Well this week, WooCommerce sent out both 6.5 RC and RC 2, which is slated for next week, May 10th. Also WordPress 6.0 RC one came out. So it was just a week of release candidates. The common element here is test, test, test, test, test. You know what I’m talking about
Now this week, instead of a more focused commentary, there were quite a few things that I came across and thought were worth talking about.
More WooCommerce plugins, more crypto
Now, crypto, Web3 or however you wanna label it. I know there’s some people that, you know, don’t really particularly listen to too much around crypto, but it is here. And it’s a reality. I saw someone on Post Status Slack. They had released a new plugin and were asking if other teams are doing products in integrations around the Web3 space and WooCommerce. And it dawned on me at that moment that I’m constantly seeing new stuff pop out consistently. We’ve had a few podcasts that mentioned it, and we had the one that’s even a bit more focused on it with Christopher Carfi from Unlock Protocol. I see all this stuff come out, I really haven’t been keeping track of it all because it’s constantly coming out and to give you just an idea
For example, in that Slack thread, two new products were shared. One was from Betterwp.co, a decentralized payment gateway for WooCommerce. And he said that their team is close to wrapping that one up version one will be some more future integrations. So that was one example I saw. And then that was followed up by Brian Henry, who is also working on a WooCommerce Bitcoin gateway.
And then I happened to see a press release about the WordPress plugin Crypto Checkout and its new support of HODL.
Why am I even mentioning this? As you can see with very little effort, I discovered two new products and an upgrade. Now just imagine what would happen if I made an extra effort to seek these out? Anyway, I’m thinking this answers the question about what is being built out there, both inside and outside of the Post Status community. And I think we’re just gonna keep seeing more and more of it.
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That’s a lot of Woo in search
On another front, WooCommerce and search results. Now, my friend, Alex Denning, he’s been busy over at Get Ellipses and they’ve published their latest analysis on WordPress and WooCommerce search volumes.
They are seeing over there. Alex has put out a few of these reports and they’re always quite insightful, and they’re very in depth. The report is titled, well, 105,495,450 searches for WordPress terms in the last 12 months, up 7.5% year-on-year, and at a glance. if you go there, you’ll see that WordPress keyword are up 7.4% year-on-year with WooCommerce taking the lead at 12%. Now this data is showing double growth for WooCommerce year-on-year. When looking at quarter four of last year’s Woo’s growth was 7%. So we are looking at close to double. There were some other cool stats you might want to check out in the same study, including the larger WordPress search results, and some of the CPC for Google ads and their increase, which was at 563%.
But having recently dropped to a closer level before that huge jump. So obviously, you know, the more people that advertise in the eCommerce space or WordPress or whatever, the more competition the rates are going up anyway, do check that one out. It’s a very interesting article.
90% of all eCommerce sites fail?
Now, speaking of notable percentages, So perusing Twitter, trying to find something interesting, it pops out at me and I saw a tweet from James Roland via Perfect Checkout. The graphic shared this. 807 billion of eCommerce revenue was generated in 2021. Now Amazon took 50% of that as their share. Then the last thing was 95% of merchants fail in their first three months. The comments were few at the time, and mostly were aimed at Amazon explaining this was the reason they have left or quite prime.
But one person did ask about that 95%. And James explained that this was a Shopify statistic that was mentioned deep in an earnings report and quoted in several different places. Now I’m guessing he meant it was specifically for Shopify because he then added 90% for all eCommerce failures in one year. So a little bit lower. I really wish I could say exactly where Woo finds itself in these figuresfigures, aside from what we maybe know personally or have seen, but maybe I’ll dig deeper into that. In another show.
Those risky third-party things that help us lose millions
Another article I came across as I was looking for some random eCommerce, there was an eCommerce times article titled third party risk could cost eCommerce sites millions. Now right off the bat, I thought, okay, this is a slam dunk on Woo and WordPress extensions, plugins, and all that good third party stuff.
Interestingly enough, it was an assessment on the broader eCommerce space, which of course makes sense, because any business you run is based on some kind of third party app or maybe third party humans. But seriously, the only reason I bring this up is since we all know this is an issue in many ways, buried in the article was one single quote that mentioned commerce.
Website size can influence how susceptible it is to third-party risk, too. “Small sites that are based on open-source software such as WooCommerce / WordPress, CS-Cart, or PrestaShop face different problems than the large commercial sites,” said Brian Martin, vice president of vulnerability intelligence at Risk Based Security, a Flashpoint company.
Now that stood out to me because they said small sites. And when they said small sites, of course they mentioned open source. And I’m not sure if they were inferring that WooCommerce and WordPress is only capable of small sites.
Whatever the case, they seem to be pigeonholing WordPress as so many of these larger tech news sites do.
A recap of DTW
That was on Thursday. We had Remkus de Vries on talking about his latest shift in dev life. Now I’ve known Remkus for several years and at fault his journey. And several years ago, he was suffering burnout from running his agency and shifted to joining the team at Yoast. And eventually at Boltserve, which according to him, he spent many happy years doing what was best for him at that particular time in his life. But as he shared in the show, he started listening to his own voice and that was leading him back to rebooting his agency. Well, one thing led to another and I won’t spoil anymore of the juicy parts, but I recommend this as one you might wanna listen to because I’m sure a lot of you can relate to what he has gone through and the changes he’s made.
