A Deep Dive into the Metorik Insights Report for Ecommerce

Marcus:
Hey everyone. Welcome to another BizChat here on Do the Woo. My name is Marcus Burnett and I’m a community marketer with GoDaddy. I am here today with my wonderful co-host from Barn2 plugins, Katie. Keith, how are you today, Katie?

Katie:
Hey, great, thanks. What about you, Marcus?

Marcus:
Yeah, not doing too bad. We’re spanning all parts of the globe today, so it’s morning for me, afternoon for you, and evening for our guest, but doing pretty good. As usual, we have an excellent guest, and like I said, today we’re spanning all different parts of the globe. Joining us today from the ecommerce Marketing suite of tools at Metorik is founder Bryce Adams. Welcome to the show, Bryce.

Bryce:
Thanks, Marcus. Thanks, Katie. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s really cool to be back on a Do the Woo show. I think the last time I did was maybe half a decade ago. I don’t know. I love being able to say half a decade.

Marcus:
Absolutely.

Bryce:
But yeah, it’s cool to be here.

Marcus:
Happy to have you here. Bryce is here to talk about a report he recently published on the State of WooCommerce at Scale. But first, would you please share with folks a little bit about yourself and your company, Metorik?

Bryce:
Sure, yeah. So my name is Bryce and my background in Woo, I guess, started at WooCommerce itself back in 2014. I was there initially in a support role and eventually in a development role. Then Automattic acquired Woo in 2015. So I joined that and that happened pretty quickly, and then left in 2016 to do Metorik. So that’s like eight years ago now. I guess the majority of my career has been spent on it. Metorik is basically an analytics and email automation tool for WooCommerce and for Shopify and maybe more platforms in the future. But primarily we started with WooCommerce back in 2015 and only really added Shopify a few years ago. The majority of the customers we have around the world are WooCommerce stores.

Katie:
So let’s move on to the report then. You’ve recently published an insights report based on the sites which are using Metorik with WooCommerce. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Bryce:
Yeah, for sure. It was something we wanted to do for a really long time. I think even a few years in, as it was starting to approach several thousand stores, I was starting to see trends and patterns. One of the most common feature requests we got was benchmarking and trying to understand how a store compared to other stores, especially in Woo, where it can sometimes feel like we’re all kind of isolated on our own server and our own websites, not necessarily all on one platform. There was a lot of demand for clarity into what was going on. So people were asking for it a while ago, but a project like this is challenging to do well and at the quality level that I wanted.

We couldn’t do it with the few of us that were working together, but the team’s growing recently and we’ve got more resources. Luke, someone who just joined primarily for marketing and design-related stuff, said, “Oh, I reckon I could throw something together if you can get the data.” We were just sitting around the couch here in Melbourne, brainstorming ideas. It’d be cool to see that stat and then on Twitter, I think Katie, we talked about some stats even a couple of months ago, about bundles. I was also talking with Vova from Freemius about different subscription stats. We started to create this foundation to do this at scale, thinking about privacy at the forefront of that. So anonymized samples of all that data and just using averages to try to paint a picture of what was going on. Once we had that list to work from, it started to be pretty fun. We were just going through a list like, okay, let’s try and figure out that metric and that one, and then you’ve got to actually dig through it a lot more to find the interesting parts. But it was a big project.

Katie:
I think it’s really useful for companies like yourself that have access to data of multiple sites to publish that because, as you said a minute ago, WooCommerce sites are all installed on people’s own servers unless you’re using Woo Express or something and people just don’t have those benchmarks. I’ve seen a bit of that going on in the industry. For example, WP Fusion’s year in review reports are really useful from a WordPress perspective because they publish data about the different sites running WP Fusion, which LMS plugins are the most popular and page builders and so on. So it was really nice to see a WooCommerce version of that.

Bryce:
I think the fun thing for me was this was, I mean, I love Woo. It’s where I first started working, my first job really was at Woo, and then it’s all I’ve really ever known. I love it as a platform. I love what it enables, the fact that people can run their own site, control everything, customize everything, but also own everything. That idea of data ownership is so important to me. Woo enables that. Part of doing the report was wanting to validate, even though all these sites are their little islands out there on the internet, the scale that Woo is operating at is massive. I don’t think people realize it. We hear numbers being thrown around, several million Woo stores and things like that, but they don’t really mean anything until you actually see the data behind it and the scale and that validation, the brands that are using it. I don’t think people know how many Woo stores out there are doing millions of dollars a year in revenue. There’s tens of thousands, but yeah, I’m not sure the exact number, but there are so many stores out there that are really pushing the limits of Woo and people don’t know about it. So it’s cool to share.

Marcus:
You said that Luke came in and kind of threw something together, but this is actually really polished and really nice.

Bryce:
Luke is so talented.

Marcus:
Before we get into some of the different pieces of it, I do want to let people know that they can also follow along with us at metorik.com/woocommerce-insights. We’ll leave that link in the show notes, but if people want to look at it while we’re having a discussion here, that’s metorik.com/woocommerce-insights. I ended up writing just a ton of questions basically on every slide, so I don’t know if we’ll get to all of them.

Bryce:
That’s awesome. No, whatever is interesting.

Marcus:
I kind of want to jump in, maybe start from the top and work our way down. One of the first things that you shared in here is that the average age of WooCommerce stores is four years. That kind of lines up with the start of COVID in my head. How do you think COVID changed the landscape of ecommerce or specifically, WooCommerce?

Bryce:
What we saw when COVID happened? Yeah, it’s an interesting perspective when you are coming at it as a SaaS because maybe as a plugin maker, Katie, you would’ve seen at the time an increase in sales as more people were setting up Woo stores. But for us, it wasn’t just an influx of more stores, but what was really interesting was what every store was doing across the line, the scale of the growth during that time. We have some reports we were looking at back then just in terms of being able to run the app and see the scale of order volume and Airbnb and things like that across everyone. It’s like a spike around COVID and just consistently through that whole period, we found that on average every store was doing better. There were definitely a lot of new stores starting, but I found it more interesting to see the existing stores all grow as a result of it.

Of course, that all dropped off, and you can actually, it’s pretty interesting when you look at the higher scale, a five-year period, you see that growth and that decline happen through the actual order volume that’s happening. But in terms of the age, a lot of it comes down to the fact that Woo itself is not that old. The oldest a store could possibly be is probably 10 years, I’m not sure the exact age. Over time, very few stores are going to go from 11 years and still be running after all that time or necessarily be on the same platform. I think four years is actually probably bigger than what I’d expect just because Woo is such a young platform.

Katie:
That makes sense. A slightly more practical question, I was interested to see that you said 32% of stores are tracking their costs and profit as well as their sales. I was interested because I didn’t know it was possible to do via a website analytics tool. Everybody knows you’d use it to get sales data and things like that, which is a lot better than the sales data you get from WooCommerce reports in core, which is very basic obviously. But how does that work, tracking costs and profit, because that data isn’t entered into the WooCommerce admin?

Bryce:
I think that’s actually something that I’d love to see WooCommerce core improve, having the ability to set up a product cost. It should just be built into Woo by default. Shopify has it by default, almost Square does, almost every other ecommerce or commerce platform does because it is something that if you look at like 80/20, 80% plus of stores probably do have a cost that they want to set on a product. It should be core. It’s not, but we decided to offer that as a feature. Before that though, we just integrated directly with the WooCommerce Cost of Goods plugin, which itself Skyverge made, and that’s probably explained why it was so good and it worked really well because for us, we were able to then basically build this whole profit

reporting feature and have all historical costs come in and profit reports come in without stores having to do anything. It was really cool because they’d never even had that. They’d set up a product cost inside of WooCommerce Cost of Goods, and there were some basic reports, but all of a sudden we were able just to bring that data in and kind of cleared it.

It got to a point where we were just telling everyone to go and buy the Cost of Goods plugin. People were like, well, I don’t want to install a new plugin just to have a field on my product page to set the cost. That’s very fair, especially when they don’t need the reports and the other functionality from it. So we decided to build it into the app. Of course, it morphed into something much bigger. We got shipping transaction, extra cost. You can say a lot of people want us to do their monthly salary costs and office expenses. They really want to have a bigger picture of things. We’re not really meant to be an accounting or profit tool in that way, but over time it’s kind of becoming that. People want more and more from there.

One of the other cool things you can do as a SaaS when it comes to this kind of thing is we integrate with Google Ads, TikTok ads, Facebook ads, all these different providers to let people bring in their live advertising costs from those platforms. It starts to be a really cool experience as a user because you’re getting all this data from different places in one location and getting to actually report on it, aggregate it.

Marcus:
What’s keeping the other 70-odd percent or so from doing the same? Is it a knowledge thing about whether they don’t know that that exists or is it an industry thing where it doesn’t make sense for some folks?

Bryce:
I think industry plays a big part. Privacy is another issue. We don’t have it in a way, again, it was just kind of bolted onto the app. It wasn’t what we initially set out to do. We don’t have a way for you to just say, this user can see all the reports, but they can’t see the cost and profit. That’s a common thing that a store owner might want to hide from their team. They want them in there using metrics for the reports. A lot of users have asked us to do that and we’ll probably do that soon. I think that would increase adoption a little bit. But also, we’re not trying to be an app for them to figure out their profit and pay taxes on. We don’t encourage it in that way. When people come to proper reporting, they’re probably looking for that level of detail. They need to incorporate all their costs across the whole thing, salary to everything.

The interesting part on our end starts to be trying to figure out reports based on that. We added these reports to the app a few months ago for doing cohorts, customer cohorts based on when they join by the month they join, week they join, or maybe the first product or first coupon they use. It’s really cool to split your customers up into those cohorts automatically and then see the lifetime profit and profit margin over time, how that changes. Then you start to understand not just at what point a customer has spent enough that they’ve reached a target revenue per customer, but they’ve actually become profitable. You can measure that and be like, by month 14, we know on average that’s where we’ve got enough profit from each customer. I love that part of it more than being an accounting tool.

Katie:
It’s really helping WooCommerce store owners to run their company as a proper business. A lot are more hobbyist sites and it helps to bring them to the next level. Some of them will already be doing that, of course, but a lot of WooCommerce store owners don’t do that kind of thing. This is really making it much more accessible. I’m kind of wishing I use WooCommerce on my own website. I use Easy Digital Downloads and I can’t access any of this because quite sensibly you’ve built this for WooCommerce and Shopify, the two biggest players. I get that.

Bryce:
I have had some requests for EDD, but every single request has come from people I knew in the community who would want it. Then I start to think about how many stores that is and it’s maybe a couple of hundred that I know would pay for it as well. It starts to be a little harder.

Katie:
Yeah, totally agree.

Bryce:
But I’ve always wanted to build it for EDD because all my friends and all my colleagues are using EDD rather than Woo. At the start, it wasn’t like I could really contact too many of my friends running WordPress businesses and say, please use my product because they were using EDD.

Katie:
You mentioned earlier about maybe they should put something in core related to the cost of goods. I was thinking that when I saw your stat about subscriptions, 28% of all the WooCommerce stores that you track use subscriptions. The vast majority of them will be WooCommerce subscriptions to one specific plugin, of course. I know they will never put that in core because they must make so much money from that premium only add-on.

Bryce:
I don’t think they make enough from it to be honest.

Katie:
Because it’s so valuable in recurring revenue.

Bryce:
Exactly. It’s one thing that we’d probably do next year and we want to improve in a report based on the feedback, but also just based on what I think would be interesting is actually saying, while maybe it’s 27% of stores that have subscriptions on, does that actually account for more like 40-50% of the revenue or are those stores by default on average double or triple stores that don’t have subscriptions? We didn’t go into that and I think we’d like to expand on that, but I think that would actually show that while maybe 27-30% are using subscriptions, those stores tend to be much more successful because it’s such a great business model if you can make it work.

Marcus:
Yeah, absolutely. I want to shift gears a tiny little bit and talk about, you have a couple of slides in here about the top themes and plugins in WooCommerce stores. Looking at the top themes and plugins, I see Elementor ranking pretty high in both and Classic Editor at number five in the top plugins.

Bryce:
Not too surprised to see that.

Marcus:
Yeah, native WordPress right now with full site editing isn’t quite ready to handle the majority of WooCommerce stores.

Bryce:
Well, I think that indicates that there’s still a heavy dependence on the Classic Editor for sure. A lot of that might come through other builders that are being used, but also maybe other WooCommerce plugins and stuff that aren’t quite there yet. I know even for us, we’ve been integrating with commerce blocks and stuff for the checkout recently for an update we’ve been working on. I think a lot of the filters that we needed were only added in a WooCommerce version that just came out or is about to come out. That’s certainly fine if things take time and it’s good to take time to get it right, but if we’re an app that’s trying to really stay ahead and move with Woo, we were really only able to integrate with some of those features in a version that’s just coming out now on June 24. It’s going to take time for that shift to happen, maybe longer than anyone’s expecting.

Marcus, while you mentioned that, it makes me think about a part of the report that I found a little surprising and actually came out of a discussion I had recently about PHP versions. I noticed that 7.4 is still at 45% of WooCommerce stores that we’re tracking. I think that’s actually higher than the average across all of WordPress generally. There is that kind of fear when it comes to an ecommerce store. Upgrades come at a very big cost if it messes up. If your site goes down or if something’s incompatible and you have downtime, it’s not just downtime, it’s losing money time. That’s a very valid concern for an ecommerce store.

Marcus:
Yeah, one of the other stats that just screamed off the page at me was that the average number of active plugins is 58 on a WooCommerce store. So compatibility-wise, you have to make sure that all 58 of those are ready to move beyond PHP 7.4 before you upgrade. But also, why so many and what do the annual costs look like? Not all of those plugins are going to be free. I know a lot of WooCommerce plugins cost an annual fee.

Bryce:
Yeah. I think we are always, and I think that comes with a caveat with this report, we’re looking at stores that are willing to pay us, Metorik, as an app, at least $20 a month, and in most cases, $100 plus a month for an app for their WooCommerce store. They aren’t reflective of every WooCommerce store. I think with that means they’re willing to spend for sure at least two, $3,000 a year on their website if they’re willing to pay that much to us as an app for their website. It’s reasonable to think that most of them would have 10, 20 plus active subscriptions, but with that cost comes so much value because a lot of these stores are doing significant numbers and significant volume. If they wanted to have a similar setup, an equivalent setup on another platform like Shopify, they would be looking at a larger annual cost for sure.

Katie:
I enjoyed the section about order milestones. I spent quite a while looking at that and trying to visualize the typical store and how long it takes them to get any significant momentum and so on. It is interesting to see that the majority, 76%, get to a thousand orders and it takes just over a year, whereas it’s a pretty small number that make a hundred thousand orders ever, which is 7.9%, and that takes multiple years. A million orders, which kind of makes sense, is only 1%. It’s interesting to see the

dropoff. It made me wonder how WooCommerce compared with that regard to other platforms that might be more enterprise-tailored or something, whereas lots of WooCommerce stores are more small.

Bryce:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Look, Shopify for sure, I think the number would be a bit quicker, but I don’t know necessarily how many are getting to that scale as well. I think it would be similar, but again, I do think it always comes back to if the store is investing a lot more in their online presence through paying more for the ecommerce platform, through spending more on hosting or developers or marketing costs, any of those things, they’re typically going to be a bigger store. I think WooCommerce by default is a cheaper option, so you do tend to get stores that invest less in marketing at the start. But then that’s what we saw that I found really interesting with this report. You kind of get to that a hundred K, and we didn’t have enough time to really show a good picture between that a hundred and a million, but you scale so much faster at that point because you’ve already got the momentum, you’ve already got the infrastructure set up, and probably more than anything, you’re at a point in the business where you want to invest in marketing and other ways to improve your store.

Katie:
It kind of fits with a theory I’ve been developing about the way that WordPress and WooCommerce are growing more widely. If you look at data on Built With, which I was looking at yesterday, I think I tweeted about it actually, if you look at WordPress and WooCommerce’s growth for the top hundred thousand sites, the top million sites, they’re actually going down a bit. They’re declining, but then if you tick the whole internet box on Built With, they’re going up quite rapidly. So that says to me that the growth is in the smaller websites, and I thought that might fit with your data that the majority have a smaller number of orders as well.

Bryce:
Yeah. I think the tricky thing with all of those numbers that are out there with Built With in different companies that try to track the state of ecommerce across the whole internet is that we just don’t know how many of those sites are actually operating and have at least 20 sales a year. You’ve got to learn a hundred, and I think really the number of stores that is like sub a hundred orders a year is the majority probably. And that’s okay. There’s still so many stores out there that are doing larger numbers, but especially with sites that are just being set up and not running, you can do that basically for free on WooCommerce. We always have to take those numbers with a grain of salt.

Marcus:
Yeah, I was looking at that chart as well. Less than 10% of stores make it to that a hundred thousand plus orders mark within an average time of four years or so to make it to this milestone. Why do you think stores don’t stick it out? The average time to a million plus is like six years. Is it just a patience issue? Do people just need to be in it for the long run? Do people give up too early?

Bryce:
Maybe. Maybe they’ve switched platforms as well. It’s hard to really paint that picture in a report like this, but it’s something that we see tends to happen. Stores get to a certain size and they end up then wanting to try a different platform, become Shopify or something custom. I’ve seen stores go to Magento, and so I think that sometimes can be a reason. But also it’s just really hard to get to that scale. You see people on Shopify, especially because they send out these trophies and things like that to commemorate when you get to certain milestones, they send a physical item. I think you order it through them to merchants and you see people posting on Twitter, but the reality is there aren’t that many stores that are getting a million plus orders. That’s a big volume. If you’re doing a hundred plus average AOV, that’s like a hundred million. So a more realistic average Woo store, I don’t think we published it in it. The number I was seeing was something like off the top of my head, 30, 40,000 orders, something around that bracket. But that’s still massive, especially if an average order is a hundred dollars.

Marcus:
The ones that are switching platforms, what is making them want to do that? What is WooCommerce not doing well at a hundred thousand or a million orders?

Bryce:
That’s probably an episode in itself just because it’s such a big thing to unpack. At that scale, stores are thinking about what matters to them. What I’ve found, it’s not even about reliability, but having someone to depend on. I think Shopify does that well. It’s like a safety net. A merchant running on that, even if their site does go down, it’s like it’s going down with every other Shopify site and that gives them some confidence. Shopify’s reliability recently has been really good. So a lot of it is peace of mind. Merchants don’t want to be technical. They don’t want to get in the weeds that much. They really just want to run their shop and not think about plugin updates or anything.

When I see a lot of WooCommerce agencies now pop up that are focusing on maintenance plans and things like that, that’s really good and a step in the right direction. But it needs to come as well with the reliability or the escape, the reassurance that someone’s got your back if the site goes down and you’re not going to lose your order data and things like that. The cost to a store if their site goes down and they have to restore to a backup and it’s eight hours before, and in that time they had orders, it’s such a big cost that it would almost pay for a subscription for Shopify or something else in a year. If it’s going to solve it by going to one of those platforms, they’re going to do it. There needs to be enough upside for them to stay with Woo.

For a lot of stores, subscriptions are amazing and above, beyond what most subscription platforms that exist for Shopify allow. The cost of running on Woo is low. If you can do that at scale and you can really optimize your site and handle how you tackle downtime, but also have a good backup plan, have a good recovery plan, then you start to save several hundred thousand a year with Woo if you’re a big store and maybe even a million plus if you’re doing tens of millions a year in revenue. Woo has a lot of advantages. It’s just about finding the disadvantages and trying to solve them.

Katie:
Marcus, did you have any questions about the average order stuff or the refunds?

Marcus:
I had one. You have a note on the refund section that physical goods are refunded at lower amounts than software because of the low overhead for software. In general, the outlier here seems to be clothing and footwear. I think I have an idea, but what makes that industry have the highest refund rate?

Bryce:
It’s probably one of the most compelling things you can offer as a business in that industry is free returns and really to almost encourage them and say, order from us as much as you want, and then the few things you don’t want to send it back will include a free return bag because that’s really how those stores start to get higher AOV. I think it’s a symptom of that, but it’s probably by design and it probably does actually increase the AOV for that industry quite a lot more than what it would be without it.

Katie:
I see that online learning has an 85% refund rate, which is kind of scary because it makes me think that people are abusing it potentially.

Bryce:
Oh no, that’s only 85% of the refund amount, not refund rate.

Katie:
Oh, okay. Yeah,

Bryce:
I’d be surprised if they were doing well enough to keep running their shop with that much of a refund rate.

Katie:
Oh, the amounts 1.5%. Yeah, that’s better.

Bryce:
Exactly. The one that we want to highlight with the refund amount was just to show, when a refund does happen, is it a full refund? Is it a partial one? I found that interesting with some consumable ones like food and beverage, the refund amount on average is 56%. That would indicate that a lot of stores are doing partial refunds. Maybe one of the items they’re not happy with is not worth the cost of returning it, while software or online learning, it’s 80-85% because it’s a digital item. You can effectively refund the whole thing without incurring a major cost as a store.

Marcus:
Those are a little harder to partially refund too. Refund a handful of lessons from a course. You’re either refunding the course or you’re not refunding the course.

Bryce:
Exactly. You might as well, if you’re having a credit cost as a software business, just find a solution like that. I’m sure you’ve experienced the thing, both of you, over the years with WooCommerce and WordPress support. Sometimes just to solve it, let them move on, give them a refund rather than try to hold on to 70 or 80% of the money or even 20-30% of the money. Risk covering someone who really has it out for you after that and wouldn’t speak favorably about you.

Katie:
I thought the devices section was interesting. We’ll all have heard many stats way before this report that the majority of online shoppers are using mobile devices. I’ve always kind of ignored that on my own website because we sell WordPress plugins. The vast majority are sitting at their desks on their desktops.

Bryce:
What percent is, in your case?

Katie:
I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s like, I don’t know, 70 or 80% or something on desktop, which makes sense. You don’t buy a plugin on your phone, do you? You’re at work.

Bryce:
I hadn’t realized that we had this in the report, I forgot,

but it says it there. Software stores have the most desktop-driven customers with 79% of orders being placed on a desktop device.

Katie:
Which makes sense.

Bryce:
That checks out.

Katie:
For other industries, obviously mobile’s important for my business as well, but it’s more so for things like clothes where people are buying from their sofas and so on. It was interesting seeing that the average order value placed on desktop is significantly higher than people ordering on their mobiles. Even if you are in a mobile-first industry, you do really need to think about those desktop users because even if they’re buying clothes or something that suggests to me that they’re having a serious session of buying clothes, they’re sitting at their computer, got multiple tabs open, it’s a very different experience and they spend more.

Bryce:
That’s a good point. Another common one is if you’re buying an appliance or an electronic product, a lot of those decisions are made at the computer where you can really take the time to research, look at five different tabs and then check out. That’s a kind of trend with a lot of these numbers. A lot of them aren’t as surprising, but the actual level that the number ended up at, in this case, 38 to 62, I didn’t know that until we pulled that. Actually, to be fair, I didn’t realize that the desktop AOV would be that much higher. If you just asked me off the top of my head, I would’ve guessed anecdotally 30-40%, not almost double. I think it just comes down to when you’re doing a high-value order, when you are spending several hundred dollars in a shop, you’re going to probably do it on a computer. Typically they’re going to move to a desktop for those transactions.

Marcus:
Yeah. I also was interested for the same reason in that section. It kind of made me think about my purchasing habits and maybe how important it is for stores to have carts that you can move between mobile and desktop via login or something. I spend a lot of time browsing on my mobile device and I’ll toss things in the cart, but then by the time I’m ready to make a purchase, I might hop over to the computer. I’ve got desktop extensions that help with coupon codes and all of that kind of thing that I can take advantage of that I don’t have on my mobile device. Really a lot of the purchasing, I would guess that I’m not in the minority, that there’s a lot of folks that are browsing on their mobile and then making an actual final purchase on their desktop, especially like you said, with high order value items and orders and stuff. Just being able to, Amazon obviously, right? I’ll toss a bunch of things in an Amazon cart and then, because I’m logged in, I can log back in on the computer and finish that order. The importance of having a system like that, maybe for even smaller stores to be able to jump between devices and keep your cart.

Bryce:
It’s an interesting product idea, really. I think we kind of do that, and a lot of plugins do that in a small way through abandoned cart tracking and being able to send a link that just restores it in one click, which is close. But I’m just thinking about, it’d be quite cool, even just a simple plugin that was just like, send me a link right now just to access this cart on a computer. That would probably have some value rather than being this whole thing to track carts. It can tie into that, but I think just as a core feature, I want to move this cart to a desktop.

Marcus:
Speaking of recovered carts, I also saw in the report that the average order value of recovered carts is about 30% higher than even regular placed orders. The report states it’s because customers tend to add multiple items into their cart before making a decision. Then they get that abandoned cart link and they come back and place the order. What are some good abandoned cart strategies to recover these carts?

Bryce:
Offer an incentive, and I think the incentive should be specific to your store and the situation you’re in. There’s no one size fits all. We kind of lead into this in one of the other pages where we talk about later in the report to do with the AOV of free shipping versus paid shipping orders. Something interesting with that is figuring out where your AOV is. In that case, if we’re looking at the cart report, it’s around 120, which is where the average cart value was when they got placed. Maybe you’d be wanting to incentivize people to spend over 150 and get free shipping or over 150 and get 10% off because at least then you’re increasing your AOV by 40-50% at the cost of a 10-15% discount. I think that’s one way, but otherwise, it’s also about using the moment when you try to recover a cart as a marketing opportunity. It’s not just saying, recover your cart, but maybe you should also add this item based on what you already have in your cart. It ends up being an actual win for the customer because they might discover something that they didn’t know about, and they’re getting a better deal with maybe they’re getting free shipping as well.

Marcus:
I didn’t see in the report numbers on the percentage of stores using abandoned cart recovery versus not using abandoned cart recovery practices. Do you have maybe anecdotal numbers on how many people are actually taking advantage of that?

Bryce:
That’s a good question. Again, in our case, it’s all limited to the scope of Metorik because someone would have to turn on the cart tracking feature. We have then opted to pay extra for our email feature to send an abandoned cart email, which is why we didn’t go too deep into that because it’s just not big enough scale to be too insightful. Of the stores actually adding, anecdotally, it’s like 20-30% of our stores are trying to recover carts, not enough. It’s very common that I’ll meet really successful stores that are doing significant numbers but aren’t really focusing on abandoned cart recovery, but also failed order recovery and really simple actions like that alone will pay for the cost of Metorik or any other plugin or app to do it. You just need to recover several carts and you can recover the cost of the software to do it. It’s worth investing in for almost any business. Again, it depends on the industry and the business and the brand and all those factors. It’s never one size fits all.

Marcus:
Katie, is that something that you guys think about for the plugins? I don’t know how that works with EDD or any of the setup that you guys have. I know that you have demos with InstaWP, and you’re tracking all that stuff too. Is abandoned cart recovery something that you guys talk about?

Katie:
Yeah. I miss Jilt. I know you used to work for that company. That was the best.

Bryce:
Jilt was such a great product.

Katie:
Such a shame. We now use Recapture, which is nowhere near as good as Jilt was, but it kind of does the job. The data isn’t brilliant. It’s pretty basic, but we do recover a lot of carts that way, which as Bryce said, more than pays for Recapture. We also use it for post-purchase emails, like sending a discount code to people a few days after they make a purchase and stuff like that. We do get our money’s worth out of Recapture. There isn’t, for Easy Digital Downloads, a particularly professional abandoned cart solution. I think a lot of mailing list providers like MailChimp and so on integrate with WooCommerce as well as you having your own paid feature, Bryce, as well. Hopefully it’s better for WooCommerce than EDD.

Bryce:
There’s definitely more options for Woo. I don’t think, again, Woo is typically a second-class citizen in a way on every platform. They’ll tend to just do it as an afterthought, so you don’t get maybe enough tracked or accuracy when it comes to carts. A lot of our cart tracking was inspired by Jilt. I think the whole team did such a good job on that product. We took a lot of inspiration from that. Klaviyo and all those apps that do integrate with Woo, MailChimp, they’re going to be thinking about Woo once every few months. It’s not like an active daily thought in how they develop and improve the product. It’s really fun for me to try to prioritize Woo and think, how can I make the best possible product for these merchants that typically aren’t getting anything made for them?

Katie:
On the country and currency section, I thought it was strange that there’s a significantly higher average order value when the customer is not in the store’s default currency. So if it’s a store in the US and they offer in British pounds, then there’d be a higher average order value on average than the US dollars. I can’t think of any reason why. Can you?

Bryce:
Yeah, no, definitely. I think it actually leads into two pages forward where we talk about, or several pages forward where we talk about delivery distances and how people typically spend more when they’re ordering from further away. A lot of it comes down to when you are ordering from a store in a remote area, it’s a bigger deal. You might have to pay more for shipping. It might be something you can do less frequently because of the cost. The average order tends to be higher because of that reason, where they’re trying to maximize that moment where they are making a purchase. It does lead into that idea where stores that offer free shipping end up having a higher AOV, and that can encourage higher spending. If you’re in an international country paying in a different currency, that free shipping could make a difference and make you spend a lot more.

Personally, I do that all the time. Being in Australia, most of the things I’m buying online are from overseas, and I will always spend even double or triple to get free shipping, which isn’t logical in that way, but no one likes

paying for shipping. I don’t want to pay 20 pounds to ship something from the UK. I would much rather just pay 300 pounds and get free shipping, but I get 300 pounds worth of items. It’s a weird thing, but I think a lot of people I spoke to about this report, especially Australian people, but really anyone American ordering from Europe or Europe ordering from America or Asia from anywhere in the world, you want to maximize those purchases to get free shipping, but also it might just not be something you do frequently because you have to wait several weeks for the delivery to come. So you want to spend a bit more instead of something local where you can order several times in a week and it’s not going to be that much of a delay.

Marcus:
I’m an Amazon Prime member, like many folks, at least in the US, probably all over the world, so I’m used to the free shipping. I was going to say, it’s no surprise that free shipping increases the average order value, but also I’m wondering if we’ve all been kind of conditioned to expect free shipping as an option. It shows in the report that about two-thirds of stores are offering it. What advice would you have for the third of stores that are not yet offering free shipping? Is it just a barrier for them?

Bryce:
I don’t remember if we actually had the number of stores that offer free shipping, but I know that 66% of orders did have free shipping, which as a sheer number of orders is significant. But I’m curious, for stores that don’t offer free shipping, is that just a no-brainer that you should offer free shipping? That’ll basically guarantee a higher average order value?

Not necessarily on every order, especially if your shipping costs are high. It’s feasible, but you need to figure out what is your shipping cost. Not just what you’re charging customers, because a lot of stores tend to charge a bit more. What’s your actual cost? What would your cost be if you were able to have double the number of orders because you’re offering free shipping? The cost might come down with that volume. But I would say figure out your cost and then factor that in. If I know my average cost is $9 and my average order is $50, if I could make free shipping over 90 or 80, it’s like I’m getting 30, $40 more revenue at a cost of nine or $10. It typically comes down to that, figuring out where you’re at, but where you want to get to. Free shipping is just a lever to get there. Abandoned cart discounts are another way, multiple different paths, and it depends on the store.

Katie:
That fits quite nicely into the page about delivery distances and where you talk about how far away people are ordering. It looks like the majority of stores are doing proper shipping, and they’re not just delivering pizza places delivering within a few miles. There’s a lot of people delivering, even thousands of kilometers, aren’t there?

Bryce:
Yeah, I think I’m just looking at that report as well. Sure, under a thousand kilometers looks like it’s around 50% of orders. But that’s a significant number of orders that are going a further distance, which is great. That’s what ecommerce is about. It’s about enabling people to buy the items that they normally couldn’t get locally. Being in a pretty remote place like Australia, you really appreciate it. So much stuff I love that I have to get from overseas. In my case, every order is traveling 10,000k or more. That probably brings it up a little bit.

Marcus:
You alone are making up that 3% of orders that travel more than 10,000 kilometers.

Bryce:
In some industries, maybe. I did buy a lot of stuff from the UK recently.

Katie:
I never knew that about Australia.

Bryce:
Of course, we have so many amazing Australian brands and products and companies to buy from, but if you’re into a niche thing, I really love synthesizers. A lot of that’s not coming from Australia or records as well. They’re coming from America, Japan, places like that.

Katie:
I have a similar issue in Spain. Nearly everything is not available from Spain and I need to order it from elsewhere. So then there is that, depending on where you live.

Bryce:
It goes back to that if you are ordering from somewhere domestically in Spain, you don’t need to really maximize that order as much as you are ordering from the states and have to incur shipping. You’d probably want to add a couple more items because you’re not going to make that order from the US every week, but you might do that domestically.

Katie:
Well, thank you so much, Bryce. That’s been really interesting, and I think it’s given us some good perspectives on WooCommerce that we never had access to before. So that’s really helpful. Thank you so much. Before we finish, can you tell us where we can find you online and also where we can read the report in full?

Bryce:
Yeah, of course. For me, I’m on Twitter at BryceAdams. I don’t tweet much, but I’m trying to be better and taking a lot of inspiration from you, Katie, to try to engage more. The report is on Metorik at https://metorik.com/woocommerce-insights. I hope people love it and really let us know your feedback because if there are metrics that people want or would find useful for their business, we want to include those next year. A lot of this was just done on what we thought people would want, but we really do want to build it for not just our customers, but the WooCommerce community. It’d be great to hear more about what numbers would be of value to them.

Katie:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much.