What is a WooCommerce Builder and a Look at the Opportunities

BobWP:
Hey everybody, Bob WP here, and we are back with Do the Woo, episode 83, and with my concerted effort to keep Woo perspectives alive and to keep Mendel from falling asleep, I am asking my co-host to come back and join me for my next expedition into this special episode every other Tuesday, which I’m hoping will now be every other Tuesday. It’s been something I’ve been working on a bit. And yeah, we’ll see what goes on, but I can always get these three to come and talk about something. And we got something to talk about, and that is the state of the Do the Woo Builder. I dunno, that sounds very, very whatever, but I’ll tell you a little bit more about that. First sponsors PayPal, want to thank PayPal, buy now, pay later. Couple great options there for you paying for. There are other buy now, pay later. Check it out,

Mendel:
Bob. I’ve set up my second site with their Buy Now, pay later. It’s amazing. It takes like 20 seconds. It’s incredible. It’s incredible. And the new plugin, I can’t, can’t underscore enough how the new plugin on woocommerce.com for PayPal allows you to one click, hook up your PayPal account with your WooCommerce site. Hey, I don’t even work for PayPal, but I’m just telling you because it’s

BobWP:
Awesome. Yeah, cool. Alrighty. Well, yeah, all it takes is a checkout PayPal checkout extension over on woocommerce.com. So get it on your client sites and get it on your own site.

Mendel:
Do it. Yeah, just do it.

BobWP:
Mendel said it. I mean, if

Mendel:
I say it then yeah, it’s good for you.

BobWP:
Yeah, really

Jonathan:
What I love about what PayPal’s doing in general is they’ve been in this space for a long time, who has done some work with PayPal in the past. It can be easy though to forget that they’ve continued to work and make new things and improve it. So this has been some great effort. It’s great to see the plugin being kept up to date, new features coming into it. I’d love to see more people building on top of it as well, finding ways to integrate into their own plug and work. So it’s been great to see their support of the ecosystem and yeah, it’s awesome. Keep it up.

BobWP:
Cool. Alrighty. And then of course, woocommerce.com is the other sponsor where the PayPal extension resides in the marketplace, so you can get that at the marketplace. You can get a lot of other cool extensions at the marketplace. One of these days I’ll have an extension on the marketplace. Yeah,

Mendel:
Right. Wait, can I say something? I’m just going to say something about the marketplace too. People think that the plugins on the marketplace are a little expensive, and the truth is they’re cheap because the amount of power and features that these plugins pack into your website, and this is crazy, the amount of reputation that is conferred trust that is conferred onto these plugins from being on the WooCommerce. Do I just trust everything that I download from the woocommerce.com website because they’re awesome plugins. I’ve never gone wrong with one plugin on the marketplace, so I just wanted to give props to woocommerce.com too. Normally I’m like, oh, PayPal is so cool, but you should totally check out the plugins. And there are some free ones too, by the way. There are free ones there, but the paid ones, there’re steel for what you get. They’re awesome.

BobWP:
Cool. Well, Mendel, why don’t you go for it here. Now we’re going to talk about, you are on a roll here, and I want to, he

Brad:
Woke up quick, didn’t he?

BobWP:
Yeah, I want him to get that buzz, keep that buzz going there. And so WooCommerce builders, that’s what we’re all about here. And like I said, I’m going to be a year down the road, I’m going to come out with the state of the do the WOO builders and what that will look like will depend on the next 12 months. So what are we looking at? What are these builders? Who are these builders? I know each one of you has a different perception of what builders are, and you’ve heard a lot of guests talk about ’em and they are builders themselves. So Mendel, why don’t you on a roll while we have you awake and you’re going for it, let’s take

Mendel:
On it.

BobWP:
Yeah,

Mendel:
I didn’t expect that. Yeah, I just talk off the cuff. It’s my thing. What’s a builder, builder, creator, developer, designer. They’re all subsets of builders. I think generally when we talk about a site builder, that’s a person that puts all the components together, maybe they borrow from other places, other places that are willing to give not bit torrance of plugins that are normally paid and then you’re getting them none of that shady stuff, but it’s people that are taking component parts and they’re making something for either themselves or somebody else. I think it’s important to note that anybody can be a builder, then you have specialties.

Jonathan:
I think about the builder ecosystem, this is part of what’s interesting about WordPress and WOO generally is that it is fairly blurred. A lot of people who are succeeding with WordPress, succeeding with WOO are getting in there and doing things themselves. And so by that, it’s like they’re building. When I think about the ecosystem, especially with the type of folks that I know hang out with, do the Woo, it’s people who tend to be building on behalf of store owners, either through service or through plugins and services around that ecosystem. There’s usually more of a scale component to it. I am sure that we have folks in this community that just do it for themselves, but most of them seem to be focused on either providing service or plugins products for people who run in their own stores.

BobWP:
How about you, Brad? Because you’re a builder talking about builders.

Brad:
I am a builder. Yeah, I mean, I guess initially when you think about builders, someone puts a store together and supports that store, maybe the default, or at least for a lot of people, I think the default thought of what that means as a coder or a developer. And I think it’s a similar situation with people that build WordPress sites too. If you say, Hey, I build sites with WordPress, is your immediate reaction, oh, they must be like a developer or coder, or are they someone that is more of a power user, expert level user that can install extensions and plugins, activate them, configure them, and really get the shop running, the store running without code. And really it’s both, right? There isn’t a right answer. It’s
From an agency perspective, we’re generally working on larger e-commerce sites, so most likely there’s going to be some kind of custom code or custom functionality that they have hired us because we’re an agency that specializes in stuff. But that’s again, beyond what probably the average WooCommerce store has to do, where they’re just putting the components together, the PayPal extensions, the merchant, the shipping, all of that good stuff to have a perfectly capable running store that can make millions of dollars without writing one single line of code. And you can do a lot in WooCommerce without writing code a lot. So I think it’s important to just keep that in mind that builder is a very, there’s a wide range of people that fit into that description and that category.

Jonathan:
The thing that I’m curious about a lot of things, but especially right now, I think it’s easy to look past the significance of how much growth this WooCommerce ecosystem has experienced in just the past year. Thanks to Covid. Thanks. No thanks. But there is a lot of growth happening in the e-commerce ecosystem as a whole and certainly in Woo. And it can be easy for, I think for some of us who’ve just been in here a long time to not really notice just how many new people are coming into this ecosystem, which is fantastic. And the thing that I’m curious about is to just understand more about the size and shape of the ecosystem as a whole. I think there’s a lot more people doing stuff with Wu today than we realize, and that’s kind of where my curiosity has been recently. I see a lot of growth. I see people coming in, I see the questions that people are asking, and that’s all really good. It’s very aligned with the broader mission of Woo and what we’re trying to do. But then there’s this bigger question of how well are we supporting that growth as a community and are we providing places where people can learn mean? The intent is there, but I think sometimes it’s easy because we’re all busy just doing things to miss just how much growth is actually happening around us.

Mendel:
So I want to get back to that, but I want to cap something off with the whole definition of the builder. And I just want to mention that a lot of the times people that are called builders are not necessarily given as much street cred as developers. And I think it’s important to note that anybody that puts virtual pen to paper and creates something on the web, especially something that’s as custom as a WordPress or a WooCommerce website, there’s a great deal of learning and skill and acumen that comes with that. Maybe just even some intuition and a little bit of luck sometimes. But sticking with it and building something and creating and learning the architecture and learning the terms, what a plugin is, it is not an app or what a theme is, it’s not a template. Well, all that stuff, I think it is super important to just remind people that are building, that’s a big accomplishment. And if you’re a business owner or if you’re trying to do it professionally, and I think sometimes those skill sets are discounted because somebody says, well, you can’t get into the PHP of the issue and fix it, right? Or I can’t believe you don’t know CSS to fix a little button thing. And I think it’s important to realize that everybody is doing something remarkable by building.

New Speaker:
I like that point a lot. And I think it’s also worth adding. It’s a continuum as well. People who start out that way. I mean, that’s

Jonathan:
How I got my start. There’s a lot of the code stuff I just didn’t know at the early days. But because there’s a community, people willing to teach you, and if you’re curious and want to learn, you can learn so much. Someone who’s just doing the most basic of assembly work today can end up doing that for clients that can then lead to creating plugins. There’s a whole path there. It’s easy to forget that for those of us who’ve been here a long time, but you got to start somewhere.

Brad:
I think just kind of circling back to what you said, Jonathan, about the growth, which kind of tees up on the point you just made, the growth that we’re seeing because of the pandemic directly, that’s not going to stop. I think even five, 10 years from now when this is all behind us, hopefully, I think any new business, any startup business, like a brick and mortar type of shop, I think they’re going to, they should at least be thinking online first. And then how does our brick and mortar support that? Because God forbid another pandemic comes, what are they going to do? There’s so many shops and stuff affected that we’re not ready for that, that they literally had to stop business completely for months and months and months while they tried to scramble and figure out how can we get online and restaurants, same thing now, most restaurants, there’s a lot of good services out there.
They can tap into Uber Eats or GrubHub or something. But for actual mom and pop shops that are selling physical goods, yes, there are some platforms, but WooCommerce is right up there as a really great competitor and option for people. So I expect it to continue to grow and even beyond once we’re past this pandemic and back to whatever the new normal looks like, because I think everything will be online first mentality of what if this happens again? Are we going to be ready versus being reactive to that situation. So I think this is a great, if you’re not in WooCommerce or not in online or e-commerce, I think this is a great opportunity to get in there, start learning, start building, because people ask all the time, where should I want to get started in WordPress or I want to start a company, or I want to start doing this professionally. Where do I start? We used to say themes. Yeah, do themes and that got saturated and then we’re like plugins. Yeah, plugins. Then that’s saturated. Now it’s like, okay, what’s the next niche that’s really taken off? I mean, it’s WooCommerce, so

Mendel:
If

Brad:
You really want to get into this market now, I think this is the prime opportunity to really be digging into WooCommerce and set yourself up because there’s going to be a lot of work in the foreseeable future.

BobWP:
Let’s talk about that a little bit because that’s exactly what I was going to ask before Brad even brought that up. Is this going to be long-term? Is this going to be a continuation? Are the, I mean the three of you and having talked, I mean we hear this from our guests and in your own work, any specific opportunities you see that have emerged right now that are going to probably be grown upon and it’s going to expand and it’s not just because of the situation right now. And generically, you’ve kind of mentioned that already, but is there any specific opportunities? I’m kind of putting you on the spot here, but I’m trying to pick out somewhere. I think what’s good for anybody listening is to understand what’s kind of got some staying power now. I mean, we’ve got the generic thing, it’s got staying power, but is there anything within the industry that specifically that has a bit more staying power that you see?

Mendel:
I want to talk about Home Depot and Target and Pottery Barn, and these things don’t, to my knowledge, they don’t run on WooCommerce, but you start to see trends in the marketplace that indicate that things are headed in a new direction, or maybe not a new direction, but an accelerated direction. And so what I’m talking about is when you all of a sudden see more self checkouts at Home Depot and they’re starting to really up their game with their in-store availability calculations, or when you go to a place, I think it’s Pottery Barn where you go to check out and they’re actually checking you out on their own website or you go to order food from a local business and they have a super sophisticated online ordering system on their own website, how did that stuff happen and how did that happen so quickly? Well, it wasn’t there the first week of the pandemic, but innovators are always going to innovate.
And so a lot of organizations, if you look around the internet, they’ve accelerated their plans to bring more stuff online to create more integration, to do better real-time availability, checks of products to streamline the way they drop ship or the way they warehouse to get things in people’s hands as quickly as possible. All of these things are happening and there’s like a hundred more or a thousand more attributes that have accelerated over time. And so I think looking at what’s happening in the marketplace and then translating that to the need that there’s going to be in WooCommerce, this isn’t just a, oh, themes are going to be something that’s important or plugins or something that’s going to be important. Why don’t you create a plugin that does this? I think this is full solution sets and a lot of them are going to end up being headless and a lot of them are going to be translatable to other applications, e-commerce applications or point of sale systems or integrations with other people’s inventory systems and things like that. So I think we’re seeing an acceleration. I don’t think this is any different. It’s like seeing Star Trek and you’re like, wouldn’t it be cool if we had self-driving cars and things that fly and stuff like that, and then a pandemic hits and you’re like, oh, actually, you know what? Let’s throw everything into self-driving cars. Then nobody has to get in a car with somebody, and all of a sudden I have a self-driving car that you can pay me to use. It’s accelerated people’s hopes and dreams for new interesting technology.

New Speaker:
So you asked about the opportunity, Bob,

Jonathan:
When I think about, let’s just take WooCommerce specifically. I feel like we’re just barely getting started at this point. When you look at the size, just the overall sense of opportunity, and there’s a few ways that you can look at this. One, you take the built width data, if I’m recalling this correctly, at least as of now, woo has more total stores than any of the other platforms, but yet we’re significantly smaller from a few different perspectives. And yet you look at how much momentum is there already in this ecosystem. And when I think about the future of WordPress broadly, my sense is that Woo is where most of the growth and this broader e-commerce movement is where a lot of the growth potential for WordPress actually is. But when I look at Woo specifically, there’s something about the mission focus and this thing that’s beyond the software.
When you think about this mission of democratizing commerce, and I spend my time in community talking with folks about that, and I am surprised, oftentimes, happily surprised at just how much depth there is to that and how much resonance there is with that. And the way that you carry out that mission. It’s not just the software, it’s also how we educate people about e-commerce broadly. And in the same way that WordPress, the movement in WordPress educated people about publishing broadly, and there’s so much that’s been built on top of that, there’s the education component, and there’s also this broader community of folks who, the best way that I know to articulate is because of the open source nature of WooCommerce and WordPress, people who buy into it have this sense of ownership that’s sticky. And I’ve seen this over and over again where people will start with, woo, start with WordPress.
They’re in this open source and you can’t really get ’em away. They’ll use other things, but there’s something about this sense of why would I give up what I can own? And the reverse is also true. Some of these proprietary platforms do a great job of driving in the numbers and getting people in. They spend so much money on marketing and they’re crushing us in terms of that sort of awareness thing. A lot of people just don’t even know that we was an option. But when they find out, I see people coming over all the time from these proprietary platforms where they’re like, yeah, that was great to get started, but now I kind of know what I want. And I value that sense of ownership and flexibility and they keep coming back in. And I think unless you really pay attention, it’s very easy to miss just how much momentum is slowly but surely building away. And for me, that means there’s opportunity, tremendous amounts of opportunity.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s no doubt we’re seeing the growth. So the niche, I guess WooCommerce is the niche. If we drill in even further, I’ll make a bold prediction around restaurants. I mentioned it a minute ago, but if you think about it, I saw this in my local area. You guys probably saw this as well, but when the pandemic hit everything shut down, and a lot of our favorite local restaurants did not deliver, and we would go to them on occasion and that’s why we liked them, and it was fine. We didn’t need ’em to deliver. But when the pandemic hit, that became a barrier, right? It’s like, am I going to leave my house just to go pick up food? Especially at the beginning of this thing when everything was like nobody really knew what was going on. That wasn’t an option for a lot of people, for good reasons, so rightly so.
All these local restaurants tried, scrambling, figured out how can we offer delivery? And they ended up on GrubHub or Uber Eats or some other service like that, which is fine. It got ’em delivering quickly. But as we all know, the fees and the amount of money they lose by using those services are pretty significant. And for restaurants and stuff that have pretty thin margins, that can be tough. So they got ’em on there. It got ’em kind of probably treading water and hopefully keeping the doors open. But I think what we’re going to start seeing is them saying, look, this isn’t going away. So we either stick with these platforms or we start trying to figure out how to do this in a more cost effective way, which is launching our own site, maybe WooCommerce. Hopefully WooCommerce people can order on there and they manage it themselves, and then they cut out that middleman, they cut out those extra fees, and after they’ve done the GrubHub and Uber Eats for a while, they can calculate the cost of that and they can project that out and say, okay, for us to continue to do this, it’s going to cost a hundred thousand dollars a year that is leaving our pocket because we have to pay GrubHub for the service.
But what if we took half of that money and launched our own site that had everything that we need? And then over the period of, however, six months, a year, whatever, we’ll recoup that investment. It’s going to end up being some fairly simple math for a lot of these restaurants. And I think the ones that are eager to really find more profit everywhere they can and to help their bottom line, they’re going to start looking at alternatives. And the best alternative is to be able to host their own site where people can order online and get delivery. So it’s a bold prediction, but I really think we’re going to start seeing that starting next year because they’re trying to figure this out now as we’re, it looks like clearly things are getting worse. What’s going to happen in the next few months? We might be back in the same position where six or seven months ago where it’s all delivery. And that’s really it. A

New Speaker:
Quick point on that, I think the difference that at least I’m observing is this difference between renting versus owning. For a lot of folks, it makes sense to start renting, like rent a proprietary platform that’s going to provide something for you. It just kind of works. But over time, both for the profit reason and also just autonomy and flexibility, you need something more custom for your needs. As the business is growing, then we’re finding more and more people are like, yeah, I want to own this. And that’s where open source really plays to its strength.

Mendel:
Yeah, I think there’s also a brand recognition component here, which is kind of hard to deny. Everybody’s sort of GrubHub or Yelp or Uber Eats. These are services that everybody has probably interacted with if they’re on the internet and they’re looking at purchasing anything from a local business or looking up an address. There’s been a lot of talk about incumbent technologies, technologies that are going to displace WooCommerce as the defacto place to get a custom e-commerce site for a small business or even WordPress, and I’m not going to name ’em for fear of the trolls will come after me. And then there are other technologies too. Blockchain people are like, yeah, let’s do blockchain’s awesome, which is, yes, great. But I think it’s important to realize that WooCommerce and WordPress are here to stay for the foreseeable future because there’s so much brand equity that’s been built by the popularity of WordPress and WooCommerce.
And so as we see other organizations try to get involved in e-commerce, I totally agree with Brad that it’s going to be the super easy, easily recognized companies that are already providing some sort of service to a small business like Yelp, then doing Yelp online ordering or online reservations or a brand like WooCommerce, accepting more and more, not accepting, but powering more and more small businesses. The question is, where do those things start to converge? Where do innovative people that are developing on top of WooCommerce say, Hey, we want to make it super easy for you as a small business to get started, and it’s not going to take you trying to figure out where to get your hosting and where to get your domain name and how to set up your payment processor and how to do your abandon carts and how to do your follow-ups and how to send people into an email list so that you can then remarket your weekly specials to them. When somebody figures that out, that’s going to be huge. And honestly, it’d be so cool if a company like Yelp would say, Hey, you know what? Actually we’re going to build WooCommerce into our platform. We’ll help you get set up. We’ll stream everything into your site, and then it’ll be whatever. But when you solve that problem, then WooCommerce is going to skyrocket. I think

BobWP:
Thanks to our sponsor, PayPal, in time for the holiday season, PayPal has launched a new pay later option called Pay in four. This means that your clients can offer their customers the option to purchase over time in four interest free payments. This feature is one of two options from PayPal for pay later with the other being PayPal credit, which gives dork customers more purchasing power through flexible and transparent choices in how and when they pay this. The second option is subject to consumer credit approval. Offering these payment options is good business. Did you know that 64% of consumers surveyed say they’re more likely to make a purchase at a retailer that offers interest free payment options? And 56% of consumers that responded agree that they prefer to pay a purchase back in installments rather than use a credit card? Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. Clients can grow their sales and get paid upfront with no additional risk or cost. All you need to do is download the PayPal checkout extension on the marketplace@woocommerce.com. Just head on over, click Marketplace and search for the PayPal checkout. Suggesting that to your clients will certainly open up sales opportunities for them thanks to PayPal for being a community sponsor for Do the Woo. And now let’s head back on over to the conversation.

Brad:
I mean, it’s like the wordpress.com, dot org, like two sides of the house. Do you want the hosted, everything’s kind of set up for you don’t have to worry about a lot of the configuration or bells and whistles, it’s all there. Or do you want to take the other approach that is going to be more time investment, maybe more cost investment if you have to hire somebody, host it yourself, but then sky’s the limit on what you can do? It’s like how far, and for many small businesses, that hosted solution is ideal, and that’s why they end up on things like Shopify or something else because you fill out some forms, you click a few buttons and boom, you have a store. But at some point, if you’re trying to continue to customize that or take it certain links, you’re going to end up running into a wall where there’s only so far you can go with those customizations.

Jonathan:
So I feel pretty strongly about where a specific opportunity is. One of the challenges that these proprietary platforms have is because they have so much scale to them, it becomes hard. You have to find the common denominator, the path for the majority, which means that over time you tend to lessen the amount of flexibility you have to curb autonomy. There’s only so much you can do there because of scale. And they’ll say things like, yeah, and we found the best checkout approach. We’ve done this and that, and there’s some truth to it for a majority. I would also argue that there’s also a general lowering of the common denominator, but where I think the opportunity is, let’s just take WooCommerce for a moment. What I would love to see, it’s important to have big players in the space just having great overall hosting. I would love to see more focus on specific markets.
For instance, someone who says, I’m going to create a hosting service for WooCommerce, and not even think about it as hosting, but a hosted solution for restaurants in Philadelphia. I don’t know, something very specific where they do things like solve the local delivery problem, they solve the payments infrastructure, they solve some logistics stuff. They sort of really lean into the space and say, we’re going to go after a particular market and then just take care of it for them, and we’re going to do it on open source technology, which gives our customers a certain freedom that if they wanted to leave at some point they could. Even if we don’t talk about it like that. But I think that’s where there’s a lot of opportunities. These more vertical plays, like these specific markets where they’re not competing with the big hosting companies. They’re going after a specific audience with a specific set of problems to solve, and using open source technology to put together a really compelling offering that brings it together for them.
I’m seeing a bit more of this. I think there’s a lot more opportunity in this space to say, take this audience and their e-commerce needs. Let’s build something for them, but let’s not go out and build some new SaaS from scratch. Let’s use open source technology and this great ecosystem that we can leverage and put pieces together and then ideally contribute back to it as well. That’s ideal if you’re a part of this ecosystem. But I think there’s a lot of opportunity there, and I am just waiting to see, I see a little signs of it, but not nearly as much as I think the market would happily embrace.

Mendel:
If you create something like that and build it to the lowest common denominator though, it is just better than if you were to have done it on a closed source platform, right? Because I mean, what you can essentially do is create a paired down experience, something that is more friendly to the business and then say, by the way, underneath the hood is everything you need to get more complex over time. And so building something on top of that, I always wondered why a company like Squarespace didn’t just say, actually, we’re building this all on top of WordPress.

Jonathan:
I know I want the same.

Mendel:
And then, oh, yeah, you want somebody to help you expand it. Awesome. You want new functionality, great. Here’s a list of all of our supported engineers or whatever. But everybody, there are some people that just want closed platforms. It’s difficult to migrate from these places, which means they capture the revenue. Whether that’s a winning proposition over time,

Jonathan:
I think it’s shorter term thinking because it works. It clearly works. But I think it can be easy from the outside in to say, okay, these platforms are clearly dominating because you look at the dollars and you look at just what’s public about it, but it’s easy to miss just how much momentum there is in open source.

Brad:
Well, and you look at those platforms, compare something like Shopify to WooCommerce or it’s tough because WooCommerce being open source community driven in a sense, up against something like Shopify that I’m seeing commercials on TV every day for. And the fact that WooCommerce is still the dominant player is really, really impressive because you’re up against a marketing machine essentially. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think WooCommerce specifically has had any commercials on TV that I’m aware of. So it’s been a lot of word of mouth, a lot of online stuff obviously. But the fact that it still owns the market and it’s up against things that have massive marketing budgets and media budgets and things like that speaks volumes to the platform. If it wasn’t good, it wouldn’t be anywhere

New Speaker:
Near the top. It also speaks volumes to the builder ecosystem. When I think about where adoption comes in,

Jonathan:
And this is what something I’d love to understand more, but look, as I’ve had the privilege of talking to builders, I’m working on this, the Woo experts program and things for Woo, there’s a tremendous amount of depth there, and builders are willing to work with the different platforms, but they recognize the flexibility that comes with using open source and the autonomy there. There’s just, I think that’s a big part of all this. You have these builders, these folks who feel a sense of ownership in this platform and ecosystem. You can use WooCommerce and WooCommerce Inc. Not see a penny for it, whereas you can’t do that with these proprietary platforms. There’s going to be a tax, there’s going to be something there. And with Woo, it’s like, we would love to see you use our services, but you don’t have to. And there’s something about that that I think people that allows people to have that sense of legitimate ownership, they can do what they want with it. And at least in my experience so far, I’d love to understand more of it. I find people who build on Woo tend to be very evangelistic even about it. They’ll do what clients are asking, but they’re like, Hey, you should also think about this. And anyway, that’s something I’d love to understand more. But I think that’s another big aspect to not be discounted.

Mendel:
The branding exercise is really kind of funny when you think about it because the whole reason you market a brand is to create affinity.

BobWP:
And

Mendel:
That affinity is emotional affinity. That’s the whole purpose of branding or marketing a brand. And with WooCommerce, the community has emotional affinity to the platform, to the concept of open source to other people within the community, to their local community. There’s a lot of emotional affinity. And so I would actually say that it’s surprising that WooCommerce isn’t more, doesn’t have more market share, and it will eventually, right? But the headwind is the advertisements, the headwind is the brand marketing of these other companies
Because they’re trying to peel off the emotional attachment that people have to something truly unique, which is a built by community for community product that people can make money using. And so I think it’s fascinating. Sometimes people are like, ah, man, these big branding dollars, all this stuff, it’s only as good as what you believe. And if what you believe in is equal access to information and the open source way, it’s really hard to break somebody of, you have to say to yourself, you know what? Screw open source and screw all the ideals behind it. I hope nobody ever picks off that soundbite and just plays it by itself.

BobWP:
No, I have an idea here.

Mendel:
But you have to get somebody to say, I don’t care about this stuff. That’s so awesome. Please let me come be a part of your closed ecosystem that much better. And that is super hard to do, super hard to do. So they are going to spend lots of money, whoever the brand is, they’re going to spend lots of money trying to make that happen.

New Speaker:
I remember one of my favorite stories, this was a couple of years ago, I had a friend of mine who had this whole story built on Woo. And I tried to convince him to move to Shopify

Jonathan:
Because he had had some frustration with some things not working or whatever else, and I was just short term. I was like, look at the comparison here that some of these problems would just kind of go away. And he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. It’s like, no, I’m not going to do it. And then I ended up talking to him again about this last year and to unpack it a bit more, and it’s that sense of ownership. Why would you want to, yes, it’s a mess sometimes. Yes, it’s frustrating, but it was his. And yes, I find the same once you’re in, it’s hard for practical reasons. I don’t, at our WooCommerce meetups, I tell people, you’re welcome. Whatever you’re using, if you’re using Shopify, we’re talking about e-commerce, you’re welcome here. What I know in the back of my mind and what tends to happen is that people will get started. I’m like, do what works for you. Get up and running. At the end of the day though, a lot of those people are coming back into woo. And those who are in don’t tend to leave.

Brad:
And what’s the guy in the back that raises his hand and say, what about Zen Cartt?

Mendel:
Get out, Jonathan. It’s really funny to hear that anecdote because my brother, I’ve been doing his website, well websites for quite some time, and as I learn new techniques, he gets them and I upgrade and he demands, and he’s a business owner, he’s also a family member, and we all know what it is to do work for family member businesses. And so he came to me recently and he said, Hey, I need another website. I said, I said, that’s cool. I don’t have a whole lot of time for a sixth website, but what if you were to go check out a store builder? And so I went and I found Weebly or something like that, whatever the best one that I could find that was managed. And I’m like, you’re going to have a dedicated person to call. They’re going to answer the phone twenty four seven.
It’s going to be amazing. And he’s like, yeah, I don’t really buy it. You just copy this thing and then put a different theme on it and it’ll be all good. And so I finally got him working on it, and I swear to you, it was like a day later he starts working and he goes, I can’t do this thing. And I’m like, okay, well, I guess you can’t do that thing, but you have all this opportunity to do it yourself rather than to have me do it with you. And he is like, yeah, this sucks. He’s like, let’s just go back to WooCommerce. And I’m like, it’s easier for him. His products are going to be on there quicker. They’re going to look better, not because of WooCommerce, but just because I’m the guy that does it and he whatever, and he’s just not about it. He’s like, the second I tell him that I’m going to just build it in WooCommerce, he’s going to be like, okay, that’s amazing. I can log in. I can do that. I can do this. What about SEO? All under his control when it’s WooCommerce. So I

BobWP:
Feel you. There is one thing I want to just ask you or get your thoughts on before we, because I know we’re going into probably towards the end, but this is a little bit different. Going back to the bigger ecosystem and builders, especially the opportunities and the new builders getting into it is going beyond the technical part of things. Do you feel that the advantage for builders now, especially with these small mom and pop and I live in a very small beach community, and these people probably freaking out about doing websites, and I think they get past the hump of you convincing them that, yes, I’ll build you a site. Yes, I’ll pay you. And then they get to the point where they say, my God, I’m on the web now and I’m competing against. They start thinking about Amazon and Walmart or whatever, especially these retailers, there’s got to be an advantage here that those builders can take on because one is that store already has customers, a loyal base that has been coming in, and secondly, that loyal base that maybe wasn’t so much into ordering online and wanted to come in has now adapted to that quite well through this whole process and realizing that they can order online, it’s a lot easier and maybe sometimes they might even prefer it now that seems like another plus that maybe helps the builder in the beginning to say, Hey, we can build this thing, but also look at what you have at your fingertips already as far as your regular customers, and don’t look out there to start stressing about how am I going to compete with everybody else because I’m entering it maybe a little late.
Or they’ll feel like, oh, I’m finally getting on the web. Is that something that is important for them to keep in mind and to actually structure around the actual sales of the site?

Jonathan:
What I’ve seen, what I’ve really enjoyed seeing happen more and more in the WooCommerce community broadly, is this focus that shifting towards more of teaching business thinking, or we’re talking about marketing, we’re talking about serving specific audiences, finding problems to solve. And when you start thinking like that, then you’re able to start thinking about, okay, yeah, so I’m offline right now. I have people who’ve been serving me here. That’s still my audience. It’s the people in this community who care about the things that I’m selling. All that I’m really doing is changing the way that I serve them by bringing technology into the mix. And I think that’s where the focus should be. And I think that’s where so much more growth opportunity is going to be unlocked is when we focus more on that higher level business thinking. And I think a lot of that, I’d say it’s more incidental with WordPress, but I think that’s been a lot of that growth is that publishing focus where people are like, I want that autonomy to be able to create things, put them online, whatever I want.
And entire businesses and industries have been built around that. And now with commerce, I think the more that we shift that narrative in this ecosystem to helping these store owners realize that all that we’re doing is it’s the same principles. If you had a successful store, the same principles apply here. You had an audience that you served, you were solving a problem for them, and now we’re just bringing technology into the mix to help you do that more effectively in a way that you couldn’t as readily before. And the technology is there. Yeah, it’s not all just like you have to put things together and we have a fantastic builder ecosystem that’ll help you do that. And then on the other side of that, you’ll own it. It’s yours. And I’m seeing that narrative shift a bit more, and I think that’s fantastic, and we’re going to just see a lot more traction in the future as people realize that, okay, it’s not about the tech that’s important, but this is really about good business practices and focusing on an audience and providing value for them.

Brad:
I mean, the idea of competing on the online basically against anybody, whether it’s Amazon, target or even local, smaller local shops as well. Yeah, that’s a, but also it’s a pro. Now you’re gone from a local shop that only people in your area could buy from to potentially the entire world if you want. So I think that the pros clearly outweigh the cons because you just expanded your potential customer really as wide as you want it, right? If you want to go international or not. But you, you’ve done that by having an online store. So I think the biggest thing is just say the pros clearly outweigh the cons of having a store online. You need to have a store online. You can sell 24 7. Your local customers are still going to be there. Whether they come into your store or they order online, they’ll probably actually, the idea that you have an online option at this point, given the things that are going on, and honestly, don’t look at Amazon and some of these platforms as competitors look at ’em as a potential new revenue stream, right?
Yes, Amazon’s going to take a cut, but you made a sale that you probably otherwise wouldn’t have made. So just getting, having something like WooCommerce and then doing easy integrations, which there’s a number of different ways you can do that are very easy and automated to push your products to Amazon, maybe to eBay, to some other marketplaces. It just brings in additional revenue streams. So I think the small mom and pop shops, it’s only upside when you get bigger. There could definitely be more downside. But for the local places, they just need to get online, in my opinion,

Mendel:
Plus 1000 for the whole distribution channel aspect of Amazon and eBay and Sears and Walmart and all these places. If you’re not using them as distribution channels, then you’re leaving money on the table because people are going to come to your website. People are also going to go to those places and never come to your website. I would say that the way we looked at the web like five years ago was mobile first. I don’t know if you all remember. I’m sure you do, but everything was mobile first. Mobile first, mobile first. Do you have a mobile website? Oh, is your mobile website the same as your regular website? Now you got to get rid of the mdot, right? There was that whole mdot thing, and now we’re saying, Hey, let’s make designs that are collapsible, that aren’t, whatever. So that’s evolved. Evolved. And now I would say if you’re a small business, you should think commerce first.
So when you’re looking at your website, there is absolutely no reason that I shouldn’t be able to either book a reservation or pay for your goods and services and pick them up in your store or pick them up online. It is the cost of doing business. It’s something that customers come to expect. They will spend more and they will still shop at your local business. To be honest, if one of your customers stops coming into your store and all they’re doing is ordering online, you have a customer for far longer and far more money than you’re going to have if they can only buy from you when they can make it into your store. And this gets more pronounced as you get into bigger cities like la, New York, places like that. If you have to fight traffic, forget about it. If you can purchase something online and pick it up at your convenience at the store, and you don’t have to wait in line, I do it all the time so that I don’t have to wait in line for a reservation or something like that. I just think you’re going to make more money.

Brad:
Wait you ever getting a long line at Starbucks? And then go on the mobile app, place your order at the back of the line, and then just pass everybody and go pick up your coffee.

Mendel:
I made a,

Brad:
I know you have Mendel.

Mendel:
I made somebody super angry once I was at this really nice restaurant, and I walked in and I was like, I’d like a table. And they’re like, we don’t have any tables. And I walked out, I went onto one of the reservation things and I booked a table. I walked back in literally five minutes later and I said, Hey, I have a reservation. And they’re like, we don’t have any tables. I said, well, let me book online. And they looked at it and they’re like, oh, you do have a reservation? And they gave me the table. It was crazy. It was crazy, right? But there’s different allocations. So anyway, that’s amazing. It just works.

BobWP:
Well. This is how this podcast, I always have this wonderful idea of the direction it goes and it goes in that direction and beyond. And I think that’s what I like about this. And I definitely am going to pursue this and keep this a regular thing. And I could bring these three co-hosts in every other week and we just go with them. But I’m sure I’ll find some other people interested too. So

Mendel:
Wait, Bob, that’s a good opportunity for a call out. If there’s anybody listening, everybody listening that has an opinion, and since you’re a part of this ecosystem, we know you have an opinion that is true. WooCommerce opinion. Yeah. Woo. Let’s hear it. Yeah, e-commerce. Anything about e-commerce, small business. Get ahold of Bob. Bob, how do they get ahold of you?

BobWP:
You know how go to do the w.io or heck, they can just look Bob Wp, say his

Mendel:
Name. Forget that. What’s an email address?

BobWP:
Yeah, email Bob wp@dothewoo.io.

Mendel:
Okay. Send an email there. Blow him up with spam, tell him your opinions and then tell him you want to be on the show. Let’s do it.

BobWP:
Forward everything to my coordinator. Mendel, I get,

Mendel:
Sorry, my email’s broken. Busy building commerce sites. I don’t know

BobWP:
All. Alrighty. Well cool. Yeah, let’s do this. And I was going to talk a little bit about the site, but just go check it out. There’s plenty of time to talk about that. You just go and follow the track over to do the w io and want to thank PayPal and WooCommerce once again. And I want to thank my cohost for putting up with me an extra day of the week. Just go around real quick and tell people where they can connect with you, Mendel.

Mendel:
Alright. You can connect with me on Twitter at, if you will it. You can also check out the company that I work for that pays for me to be a hooligan on this show, nexus.net. It’s N-E-X-C-S s.net.

Brad:
Cool, Brad? Sure. You can find me. Company’s web dev studios.com. You can help you out if you need it. And I’m on Twitter quite a bit. Williams ba

BobWP:
Jonathan,

Jonathan:
I’m on Twitter at Sir Jonathan, and I’m always interested in ways to support the broader WooCommerce community. If you want to start a meetup, I’m the guy to talk to. I’d love to see more meetups happening.

BobWP:
Do it. Alrighty. Alright, that’s it everybody. Hope you return for our regular, do the Woo and these episodes scattered throughout the woo perspectives. And until next time, do the woo from the gang here. See you.