Talking WooCommerce Product Demos, Onboarding, Pricing and Social Media

BobWP:
Well, it’s that time of the year. We start reflecting on things, wrapping up the year, and also looking to the new year. I thought with some of the shows, it’d be fun to come in and talk to the hosts a little bit about what they have been up to and touch on some of the topics they’ve discussed with guests over the last year. Katie and Marcus actually allowed me to enter their domain, so that was good as well. How are you doing, Katie?

Katie:
Yeah, great, thanks. Good to be back.

BobWP:
And Marcus?

Marcus:
Doing great. Thanks, Bob. This is all your land. We’re just squatting in it.

BobWP:
Well, before we get into the stuff around some of the topics of the show you’ve talked about, why don’t you just let everyone know a little bit about what you’ve been doing in business and your work side gigs? Maybe we’ll start with Katie. What’s been going on at Barn2 that you can share with us, or what were the highlights of the year?

Katie:
So this year has been a year to focus on perfecting our existing plugins. We started the year with 24 premium plugins, most of which were WooCommerce, and it was just too much. As with anything, the 80/20 rule applies: a smaller number of plugins were making most of the sales. So we thought we needed to rationalize this a bit and focus on what we know works. We’ve spent the year implementing that philosophy.

First of all, we sold five of our plugins, plus two free ones, so seven in total, to Kestrel, who has recently set up as a WooCommerce kind of marketplace. They’ve got a lot of products already, so they were looking to acquire WooCommerce plugins. They were interested in the plugins that, for me, weren’t worth putting that investment into. That worked out well for everybody because they can put in the investment that I didn’t want to.

That freed Barn2 up more to focus on the plugins that are selling the best for us. For example, our WooCommerce Product Options plugin is about two years old now, and we’ve put a lot of resources into that. This year, we’ve added tons of new features. In fact, yesterday was very exciting because we launched a new add-on for it, which is called WooCommerce Live Preview.

Imagine you’ve got a T-shirt product. You could already upload a file to the T-shirt, but you couldn’t preview what that would look like on the T-shirt. We had so many feature requests for that—more than any other feature request—and we track everything. So we’ve spent the last six months building this live preview, which we know people want. We’ve already had several sales, and it’s just been a day. So that’s really good.

We know it’s not complete because people also want text previews and a kind of layered thing where you can select multiple options, and it will change the image each time you select something, like changing the color of a guitar or something as you click a different color. So we’ve got a lot more work to do on that, but that’s a big thing for us at the moment.

BobWP:
Cool. And Marcus, any highlights at GoDaddy? And also, I know you’ve been busy with the side gig too.

Marcus:
Yeah, well, you kind of touched on it. I had a big shift actually recently this year. For the better part of the year, through October, I was at GoDaddy doing field marketing and events there, getting a chance to head out into the community, meet people, and connect at WordCamps. I was heading up our sponsorship efforts for WordCamps through GoDaddy.

But as of November—which is this month that we’re recording in—I’m now part of the Bluehost gang. So that was the major point in the year for me. I’ve shifted out of field events. I’ll still be at some events, like the larger WordCamps, but now I’m helping out with the Bluehost Agency Experience, specifically with Bluehost Cloud, the Bluehost cloud hosting offering.

We’re just getting started there on making that hosting product and the experience for agencies everything it can be at Bluehost. That was the major shift in the year for me.

Obviously, there’s also the WP World project that I’ve worked on this year. Lots and lots of updates throughout the year. I took the last couple of months or so off to have a little bit of a break. That was also the transition period from GoDaddy to Bluehost, so I wanted to devote time to onboarding and getting started with the Bluehost team.

Now, I’ve just started picking back up on WP World updates. That will continue to be my involvement in the community. While I’ll be at slightly fewer events than I was before, my involvement in the community will be no less. I’ll still be diving into all the different social platforms, Slack channels, and all of that. The community is still a big part of who I am and what I do with WordPress. WP World will continue to get attention starting now and certainly through 2025. I’ve got lots of big plans for it.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’m amazed with how both of you balance work, business, side gigs, and all that stuff—and still find a little bit of time to come here. That’s always appreciated from my point of view.

What I thought we would do, aside from just digging into the different shows and episodes you’ve done, was to pick four of the topics from four of your episodes and have you give a little insight into what you’ve seen throughout the year on those and maybe what you hope to see in 2025. These are very generic topics, so you can zero in on whatever’s important to you.

One of the shows we had was about using demos to increase sales. Katie, I know you’ve had more hands-on experience with that, but Marcus, you can chime in on the bigger picture too. So why don’t we start with Katie? What have you learned this year from that, and what do you hope to see in the next year?

Katie:
Well, this has been the year that we implemented admin demos for the vast majority of our plugins. It was really great to do that show with Vikas Singhal from InstaWP because he gave really hands-on tips about how to make the most of admin demos. That came along at the perfect time for me because I was just in the middle of doing that.

Since that show, I’ve gone ahead and implemented more admin demos for our plugins and thought a lot about how to make them convert. It’s not just about the admin demo; it’s about how to use that as an opportunity to close the sale. That comes from the experience of the admin demo, and I know we’ll get onto onboarding in a minute.

With an admin demo, onboarding starts with what happens when the customer lands on it. What page do they start on? Do we drop them into an existing site with the plugin setup to help them understand it and see the opportunities for them as quickly as possible? What’s the quickest way for them to buy once they’ve decided they’re happy?

We did things like adding banners to the top of the front and back end of our admin demos. Then there’s the whole email side of things. We’ve integrated our InstaWP demos with MailChimp so that people get added to a sequence of maybe six emails. These show them how to use the demo. When the admin demo expires, it sends more emails if they haven’t bought yet, explaining why the plugin is so great, offering to help them out, giving them explanatory videos, and eventually a discount as well. So, step by step, we think about how to close the sale at each stage of the decision-making process.

BobWP:
Will demos change next year? I mean, will there be another direction, or a different way of presenting demos? Any thoughts on that, or do you see it just hopefully increasing as more businesses adapt to them?

Katie:
Yeah, I think it depends on the products. Unfortunately, I’ve been reflecting on this after setting up most of my admin demos and realizing that for some products, an admin demo isn’t the best option.

For example, one of my more niche plugins, WooCommerce Multiple Email Recipients, is not very visual. It adds extra email fields to the account and checkout page, and it lets you add more recipients to the admin emails. That’s all very much back-end, except for a few fields on the front. Really, a few screenshots are enough to show how that works.

So we need to think more creatively for each product about what the best way is. An admin demo is just one option. Another thing we’ve recently started doing is A/B testing. Our first A/B test is whether or not it’s good to have an explanatory video near the top of our plugin sales pages. If we discover that’s effective, it has implications for admin demos. For some products, people might not need an admin demo, especially if there aren’t many settings. A video walkthrough might be enough.

BobWP:
Marcus, do you have any thoughts? Especially with your hosting background—what have you seen, and what do you hope to see? Has your pivot into agencies shifted your perspective?

Marcus:
Yeah, definitely. I actually really love all the things Katie has done with Barn2 and their product demos.

But thinking about it from a different lens, from the agency standpoint, one of the things agencies sometimes have to do is persuade their clients that WordPress is the right tool for them. In that case, tools like InstaWP and the Playground offer agencies the ability to demo WordPress itself—WordPress and WooCommerce—even against platforms like Shopify.

It’s a way to give agencies the power to show clients, “Hey, we can set up this WordPress WooCommerce site for you. Here’s what you’ll be able to do. Here’s how you’ll administer it,” versus what they’d get with a Squarespace or a Shopify site.

Having those tools like InstaWP, Playground, and Studio to demonstrate the WordPress experience and WooCommerce experience is valuable for selling clients on the platform. They can show clients how they’ll administer it and explain its limitations. That’s where proprietary platforms differ from open-source CMSs like WordPress. With WordPress, it’s mostly, “There’s a plugin for that,” or, “Developers can hook into features to extend functionality.”

Even stepping out as far as the platform itself, giving agencies the ability to share a demo of the platform they’re going to use and why they’re using it is super valuable. I love those tools for that reason.

BobWP:
Yeah, and I’m not going to give you a rest, Marcus, because I’m going to have you start on this next topic: onboarding. Katie already brought it up or touched on it. Onboarding plays a huge part in everything. Is there anything you want to add about onboarding and what you hope to do with it in 2025?

Marcus:
Yeah, whether it’s platforms or plugins, onboarding is a critical part of getting people where they need to be quickly. I think one of the pieces of onboarding that’s sometimes missed—and something we can all do better at—is the educational process of how to use the plugin long-term.

What onboarding typically does is take you from nothing to something pretty quickly, but it doesn’t necessarily teach the person using the product how to continue from there. For example, “Okay, you got me to something usable, but now what do I do with it?”

I think there are opportunities during the onboarding process to say, “Here’s what we’re doing for you now in onboarding. Here’s where you’ll need to look if you want to make changes to this part later.” Adding those educational pieces along the way during onboarding would be super helpful.

Katie:
It was really good talking to Laura Elizabeth about onboarding. If you don’t know who she is, she’s the person the official WordPress Twitter account recently asked, “Who are you?” So she is now very famous—since she was on Do the Woo—for being unknown! She’s done a great job embracing that, and she’s even put it on her About page. So yeah, kudos to Laura.

Anyway, we had a great conversation about onboarding, contrasting onboarding for services versus software products. For services, it’s about your clients: how to get them used to your services so they understand your processes and know where to get help. She talked about how her Client Portal plugin can help with that.

For product onboarding—which is what I have more experience with—it’s things like onboarding wizards, email flows, and thinking about each step of the customer’s journey to learn your product and find success with it.

I’m sure we’ve all installed a WordPress plugin, clicked “Activate,” and then… nothing happens. You think, “Well, what do I do now?” If you know WordPress well, you might know a few places to look for the settings page, but it’s often not obvious. That’s a classic example of why good onboarding for WordPress software products is essential.

BobWP:
Yeah. Now, let’s shift gears a bit. Pricing services and products—it seems like a never-ending challenge for a lot of businesses trying to figure it out. I don’t know if you’ve come to any really solid conclusions, or if it’s just a matter of always testing things. What are your general thoughts around pricing services and products?

Katie:
Well, it is an ongoing journey to continue optimizing your prices for more profitability. I get really bored going through data endlessly, so I outsource this to Ellipsis, who we use for a lot of our marketing. They’re amazing at data, and they know my numbers so much better than I do.

Every six months, they do a massive analysis of our sales, conversion rates, and how those things have changed when we’ve adjusted the prices of our plugins in the past. Then, they make very specific recommendations on price changes that I should test.

I implement what they say, and then we test again next time. We ask: Was it a success? Should we reverse the decision? Should we try something different? It’s an ongoing, iterative process that will never be finished because markets change.

For example, a plugin may have had no competition initially, so you could charge a high price. But if the market becomes more competitive, you need to analyze the price in the current context and think about adjusting it—maybe even lowering it.

Sometimes you’ve added value to a product, and you can charge more. But it’s not always what you expect. A funny example is my Easy Digital Downloads EU VAT plugin. We built it because we needed it for our site, which runs EDD, but it’s always been a pain. It had some sales—WordPress plugin companies loved it—but apart from that, it was one of our worst-selling plugins.

It’s also expensive to support because troubleshooting tax issues can be very complex. So, it wasn’t that profitable. We thought about selling it, but I wasn’t sure who would want to buy it. I would have liked to sell it to Awesome Motive, but they weren’t interested.

Instead of discontinuing it, we tried increasing the price. First, we doubled it—from $100 to $200—and sales shot up. Not just revenue—the actual number of sales increased. We didn’t understand why, so we increased the price again to $250, and sales continued to rise.

Of course, we grandfathered in existing subscribers. We would never increase their price. But for new customers, we made the plugin significantly more profitable and increased sales by radically raising the price.

But you can’t just do that for all your products. I tried analyzing my WooCommerce extensions to see if I could do the same thing, but you can’t if there’s a lot of competition. The unusual thing about our EDD VAT plugin is that it has very little competition, and people see ours as the undisputed leader. So, they’ll pay what they need to.

BobWP:
That’s interesting. I’m in the process of redoing our sponsorship model and pricing, and again, it’s really no different than other products and services—trying to figure out that sweet spot. I’ve done it several times over the last 10 years or however long I’ve been doing sponsorships.

Marcus, any general thoughts? And will you be working more on pricing services with agencies?

Marcus:
Yeah, I mean, it’ll definitely come up as I dive deeper into agency work. We’ll have conversations with agencies about their budgets for hosting, what they charge for websites, and all of that.

One thought I had—and I’m curious to pick Katie’s brain on this—is whether there’s a trust factor in pricing. If you price something too low, do customers feel like it’s just a cheap solution that someone threw together? On the other hand, if you double the price of the exact same product, does it create a perception of higher quality and trust?

This happens in agencies too. When I worked at an agency, we could charge $500 for a website or $5,000 for the exact same site. I’m certain that the $5,000 client felt like they were getting a higher-quality product, even though the work was identical.

Katie, do you feel that pricing impacts perception? If you price a plugin too low, do people question its quality? And does pricing higher make it feel more reliable?

Katie:
Yeah, definitely. There’s a reputation for very cheap plugins, often stemming from platforms like Envato, where a plugin might cost $29 and have tons of features. That pricing model—along with cheap lifetime licenses—has taught some people that these are warning signs.

It’s not just about a race to the bottom. You need to price competitively against trustworthy products, but you don’t have to compete with plugins from sites that aren’t professional or aren’t well-known.

That might be why sales of my EDD VAT plugin increased when we raised the price. One of its strongest competitors is a SaaS solution called Quaderno, which is far more expensive because it has monthly SaaS pricing. By getting closer to that price range, our plugin may have appeared more comparable to that high-end solution rather than something quick and cheap.

BobWP:
Very cool. Like you said, pricing isn’t horrifying or a bad thing to be constantly working on. You just have to keep working on it.

Now, the last topic is marketing. I’m going to throw you a curveball here. Instead of going general, I want to focus on social platforms.

Everyone approaches social differently. Some find their groove, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. But looking ahead, with platforms fragmenting more than ever, how are you planning to approach social in your business? Are you sticking with your current strategy, or are you considering changes?

Let’s start with Marcus.

Marcus:
Sure. I think there are two parts to the formula.

Part one is being where your audience is. If you’re an agency looking for clients in a specific business niche, there might be forums, Discord groups, Slack channels, or Facebook groups you need to be in.

For me, communicating with the WordPress community means I need to be where WordPress people are—where conversations about WordPress and its future are happening, and where people are sharing resources for plugins and tools.

Part two is maintaining the mental space and awareness to know how much is too much. Like you said, it’s becoming fragmented. There have always been many social platforms, but now there seem to be more than ever.

It’s about focusing on where your audience is, but also ensuring you’re not spreading yourself too thin. If your content is watered down because you’re trying to be everywhere, you’re not having much impact anywhere. I’d say pick two or three places to really focus on and stick with the ones that make the most sense for your goals.

Katie:
Totally agree. I’ve learned to distinguish between individual marketing activities within the WordPress community and company activities aimed at generating sales.

Social, from a company perspective, hasn’t been very relevant for us. The Barn2 social media accounts exist, but they don’t get much engagement. People don’t particularly like interacting with brands on social media; it has less credibility. Social media is really about individual connections.

On the other hand, my personal social media—especially Twitter—has brought a lot of business benefits. But that’s not from potential customers; it’s from colleagues in the WordPress community. It’s been great for exchanging business advice, ideas, feedback, and partnership opportunities.

For marketing our products, though, social isn’t a priority. People keep saying SEO is dead, but we still get the vast majority of our sales through SEO. Our second-biggest source of sales is YouTube. It’s organic video marketing, and it appears in Google search results as well as on YouTube itself.

So I’d say SEO is still really important. Other things like ads are also more relevant for finding customers and generating sales compared to social.

BobWP:
Yeah, I totally agree. I’ve spent—people might freak out—two months researching all the stats on why people leave, follow, unfollow, and all that. I was curious.

It’s easy to manage several social media platforms when it comes to posting and scheduling. There are tools for that. But when it comes to managing engagement and conversations across platforms? There’s no tool for that—it’s just not possible.

You have to spend the time to find what works for you. I’ve found what works for me: it’s not so much about engagement as it is research, sharing, and resharing. That’s what I’ve decided to do.

BobWP:
Well, to close this out, is there anything you’re looking forward to—whether it’s in your business or just in this space—that you’d like to share for 2025?

Marcus:
I posted a tweet a couple of weeks ago about how 2020 to 2023 were the years of eCommerce, 2023 to 2024 is the year of AI, and I think 2025 will be the year of agency focus.

I’m obviously biased because of my current focus on agencies, but I think I’m not alone in seeing a shift toward agencies, both on the hosting side and the product side. We can all continue to go after individual customers, or we can leverage the fact that agencies have multiple customers—sometimes hundreds—at their fingertips.

That said, I think it’s all building on top of one another. eCommerce isn’t going anywhere. AI isn’t going anywhere. As the shift toward agencies happens, it will bring with it everything we’ve done for eCommerce and AI over the past few years.

I’m excited to see how the advancements in AI—getting better and better—and innovations in eCommerce blend into agency-focused tools and services. I think the next 12 to 18 months will bring some big innovations, particularly in AI, that will change how we think about building websites and the tools we use. I don’t know exactly what those will look like, but I’m excited to see it all unfold.

BobWP:
Yeah. Any thoughts, Katie?

Katie:
It’s an interesting point about the future focus on agencies. As a plugin company owner, I haven’t seen a particularly good model yet for product companies like ours to work with agencies, for example, as preferred partners.

There are agencies that prefer our plugins and use them multiple times. They might buy an all-access pass or agency licenses. But in terms of working together directly, I haven’t seen that model evolve yet. I’d be interested to see if that becomes a natural evolution as part of what Marcus is saying.

As for WordPress overall, a hope for 2025 is that the last quarter of 2024 has been surprisingly unstable with all the drama and controversy going on. I sincerely hope things stabilize in 2025. People need to realize that the WordPress ecosystem is far stronger than any one person and can’t be rocked or destroyed by certain events. I’d love to see that stability and increasing confidence return.

BobWP:
Cool. Well, I just want to thank you both for an amazing year and for what you’ve brought to the podcast. I’m fortunate to know that you’ll both be sticking around.

Marcus will also be filling in occasionally on the Woo Agency Chat because one of our hosts, Robert Jacobi, has a tendency to travel the world. I never know where he’s going to be or if he’ll have internet! Marcus will be able to slip into some of those discussions.

If you want to connect with Marcus or Katie, remember you can go to our About page, click on their profile pictures, and find all their links there.

In January, we’ll be celebrating the seventh year of Do the Woo. This is the first time I’m mentioning it—I haven’t talked about it yet. We’ll have some fun things coming out of that. I’ll also be releasing version 4.2 of Do the Woo. Yes, I release versions of Do the Woo! I envy products that have changelogs and versions, so I do my own changelog and version updates.

Version 4.2 will launch alongside our anniversary, and it will reflect what we’ve been working on for the last few months. Between now and then, we’ll keep refining things.

Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Marcus. It was great being able to get some of your insights. You always share so much in your shows, but it was nice to put you on the spot here and hear your thoughts directly. Thank you, and thanks for making this show so great.

Marcus:
Thanks, Bob.

Katie:
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to share.