AI, Adaptability, and the Future of WooCommerce, Insights

Gigi:
Good morning, Steve. How are you?

Steve:
I’m well, Gigi, and yourself?

Gigi:
Doing well too, thank you. So, for this podcast, let me introduce myself. I am Gigi JK. I run an eCommerce engineering company.

Steve:
And I am Steve Tamulewicz with eCreations out of Phoenix, Arizona. Also a WordPress and WooCommerce platform engineer as well.

Gigi:
Alright, so a little bit more about my company. We are a WooCommerce certified agency. However, we have expertise in multiple eCommerce platforms, and we differentiate ourselves from most of the other agencies by being an eCommerce engineering company. The reason why is that, for us, eCommerce is like a car rally, and in order to win the race, you need a great driving team—that’s your marketing agency—and then you need a great hardcore engineering team to figure out what the right car engineering you need to have and what the right gears it should have. That’s where Virtina comes in. I started as a software engineering company, Virtina. Then we saw this need in the marketplace for a good software engineering company, just like a good car engineering company. There was a need for a great eCommerce engineering company. So we shifted the focus from being a software engineering company to an eCommerce engineering company. The last point is, 90%—no, 98%—of my clients are small to medium-sized businesses. But once in a while, we get a client like Amazon or the world’s largest democratic country. When they get into trouble, and somehow our name gets passed around, they come to us, and we do a good job at it. And we have other agencies also work with us behind the scenes, in front of the scenes, etc.

Steve:
So, we, on the other hand, are focused on Woo. So, when we have clients who come to us with a certain challenge, we want to understand what our client’s end game is. And a lot of times, if they’re sold on a different platform than Woo, I haven’t done my job. But if they are, I will turn them over to XII, or if they need someone in their specific geographic region, we work with other verified experts as we are, and as you are, Gigi. But you’re absolutely right when you say that we have to understand the client, and I love the race car analogy. We’ve got to put together the pieces. I still need to make a living, but if it’s not right for the client, I’m not going to put myself in that position. So, most of our clientele is probably mid-to-enterprise level, and I think you and I are probably one of six or seven in the country who get that.

I always get the calls to fix things, but a lot of times, when other agencies or freelancers say, “This can’t be done,” you call one of us guys. So, we like the data analysis. We like working with them to make sure that they come up with the right solution, whether it be Woo or not. If it is, great, we’ll work with them, and we’ll start doing the architecture and going through that. If it’s not, then we have no problem referring. As a background, Gigi and I, we met—was it in ’16 or ’17?—up in Seattle at WordCamp. It was a good party.

Gigi:
Just before COVID.

Steve:
Yes. So, I think that kind of sums up what we do. I was thinking about this podcast, Gigi, and I wanted to ask you—you brought up a good segue—did COVID affect you? And if it did, did you become busier? Did you slow down? How did that happen? What was your experience with the whole COVID thing?

Gigi:
Very good question. By being in this space, competing with other digital marketing agencies, with our background, we have specific challenges every day, right? I’m talking specifically, as I mentioned, we are a software engineering company focused on eCommerce, right? We are not a marketing agency, and we compete with the marketing agents, the gurus, the pundits, and experts who are really good in marketing. We compete with them. When COVID happened, it just hit us really badly. We had to take certain steps internally. I’m very grateful to my team, some of whom have been with me for more than a decade—even predating me in the company—and the team stuck with us, giving me a lot of support to go through those challenges. We learned a lot of things that made us resilient.

Today, when a lot of agencies went out of business, and other businesses as well, we are still here. And if I sum up what made us strong, it was how to market better. Our marketing became our storytelling, and our marketing became way better because COVID forced us to do that. That’s one thing. The second thing we learned is that our lead source used to be leads from partner platforms and organic. The shift was, 90% of the leads came from platforms and 10% from organic. Today, because of COVID, we were able to change the equation to just the opposite—90%, 98% from organic, and almost 1% from any other sources. It taught us a lot of lessons. How about you?

Steve:
So, it was interesting. It was challenging. We were considered essential with what we do, and I give my team credit. Again, I’ll give my team more credit than you gave yours, how’s that? Without my team—they all had options to work from home, and we had the protocols in place, obviously—but it was odd because there was a paradigm shift. I think we have a lot of brick-and-mortar and online clients, and we deal with a lot of clients that have both. Because brick-and-mortar sales went down, their eCommerce sales just went through the roof, and that opened everyone’s eyes. They realized, “Hey, we were able to do this in the store, we need to be able to do that online too.” And short of coding “smell-o-vision,” it was very difficult and challenging for us to be quickly reactive based on the decline of in-store traffic and the increase in online traffic. So, we got through it. It was fun, it was challenging, and it was definitely a learning experience. I think with the whole COVID era of 2020 and 2021, everyone learned, especially with online commerce. Regardless of the platform, I think everyone learned that it’s here to stay. Obviously, you have all these stores still today going out of business, and I believe that’s because online commerce really accelerated during the COVID period.

Gigi:
Yeah, true. There has been a big shift in the last, let’s say, 12 months with the advent of AI. I am curious to know—

Steve:
That I fired all my developers? I use ChatGPT for all my code.

Gigi:
Yeah. How is that affecting your marketing, your lead flow, the Google changes—GA or Mute—sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not there, right? And SEO versus GEO, all that AI stuff—how is it affecting your agency?

Steve:
So, we use AI as a pretty decent springboard. When we are in charge of content, product descriptions, or whatever the case may be, and we get writer’s block or creative block—it happens in every agency, right?—we’ll go to ChatGPT or another AI tool and say, “Okay, write me a description that says this.” And then it’s like, “Okay, alright, now I can get started.” It’s kind of like a kickstart, but then you have to make sure that it’s not recognized as AI. But we use it as a clutch in an engine. Going back to your race car analogy, we use it just to warm up the engine a little bit. Do you use it?

Gigi:
Of course, right. We’ve been using it for idea generation and idea evaluation, in terms of any form of content—idea generation and evaluation. When it comes to creating the meat of it—let’s say we’re talking a blog—we can create the table of contents, figure out and evaluate the ideas, topics, etc., and decide what’s good and what’s bad. Then we start generating the content. Well, initially—I’m smiling because about a year ago when I started pushing AI to our content writers, it took me about four or five months to change their minds because they were used to writing a certain way. Now here comes the tool. They said, “No, no, no, no!” But over time, their attitude changed. Now, today, we use the AI to write the content and then use human expertise to make sure it’s providing unique value and a unique perspective whenever we produce something.

Steve:
And the right voice. It’s got to be the right tone and the right voice for the company you’re writing for.

Gigi:
Exactly. But on the other hand, back in the day—when I say back in the day, let’s say six years ago—Google became stronger, and we had the problem of information overload. Everybody had that problem of information overload. There was a lot of information everywhere, and how do you condense that information? Then comes AI. Now we are able to take a huge amount of information, condense it, and ask, “What’s the expertise or the focus you’re looking for?” You

can get the answers you want very fast. Sometimes, down to a three-word answer from a 5,000-word article. That’s amazing. Then we started thinking, “If we take that analogy, how can we help our customers? Is there a tool that will help us do the same thing for them?” Our customers are mostly small- to medium-sized businesses—business owners and marketing decision-makers. When it comes to their eCommerce businesses, they’re trying to figure out their strategy, their competitors, understanding their customers’ needs and wants, and how to extrapolate a marketing strategy. Then, they have to figure out feature gaps, conversion gaps, and so on. So, I’ve been in search of a tool, and I recently found one called Inverse Hub. It’s not publicly available yet, but we’ve been lucky to be the initial guinea pigs. We’ve been testing it, and so far, it’s doing a great job for our very solid customers. We are using AI to help our clients understand their competitive landscape, their buyers’ needs and wants based on data, and to understand their strengths and weaknesses. It’s creating strategies, action plans, content calendars, and all of the above. AI accelerates all of that. So, that’s the angle I’m very excited about in the last three months. Having that kind of partnership will help us succeed.

Steve:
I think it’s interesting with AI because, as a broader picture, it’s still in its infancy. The longer this goes, the more it’s a double-sided coin. It’s there to help, but I’m a little nervous to see what else it’s going to be able to do.

Gigi:
I can tell you what it’s going to do, based on my understanding. It’s going to help us make better, faster, more accurate decisions. That’s the benefit of it. But, it’s also going to make us dumb. Even though we’re making better, faster, and more accurate decisions, the tool is going to make us dumb. So, those who can stay sharp with the tool, understanding both the positives and negatives, are going to be the ones who win the race.

Steve:
Interesting take on that, sir.

Gigi:
Yeah.

Steve:
So, it’s going to make us not think for ourselves?

Gigi:
Not exactly. But, if we can think with the tool…

Steve:
Yes, there we go.

Gigi:
Like with Inverse Hub. I really love that tool—that’s why I’m saying its name again. Similar tools will emerge in every industry. People who can think using the tool like that are going to be the true winners. But if somebody is going to truly depend upon and rely 100% on the tool itself…

Steve:
I got you. I think we both use AI in kind of the same way. It’s interesting that your content writers didn’t want to touch it for a while, because I have three writers, and they looked at me and said, “Okay, let’s give this a shot.” I told them, “You better, because your deadline’s at 5 o’clock today.” So all of a sudden, it went from hesitation to adoption. I think for us, it may have been a quicker acceptance. But, as tools progress, it gets easier and easier. What was your first IDE that you used, right? Yeah, right after Notepad or Notepad++, and now they have things that will just automatically finish the flow. It’s an interesting time, and everything’s still young.

Gigi:
Yeah. Someone told me last week that something came out in the market called Cursor, I think—code generator using natural language. There’s a lot of buzz around it now. I don’t know if it’s the talk of the town, but there’s a lot of buzz. I need to take a deep dive into it. I always wonder, and this is one of the positions I have—I always wonder how this will affect platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. Let’s say three years from now, would I be able to generate a completely rich-featured eCommerce platform, better than my competition, addressing and understanding the needs of my customers, with all the features built in? What if it knows everything, and all it takes is a few lines of commands to generate it, right? So would that happen? If that happens, what will happen to the platforms?

Steve:
I’ll tell you what would happen, in my opinion. You’d have the dog chasing its tail, hypothetically. If I can upload a photo of a product into some platform, and all of a sudden everything just starts spitting out, my competitor is going to do the same thing. So now it’s going to come in, and it might really increase the competitiveness of commerce. I think it has the potential to do that. I’m sure it has that potential now. I still want the human touch, because it’s important. Regardless of whether you say, “Hey, write this in the tone of so-and-so,” you still need some human interaction. I think there will always be a need for people with fingers and toes and eyes and ears.

Gigi:
Yeah, I totally agree. This goes back to what we discussed a couple of minutes ago: the people who are going to depend upon the tool itself are going to die; they are going to become extinct. But the people who understand the tool, and then bring their human intelligence, are going to be the winners. I totally agree with that. But at the same time, as these tools become more mature, our need to be involved gets lesser and lesser. At some point, how will these platforms affect the game? How will the competitive landscape of the platforms themselves be affected?

Steve:
So, AI keeps you up at night, thinking about it?

Gigi:
Yeah, it does. It does. Nowadays, I’ll tell you, getting older, and when we go to doctors, they’ll start prescribing us medicines. I come back, I put it into ChatGPT, just to make sure, “How does this react with my history?” Without my name or any identifiers, I can create avatars and say, “Hey, this guy, these are the problems, these are the medications. The next doctor—what should I watch for?” Even with that, it is giving me really good advice. The doctor prevails, of course. I’d say I’m a bit on the riskier side of that, but it’s okay for me because I have this tool, and I have the doctor as well. So I’m not completely AI-based, but before, I didn’t even have that.

Steve:
We all got our medical degrees from Google, and now we can get them from AI. That’s funny.

Gigi:
I’m curious to know how your company, eCreations, uses AI beyond content generation. What other ways do you use it?

Steve:
With AI?

Gigi:
Yes.

Steve:
So, content calendar—everything dealing with content, obviously. Or if we get stuck and we’ve got a rogue semicolon somewhere, or this isn’t working, or this custom extension isn’t working that we’re making for Woo, ChatGPT will, again, shed light on maybe something we missed. It may give us a snippet of code that makes us say, “Interesting. Okay, cool.” So I think it provides us, again, with content, ideas, and answers to quick questions. But it also assists us with maybe a different set of eyes. Like, “Here’s my code, and I need it to do this,” or whatever the case may be. Again, just as content writers have content block, sometimes if you’re coding a custom plugin for Woo, or an extension, or whatever, you’re going through your thought process, and you’ve got your systems architecture in place. Everything’s great, planned and dandy, but you forgot a component. We’ve used that for funnels—not only for creation, but verification, and also just double-checking. Like, “Hey, what else am I forgetting?” kind of thing. So we use it as another tool to look at something with a different perspective.

Gigi:
I see. Yeah. I’ll tell you. So, you primarily use it for content and code quality. We started with content, then went into code quality. Nowadays, my QA team is coming up with AI-based tools to increase the effectiveness of the QA itself. They use certain tools like TestRigor, and there’s another one, so they use these tools even beyond automated test tools like Selenium and others. Their life is getting better and easier, and therefore, more effective, using an AI-based QA process. Our UX team uses AI to understand the effectiveness of designs. They identify conversion leaks before they convert the designs into actual pages. We take that, and we’re just beginning to use that tool for ourselves to figure out our competitive landscape and marketing strategies—how to expand. So we started using that internally. Also, someone was telling me yesterday—you know the saying that every 18 months technology doubles in size or increases? Yesterday someone told me that’s now happening every 10 hours. Technology is making changes by many folds every 10 hours. I can see that in my business. The more and more we identify use cases to improve, not only our customer’s lives and their businesses but our own business as well, using AI. I’m very glad to see that it’s coming. And I’m not the only one driving this, pushing this. I used to be the one. Now our team leads are coming to me and the management team saying, “Why

can’t we do this? Can we look into this?” So it’s exciting. It’s exciting.

Steve:
You know what? That’s another good thing here, and I want your input on this. You and I have known each other for many years, and it was good to see Bob again. I saw him in San Diego in—was it 2020?—yeah, it was COVID time. So, I’d like to think that we’re the best in Phoenix, but there are other agencies around. There are agencies like you, Joe, Johnny, and everybody else, and we all get along. We see each other on the WooExperts channel through Automattic. And when we get together, there’s always this tension that I never quite understood. Not between us, but with other agency owners, it’s like, “Hey, we’re all in the same ocean, we’re all in the same sea,” but there’s always this competition. I didn’t mean to bring that up earlier, where I’m going to crush you because I like you quite a bit. So, I understand the competitive part of it, and I understand that everyone has their specialty. If someone wants Shopify, I don’t do it, you do. So boom, we’re done. And at the end of the day, the client is at least directed to someone who can help, right? I’m curious to see if you’ve also ever experienced or are experiencing this fight to the death with other agencies, like, “My job is to get the deal, get the deal, get the deal!” Are you in that boat, or is it just a Phoenix thing?

Gigi:
I would say I have not experienced it. The reason I haven’t experienced it is that I have a couple of guys who watch the Slack space, what’s going on, and then whenever I need something, they tell me, “You get on it.” So I am always where they need me most, and I’m there. So, I don’t go into that kind of level to experience that. That’s why you don’t see me much at all in the gatherings, community gatherings, etc. I’m a little busy. If you need me, any agency needs me, I’m there deep. And you have been, too.

Steve:
Yes, yes.

Gigi:
So, it is unfortunate, but I believe it is there. I’m lucky not to experience that, but it is unfortunate that you identified that the ocean is big enough, and it is growing. There are agencies—well, we don’t discriminate against project sizes. We are fascinated. One of the biggest companies in the world came to us—this is in the office equipment business—they came to us, and the first project was $1,500. There was a high-risk merchant who came to us, and the first project was like $3,000. Then, he became a $75,000-per-year customer. He stayed with us, and in three years, that client became a $6 million client. So, this is eCommerce. We don’t discriminate against project size or revenue size. We love the complexity of it. But then there are agencies coming to us saying, “This is a $20,000 project, help us. We don’t want it,” or, “This is a $10,000 project, we don’t want it. Do you want it?” We take it. So, we operate in more of a collaborative space rather than a competitive one. What I’m trying to say is that kind of mechanism or mechanics is in the marketplace. But the ocean is big enough for us all to survive.

Steve:
Yeah, it’s always interesting finding different agency owners’ perspectives on it. It might be a city thing, because I have a lot of friends like you in different cities, and they’re in a very competitive, bigger city. And it’s like, guys, quantity, quality, or cost—choose two, because you can’t have all three. It’s all about the dollars with these larger organizations that say, “Hey, I have X number of dollars to spend. I’ve got to spend it by the end of the year. Here’s the scope of work. Can you do it for X?” And if the answer is no, they just move on. Then I’ll talk to you in six to eight months because you’re not going to get it delivered. It’s going to be bug-ridden, etc., etc., etc. So, I was curious to get your input on that. And yes, you are a busy person, I’ll give you that, too.

Gigi:
Yeah, I’m lucky to have a couple of companies, a couple of agencies, that have partnerships with us. Maybe you’re too much out in the open. Maybe everybody’s seeing you as a threat, Steve, because you are a better marketer.

Steve:
Look at me, I’m not a threat!

Gigi:
They see me as a network geek. “Oh, he’s a software engineering guy. He’s not a threat. He doesn’t know anything about marketing, that’s fine. He’s not a threat.” If they see you as a marketing agency guy, you’ve got more marketing muscle under your belt than me. I think that may be the reason.

Steve:
Well, I always love talking to you, Gigi. I really do. And I’m glad that we kept in touch since we first met. But enjoy Florida. Take care of yourself, your family, and your team. And with that, I think this was a good conversation. I appreciate you.

Gigi:
Yeah, likewise. It has been a wonderful journey so far. I’m glad that we crossed paths about six or seven years ago. It has been a blessing, Steve, and I wish you the best, both personally and professionally. If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know.

Steve:
The door’s open here too. So, if you ever get sick of the humidity down in Florida, come out to the heat in Phoenix. Today it’s 103 degrees!

Gigi:
Every day it rains, and it’s crazy humid! We’re going to be about 103 today, too. Yeah, it’s crazy.

Steve:
Alright, my friend. Thank you again. We’ll talk soon.

Gigi:
Alright, thank you.