AI, WooCommerce Changes, and the WordPress Community in 2025

Robbie:
Hi, and welcome to Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair, and today I have two people with me on the show: one, Robert Jacobi, as you usually are hearing on here. Robert, tell us a little bit about what’s going on in your life, and let’s definitely hear about the company you’re working for now.

Robert:
My lovely co-host Robbie always teases me. Happy New Year, first and foremost. This is probably one of the first Do the Woo podcasts of the year, and obviously, we’re changing it up by doing it with video. Crazy. For the audience, I’m Robert Jacobi, VP of Americas at Botguard, so happy to be here with Robbie and Marcus.

Robbie:
Yes. So joining us today is Marcus Burnett, and Marcus is actually going to have another Do the Woo podcast as well. So, Marcus, tell us: one, how you’re doing; and two, just tell us the name of the new podcast you’re going to be doing with Do the Woo.

Marcus:
Yeah. Hey, welcome, everyone, to another new year. Yeah, some of you might know my voice from co-hosting Woo BizChat, but in 2025, I’m going to be starting WP Agency Tracks here in the Do the Woo network, just continuing to build Bob’s empire with new shows. It’ll basically be kind of a broader version of the show, encompassing agency life within the WordPress community, and I’m excited to get that started at the end of this month.

Robbie:
Cool. Yeah, I tell you, a lot of our audience out there either runs agencies or works in agencies, and we know that—all three of us—we are at almost all the events. We see each other all the time, and we know that agencies make up a broad audience inside the WordPress community. They’re the ones attending these events, and they’re the ones listening to this type of stuff because they need that. It’s always better to learn from other agencies’ mistakes and successes than to try to do everything on your own. You can really expedite your agency if you listen to advice out there from other agencies.

So cool. I’m glad there’s going to be more information out there. Even for myself, I have an agency, and I listen to these types of things because you never know—you’ll hear something as simple as the way someone organizes their calendar, and it saved them a little bit of time. And you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s a great idea. I’m going to implement that.”

Anyway, as Robert said, this is a new year—2025. Wow. As a Gen Xer, I’m just going to say it makes me feel a little knowledgeable. That’s what I’m going to say—it makes me feel knowledgeable.

Robert:
Knowledgeable, yes. Yes, Robbie, you and I are very knowledgeable.

Robbie:
We are very knowledgeable, Robert.

Robert:
Not as knowledgeable as Bob, but I mean, yes.

Robbie:
Bob is wise. It’s a different level. We are all learning from Bob’s podcast empire. So, 2025—tell me, as an agency owner, one of the things I’ve been looking at are design trends that are coming up this year, or what they’re saying the design trends are going to be, and what technologies they think are hot.

So, Robert, you’re also really involved more in the hosting side of things because of what you’re doing now—security at the server level, things like that. And so, you know the hosting side of our industry really well, along with the security side of our industry. What are you seeing as potential trends this year?

Robert:
I’ll take it from a reflection on 2024 and how that might actually incrementally improve in 2025. I had a wonderful conversation at CloudFest US with the Chief Support Officer—that was her title. I’m probably screwing that up, but just going on memory.

But, as much as we joke and have joked throughout all of last year about AI this, AI that, it’s the little bits and pieces of AI that are actually useful and support redundant tasks. I think we’ll see more and more of that come into place, where hosting companies are taking advantage of that for all sorts of customer support, security, and onboarding processes.

And I can’t imagine that not a single hosting company is actively pursuing this. Marcus, maybe you’ll give us some secret stuff that you can’t talk about, but we’ll just keep it between ourselves here.

Robbie:
And I know Marcus is also in the hosting world too, but I also think of Marcus more as community. I don’t know why, but I just think of you as community—always in the community. So I’m going to ask him about community.

Marcus:
You start one community site for WordPress, and all of a sudden—I’m just kidding—that makes sense.

Robbie:
And then all of a sudden, you’re the expert. That’s right. And by the way, Robert, just a little bit more about the AI side of things. As I’ve been talking about AI at a lot of events, I love AI. That’s what I mainly listen to podcasts about. I think it’s fascinating.

It is the most exciting thing. I’ve had my agency for 22 years, and I swear it’s the most exciting technology we’ve seen in all of that time—and developing so quickly. I should say the speed at which it is getting better is just amazing. You could wake up tomorrow, and there’s some other new tool that you’re just blown away by.

Robert:
Crazy. It’s just those incremental improvements that are happening every single day.

Robbie:
All the time. And so what we’re going to see, I think, for AI are the AI agents. That’s going to be the big, big push this year. They started this year, and they really took off. The big corps are now looking at those.

Google, I think, is going to be introducing some pretty amazing ones. They were showing some demos of it. And just because when you start talking about AI agents, you can have them be very niche and specific in their knowledge base. You can also give them personalities.

And so this is a really cool thing. We can have different agents doing different things, and then they can all talk together as well. You can compile all of that. So I think the AI agents are going to be a really exciting thing to watch this year.

So, Marcus, tell us—you can also talk about hosting if you’d like to as well. And you can also talk about community. You can talk about whatever you would like, actually. What do you think about the coming year?

Marcus:
Yeah, I mean, I hate to just continue to belabor the AI thing, but that’s something that I’ve been deeply excited about too. And I think that will continue to permeate its way through. What I’m hoping—this isn’t really a prediction so much as a hope—is that AI will focus on doing the things that I don’t want to do.

I see a lot of AI come out saying, “AI will build your site, design your site for you, and put it together.” I’m like, well, that’s the fun part! The design part and putting the site together for our clients is kind of the fun part.

Why don’t you do a discovery process for me? Put together a proposal for me that accurately reflects the amount of money I should make for the project or whatever. That’s the stuff. I mean, some people also find that exciting, but that’s the part for me that I struggle more with. I’d rather let AI handle that and let me do the actual fun stuff.

Robbie:
Let AI handle the tedium—our routine stuff that we do. And I do think that we will find that, especially if you’re in the tech world or just the web world, you’re going to start using those tools just because you have to keep up. If everybody else is using those tools and can do everything faster, then you’ve got to keep up.

So yeah, I do think that you’ll see yourself using those in your day-to-day. I also think what we’re going to see a lot of are tools where they say, “Oh, this will design the whole website for you.” I kind of feel like some of those tools have been implemented, but the design side of things is not great.

And again, it’s not having that human element, I think. Can it give you a rough draft? Can it give you ideas to start yourself? Absolutely. But we all know it’s really that finishing touch that the humans do on it that makes it the most valuable.

So what it’s doing for us—it’s saving us time getting that first draft or maybe getting inspiration. From there, we can take it forward. I can take it forward. I use it all the time with my writing proposals as well, Marcus. I use it for proposals already—not like, “Go generate me a proposal.”

What I do is I’ll take a segment out of my proposal where I’m describing what we’re going to build for the client, and I’ll then take that over to AI and just say, “Hey, can you make this a little less techie?” Or, “Can you make this a little more concise?” And so I just ask it to rewrite some of this stuff. Let me see it—I may or may not use that, but I may use some of the ideas from that for my next edit.

So I use it for editing all the time with my writing.

Robert:
I love OpenAI, where you can just dump all your specific information. So here are my last 10 proposals—generate a proposal for this client with these requirements based on my library of proposals. You’re going to have to go in and edit, but yeah.

Marcus:
We kind of do that now.

Robert:
You’re saving a whole day’s worth of work right then and there.

Robbie:
We write a lot of client scripts for videos that we’re doing, and I 100% now use a combination of ChatGPT and NotebookLM. What I like about NotebookLM is it allows me to put in sources that are more private. So they’re not out there on the web; I’m not exposing them to ChatGPT’s brain to absorb.

I’m keeping it more segregated there. What I like about it is that I can then take stuff from there, stuff from ChatGPT, and then mold that together to make the perfect script. So yeah, I’m so excited about all the things.

I’m like, I have a list of things here that I’m going to try and switch over to use more AI-powered tools for. So I’m very excited about that.

Robert:
The amount of information you put into that private library of yours—it’s huge. And we see that in WordPress on the hosting side with products like Tidy, Espresso AI, and all that. They’re trying to leverage everything that happens out of the hosting company with those customers, as well as their voodoo and magic, to spin up a website.

But again, those are sort of drafts, in my opinion.

Robbie:
Well, while we’re still on the AI topic, I’ll move us off of that in a minute. We could spend the whole show talking about AI, obviously.

The one thing I do want to ask—what do you think about Automattic buying WP AI? What do we think we’re going to see from this?

Robert:
I’ll let you know in six months.

Robbie:
I’m like, no one even has a guess! I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.

Robert:
Actually, my favorite purchase by Automattic last year was Beeper, and I’m really waiting to see how the new iOS plan will come out for that in 2025. It actually is a pretty awesome tool.

Robbie:
Really? I haven’t used it yet. I’ll have to try it.

Robert:
Oh my goodness. It connects all your messages from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp—those are the key ones—Slack. So I really have one app to rule them all, except for Apple Messages, which is completely not part of that ecosystem.

Robbie:
Interesting. Yeah, I’ll have to check that out. I haven’t checked that out yet. I think my favorite tool that they bought in the last few years, anyway, is Day One for my journaling. I love journaling, and I love that tool. That’s one of my favorites.

So, Marcus, what are your thoughts on it?

Marcus:
Yeah, I’m not sure. I was torn when they bought it and shut the whole thing down. I was on the waiting list, ready to check out what’s going on there, and I was getting close to launching something that I could play with. And then they got acquired and shut everything down. They’re going to build some of that stuff internally.

So I’m excited to see what they do with it, but at the same time, I was kind of bummed—I was ready to get in there and play with some of the automated stuff it could do for you.

I haven’t played with Beeper yet. The one thing I was going to mention from the hosting side—this is not really giving anything away—but like you were saying, the tier one support stuff that Bluehost already started tinkering with, I don’t know if you’ve heard of DocSpot AI.

It allows you to feed in documentation, like NotebookLM does. It lets you feed in documentation. So we’ve got all of our support documentation feeding into it. It’s not handling frontline customer support, but it’s giving our support staff a way to do quick research without surfing through tons of pages of documentation.

It’s easy. A customer asks me a question—maybe I have an idea, maybe I don’t, or maybe I do and just want to confirm that what I think is right. I can ask the bot a question, and it feeds me back an answer. Then I can put the human touch back on it as I reply to the customer.

That’s, I think, a great starting point, especially for those that are hesitant to let AI loose—not knowing what it’s going to say to your customers or whether it’s going to behave properly.

Robert:
Yeah, and that’s what DreamHost was talking about—using that very carefully because all the hosting companies don’t want to screw up their customer support by just spitting out auto-generated nonsense. There’s a lot of internal training.

So I’m curious to see all the incremental steps for all that basic stuff that needs to be done—customer support, onboarding, security, even basic e-commerce things like “Do you have a credit card attached to your store?” or “How can we walk you through that?”

Marcus:
Yeah, I think that’s maybe the possibility for what they’re going to do with some of the WP AI stuff. Like, okay, you set up a site, I’m a customer, I log into WordPress. Oh, I don’t know how to do this. Let me ask this window on the side, “How do I do this?” It tells me, and then it just asks, “Would you like me to do it for you?”

“Here’s what you need to do, but I can do it for you. I’m already in the site here,” and you just hit, “Sure, why not?” And then it goes to fix settings, set up a payment gateway, or whatever the case is. I think there’s some opportunity there.

Robert:
Yeah, I mean, how awesome would that be? Like, “Hey, I have a Chase Bank business account. Can you set up my e-commerce?” Yes, I can. I mean, how cool would that be?

Robbie:
I don’t know. I get a little nervous thinking about it doing those types of high-level things just because what I worry about with that is that, yes, if it’s a web developer using that tool and they can double-check that everything was properly set up afterward, I’m good with that.

But if you’ve got someone who’s a layperson who doesn’t normally do this and they just go in there willy-nilly, saying, “Yeah, hey, do this, fix this, do this,” they’re not checking that it’s properly set up, that it’s properly secured.

And maybe if we could train the bot to also go, “Hey, it’d be better if we now turn on two-factor authentication for your website,” or things like that. If the bot goes on to give them more things that they should do to check things…

Robert:
Well, web hosting, in general, has been commoditized for years. How about this: hosting companies actually go through that extra step to do the “check”? (I’m going to put that in quotes because I don’t know what that check means.) That’s the value add.

Do I pay $3 a month at Web Hosting X, or do I pay $10 a month knowing that if the AI tells me to do this, it’ll be double-checked at some point, and I don’t have to worry about it? Hosting insurance.

Robbie:
Hosting insurance. I love it.

Robert:
This is great because this is on video finally, so I can put quotes, and people can actually see them. In the past, I would do this just audio…

Robbie:
Well, people may just listen, so you better still say it, even though you’re…

Robert:
I’m putting this in finger quotes.

Robbie:
Finger quotes. That’s right—putting this in finger quotes. I know. So yeah, I figure people will still want to listen. My time to listen to podcasts is typically when I’m on an airplane. I download everything beforehand, and while I’m on the airplane, I just listen to my podcasts.

I mean, I guess I could also do video now, but then I’d have to pay for the WiFi on the plane.

Robert:
Don’t download the video.

Robbie:
I could have downloaded the video too. I could.

Robert:
Excuses.

Robbie:
Excuses, excuses. Yes, exactly.

So it will be interesting to see how popular this is, going back into video. I know we used to do video way back when with Bob, so it’ll be interesting to see. Well, we’re going to watch the master at work here and see what he does with all these videos.

Robert:
I really hope this is the first one so we can set the standard, set the bar.

Marcus:
It’s going to end up being four minutes long. He’s going to cut all of the sound.

Robbie:
I know. It’s going to be like, “Hi, happy New Year! Listen to Do the Woo.” Absolutely.

Robert:
“Visit our sponsors. Don’t forget that.”

Robbie:
Yes. Don’t forget all the sponsors. That’s right. Absolutely.

I’m going to move off the AI topic—like I said, we could talk about that for days, obviously. So let’s move on. Let’s talk about some other things with web development in the new year.

And I don’t ever talk about this—I don’t like to talk about this, and I don’t want us to go into a deep dive into this—but what I’m going to say is, do we see the WP drama calming this year? Please, Lord, do we see it calming this year? That’s what I’m going to put out there.

We don’t have to dive in. I don’t want anybody taking sides. I don’t want anybody getting mini on here. I just want to know: Do we think we see an end in sight?

Marcus:
Two different questions: whether it comes down or whether it ends.

Robbie:
Oh no, I don’t think it’s ending. I’m just asking: Does it calm down?

Robert:
I mean, there’s a legal process that’s going to play out, and it is what it is. Community, businesses, stakeholders—the entire ecosystem will probably pay attention to it, but I think it’s less important day by day.

I mean, there’s an argument to be made about what the WordPress trademarks and intellectual property mean going forward—how that’s maintained, whether it’s properly maintained, and so on. But at the same time, I think most people need to—and will—focus on their immediate issues.

So, same as it always has been: sales, deliverables, production, rinse, and repeat. Whether you’re a plugin developer, an agency, or whatnot, this will be part of what’s going on in the community ecosystem.

But I think, in my personal opinion, for most of us day-to-day WordPress users, we’ll keep an eye on it, maybe raise our hands about something, but we still have to pay the rent.

Robbie:
Yeah, absolutely. And I do think, at the very beginning of this all starting, everybody was kind of like, “Oh my gosh!” And then, after the next month, most of us had to go back to just doing our work and, like you said, paying the bills.

But there’ve been enough people who obviously have enough time on their hands to keep this going. It has continued on social media and such.

I will say, though, like you said, Robert, we’re going to see legal decisions happening this year. And to me, that’s the most important thing to watch. I will say, because with OS Training, I’m in other communities too—Drupal, Joomla, right? Everybody’s watching this. PHP. Everybody is watching this from an open-source standpoint.

Everybody’s watching this because the outcomes of this could affect other… it could affect open source overall.

Robert:
I love disagreeing with you, Robbie. I don’t think it will.

Robbie:
You don’t think so?

Robert:
Because each of those projects is completely run differently.

Robbie:
Oh, that is true. That is true.

Robert:
So I think what we’re dealing with in the WordPress world is a WordPress-specific issue, an Automattic issue, a WP Engine issue. Certainly, it’s impacted the community in different ways. I mean, Marcus, Bluehost is an official licensee—or, let me say, Newfold is the official licensee.

So there are all these bits and pieces of the entire conversation, and none of us really have time to get into the nitty-gritty of it.

Robbie:
No, no.

Robert:
Those who get paid to deal with this—I’m happy to see what the outcomes are. WordPress changed my life—wow, what year is it? Over eight years ago! The opportunities in the ecosystems that exist—I don’t think that’s going anywhere, honestly, no matter what the decisions are.

Robbie:
That is 100% my take on it too, Robert. It really doesn’t matter which way things wind up. Community is community, and it’s there anyway.

I mean, it’s just like you and several other people in the WordPress community—we were all in the Joomla community before this, and we all knew each other there. Community is community. Friends are friends, and colleagues are colleagues.

You still build that network, and that network is not going anywhere. So I don’t think that part of it is going to change. I think I just see it more as sponsorship and potential sponsorship for open source and things like that.

That’s where I see we might start to see some changes—changes in pricing, changes in contractual agreements, things like that.

Robert:
It’s been 20-plus years of WordPress. Changes will happen. Exactly. I mean, now I’m playing the old man card here, but I’ve seen many projects come and go—and come back again.

You talk about Joomla? Yeah, I started out at Mambo. That’s a fork and a company 25 years away. We’ll all be fine at the end of the day.

And I do have to give props to the creators. I mean, how much of the world runs on Linux? Thank you, Linus. How much of the web runs on WordPress? Thank you, Matt.

This is crazy stuff. I mean, everyone’s got their days, but these have been internet-, web-, community-, and e-commerce-changing things, and we shouldn’t, for blips in… however we want to legalize it, business, blah blah blah… we shouldn’t discount the insanely huge impact these open-source projects have made on our lives.

Robbie:
Open source has made such an impact—yeah, on our lives, our businesses. And it has also made big impacts on business overall. Just business overall. Even corporates—it has affected their business to have open-source models out there.

And on the open-source note, by the way, and AI—I’ll combine those two—it’s interesting to see the AI tools that are coming out that are open source. And some of those open-source AI tools are coming out by the big guys. Google is open-sourcing some of their stuff.

So it’s pretty amazing that open source has become such an acceptable model that even the big guys that are used to making corporate dollars—and it’s all about making their shareholders happy—are still embracing open source.

Our government has embraced open source. We have a .gov open-source level. So open source has changed business dramatically over the last, probably, whatever—three decades, I’ll say.

Robert:
And I’ll let Marcus chime in. Sorry, I’ve been rambling. Marcus, it’s your turn!

Marcus:
No, no, I think everything you’re saying is spot on. Open source has been transformative, and I think it’ll only continue to grow.

Robert:
And look at the journey of Endurance to Newfold—with Web.com, Registry.com, and all that. How much Newfold has embraced open source and partnered with WP Cloud and all these other solutions and tools that are going on. Back in the day, when Newfold—aka Endurance, blah blah blah—probably really wasn’t even thinking about it.

Robbie:
Marcus, are you going to respond to that?

Marcus:
Listen, I’ve been at Bluehost for six weeks. I’m not diving into that conversation.

I mean, getting back to the original question, I think that there’s an inner circle of folks that will continue to keep an eye on what’s happening. I kind of disagree with your disagreement that whatever happens doesn’t matter.

I think there is precedent that will be set by rulings that, if nothing else, will have to be considered by all of the other open-source projects. Whether or not they also become rulings, they’ll have to dance around, “Well, this happened to WordPress, so we have to be careful here.”

So I do think that will happen. I think there’s an inner circle of people that will continue to watch that unfold and see what happens there. But I’ll agree with both of you that the majority of the people in this WordPress space are going to move on and continue to do what they’ve been doing—continue to do the work they’ve been doing for customers that want to be online.

And so, yes, the majority of everyone will move away and be like, “I’ve followed as long as I can. I just need to get back to doing good work. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Robbie:
Exactly. There’s only so much drama anybody can take, and you’re just kind of like, “Okay, I just need to turn the volume down on that, set that over there, and get on with my life.”

So yeah, I know for some people, they’re more intimately related to what’s happening here. And so that may mean they can’t let it go as much. But for the rest of us…

Robert:
As a former president of Joomla, I know how much people can be personally invested in a project. And it really is their thing. And it’s hard to navigate and continue those relationships. I get it. But also, maybe I’m just slightly cynical about it—it’s just code. At the end of the day, we can do a lot with it.

Marcus:
And that’s fine. And as important as the code is, obviously, I do think that the community around WordPress is what makes WordPress significantly different from a lot of other projects.

And so, just kind of keeping an eye on what happens with the community over this year, I think, is important—just to see how big of a percentage is ignoring everything and just moving on. And how much of an effect will anything happening in that inner circle have on the community at large?

Robert:
Well, we have WordCamp Asia coming up in February. And as far as I can tell, it looks like it’s going to be even bigger than the WordCamp Asia last year.

So, at least from that perspective, I think people are just like, “Okay, there’s WordPress, the project. There’s the Automattic/WP Engine stuff all the way over here. But we’re still WordPress folk that love the code, love the community, love the ecosystem, and we’re going to get stuff done.”

Marcus:
And I think that is a testament to the community—that is a community gathering. Yes, it’s around this project that’s in the middle of the drama, but I think it is a testament to the community saying, “We’re still a community. We still want to get together. We still want to be with each other in person, talk business, talk web,” and all of that stuff.

And so, I think it shows kind of how resilient and strong the community is to have an event after all that, that’s even bigger than that same event was the year before.

Robbie:
Exactly. It’s not like it’s going away tomorrow. There’s just no possible way. By the way, you mentioned Mambo—there are still Mambo sites running on the web today.

Marcus:
Wow. Somebody needs to update.

Robbie:
I don’t know how they haven’t been hacked yet. Yeah, I know. It’s crazy.

Robert:
Probably a free-for-all.

Robbie:
And I’ve had people contact me before, and they’re like, “Can you help us with this website?” And I look at it, and it’s like Joomla 2.0. And I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t even believe this thing is still operating.”

Marcus:
Don’t touch any button. It’ll just be done.

Robbie:
I had a client one time who was like, “Hey, can you take a look at my website?” I can’t even remember what he asked me about. And I realized we had not worked on this guy’s site in 10, 15 years.

We had built him a Flash navigation—that tells you how long ago we worked on his website. His Flash application didn’t work. I was like, “Well, of course it doesn’t. Flash isn’t even supported anymore. Oh my gosh.”

He was like, “Well, it’s alright. It’s on the bottom. They can click.” I was like, “Yeah, you have a footer menu. I get that.”

Marcus:
The question is, how long ago did he ask you to update the site? Because that navigation hasn’t worked in years.

Robbie:
I was like, “You obviously don’t use this website.”

Robbie (continued):
You obviously don’t use this website. You don’t need this. It was his main website, though, and I was blown away. He had just let it sit that way with a broken thing at the top.

Robert:
There are a whole bunch of listeners who can’t wait to take over and rebuild that website right now, Robbie.

Robbie:
It’s been done, thank you. But I was still just startled whenever I saw that. And I was just like, “Good Lord.” There’s some really old stuff.

So, my point being, even old technology is still around—it’s just still around. There are still COBOL programmers out there doing stuff. I mean, we’ve got old technology.

So something like WordPress, which is current, is not going to just go away. And I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, it’s the end of WordPress.” I’m like, “It’s not the end of WordPress.”

I mean, it’s not the end of PHP either. Every year the prediction is, “Oh, PHP is old, it’s going away.” I’m like, look at the percentages. PHP is going nowhere. It’s actually just going to keep…

Marcus:
It keeps getting better, actually.

Robbie:
I know. It does keep getting better. Wow. I mean, it keeps getting faster.

Marcus:
Yeah.

Robert:
If you add up WordPress just on the open-source side, if you add up WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and other projects, you are already looking at 70% of the web being run by PHP.

Robbie:
Exactly. Exactly.

Okay, alright. So, we’ve talked about AI. We’ve talked about the not-to-be-talked-about WP drama. Now let’s talk about the final thing, because this is Do the Woo. Let’s talk about e-commerce trends, WooCommerce, whichever you prefer to talk about.

What do you think we’re going to see coming up this year, and what would you like to see coming up this year? So it’s a two-parter. Again, sorry—I like to ask two-parter questions. I don’t like you to give me a yes-or-no answer on anything.

Robert:
Yes.

Robbie:
So, Marcus, let’s start with you. What would you like to see in e-commerce, and what do you think we might see?

Marcus:
Yeah, what I think will be interesting this year with WooCommerce is following along with the more-in-core initiative that WooCommerce has going on and the balance between the benefits to users and agencies, and how that affects developers who are building some of the products that are looking to be kind of incorporated into core.

I think it’s going to be interesting to watch the folks that will have conversations with customers, agencies, and product teams. They’re going to have to say, “Here’s what we’re thinking about doing. How does that affect you? How does that affect your business? How do we work together with these concepts?”

And bringing in some of those things that I honestly, as someone who’s worked on the agency side building WooCommerce sites, think should have been in core for a long time.

But at the same time, I understand also now from having friends that do WooCommerce products—and having been a part of SkyVerge as well, right, WooCommerce product company—that you obviously don’t want to take something that’s maybe one of your bread-and-butter plugins and see it disappear as it gets built into core and lose out on that business.

So, I think it’ll be interesting to see what gets built in. I think WooCommerce will continue to get better as more of those things that should have always been there are there, and block building with blocks gets better over the course of the year, and all that stuff too.

But at the same time, watching them balance and strike that balance with the WooCommerce product companies—because those product companies are also what keep WooCommerce being the de facto commerce platform for WordPress.

Robbie:
And I agree with you, Marcus. There were several of those things that I saw in their proposed additions that I was like, “I always thought they should have just been in there.”

I don’t feel like they’re putting in anything that’s going to take down a big plugin out there. It’s the little things, like being able to just set a minimum quantity on something.

I had to pay like $30, $50 a year for a plugin—it’s probably three lines of code, is what I figured. But I mean, that seemed like such a basic thing that should have been built into core, I feel like.

So, I agree with you that I think some of the things they’ve proposed should have been in core anyway. And I also think, as a plugin developer, you always know any of your plugins are at risk of becoming not needed anymore.

Robert:
The phrase is “Sherlocked.” Oh, excuse me—we’ll get the technical phrase here.

Robbie:
We’ll get the technical phrase, yeah.

Robert:
Apple days—when Apple “Sherlocked” their search tool.

Robbie:
Okay.

Robert:
Oh, this will be fun. All the kids can go Google it as a term.

Robbie:
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Alright, so, Robert, what about you?

Robert:
It’s going to be another year of incremental changes. What I kind of hope, or magically want to see, is Woo.com becoming that super-simple, stupidly easy payment process and gateway for agencies who want to directly tie into it, or hosting companies who want to utilize that.

I think as an end-user—whether that’s a consumer, a small business owner, or whoever—I should be able to say, “I want an e-commerce shop.” Click that button, wherever that button may be, and let’s say it takes me over to Bluehost, and everything’s magically set up.

Let’s use the AI, let’s use whatever payment gateway, and I get a bill that says $50 a month. It’s just done. I mean, if I want to sell a handful of t-shirts a month—yeah, okay. So I sell 10 t-shirts a month. I pay for my hosting, which includes the payment kit, which includes… I don’t need to go through any kind of verification process or whatnot.

I want to see that e-commerce portion become completely seamless, behind the scenes—not my problem. I want the Newfolds and other hosting companies of the world to just take on that risk and just say, “I can sell up to $200 a month and not worry about it at all.” And the risk? I just click the button that says, “Yes, I’m a store.”

Robbie:
Yeah, I think we’re going to see more of that. I think they’ve been working toward that—making it a little simpler, more wizard-driven.

I think that we’re also going to see some different payment gateway things happening this year. What I would like to see that I don’t know if we’ll actually see—and I say this every year—is I would like to see WooCommerce putting more marketing budget out there.

I’d like to see them actually… When I’m watching my streaming TV and a commercial comes up for Squarespace, or Wix, or Shopify, I’d like to then see a WooCommerce commercial pop up.

At least on streaming, I know that’s cheaper. So they could go that route to start with. I would like to see some more mainstream commercials so that WooCommerce becomes an everyday word out there to the general populace—not just inside the web development world.

Robert:
It’s like the old “Intel Inside” model: Botguard Inside, WooCommerce Inside, kind of thing.

Robbie:
Yes, exactly. So I would like to see them just get a broader reach, a broader look out there. So you have people who think about it the same way they think about those tools that are advertising at a higher level.

But it kind of depends on how easy it is to get into it. So that comes back to needing that wizard-y kind of thing so that it is easy. If you’re advertising and the average person just sees it and goes online to try and do it, they actually can do it successfully.

Robbie (continued):
Alright, Marcus, when does your new podcast start up again?

Marcus:
Yeah, the first episode will be recorded at the end of this month, so probably early February it’ll be live for everyone. And we’ll see what the format looks like.

I’ll probably have, from time to time, an agency on and ask them five things, or have five agencies on and ask them one thing. But it’ll be fun to see just what’s happening in the WP agency world and get some more info out there for agencies—a little bit broader than just the Woo sphere.

Robert:
And the official title is…?

Marcus:
It is WP Agency Tracks, and it’ll be in the main feed, but it’s its own show. So it’ll have its own show feed and all of that stuff too on the Do the Woo network—DTW.

Robbie:
Awesome. So, Robert, where are you heading next? Robert’s always going somewhere.

Robert:
Next on the agenda is DigitalOcean’s Deploy Conference in just a couple of weeks in Texas. Then, of course, WordCamp Asia, which I’m very excited for.

Robbie:
And I know Bob’s going to be there too, right?

Robert:
Bob’s going to be there. So it’ll be Bob and I. I’m officially the gaffer. I’ll be taping everything…

Marcus:
Taping everything down.

Robert:
Taping everything! He’s going to tape all those cords everywhere.

Robbie:
That’ll be great.

Robert:
Tape. No, like the hardcore tape. Yes.

Robbie:
So if anybody wants to meet the wizard behind the Emerald City, they can meet BobWP. No, everybody’s going to be coming up to Bob and going like, “Bob is the wizard.” I love it. I love it.

Robert:
Jeff Goldblum or Bob? I’ll take Bob.

Robbie:
Yeah, Jeff Goldblum—he’s a strange duck. But he did a good job in that role, by the way. That’s coming from a musical theater fan.

Robbie:
Alright, well, thank you both for being on the show and chatting about this next year. Now, it’ll be interesting to see at the end of the year: did any of our hopes happen? And did any of our predictions happen?

Who knows what’ll happen, but anyway, hopefully, we’re all going to have a very good year. I hope our listeners have a very good year and keep listening to Do the Woo. It sounds like we’ve got even more episodes coming out this year.