Balancing Infrastructure Security and Business Goals in Ecommerce

Brian (00:00):
Hello and welcome back yet again everyone, I am still your host, Brian Richards, and I’m still excited that you are here and now flanking either side of me, if I can center myself in the frame here we have Robert Jacobi and Zach Stepek. I’m going to take just a quick moment here to introduce each of them and then we’re going to get started on our recap. So for those of you who are unaware, both Zach and Robert are distinguished hosts for the Do the Woo podcast. And each of our broadcasts this week are going to culminate in one of these live recaps and I am very excited to be working with them. Just like last year, Robert, for those of you who haven’t met him, is an ambitious participant and contributor to open source hosting and infrastructure communities. And over the past 20 years, he served in multiple roles with Joomla, including president of Open Source Matters.

(00:49):
He’s a member of the Make WordPress hosting Group and a contributor at large for ICAN. And all of this only scratches the surface of the things he’s done over the last 20 years. Recently, Robert served as director of WordPress at Cloud Ways and led the charge to their acquisition by Digital Ocean, and today he provides industry analysis and commentary at robertjacoby.com. And then Zach, on the other hand, serves as the client enablement manager at Convesio, and he endeavors to help e-commerce store owners run more profitable businesses. In particular, he specializes in creating faster and more scalable e-commerce solutions. He places a heavy focus on business objectives and manages the way the complexity and technical architecture to meet those objectives rather than the other way around. He’s a pretty great guy to work with, which is true for both of them. So today we had what, five, six sessions before this.

(01:44):
We kicked things off with State of the Woo with our opening keynote from eight different members from the WooCommerce team. Then Leanna Patch led us through nine ways to write higher converting copy without sounding sleazy emphasis on the without sounding sleazy part. She was amazing and really good at avoiding that common problem. Sean Conklin gave us building standards to block theme generation. Tim Nash taught us how not to woo a hacker. And then just moments ago, Brad Williams and Phil Wiley taught us how to rescue disgruntled clients. Really cool stuff that amazingly stacked together and sort of complimented one another to build sort of this comprehensive picture of how to be out there in the world

Robert (02:29):
Listening to everyone. I’m just waiting for that magical woo.com experience to happen. That really just takes a big, what’s the word I’m looking for? Right fist, left fist, depending on what hand you dominantly use to shopify.com.

Zach (02:51):
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think Woo Express is definitely a stepping stone on that journey. The new product experience, the new store builder experiences, the focus on block themes and on enabling us with a number of blocks, a plethora or even a cornucopia of blocks for WooCommerce.

Robert (03:16):
Oh my gosh. I think we’re jumping like five or six sessions ahead, talking about blocks, but yeah, absolutely.

Zach (03:23):
Well, and they were mentioned during the state of the Woo as well. There’s over a hundred blocks now in WooCommerce core, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. And then there’s all these patterns they’ve been working on to make it easier for a store builder to build a store that has varied display. We’re not in the days of storefront where everything looked like storefront. We’re past that now, and we’re to a point where people can build something that really fits the personality of their brand and without having to have a developer do all of that work.

Robert (04:02):
Oh, absolutely. Which is really nice to see in the whole world and the fact that pretty much most of it is open source and everyone can take advantage of it and run with it.

Brian (04:19):
Oops, unmuted myself there. That to me has been one of the more interesting things to observe over the last, what’s it been? 15? No, not 15 years for a while anyway, 11 years. I think of 12 years of WooCommerce history is how anybody could step up and set up a hosted e-commerce competitor, and nobody did for a long time. And then almost uniformly across the board, so many different teams unlocked it at the same time over the last couple of years. And now we have a proliferation of hosted e-commerce solutions.

Robert (05:02):
Absolutely. I mean, you see it at GoDaddy, you see it new fold, I guess, which would be Bluehost. You see that Nexus, you see it. All these folks are like, wait a minute, we can actually build fully hosted WooCommerce solutions.

Brian (05:29):
Sorry, I’d leave you all with some dead air there. As I was

Robert (05:32):
Getting

Brian (05:32):
The audio situation straightened back out and Oh no, we lost Zach

Robert (05:40):
Zena’s car again.

Brian (05:43):
Yeah, I wonder, well, I’ll

Robert (05:45):
Talk over

Brian (05:46):
Here to nothing for a second. Hey, there we go.

Zach (05:51):
Okay.

Robert (05:55):
There’s nothing better than doing it live. I mean, forget all the scripted your prerecord stuff. We’re going to do it live.

Brian (06:02):
Yeah. Going

Zach (06:03):
Live. My internet connection at home is going to stop working and I’m going to jump to my phone and use my hotspot just in the middle of fuss doing this.

Brian (06:14):
Yeah, that happens from time to time.

Zach (06:18):
It does. It does. At least we recovered

Robert (06:22):
Again, we’d like

Zach (06:23):
To think. Yeah, doing it live is Yes, absolutely. So the state of the Woo was great. Favorite part of the whole day for me. The whole conference every year is hearing from the Wu team and getting that insight. But I have to say that I thought it would be hard to top that today. And then we got into the session about how to write higher converting copy,

Robert (06:55):
And

Zach (06:57):
I just started laughing and I didn’t stop for most of the session. I was engaged from start to finish. That’s a rare skill.

Brian (07:08):
Leanna basically delivered a masterclass, not only in how to write good copy, but also how to deliver an engaging presentation and maybe unsurprising to those two skills go hand in hand. Good delivery is good writing. And so that common thread was sort of shown throughout, not just in what she was talking about, but also how she was talking about it. It was a treat to get to host that and bring that to everyone today.

Zach (07:45):
It really was a great session. And I mentioned in the WSEs Slack, which by the way, if you’re watching this and you’re not in the woosh slack, you’re probably missing half the conference because conversations that happen in that Slack channel add more depth to every session.

Robert (08:09):
Every time you see one of our heads turn one direction or another, we’re like, oh my gosh, what did someone just say? You’re a hundred percent correct, Zach. There’s so much. It’s like the hallway track for the sessions, which happens at every conference and everyone should be taking advantage of it and jumping on.

Brian (08:31):
I would have to agree wholeheartedly, not just because it’s my Slack instance that I’m inviting everyone to join, but in particular because as Zach said, you’re missing out on a significant portion of the event by not being in Slack. And I realize not everybody uses Slack or enjoys being on Slack, so lemme give you a 32nd pitch on why you should do it anyway. And that’s because the connections that attending conferences enables is unparalleled in terms of sort of like a multiplying factor for your life. I can point to so many different amazing things that have happened for me because of an incidental conversation that I happen to be part of at an event. And while those are largely physical events, it’s not exclusively physical events. And I found that Slack, the post status Slack is one of my favorite haunts because

Robert (09:26):
There are

Brian (09:26):
So many amazing people hanging out there, and there are so many people, amazing people who drive by and hang out here in the WP Session. Slack for Word, all of our speakers, most of our sponsors, fellow attendees. It’s incredible the kind of conversations that we can get caught up in over there.

Robert (09:47):
The stress is not screwing it up. Right?

Brian (09:50):
Bingo. Yeah, exactly.

Robert (09:51):
I’m just pointing at Zach. Of

Zach (09:54):
Course. I mean, I already tried once. So yeah, that session I found a whole bunch of value in what Leanna had to say about writing copy. It was probably the best content focused session that I’ve seen in a long time. And then we got into block themes with Sean, and that was great talking about how our building standards have changed as we move into a world where we’re trying to embrace Gutenberg more. And honestly, it’s light years ahead of where it was when we first started, and it’s really

Robert (10:46):
2019.

Zach (10:47):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s really cool to see it evolve and see the tools evolve around it and just getting that primer on how to start from scratch with a block theme and build something out from nothing, and seeing how much fewer files, how many fewer files are needed for a block theme compared to a traditional WordPress theme was pretty eyeopening.

Brian (11:20):
Yeah.

Robert (11:20):
Oh my. It’s night and day. Sorry, Ryan. So I really came into WordPress just as the switch from classic to Gutenberg happened, and I did not understand why people were wedded to classic at all. And being able to work with blocks in WooCommerce is, I mean, it just makes sense. We don’t like to be sitting there doing 1960s data entry when we can pull up blocks that access the database with all of our products, with all of inventory. For me, it’s literally night and day.

Brian (12:00):
Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think the reason that so many of us, myself included, we’re still stuck not embracing blocks, is for the first couple of years it was touch and go because there just wasn’t a lot out there in terms of documentation or practice design, et cetera. And even only recently, we gained block patterns and some of the more nifty things that the block editor can do, but in large part, it was just people are comfortable with what they know and well, I know how to do this powerful stuff without blocks. How could I possibly replicate this with blocks? And now we have so many fantastic examples of how to do exactly that and more still coming to call back to the state of the Woo, a third of what they were showing off were like, here are some amazing blocks that we’ve made. Here’s the new product editing experience that’s sort of rich with block integration. Here are some incredible new theme opportunities that are possible now thanks to blocks and so on. So we’re still getting, we haven’t even reached the best stuff yet, is

Robert (13:09):
Completely agree. I’m reaching back to last, so 2022 state of the word where Matt talks about how Gutenberg and blocks and patterns is the future of how we work with and manage content on the internet. WooCommerce being to a huge degree, the most valuable piece because there’s financial transactions going on all the time. So how do we enable that and get the most people comfortable with it without ever thinking of shore codes and any kind of code? The word COD each never exist for most folks, period.

Brian (13:51):
Yeah. Zach, I stumped on you earlier, and that left

Robert (13:53):
Zach, Stu because he was like, how can you not say code?

Zach (13:57):
Well, no. See, the thing is we used to have to use hooks and filters to change the order of presentation on a screen in WooCommerce, and now you can just drag a block up.

Robert (14:14):
Yes, yes. It’s amazing.

Zach (14:18):
Yeah. The experience is way different, and it’s just enabling, it’s opening up the ecosystem to enable more people to design and create stores without requiring specialists. And that’s great. That’s what we’ve always been moving toward.

Brian (14:36):
Yeah. I remember when I first discovered WordPress in 2007, the part that blew me away because I’d heard about it, but I hadn’t really bothered looking into it. And then a roommate of mine in college mentioned it. I’m like, I’m not looking to make a blog for this project I’m working on. And then little by little, I kept noticing the WordPress name show up in the footers of all these different sites that I was frequent powered by WordPress, powered by WordPress name. Oh, and those two things aren’t at all alike. Neither one of those are blogs. What’s going? So I took a deeper look and the thing it crystallized for me is that my clients could update the content on their own website without having to call me or send me an email every time they wanted a headline changed or a paragraph changed, or even if they still were not interested in that, they’re not in the business of managing websites, I could do that without shipping a code change. And that was the real powerhouse right there, is that I could use it without writing code, not just my clients could use it without writing code.

Robert (15:46):
And so for all the freelancers out there and side gig folk, you get to charge more for the privilege of people having an easier job of dealing with Woo. And I think that’s what everyone should be really on that freelance solepreneur side gig side of the universe should be kicking away from this. I’m providing a value to my customers who can sell more because it’s easier for them to sell more, so maybe I’ll charge ’em a little bit more and the whole ecosystem grows. So you’re talking probably one of the biggest blocks fans on earth, anything that makes the end users life, whether that’s that content creator, that inventory manager, whatnot, business owner, is great for everyone.

Zach (16:36):
Well, and that’s part of what the Do the Woo community is all about is empowering builders. And so that’s why we’re here. Our mission has been to empower builders, and I like to think of builders not just as people who can click around the WordPress admin, but more as people who are guides, right? They’re guides to the end users, the customers who are using tools like WordPress and WooCommerce, and they are paid guides through this jungle that they’d have to figure out on their own.

Robert (17:11):
Absolutely. And that’s what WSEs is great about is here are some guides, here are some trails you might want to take the trail with a map and a guide, or here are some starting points where you can, well, I’m going to totally screw up the metaphor, but I’m, I’m going to go skiing. Here’s some green slopes, blue slopes, black slopes, and one of these ways is going to be the best for you to go down.

Zach (17:38):
Well, and speaking of Black Slopes, Tim Nash shared a story with us, right?

Robert (17:44):
And

Zach (17:44):
That story was definitely a black diamond slope that sounded like it was a very difficult situation to deal with in the moment, and there were a ton of learning opportunities in there for us as practitioners in this space. First of all, it’s very easy for there to be a vulnerability that somebody can exploit, right? All it takes is forgetting to hit that update button for long enough, or having the

Robert (18:21):
Wrong that long enough keeps getting shorter and shorter pss.

Zach (18:25):
It really does. And there are tools out there to help mitigate that. Obviously we heard about one of them, the head of web application firewall installed that happened to be co-opted by the hacker, and in some ways, or at least disguised to look like it had been, right? But all of those lessons are important, and as we get into the e-commerce space more and more as a community, things like this matter more because there’s more money on the line than ever before, and we’re dealing with things like card skimmers that could steal all of our customer’s data. That’s a huge problem. So yeah, I think it’s a really good story that helps us to understand why these things are so important and how they can hide in plain sight.

Robert (19:30):
You mean I shouldn’t add my credit card into any JavaScript popup that appears, right?

Brian (19:36):
No, you can’t. I prefer, in fact, there’s going to be one appearing on your

Robert (19:39):
Screen screen. Thanks, Scott. Got it. In

Brian (19:41):
A few seconds, it’s going to say credit card security verifier, and that’s just for you. Make sure you type that in. No, Zach, that’s a very salient point and almost sounds antithetical to what we were just saying, where the goal of the tools that we’re helping develop and the experiences that we as practitioners are helping produce is one that makes it as easy as possible for the people who own the business to take care of their whole web presence without having to be an expert in managing websites. And yet, the opposing force to that are all of the malicious actors who are coming for and seeking out exploits because for sure, a person who’s brand new to putting something on the internet does not bring with him the baggage of the past 20 and 30 years of, oh, I got to make sure this is really locked down. And I have to constantly be checking against that because as you mentioned, Robert, the time of discovery of the exploit to the exploit being actively maliciously utilized in the wild is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking from months to weeks to days to hours. And so people need to be really fast to stay on top of things, which I guess is another point of credit to all of the managed hosting offerings that exist, like W Express, like GoDaddy, like et cetera, where they will do much to help take care of that for you.

Robert (21:14):
Yeah, I mean, new day hacks, everyone wants to pick on word and woo for being open source, and so no, it’s a target because it’s huge and zero day hacks are going to happen everywhere. So you need to rely on your host, you need to rely on security partners that either you’re working with or your host is working with, and you want a team or agency of folk that are managing that for you so you can worry about your business and making money as opposed to worrying about who’s going to break in at 2:00 AM and Rob the kitty.

Zach (21:56):
Yep. And if you don’t know if this is covered, the W experts that they mentioned, that they’re revitalized the program for a great source to have somebody check and make sure that your host has things covered for you, make sure that you have the tools in place to make sure that you’re not a victim

Robert (22:22):
And folks who are freelancers and solopreneurs, they’re on it. So as a client to those folks, make sure you’re engaging with them. I mean, then there are obviously other sort of third party services with the developers and security folk that you can take advantage of as well.

Zach (22:44):
Yeah, absolutely.

Robert (22:46):
I get trouble from name dropping, so I’m just going to just say it that way.

Zach (22:51):
I use a couple plugins myself. If you want recommendations, feel free to reach out to me in the WP session Slack.

Robert (22:58):
That’s right. That is a perfect, let’s check that Slack out. What’s going? Oh boy, it’s blowing up again.

Zach (23:03):
Well, Tim Nash has declared he’s the wallet inspector. Yes. He needs to check your wallet. So Tim, thank you for the laugh. I enjoyed that. And Ben Lobo here is reminding everybody that mind size has an offer. If you go to mind size.com/woo, and you can enter a giveaway for a 10 bucks two bag. So go ahead and go get a 10 bucks two bag if you can, and get yourself in for that special that they’re offering.

Brian (23:42):
Nice bag.

Zach (23:43):
And then back before that is a whole bunch of, we can’t hear Zach or Robert, so

Robert (23:49):
That’s right.

Brian (23:50):
Yeah. Everybody is quick, thankfully to point out when things are not working even or probably especially because I’m slow to notice and I’m caught up in the conversation. So thank you to all of you who helped keep me honest here and got me back to flying the plane

Robert (24:07):
Again. The benefit of making sure you’re on the slack for the next, well today and certainly the next two days to be able to talk to any of us at any time. I mean, this is the hallway chat that gets things done.

Zach (24:26):
Speaking of hallway chats, a long time ago at a host’s agency event, there was a conversation that Brad Williams and Kareem Maki and I had about rescuing disgruntled clients, and it was worded kind of differently in that conversation, a way that I won’t share here, but it was really nice to see Brad and Phil going into their experiences with rescuing disgruntled clients and how to handle when a relationship goes off the rails a bit. And so I just want to, Ben, you were already famous, man.

Brian (25:20):
I was just going to let you drive that one yourself.

Robert (25:22):
We’re just going to make everyone famous. So we got Ben, we got bet. Again, everyone knows Bob Dun already, so we don’t need to say that.

Zach (25:29):
Yeah, Bob’s Bob. Yeah, but the format of just having a panel with two people who have experience in the trenches of doing exactly that, servicing clients, things are going to go wrong no matter what. You do the best laid plans. They don’t always work out the way we want them to. So having both of them as Wu experts here to share their experiences and how to navigate when things do go wrong, that was really cool. It was really nice to get those insights. And for the store owners, just like they said in their description of the talk, if you’re a store owner and you watched this, it gives you an understanding of how we think internally at agencies and how we work with you as a store owner and gives you a bit of a platform from which you can manage your relationship with your agency partners from a place of knowledge, a position of understanding.

Brian (26:50):
I was going to add there in terms of things absolutely will go wrong, the best strategies, how do we prevent all possible disasters and shortcomings, though that’s a really nice thing to strive towards. The better strategy is how are we going to handle any challenges that arise? Some event producing friends of mine introduced me to this idea of a pre-mortem, which they would do ahead of the events that they were producing, and I couldn’t believe that in 25 years of web development, that idea hadn’t occurred to me leading up to a website launch of like, okay, we’re going to launch this thing and everything should go fine, but let’s just pretend for a moment that they didn’t go fine. What are the things that are likely to go wrong in this? Oh, well, the DNS doesn’t propagate. Yeah, that’s a common one. How are we going to mitigate that? Well, we’re going to do, oh, well, what happens if all of the URLs start to 4 0 4 because they were pointing to internally referencing the development site and they didn’t get cut over when we Oh, well, let’s,

Robert (28:09):
You sound like you’re speaking from experience there.

Brian (28:12):
I mean,

Zach (28:13):
I don’t think you’ve run into any of those before, have you?

Brian (28:16):
Hypothetically speaking, I’ve heard of other people handling situations like this, and I talk to them a lot, and boy, do they never want to encounter those situations again. And so going through the mental exercise of a pre-mortem of here are all the things that may go wrong, so what do we do about that? And then what do we do for the unknowns here? How do we handle problems that we haven’t defined? What are our steps for troubleshooting and processing through that is such a useful way to keep a cool head when there’s an emergency.

Robert (28:57):
The known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.

(29:04):
My favorite is have you ever just tested any of these theories? Like, oh my goodness, our droplet goes down, or whatever VM we’re using, what’s the bed? How quickly can you restore? How quickly can you get back online? Oh, we have a plan, which is like 30 pages of what we do, and which has never ever actually been gone through and done it in sort of a real life situation. And we could talk about this for any kind of site, but most importantly for a WooCommerce site where transactions are critical and you can’t be down for days, hours, or even seconds. What’s that recovery process look like?

Zach (29:55):
And every site has value to uptime, but in an e-commerce site, that value to uptime is a completely different thing.

Robert (30:09):
Oh, for sure. Because it’s not just like, oh, I’ll take that credit for downtime. No, you lost thousands of dollars in that outage or whatever that may be, and you’re 30, 50 hundreds of dollars aren’t even close to covering that as well as reputational damage.

Zach (30:30):
That was weird. By the way, my microphone was ducking for some reason, and I apologize for that, everybody. I’ve fixed it now. I was at about a quarter of the volume I was supposed to be for that last little bit.

Robert (30:43):
Little bit. I heard you loud, unclear.

Zach (30:47):
Well, that’s good.

Brian (30:49):
Yeah. So let me get back to some of my hosting duties here as the host of WSEs. I kind of skipped over the fact that you guys are here representing Do the Woo. We talked about it like this much, and then I just moved right along. So before we close out, we are starting to get close to that. Could you explain to our dear audience members a little bit about do the Woo and why you are here hanging out with us today?

Zach (31:22):
Sure.

Robert (31:25):
Yeah. I want to say because Bob paid us, but we know that’s not true. So do the woo.

(31:31):
It’s been for, wow, I don’t even know how long at this point, 10, 15 years sort of the authoritative, authoritative hate podcast news engine for information about what’s going on with WooCommerce and Bob Dunn, the founder of Do the Woo, has kept expanding the amount of topics and sort of almost niches that he covers. So for example, I worked with Robbie er of always training on the agency chat side of the universe. So we’re always speaking with new agencies who just got into blue agencies that have been there for a number of years talking about their experiences. It’s almost like a case study once a month about what an agency and WooCommerce can do on do the Woo. I know Zach comes at it from a much more technical perspective.

Zach (32:32):
So on a monthly basis, I host the W Dev chat with Carl Alexander and we nerd out the geekiest parts of WooCommerce from hosting to performance to scalability, to we even have sessions that are ancillary to that. So we just had an episode we did about the contributor onboarding tool that’s now on the Make blog for WordPress so that you can determine what teams might be a good fit for you as an individual to start contributing to WordPress. So that was a great episode, but we tend to focus more on the developer side of WooCommerce. So if you’re interested in learning more about those things about scaling, and really just diving into the deep complexity of what I do day-to-day, what Carl does day-to-day, we bring on guests that talk about that stuff. I believe our next episode we have Ben from rocket.net and Tom from Conveo talking about hosting difficult WooCommerce sites.

Robert (33:53):
Oh my goodness. Now since I know both Ben and Tom very well, both the founders of the respective hosting companies, so Conveo and Rocket, that should be great, except they’re both from Florida, so I know if anything goes wrong, they can each drive to each other’s house.

Brian (34:13):
The trouble with hosting difficult sites is going to be a fantastic topic to cover. And in my experience, what’s interesting about those is they have a few similarities, but the rest of it is they’re just radically different in terms of what makes them difficult, right? Yeah, they’re big, but they’re all big in different ways. One has a ton of skews that they manage. One is managing a ton of order volume one has to do with lots of rebuilding and subscription renewals and things like that. And so they all face different problems for their bigness.

Robert (34:51):
So Zach and I could definitely speak to an experience and we’ll just leave it at that where they had huge spurts. It’d be like two days out of every four or five months. And how you manage that kind of instantaneous traffic madness is hard. And it’s even different than the folks that are worried about Black Friday, who you can plan for those specific days, months ahead of time, and how we’re going to optimize our services, optimize landing pages, optimize server utilization, all that kind of fun stuff, when those spikes happen almost unknowingly. That’s a fun challenge.

Brian (35:43):
Yeah. So question from the audience. Bette is wondering, when is this episode going to air? Zach, do you have a rough estimate? Is it next week, two weeks

Zach (35:53):
Later this month? It’ll be the end of November. We record the fourth week of every month. So we just released an episode, or I’m sorry, it should be the end of October. We’ll

Robert (36:06):
Record. It’s the week after we record.

Zach (36:08):
Yeah, it’s always the week after we record. So it’ll be in the end of October, not November. Let me correct myself in Slack as well.

Brian (36:17):
Amazing. That’s

Zach (36:19):
Great. And if you want the topic, one of the things that’s great about Do the Woo is we are open to feedback from our listeners in a way that most podcasts aren’t. So if you have an idea for a topic or you want to come and join us on a woo dev chat and talk about something that you’ve done, definitely reach out to us through the website@dothewoo.com or.io, do the wooo io. Yep. And come let us know what you want to share or what you want, want to talk about. We have a number of shows and it’s only going to be growing. We will have lots of fun things to talk about in the future. And I see Bob typing probably telling me to stop talking. But yeah, we have a ton of different types of shows, and you can find us everywhere you’d find your favorite podcasts.

Robert (37:26):
And just like we’ve been pushing everyone to jump on the woo slack, same with the do the Woo slack. There’s so much that goes on. And to Zach’s point, you can reach out to all the hosts. Even Bob doesn’t sleep, so feel free to ping him all the time. Whoops. Now I’m in trouble

Zach (37:49):
Now that he is crossed the pond, he’s just awake all the time, right?

Robert (37:54):
That’s right. So start at 9:00 AM Eastern European time and keep going until 9:00 PM Pacific time. Right? A good 20 hour day is what Bob needs in his life.

Brian (38:08):
Interesting.

Robert (38:10):
Brian, don’t think we’re leaving out any overflow should just go straight to you. So don’t worry about falling asleep either.

Brian (38:15):
Perfect. Yeah, that’s great. I was going to say, the interesting thing about that is those are the hours that Bob has always kept. It has nothing to do with where he is physically in the world. He’s just incapable of sleeping more than four hours a day. And so he’s, that’s how he’s been able to stay on top of so many breaking stories over the past 15 years. Really,

Robert (38:35):
It’s the life of being in Woo and WordPress

Brian (38:42):
Pretty much. So I need to get you guys out of here because you have other schedules that you’re keeping. I could keep the conversation going for ages, but that would be rude. I also know the audience has other things that they have planned to do today besides just hang out with us.

Robert (38:57):
They’re getting ready and rested for tomorrow. What do we have on that agenda, Brian?

Brian (39:02):
Yeah, we have a bunch of amazing talks coming up tomorrow, and I have to look over here instead of right at my teleprompter. I forgot to put those notes up there. But tomorrow we have, what, eight sessions technically a more human touch through robots with Yob Thomas Landing page Launchpad making Your Page Sell with Kathy Zt. Both of them are talking about AI and how to incorporate it into what you’re doing. Then Krupa Laia is going to talk about how we can balance personalization and privacy. This desire to make our websites as catered to our audience without exposing all of their personal identifiable information to all of the different companies that want to try to help you with this first part.

Robert (39:50):
And we call that P-I-I-P-I.

Brian (39:53):
That’s exactly right. Which

Robert (39:54):
Is would love for us to all memorize that.

Brian (40:00):
And then in the middle of the day, Omar TI is going to teach us about a better way to pay, and he’s also brought a guest, Jeff Gleason, and we’re going to get a little bit of a case study there on how Amazon pay, along with multiple payment options, really made an incredible transformation to USA Burke filters where Jeff runs operations. And then after that, Theo SRA is going to talk about how he and his compatriot transformed the mattress business in Latin America, which is a really cool case study as well. So we’ve got back to back interesting case studies. Then Chris Ire is going to talk to us about shipping trends from the past year and how we can better cater to customers and create a better experience for both store owners and customers as we go. And then we’ll have another recap with different hosts from Do The Woo along with some interesting do the Woo News that we couldn’t exactly break today, which is pretty exciting.

Robert (41:02):
Yeah, thanks a lot. Talking about, yeah, I’m going to have to do a huge shout out. She’s going to kill me. I love Kathy Zane. I can’t wait for her session tomorrow. She’s a star of that. Everyone should really check in on.

Brian (41:20):
Yeah. So let me roll into some of my closing notes here before we shut things down, and I’ll come back over to you guys to get some parting words of wisdom from you. So first of all, thank you to everyone in the audience for attending today. We are so glad you’re here. We’d otherwise just be talking to our screens. We could have fun talking to each other here just fine. But it’s all the more special to know that you’re out there and enjoying things with us. But before I kick you all out and say, thanks for being here, lemme bring our guests back up on screen. Zach, Robert, maybe I’ll have you go first. Any other parting words for our audience here?

Robert (42:03):
I’d like to say that Woo is moving faster and better than I had ever expected. So I’m very excited about sort of the pivots and shifts that have happened in Woo and that it will be driving a huge economy. So kudos to everyone who’s attending. You’re ahead of the curve by being at Woosh.

Brian (42:29):
Indeed. I agree. How about you, Zach? What do you want

Zach (42:32):
To, I concur with everything that he said, but I also want to use this opportunity to tell our community that if you are using plugins that say they’re not compatible with high performance order storage, when you go to your WooCommerce system report, contact those developers and tell them that they’re not compatible with high performance order storage. If you’re writing code and you’re still reaching directly into post meta to get things, stop doing that. Learn how to do it in a way that’s compatible with high performance order storage. And yeah, I think that is my message for all of you at the end of today.

Robert (43:14):
And that’s why Zach runs the do the Will Tech, sign the Universe, and why I Run the Other Side.

Brian (43:22):
Well, I could not agree more with both of those sentiments and especially the fact that you each serve different roles, and it’s very obvious why each of you are in your own different corners. So on that note, I think it is time for me to bid you all ado. Thank you Robert and Zach for joining us here today. It was a pleasure.

Robert (43:42):
Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having us. I really appreciate it. Love the opportunity.

Brian (43:47):
Me too. And thank you dear audience members for watching. Thank you to all of our incredible sponsors for making this possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you and dear attendees. It is because of them that we get to run this event and enjoy it all together. So it’s been a blast. On that note, have an amazing evening, afternoon, rest of your day, wherever you happen to be, and we’ll see you again tomorrow.