I guess we could talk about that. And

Brad:
Why not? Nine stars? 10 stars? Yeah. I mean if nothing else that gets your attention like seven stars and it makes you do a double take, like wait, why seven? Then you start taking, I will give him props. I love seeing companies like LiquidWeb and others rolling out products. This is on wordpress.org for free products for WooCommerce and for WordPress in general, putting some of their money and time and resources and improving it. Obviously there’s marketing and stuff that they get out of it, which is great, but it’s contributing back to WordPress, so that’s really cool to see.

James:
Yeah, I mean actually in terms of liquid web, their WooCommerce plans come with all of my plugins.

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s right. Yep, yep. That’s good to mention. And the other part of that plugin, I mean not to get into that whole thing, but the attributes, I did find that attributes interesting that people could actually, if you pulled out, I mean my example, my post wasn’t maybe the best, but I had gone through the process of buying a cat tower or whatever you want to call a cat condo and you’re looking for specific things and being able to pull out and have people rate on specific elements instead of having to read through all
The reviews to try to dig out that information yourself. I think that probably is even more than the seven stars. A lot more helpful. Yeah, I love that. For people looking, that’s huge. It’s a great feature. So anyway, let’s see. So the other thing I pulled, let’s see, what did I pull here? I pulled a little article, very short article, but I thought a couple things were interesting on it. It said Walmart sees 37% sales growth in e-commerce in quarter one. And we every once in a while talk about the bigger picture of e-commerce. And I think the interesting thing I’ve found is that their next day delivery, they feel like that is probably part of the increase in that they actually, Walmart has a plan to reach 75% of the US population with it looks like the next day delivery by the end of the year. That’s pretty phenomenal when you think about it as far as all the rural areas. And I know that rural, of course it’s going to be less population. But yeah, again, very short article. I have a link in there, but I don’t know if there’s any thoughts either one of you have on it as well.

Brad:
I definitely love when these massive companies are competing for our business. This is why competition is good. They’re fighting for next day delivery. That’s what they’re giving us and trying to win this online war. Great. Next day, how about next day will be same day, who’s got that going first? So it’s pretty cool to see that. I think next day delivery, I thought two day, it still blows my mind how they can do two day with the price that they do, but next day even better, it’s cool to see these also target Walmart. Obviously they’re not just going to roll over with Amazon, but they’re really more so than just kind of trying to survive the online space. They’re growing it and they’re competing pretty well with Amazon, which is cool. And I think one of the big reasons, and this is going to be honestly be a struggle for Amazon at least for a while, is they have physical stores.
If I order something from Amazon and I’m a little wishy-washy whether what size to get or if it’s exactly what I want, it’s less of a I’ll just order it and see because now if I don’t want it, the return, I either have to pay UPS to come get it or I have to drop it off and still pay or I can go to Amazon drop off. But there’s not that many of ’em. Even around Philadelphia, the closest one for me is basically going downtown, which is not ideal to drop off an Amazon package where Walmart and Target, they’re everywhere and you can take them back to the store. And Kohl’s too, all these big stores, the fact they have physical buildings while at one point it was like, that’s going away. It’s dying. I think that’s a huge advantage to them. It’s easy to just say, let me order two different sizes. I’ll take the one back but that doesn’t fit and I’m done. Or Amazon, they don’t have that luxury right now or at least it’s not as easy.

James:
Yeah, it’s actually quite different over here.

BobWP:
I was going to ask you that.

James:
Yeah, I mean Amazon, they do actually do same day delivery here. So you could order something in the morning and have it by six in the evening depending on where you are. And they also have quite a few drop off return points and collection points. Walmart isn’t really a thing over here. They own Asda, which is a food supermarket. They do also do home and electronics and things like that as well. But it’s more of a supermarket than whatever Amazon is. I dunno what you in

BobWP:
Everything. So is there actually any, would you consider in that area a competitor in, I mean over where you are in the UK as far as a competitor to Amazon yet? Or is there anybody sneaking up on Amazon?

James:
Not in the same kind of book as Walmart would be? No. I mean personally, I dunno. Maybe I’ve missed some massive company that is competing. But yeah, I use Amazon all the time. With the Prime membership, you get next day delivery included, which I actually think is a massive thing. I would often not buy a product because I have to wait two days to get it. I try and then find a store that sells what I need instead. It tends to be because I need it by the weekend or before I go away. So I do think for e-commerce stores to offer same day or next day delivery is a massive plus point that people will definitely take advantage of. But I don’t think there is any real competitors to Amazon over here.

Brad:
Interesting. Yeah, they’re big.

James:
I’d like to be told differently,

Brad:
We have these dominant, like Walmart and Target, they’ve dominated for years, but Amazon came along and just destroyed everybody online. So now they’re playing catch up, but they’re huge. They’re still huge. Walmart and Target, they’re still massive companies. So it’s good when companies like that at that level compete. Ultimately the consumers win. And that’s what we’re seeing with next day for free. It’s crazy.

BobWP:
And I think I added something on Target too, which of course is in the states here. I didn’t notice, I didn’t catch that. But theirs is going up too, and their surge is driven by curbside grocery pickup. So everybody’s finding their little sweet spot, I guess with the big players.

James:
So what do Target actually sell? We don’t have a target here.

BobWP:
You’d say that similar to

Brad:
Walmart except not. I call ’em a classier Walmart. I mean, yeah, that’s it. One if you want to pay a couple extra dollars and have a better experience, I got to target. Yeah, it’s the same thing, just generic electronics. They have food. I don’t think the food is necessarily as big as Walmart, but they definitely have food. So it’s a big supermarket like Walmart.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah, it is. I’m trying to do an analogy. I can’t even think of one of the Walmarts or something. So I end Walmart. It’s a classier Walmart. Yeah, it is.

Brad:
Alrighty. Well I’m closing out. I guess we’re wrapping up. How

BobWP:
Bob? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that pretty much covered it.

Brad:
Cool. Let’s find it down. That was a great show. Thanks for coming on, James. It was fun to hear the story of iconic. I didn’t say Ionic. Very proud of myself. Really cool to hear about that. And so where could people find you online? You mentioned your website, maybe on Twitter, some other areas people can track you down if they’re interested in seeing what you’re up to and checking out your products.

James:
Yeah, so website iconic wp.com and pretty much any social thing is iconic WP, apart from Instagram, which is iconic WP under because I had issues setting up and every time I typed it in it said it was taken and then it would kind of block it or C Kemp on Twitter. And I’m also in the WooCommerce Slack group, so it’s a good place to come and have a real time chat.

Brad:
There you go. Yeah, again, Bob, we got, where are you going to be? I know you got an announcement around Woos. You want to throw that one out there?

BobWP:
Yeah, just that, I don’t know if you haven’t heard of it, Esh, it was the offshoot around Woo from Word ESH that just recently happened and Brian Richards and Patrick Rawlin put this together. WooCommerce, I think it actually this last time took the place of the W Comp. They decided not to do that anymore and then they moved everything online I think just for the availability where everybody could attend it as well. So that’s been announced for October 9th and 10th. So I would say go to ish.com, you can get updated and learn more about that, but it was pretty successful last year, so I am really looking forward to it. And as it gets closer, I’m sure we’ll have Patrick and Brian on to talk a bit more about it.

Brad:
Yeah, looking forward to that. I know a lot of sessions going on. Word sesh was last week. A lot of good chats or presentations, topics covered. You haven’t checked that out. You should. I believe they’re making the presentations available online. I know they’re all recorded so you can go back and watch it. You’re a leisure, but by and large it look like a pretty successful event. So congratulations to everybody involved. And then finally we have our liquid web promo, which is 69% off, three months of Woo managed hosting at Liquid Web. Just use the code, Bob, WP 69 and get 69% off. And as James, you mentioned that your plugins are available over there, is that right?

James:
They’re indeed, yeah. And any plugin I add in the future will be ported over there as well, which I do actually have a new plugin coming out next week for Cross-Sell and it’s going to be good.

You can get some of James’ Amazing products over there for WooCommerce. Take it to the next level. Anything else Bob? Nope, I think that’ll do it. Alright, I think

BobWP:
We are good to go.

Brad:
Thank you for listening to do the Woo, episode 19 and we’ll see you on the next show. Thanks

BobWP:
Guys. Bye.