The Journey Behind Building Better Ecommerce Products

Jonathan: Hey Eran, how are you today?

Eran: I’m good. How are you Jonathan?

Jonathan: I am excellent. It’s starting to get a little bit colder in this part of the world. How about where you’re at?

Eran: I’m in Thailand, so it’s very hot. Actually it’s a very rainy month now. So it’s hot, humid and rainy, but I don’t complain.

Jonathan: So WordCamp Asia is going to be in Thailand in February. You think it’s going to be about the same type of weather?

Eran: I’m not sure. It’s going to be in Bangkok and I’m not in Bangkok, but I’ll come and check it out.

When WordPress came onto the radar

Jonathan: Excellent. I’m looking forward to it as well. It’ll be my first time to Thailand and where I’m at right now, it’s icy and snowy, so that’ll be a very different contrast. So Eran you’ve been in the WordPress and WooCommerce community for a long time. When did WordPress first come on your radar? How did you first learn about WordPress?

Eran: It started at 2009, started a few eCommerce websites with Magento and I was looking for ways to create a blog for Magento and the Magento blog was not so good so I installed WordPress and then I found myself with two installations. One for the eCommerce, which was Magento, and one for WooCommerce. And I bumped into WooCommerce, decided to move everything from Magento to WooCommerce. At the point where I started, it was still WooThemes and they great themes and I liked their designs and I liked their eCommerce solution. It wasn’t perfect, but I decided to consolidate all my eCommerce and content websites into WooCommerce website. So-

Jonathan: You had a Magento. So first you start out with Magento. Magento has always been a pretty big solution. You might have told us the clue there, but what convinced you to make the switch? Was it about having the content together or why did you make the move?

Eran: I’m not the developer and when I started working on and developing my websites, I learned by myself everything and Magento was very technical. And sometimes it went on down and for a day I couldn’t bring it up again. So it was a little bit too technical for me. And I went for the easiest solution that was WooCommerce and that was much more intuitive and much more built for people like me that are not developers. I call myself more integrator than a developer. I know how to code, but I’m not a pure developer.

Jonathan: So WooCommerce, which was WooThemes at the time, it sounds like it came on the radar at about the same time that WordPress did. Did I hear that right? So basically you started using WordPress and WooThemes together at the same time.

Eran: Exactly.

Jonathan: Cool. So I’m curious, so 2009, that’s quite early in the WooThemes WooCommerce journey. It sounds like you started out using it for your own projects.

Eran: In 2009 I started my own eCommerce websites. Started being as a merchant and I was building my own website. So WooCommerce was the easy solution and at the beginning I started just doing the work for my own. It was the first website, then another two, so I managed as a one-man show three websites built on WooCommerce. First on Magento and then on WooCommerce. And I was very excited about WooCommerce, keeping up to date about what’s going on in the platform and I continue developing my own websites. But at a certain point I realized that I’m more attracted to the product to WooCommerce creating an eCommerce solution that can work for you. Then I shifted my business around 2015 to be more an agency and we built other eCommerce solutions for companies and big online stores. And around 2018 I started posting plugins to the wordpress.org.

Jonathan: So I’m curious, going back to the transition, a couple of years you did the stores yourself. I’ve heard this a few times from different folks where that’s a fairly common.  You start out doing stores yourself and then something switches where you find that you’re more interested in the product. What do you think that was for you? Why did helping other merchants become more interesting than just growing your own stores?

Helping other stores and building a product vs. growing his own store

Eran: Because I’m not a merchant in my nature and I was attracted to building the websites. And the thing about WooCommerce that I felt it, and I feel it until today sometimes, is that most of the businesses are focused on the front end. And I was as a one-man show that I needed to run three stores on my own. So I was very also focused on the backend on managing the website, processing orders, managing the orders, working with shipment, doing fulfillment, working with shipping carriers, working with Amazon.

I had stores on Amazon so I needed to integrate everything into WooCommerce. And I always looked at WooCommerce as my source of an eCommerce solution. That was my base for all the eCommerce operations and I tried to integrate everything and all the orders from other channels and everything into the backend of WooCommerce. And that’s the things that are more interesting for me. The backend managing, operating the eCommerce store. So I was more attracted to that and that’s why I started doing more backend work.

Jonathan: It sounds like there’s the problem solving piece to it. So you have the stores yourself, you’re focused on the integrations, figuring all the pieces out. And it sounds like you had an advantage because you were working on multiple stores at the same time, which gives you different perspectives. So you then started doing the agency work, which I’m guessing that was more service-oriented at first where you’re just helping other folks.And then in the process, how did product development first come into the radar there? Because the service, you’re using existing stuff and beginning to just customize it for clients. Where did the idea of making your own products come in?

Eran: The idea came from using a lot of WooCommerce plugins that did not fit or that they sold half of the solution or that they required a lot of code snippets in order to work good and the way I wanted them to work. And at that point I realized that I want to do things better and I want to do things differently. And then we started at around 2018. At the beginning of 2018 I hired my first employee in India. An Indian guy that I met on a trip on a micro freelance platform. We started working together and we started building the team. We develop things for customers and imported some of the plugins of WooCommerce for the customers and we decided to start submitting the plugins through wordpress.org so everybody can enjoy them.

Jonathan: So I’m curious about the entrepreneurial decision because you’re describing a pretty natural progression. You’re helping clients, you’re finding products that aren’t working as well as they could be. So you get those ideas. I think a lot of folks can relate to that where they’ll see, oh man, it would be better if it’s this. But you made a decision there. The decision to hire the first employee and begin going that direction. Was that an easy decision? Was that a natural progression? Did you find that difficult? What was that like?

Eran: It was quite natural and because I was still working as an agency and I could support myself and additional employees through the work as an agency. And in parallel we started developing the plugins. So we started developing more advanced plugins. At the beginning it was private plugins for customers. Then we realized that we can add options and settings and wrap them as a plugin that would fit everyone.

I was never thinking of myself as entrepreneur in the classic way. I did this business to support myself, to be able to … I’m a digital nomad, so I wanted the lifestyle of the digital nomad and to be independent and that’s how it all started. I didn’t make money in the first years hardly just to survive. Minimal wage. It was my freedom and that what was important for me at that point. And I was drawn into this business. I never thought that I would have 15 employees. It’s currently the situation and I’m just going with the flow. My first company Zorem. And Zorem means flow and equal. So I flow. It was unintentionally.

What it’s like going with the flow

Jonathan: So I love that idea of going with the flow. I’m curious, if you look back. So 2018, it sounds like that’s when you began to crank up the dial on the product side of things, right? You’re like, “Okay, we’re going to do more of this product stuff.” It’s still though a natural progression. You’re going with the flow.

For you as an entrepreneur, because that’s what you are. If you look at the classic profile, you’re building a business. There is risk associated. You now have 15 employees that you’re responsible for. Has there been anything that you’ve found especially difficult about this experience? Yeah, let’s ask that first. You’re describing going with the flow, which is, I think, a great way to approach life. What’s difficult about it?

Eran: I think that the most difficult thing was to create a system. One is to work with the guys remotely, always. And also to create a system. We started as it was me and two developers. So it’s like the Wild West. We do whatever we want. And suddenly when you grow and you have more developers, so you have to create the system, you have to create procedures, you have to create a lot of automations, a lot of development environments, security. And you have to motivate them all the time as well to be part of the business. And it’s a little bit hard when you’re far away from your employees.

So at 2019 I decided to go to India to visit them and to meet them. I was there since then I think at least six, seven times. And I think that’s the secret of my business is the personal relationship with the employees. We know each other. The way we work, we work a lot with Loom. We do a lot of sessions, video sessions online during the day. Now we have new offices, so we have a meeting room so we’re starting meetings and doing them with a few people at the same time.

And I took my employees a few times to company vacation, company retreats. So we have a very, very good vibes and when I come to the office it always gives a boost to everyone. I live with them when I’m there so it’s totally different life than anything that we know in the west.

Jonathan: You might have just answered my last question on this opening topic, but I’m curious about, so you described some of the challenges of building a system. Because it’s remote, there’s all these things that you’re having to figure out. What have you enjoyed most about this whole experience? There’s a lot of things you could pick from, it sounds like.

Eran: I love visiting them. The hospitality, the culture. As I said, it’s totally different than anything I knew before and when I came to India I just fell in love with them, with their families. I stay with them. The hospitality is the thing I like most.

Jonathan: That’s one of the things that really stands out to me too from my experience in WordPress and just the community as a whole is it’s interesting how technology can give us this chance to connect with people that we might not have had the chance to a obviously otherwise. And that’s really cool.

What is TrackShip

So you’ve grown. You did a number of things. So you started out with Zorem. You had these plugins. Your focus today on a business called TrackShip. Tell us who is TrackShip for. We know it’s in the WooCommerce space, but who is it for and what problem are you trying to solve with it?

Eran: One of the first plug-ins that I submitted to wordpress.org was Advanced Shipment Docking, ASD. And I remember we got to 100 active installs and we did a party, everyone together. And then 200, 300, 1000. It took some time. We didn’t expect that so I submitted the plugin just as a trial, let the people use it. And then we got so many response and a lot of support requests and feature requests and stuff and we developed the product more, the plugin. We added more features.
And at the certain point I remember that I was using FBA and working with FBA in the past and I remembered all the shipment statuses.

Jonathan: What’s FBA? For those who wouldn’t know.

Eran: For payment by Amazon. So I used to work with Amazon and send my products to Amazon and fulfill them from Amazon and then they would give me very detailed tracking and I could know where are the shipments at any point and as well as my customers. But there was no such thing for WooCommerce. So basically that shipment tracking lets store owners to fulfill the orders, to add the tracking information and communicate the tracking information with the customer.

But once the customer gets the email with the tracking information, they click and they go to USPS, UPS, DHL, whatever shipping carrier the merchant used in order to ship the product. And from the shipping point, when you fulfill orders, it’s a black box. So most merchants don’t know anything about the package, the order, the shipments and the order, what’s the status, unless they will go and click on the link and go through the shipping carrier websites as well.

I identified that some companies provide this solution and some shipping carriers provide the SMS notification, but it’s like a black box. And I wanted to bring the black box into the WooCommerce admin and to create a platform and to allow any merchant to have the last mile step of the fulfillment workflow and to be able to control and own the data and control the customer experience post purchase, to see everything and to know where the shipments are at all times, to get the legal confirmation. To be able to keep his customers coming to his website instead of sending them to third parties. And also many of the merchants are using a few shipping carriers or that they use a few different fulfillment providers or that they drop ship some of the products.

So we wanted to give the same consistent customer experience to be able to allow merchants to further engage the customers after the shipping.

Jonathan: So I love that engagement point. Here’s what I’m curious about. What you’re describing makes a lot of sense in hindsight where the question is almost like, yeah, why wasn’t that already a thing? It makes sense to give a more integrated … Now, I’m curious because of your agency background and because of what you’d seen as a merchant, I’m imagining that there were multiple problems that you saw that you could have worked on. Is that fair to say? Was shipping the only thing that you thought about or were there other things that you considered?

Eran: No, no. I’m thinking all the time and I’m working on a few other projects in parallel in Zorem. So the idea was at a certain point was to split Zorem and TrackShip. TrackShip is a spinoff. Now it has its own company. So TrackShip and Zorem are the big brand. And in Zorem we’re thinking about so many things these days and new developments and there are so many new opportunities in the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem.

Jonathan: What I’m curious about is how did you decide? So you got that first 100 installs and as you described it sounds like it did more than you were expecting. More people resonated with it. Because when you put something out there, it’s like you don’t know sometimes. How did you decide to invest more in it? Was it just a go with the flow type of experience where you saw people liked it and you did it? Or was there a point where you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to consciously put more into this and see where it goes.” How was that?

Eran: The point was that at the beginning I was looking for ways to provide better service with ASD and that was before we launched the premium version of it. And I was thinking what I can do and which features and which functionality I can add in order to attract customers to get more of my products. And then I wanted to do an integration. So the simple thing was to do an integration with shipment tracking platforms. Just do the integration. But when I looked into this platforms, they all were taking the merchants to their platform, to a different dashboard.

Then I said that I want to create something like that but inside WordPress. Inside the WooCommerce admin. Something that will be embedded, will work seamlessly with the WooCommerce order flow, that the merchants will not have to go to any other platform or to any other dashboard in order to manage their orders. That’s where the idea for TrackShip game. At the beginning, I went to other companies that do the shipment tracking and the automated shipment tracking. I just took them and I said I’m going to do something like that. And I called my lead developer and I told them, “We’re going to be something like that for WordPress.” And that’s how it started.

Thanks to our new Pod Friend Avalara

The SaaS component

Jonathan: So you started out as a plugin. So there’s a software as a service component to TrackShip now, right?

Eran: Yes.

Jonathan: It works together. Because on the one hand you’re wanting all this experience and the flow to be inside of WordPress, WooCommerce. on the other, there are things that need to be done to fetch all the information and process it. So to me this is a good example of a really logical SaaS and WordPress combination. It sounds like that was probably just the only obvious way you could see to solve it, right? If you’re going to integrate with all the other third parties, you have to have some way of processing. It needs to be consistent. Because if I’m guessing right, these third parties probably make changes to their APIs and their processes. That’s something that you probably have to stay on top of.

Eran: Yes, of course. That was one idea. At the beginning we thought about, okay, let’s ping to the shipping carriers, phone book commerce every two hours, three hours, four hours based and check the shipment status from the store with the plugin. But then it was not scalable.

So what we decided to do is some kind of an hybrid model. So we have a plugin and the plugin is setting up the email notifications, the tracking page, everything. All the functionality of the tracking experience is inside WooCommerce. The emails are being sent the same as the transactional emails. The tracking page is hosted on the store. Everything is fully customizable and you can personalize every aspect of the emails and the tracking page. On the tracking page you can use any page in there and you can add any information, add upsells. We have also an idea to create a blog for the tracking page, for Gutenberg and for maybe Elementor or other page readers.

Jonathan: I’m curious, have you built software as a service before or is this the first time you’ve done that?

Eran: It was the first time and we are WooCommerce people. So we built the entire platform on top of WordPress and WooCommerce and we’re still using WooCommerce, the subscription plugin in order to manage the subscriptions. We needed to change a little bit there and to modify and to tweak a little bit so it will work with the usage-based subscriptions because the WooCommerce plugin, the subscription plugin is working based on the dates on the current monthly, yearly. So we needed to add the usage element because on TrackShip would charge by the usage based on the number of shipments. So we needed to tweak WooCommerce, but we still use a lot of resources and plugins from WordPress. WordPress plugins to manage the platform.

Dividing time between agency and products

Jonathan: So you’ve had quite the arc. Starting out as a merchant, doing the agency things, products. And you’ve got lots of ideas. You’re focusing. Of all the product focus, is TrackShip most of your focus right now? Because you have mentioned the other things that you’re working on as well. Where do you tend to focus your time?

Eran: Right now it’s around 50 to 60% of my time. The rest of the time goes to Zorem, but I plan to move my focus more and more to TrackShip because I prefer the SaaS model on the plugins model.

Making mistakes

Jonathan: Good. So for other folks listening, are there any lessons that stand out to you from your experience? You’ve gone through a lot. You’ve seen a lot over the years. Have you made any mistakes at all?

Eran: I make mistakes every day. There is no single day that I’m not doing mistakes, but I’m laughing at my mistakes as well. And it’s trial and error. This entire business is trial and error. We have no marketing so far. The marketing that we do is the support. So when we do good support, we listen to the customers, we know which features they want, we know what are the pain points that they have with using our plugins. We know which other plugins or platforms we need to create integration or compatibility. But mistakes I do every day and from the mistakes I’m learning.

Jonathan: So one of the things I like to think about, because I feel the same, we learn from mistakes. I like to avoid mistakes where I can. And one of the ways that I do that is to see what I can learn from others. Sometimes someone can tell me something but I still have to make the mistake anyway. I’m curious, in your experience, were there any shortcuts that you took? Were there any things that you were able to learn from what you saw others do? You know that you’re going to make mistakes. How did you minimize them?

Eran: Planning. That’s the number one way to avoid mistakes. So when we plan stuff ahead and we do wireframes and organize design documents, then we do less mistakes. But I don’t think I can avoid the mistakes and I think that the mistakes, it’s my compass. It helps me to grow and to get more mature with the order.

Jonathan: It’s interesting, this idea of planning, is that in contrast at all to this idea of going with the flow? If the philosophy is a go with the flow, how do you avoid being too rigid in your plans?

Eran: I don’t do long-term plans. So I never looked at this business as a startup that I need to think what I’m going to be five years from now. I’m taking it step by step.

Jonathan: It’s sounds like a lot of folks I talk to, I think it’s pretty easy as humans for us to feel afraid of making mistakes. Do you feel that? Are you worried about making mistakes? Why do you think that is?

Eran: Because mistake is the nature of people, of life. If we don’t do mistake, we don’t learn. So I try to avoid doing mistakes, but I don’t look at it as avoiding [inaudible 00:25:49] doing mistakes during the day-to-day. For example, I will not publish any plugin or I will not submit any plugin or any update for a plugin on Friday nights or Thursday nights. Because I did this mistakes in the past and then I have to deal the entire weekend with angry customers or users. There is no way to really avoid mistakes.

Jonathan: So on the one hand I agree. It makes sense. We learn through effort, through trial, figuring things out. There’s something also about risk taking because when you put something out there, you’re taking some risks. You don’t know what’s going to happen. As you think about your experience, because you’ve been through a lot, you’ve seen a lot, you’ve made a lot of mistakes. One of the things that stands out to me is that because you’ve been customer-focused, that’s, that acts as a North Star of sorts where it’s like, “Hey, we’re here to help the customers. We’re going to listen to them, we’re going to solve problems for them.” It sounds like that helps you course correct and stay on track with what you’re trying to do. Are there any other, I guess, pieces of advice or guidance that you’d offer to other folks who are trying to build businesses in WooCommerce?

Focus on that niche

Eran: One is focus on your stuff. You can do everything in WordPress. You just need to find a good niche and be the best in this niche. When you build the product, don’t just build it and stop. Improve it every day. Listen to the customers, creators. First of all, build it in the highest standards so it’ll pass any code review everywhere. And compatibility and integration.

So the compatibility, it’s the most important thing in WordPress and in WooCommerce. Plugins. And that’s the bigger thing, the decentralization of the plugin developers you can all it. There are many plugin developers so you have to develop many plugins. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. So I would advise first of all, go with the highest security plugin and the coding standards and create as many compatibilities as possible. So I say that if you build the plug in the right way, it will not have a lot of conflict with other plugins.

And the second one is to focus on SaaS and less on WordPress plugins, with all my love to WordPress plugins. But as I see it, there are so many advantages for SaaS products. You can go out of the WordPress ecosystem at a certain point if you want. For example, with TrackShip now we have a Shopify integration and we’re working on a cloud platform that will allow to do everything on TrackShip. So then it will fit any CMS when you work on a SaaS platform. So always think about how you can take your plugin and make it a SaaS.

Jonathan: I want to reference a point here because I’m all in on WordPress. I love WordPress. I want to continue to see it grow. And you have the same. I’ve noticed that the more we’re conscious of working with other ecosystems, the better we are in WordPress. You mentioned your experience with Fulfillment by Amazon, which gave you ideas that you were able to bring into WooCommerce.

I recall going to WooCommerce meetups for instance. When someone says that they’re going to do something with Shopify, I’m like, “That’s great.” In the end, I want WooCommerce, I want WordPress to win as an open source ecosystem. And we do so by facilitating that exchange between our ecosystems. By being able to look and say, “Hey, what is Shopify doing? What’s Magento doing over here? How do we make stuff better?” So I’m glad that you brought that up because I see people sometimes just like, “Oh, we have to just stay in WordPress the whole time.”

I’m like, “No, have a great WordPress experience. And the more that you connect to other ecosystems, the more good you’re actually doing for our ecosystem here in WordPress because you’re facilitating more connection between these different ecosystems. So I’m glad you brought that up because I think that’s important.

Eran: Yes, I totally agree with that. I’m a WooCommerce person. I always worked on WooCommerce. If you ask me what’s better, WooCommerce or Shopify, I will always say WooCommerce. But you cannot ignore the other platforms and if you can provide the same service to other platforms.

Putting systems in place

Jonathan: One more point I wanted to bring up. You mentioned your experience early on in creating systems. Can you say any more about that? I think for some people that comes more naturally than for others and so it was interesting for me to hear you’re someone who has a go with the flow mentality, yet you’ve also recognized the importance of creating systems and processes. Do you have any guidance to offer? Especially for folks who are newer. Maybe they’ve been growing, but they don’t have a lot of systems and process in place. Any guidance that you’d have to offer on how to start? Where do you focus your energy? Because I can see that being overwhelming for some people.

Eran: What comes in mind are the tools that we’re working with. So I mentioned before, I’m working with Loom. It’s a great tool that I started working with just for showing my guys on the screen what they need to do or what I wanted to do and to make it easier for them to understand. And now we started using it in the support system as well, sending customer Loom videos.

So if you create a good system that everybody knows, I’ll do a call. The video can save a lot of typing and a lot of time going back-and-forth with your employees or with your customers. So we’re using Loom a lot. We use Slack for the communication inside the team. We use a lot of Slack automations now with the tracking API and the tracking engine with extensive moderation and a lot of things that are going directly to Slack automations. We work with ClickUp for managing the tasks and the projects.

Jonathan: Bob is a big fan of ClickUp. Bob uses it for all the do the Woo stuff behind the scenes.

Eran: Yeah, cool. It’s a very nice task management system. Of course everything goes to Git. Everything is very organized. So when any plugin is going, there is an update. Everything goes to Git first, everything goes through a code review. We created the code review the same as in woocommerce.com and in wordpress.org, which are different code reviews.

And not to avoid writing. Write everything, document everything. I’m working really hard with my team that they will document that, they will learn how to write documents themself if it’s a design document. But we always stop from the design document and then we can take the documentation based on that.

So I always tell my developers that they need to write things like they explain it to somebody that doesn’t understand WordPress and it doesn’t understand anything. And I think that most of our products were built in that way of thinking. We’re thinking about the end customer, our customer, which is the merchant that not necessarily has any technical knowledge. So we try to make the plugins and the platform as intuitive as possible and no calls.

Jonathan: Yep. Well one of the things that I’m curious about is you’re building a business. You have a team now, there’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of moving parts. Especially when you’re decentralized and working remotely, you have to have ways of doing things. Here’s how we handle support, here’s how we handle the product roadmap, here’s how we handle sales, here’s how we handle partnerships. And each one of those is going to have steps and multiple things that needs to get done.

And at least what I found useful is this idea of saying, okay, let’s figure out what matters the most to our business right now. What has the biggest impact? Rather than try to figure out everything. Because there’s so much documentation to write, there’s so many things that are always happening, there’s so many things that you could focus on. And to just start with what makes the biggest impact.
I’m curious, it sounds like that’s what you’ve basically done because you’ve gone with the flow where you’ve needed it. I’ve just seen some people who get overwhelmed and they’re like, “Ah, there’s too much. I can’t document it all. I can’t do anything.” And then they don’t.

Eran: Yes, but whatever if we don’t document, so we need to document in the future. Right now, when we’re developing something, we’re starting with building the design document and that will be a base for the documentation because I realize that it’s the most important thing. We developed so many features in the last few years that we just didn’t tell anyone about them. We just told the one customer that asked it or the 10 customer that asked for the feature.

So when you’re not planning; and when I say plan, it’s in that sense. When you’re not planning and you’re just releasing features … And that’s how we worked so far. We’re trying to change that. So if you work on things and document and add them to your website and maintain your documentation and your business, that’s the key, I think, for success.

Jonathan: Well Eran, congratulations on all the progress that you’ve made so far. It’s really cool to see the journey. It’s been cool to watch you and the business grow. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next couple of years bring. There’ll probably be more mistakes and there’ll be more progress.

For anyone who’s interested in connecting with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Eran: So I’m not the most active person on social media, but they can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Facebook, Eran Shor everywhere. And I will be happy to connect with anyone.

Jonathan: Awesome, Eran. Thanks for your time and we’ll see you next time.

Eran: Thank you for hosting me.