Smart Support Better Checkout and Global Commerce Shifts

Brian (00:00:00):
Hello and welcome back everyone. As you can see, I am now joined by the venerable team from Do the Woo. You see Bob WP Robbie Adair and Katie Keith, if you have not listened to do the WOO before, this is my call to tell you that you should add this to wherever you listen to podcasts as a regular subscription because they do an excellent job covering so many different facets of the WooCommerce ecosystem. And you would be surprised at the number of things that you don’t yet know, even if you’re already well connected. Like me, I always come way discovering something new, which is surprising given how long I’ve been in the community and how well connected I am. And if you don’t know the host beyond this introduction I’m giving you right now, you should know that Katie Keith runs Barn two plugins, one of the magnificent creators of WooCommerce extensions.

(00:00:56):
They’ve been in the game a long time and they’ve made a lot of really awesome stuff. Robbie Adair is my frenemy competitor cooperator. She runs OSS training, which provides training resources across a multitude of open source platforms. And then Bob is the man behind the mic. You might not recognize his face, but for sure you will recognize his voice because he has been providing podcasts and training longer than I’ve been in the WordPress ecosystem. He’s a veritable force to be reckoned with. So thank you all for joining me today. Katie, why don’t you take it from here and tell us where we’re going.

Katie (00:01:37):
Sure. So we’ve had an amazing day at esh. There’s been some fantastic sessions about various different elements and angles on WooCommerce and tons of new stuff that’s quite new and new to the whole community really, like AI and how that’s working with WooCommerce and different payment gateways we might not have considered and lots of things like that. So we’re going to recap those and what we’ve learned today on esh. And we’re also going to talk a bit about changes in Do the Woo recently and all the amazing things that Bob’s doing to bring it to the next level and make it even more useful for the community.

Brian (00:02:15):
Sounds wonderful.

Robbie (00:02:16):
Yes, and so I’m excited because the very first session that happened today, and we’re going to have Brian give us a little recap on it and then we’re going to discuss it more because it is about AI tools, which is near and dear to me. I’ve been speaking about AI and using AI in your web development at a lot of the work camps lately, and so it’s just a topic that I’m fascinated with right now. And so Brian, tell us Job Thomas was the person from WooCommerce that did this session, correct. So give us the high level view so that we can now start talking about this.

Brian (00:02:50):
Yeah, absolutely. So Yob framed this beautifully when he first submitted the talk, and I read it like this needs to be out there all year long kicking off. Now I forget the exact specifics, at least at the beginning of this year, maybe even towards the tail end of last year, they started exploring using AI to help better solve support requests, particularly ones that already had answers and documentation in their systems. People ask the same questions all the time. Anyone who runs customer support knows this. And one of the most tedious things is finding where you’ve already answered this before, especially for ones that have been asked questions that have been asked before but aren’t asked frequently enough to be like, oh yeah, of course, here’s the answer to that. And so they started using OpenAI and other LLM tools to mine all of their own documentation and support feeds to surface, Hey, here are the ways that you’ve commonly answered this in the past, to more quickly address those and give them more time in the places where they can really add the most value, which he describes as helping customers grow their businesses. And through this, he shared experiences both the successful decisions that they made to do this and the mistakes that they made, which to be honest is my favorite kind of case study. Anytime where you can say like, Hey, we tried this thing and here are all of the things that went wrong with it. There is no better way finding type of presentation or instruction than showing someone like, here are the mistakes that you can now avoid because I made them for the both of us.

BobWP (00:04:34):
So I think conceptually with Katie and Robbie, both what they do with their business, I’m curious from a talk like that, is this something they’ve thought about themselves as far as support? Because they’re both Katie’s in the plugin business. Robbie is in the training, and I’d love to hear a little bit about what they think on the topic themselves and is that something they’re going to ever, you never, never, you don’t want to say I’ll never do anything, but is it something that’s on the radar?

Robbie (00:05:12):
Katie, I’m sure your customer support is more similar to say a word, WooCommerce support, where it’s more, well, you’ve got documentation that you’re referencing as a support. And by the way, I have a friend who also has a company in Bangladesh actually, and he’s doing a very similar thing to what WooCommerce is doing where they’re using AI to help solve their customer service. And I think they’ve been using the tool, they developed it themselves, but been using the tool for about two months and he thought he was going to be moving about 20 support people out of those support roles and moving them over into other roles in his company because they had been able to decrease the amount of time that it took on every answer. And so that was pretty impressive. Now for myself in the training, the problem for us is we’re not referencing documentation.

(00:06:11):
We’re referencing classes that have been built and usually even the questions outside of that, like, oh, I watched the class on WordPress and now I’m trying to do X. Well, that answer is not necessarily in there. It may be an answer that we just have to know and tell them or whatever. So we don’t have something that we can reference. So I would love to be able to use AI to do customer support Quest. I would be fantastic, but I don’t see it as being something that we can do there. We do use AI in our day-to-day, but not that way. Katie, what about you guys for customer support? Do you use it, thinking about using it?

Katie (00:06:43):
I’ve experimented with using it because as Brian said a minute ago, it’s all about what have you answered many times and how to automate that. So we’ve done that through things like Google Docs with huge amounts of canned content, which we tailor to each customer, but it does save time. We’ve got a huge knowledge base, probably thousands of articles these days. We’ve got 23 plugins, so it’s a lot. So we’ve got a lot of resources. But then when things like docs bot AI came out, I’ve tested a couple of tools, I’ve trained them in our documentation and our canned responses, and when I’ve done it, they haven’t been good enough yet. So for example, they’ve given incorrect advice, they’ve made stuff up about our plugins. Even a simple question, how do you install WooCommerce product table? And it’ll say, go to a plugins, add new search for WooCommerce product table.

(00:07:45):
No, it’s a premium plugin. That’s not how you install a premium plugin. You upload it, you have to buy it first and it just lies. And that’s the problem with these AI tools are language prediction models, and that is what they do. If they don’t find the information, they’ll say what sounds logical based on the query. And so when I’ve tested it, I’m not happy for that to go out to my customers, to misadvise people and things like that. It also, because we have so many different plugins, it wasn’t very good at knowing which plugin they were talking about because sometimes say if you do a live chat, you might say a question, how do I add to cart column to my table? And it would start talking about a completely different plugin, whereas a real person would’ve inferred they were talking about WooCommerce product table, for example. So I therefore pulled the plug on the project thinking it’s not ready. But after watching this talk on esh, I’m inspired to have a play on WooCommerce dot com and see if I can try and break it some really complex questions and see what happens. Maybe they’ve trained it better than I did or something

Robbie (00:09:03):
AI tools, but I mean it’s all about the training and it is all about, it’s not only about the training, it’s also about the prompts that you are giving it just like you’re saying, if they had in their question said premium plugin. So partly it’s learning. And so using tools where you kind of guide a user through their prompting is how you can then control those answers you’re getting and you’re getting, by the way, Katie, we don’t call it lies in ai, we call it hallucinations, which I think is hysterical. I think it’s hysterical. Hallucinations like the ai, it’s a real person hallucinating. It’s funny it’s not. But anyway, so interesting and I hope that everyone else enjoyed that session because I think AI is a fascinating topic right now and we’re just scratching the surface of what we’re going to be able to do with it. And so it’s really cool. The next one, Kathy, we love Kathy and Kathy talked about landing pages. So Brian, give us a little 9,000 foot view of that.

Brian (00:10:03):
Yeah, so Kathy also talked about AI with regards to landing pages. And so she spent the first part of the talk examining successful landing pages from notable brands and explaining what made them great. Here’s generally how to build an effective landing page, which isn’t so much about how it looks, but how it structured the information you’re disseminating. And then she provided a live demo of Cadence AI because she works with Cadence WP, and they’ve been working on training a language model to build landing pages on your behalf. So she showed how you can rapidly create landing pages and even complete sites by sort of expanding on your prompts and building the thing out so that you can get landing pages that are more or less tailored to specific customer journeys that ultimately lead to higher conversions. And so that was a fun, that exploration to me. They’ve been working on this for quite a while, and so it’s neat to see how it’s progressed and where it is today.

Robbie (00:11:10):
Yeah, so I mean, again, using AI tools like that, because you’re guiding it so much more, I feel like you’re getting a lot of use out of ai. Nothing’s going to be perfect, nothing. And this is what I always tell people when you’re using ai, you’re not going to ever generate a completed something, whatever it is you’re using AI for, you’re creating your scaffolding, your outline, your first idea, your whatever. That’s what you’re doing with ai. So you using it to pop out a landing page or eventually popping out a whole website, it’s not like I’m just going to click a button or put in one prompt and I’m going to get this. I’m going to get something to start with. You need to put eyes on though and tweak it out and put one your voice on it. If it’s something that has writing on it that you’ve generated writing of any type, you need to put your voice on it so it sounds like you.

(00:12:05):
And then you also just need to check your facts because as Katie pointed out, AI is designed always to give us an answer. It very rarely will say, I have no answer. Now you can keep prompting it and asking it things and saying, well, how did you get me that answer? And eventually I asked a question about one of my clients, and by the way, I asked Bard, I asked Chad GBT about my client and it gave me whole writeups and telling me how when the CEO passed in 2020 or 2022 or something like that. And then another one said in 2012, and I was like, why are these chats, the founder has not passed away? But both of them thought and they thought different years. But on both of those, if you pressed them and you said, Hey, did this really happen? They’re like, oh, well I really can’t find any notations out there that this happened. So I just made that up. It literally said that. And I was like, wow, okay. So you can get out of AI an answer that says this is not correct, but it does take some time to do it and no one wants to take that time. So better is generate what you want, whether it be a landing page, site, whatever, and then check over everything and make sure it’s proper.

Katie (00:13:16):
I like the way she focused separately on landing pages because a lot of people building WooCommerce sites don’t realize that landing pages are relevantly different to any other page on your site in many ways because it’s like the introduction to the topic, but it’s not the homepage. So people have probably arrived there from a very specific query, for example. So I think that with the AI side of things, you can through cadence theme and other themes, doing that helped to put those best practices in which the user building the site on their own may not have been aware of. So things like clear call to actions, maybe information about what is this website you’ve landed on and things like that that you may not be thinking from the user’s perspective about this being a landing page specifically.

BobWP (00:14:05):
And I just wanted to add that if you miss Kathy’s session, of course you can get all Access pass and watch it later, but you can also see her tomorrow at the end of the day recap be She is one of our hosts, so she will be making the second appearance here, so at least maybe you can even send a chat or something and ask her a question if you have it.

Robbie (00:14:32):
So the next one was on bouncing personalization and privacy. So Brian, give us a little recap here on this. And this was from someone at Awesome Motive, correct?

Katie (00:14:42):
That’s right, yeah. PLE laia, he is talking about something that is dear to my heart, which is trying to

Brian (00:14:50):
Provide customized experiences, unique experiences delivered specifically for the people who are looking at your site without just giving their data out to the world and exposing it to everyone. And I love that this is a current movement that we are living through in the web spurned, or I guess not spurned, but provoked by the addition of GDPR across Europe and similar laws that are trying to take hold in various states across the United States. It’s fantastic. And so this has birthed all kinds of first party data tools. In fact, Klaviyo who’s sponsoring ES, has a ton of stuff for helping you collect first party data and deliver personalized messaging and just in time text messages and customized emails for your customers and visitors because they saw the writing on the wall ages ago and got to work. And so Kals talk was largely aimed at developers and any store owners who are concerned like me, about protecting their own users’ data privacy while trying to deliver those personalized experiences.

(00:16:14):
And so he talked about strategies for how you can secure user data and why you should choose first party data over third party data providers to help maintain that privacy. And in particular, somehow notoriously and historically, those third party providers and ad tech platforms use cookies and just kind of leak data everywhere and leach as much data as they can. And did a really nice job of highlighting the privacy implications that you could find yourself in perhaps unwittingly not even realizing that you were exposing folks to all of this data slurping from these mega corporations.

Katie (00:16:55):
Yeah, that’s true. I thought it was really fascinating to think about the inherent conflict between wanting to personalize the user experience, which is about the customer and the privacy element of that, particularly in light of mostly European legislation, but not just, and the need to stay on the right side of that. And I think it’s important, another sort of angle on that is most WooCommerce stores are not offering a personalized experience really to their users at all. For example, let’s think about booking.com, completely personal, and they know things you’ve done and they change what they display to you based on previous behavior and also based on what other customers are doing. And to go for the whole fomo fear of missing out psychology. And there’s lots of elements where they dynamically show different content. And I think I haven’t really seen many WooCommerce plugins that offer that functionality to display different content, even welcome back type content, maybe clearer call to actions or something if you’ve been there multiple times and not made a purchase or something like that. So if any developers that were watching were looking at product ideas to develop, actually I think there’s a gap in WooCommerce to do that, but privacy wise, that is an issue, which perhaps is what’s putting people off developing these sorts of personalized WooCommerce plugins. So it’s useful to have this talk to help people think about whether they can navigate that sea successfully and find the right balance.

BobWP (00:18:42):
And I don’t know if I’m Robbie, I was just going to say, I don’t know if you remember Robbie, one of the guests you had on the agency chat had brought up as far as what they thought was the future in WooCommerce. And one of the things he mentioned was not only personalization, but personalization with recurring subscriptions. And he talked about there was a pet store they were working, they had done, I mean an online pet shop. And as far as personalizing that and being able to make recommendations on a recurring basis and not just when they visited whatever, it was real interesting. And I think a lot of agencies are seeing the potential there, and I think a lot of them are going all down on personalization, but then again, you do have the security issues.

Robbie (00:19:35):
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, Bob, we’re seeing personalization. Personalization happen in a lot of different ways, but Katie’s right, I don’t really see a lot of plugins that are offering the ability to do this. A lot of it you have to do custom if you’re wanting to do it. And so I think that there is definitely a gap there. Katie, the other thing I was going to mention though is yes, I do think the European laws have really driven us to think more about data security and privacy, but now we’re also starting to see this happen in the us. I mean the laws that are coming out of California and then a few of the other states now are NAF got some things that are out there to be voted on. So we’re going to start seeing this be even here in the us, which is even I think more of an implication because a lot of our agencies may only deal with a company that really just has to think about US-based.

(00:20:29):
They don’t really have to think internationally yet, but it’s about to happen mean. So even you’re very localized, your little restaurant down the way that’s allowing ordering and things like that, they’re going to have to start thinking about this more. And so yes, you want to personalize for those type of people, but you also, you’ve got to keep the data security in the top of mind right now if you’re an agency building for your customers here, because we’ve got a lot of things that are coming as well as I’ll just throw out there not only the data privacy and everything, but also you need to be thinking about accessibility. I’ll just toss that in because I think that data privacy and accessibility are probably the most forgotten things usually for agencies as they’re developing. And so I think that those are going to become much, much more important here in the us. So our next one that we had was a better way to pay, which by the way, this was most interesting to me because I actually we’re just in the process of getting set up with Amazon Pay to add and so to add it to our shopping card. And so it was really interesting to see this one. And I’m going to let Brian give us his recap again and then we’ll talk a little bit more about Amazon Pay.

Brian (00:21:41):
Heck yeah. So the next two sessions went hand in hand, so a better way to pay with Omar Saddi, the director of Americas for Amazon Pay, he outlined some key trends that Amazon was seeing in the marketplace this year and took a deep dive on how Amazon Pay helps streamline the payment process for store owners. And that fed directly into a case study with USA Burkey filters, and Jeff Gleason is the head of sales there. He runs that. And so I got to moderate that conversation and asked Jeff a bunch of questions on how easy it was for him to incorporate Amazon pay, the benefits of multiple payments with a firm multi-pay, being that you can break a bigger payment into four or five smaller monthly payments. And then the impact that those had on his business. And spoiler alert, if you haven’t gone back to watch that talk, it was incredibly easy for him to turn on both of those things.

(00:22:44):
And he immediately saw a lift in sales for doing so because his average ticket price for the filtration systems that he sells is around like $300 per order. And so to be able to say with no extra work on his part, Hey customer, would you like to, instead of paying $300 right now, pay $50 a month or $60 a month or whatever, they can just say yes. And then everything on his end as a merchant is exactly the same, and the customer is able to check out with basically zero friction using their Amazon wallet, which is just incredible. And then I asked Omar along with that, what does Amazon pay doing? What are they thinking about for onboarding merchants and for the customer experience? Because Amazon claims and demonstrates that they care radically about the customer experience. And so how do you go about bringing in all these additional payment methods without creating enormous technical hurdles for store owners who don’t have a technical background necessarily or have an entire team like you do, Robbie supporting them being able to make these changes happen. And so it was fascinating to hear how they’re thinking about things and the impact. I think Jeff said at one point he had 30% of his sales in a month were attributed to Amazon Pay. That’s significant. Super significant.

Robbie (00:24:18):
Exactly. I love hearing that too, by the way. Love it. Because that’s so one of the reasons because we offered other payment methods, and I had looked at this in the past, but we had other objectives that we were working on, and so I just kind of put it to the side. But what made me pick it back up just recently was I realized my own buying trends when I’m online, if I’m on a website that offers Amazon Pay, it’s my method, the choice that I make. So that’s the payment method I choose. Why do I choose it? Well, because I’ve got my wallet with Amazon, I can pick, which is this a business sale or a personal one? I could just pick my credit card that I want to use there. So it makes it very, very easy. And I was like, wait a minute, if this is the one I’m picking, why don’t I offer it? So actually, so I was going to say Omar is correct. It was a simple, simple signup process. I would say it’s probably one of the easiest signup processes, Stripe or Amazon Pay, probably about the same as far as their signup process and the ease of signup. So I’m really excited now. We haven’t done all of our testing, so we haven’t launched it yet, but I mean it’s been super easy so far, and so I’m very excited and I’m really excited. If I could see a 30% increase from it, that’d be woo-hoo Christmas early,

Brian (00:25:39):
Right? Substantial even like a five or 10% lift would be enormous. Exactly. Yeah.

Katie (00:25:47):
So Robbie, do you

Robbie (00:25:48):
Know how

Katie (00:25:48):
The payment percentage fees compare to something like PayPal for Amazon?

Robbie (00:25:54):
I think it’s very compatible, but I haven’t really went down the deep dive on the technical jargon on the legalese part of it. But when I just did my high level research, people were saying it was about the same. And so your PayPal, your Stripe, this is a comparable type percentage, but I guess I’ll see whenever I actually get it, start doing the test transactions through it and I’ll be able to see then exactly what they’re taking out. But as I understand it, Katie, it’s very comparable, but I don’t know the percentage exactly. Sorry.

Brian (00:26:28):
Well, I can tell you that if you’re a US based merchant and you add Amazon Pay to your WooCommerce store by November 23rd, they’re offering a special discount, a special promotion for attendees where for an entire year you can lock in a lower rate. So it’s two and a half percent plus 30 cents instead of the typical 2.9% and 30 cents. So 0.4% savings is pretty substantial as well for any business’s margins.

Katie (00:27:03):
Absolutely. Oh, good. Well, Brian, we’ll be talking after this. Great. Yeah.

Brian (00:27:06):
And if you’re not in the US, for all of you who are listening, they mentioned that any Amazon Pay expert will work with you one-on-one in your region to find a comparable offer for how you’re operating.

Katie (00:27:20):
Interesting. They do mainly probably sound like they’re going head to head against PayPal because PayPal has a lot of the same benefits, which is what people have traditionally used on their WooCommerce sites, often with a credit card payment provided Stripe as well. So PayPal has had in certain countries, like PayPal credit, which is similar to the multi-stage payments that Amazon’s now offering everybody in most of the world, a lot of the world has PayPal, as with Amazon, you’ve got your wallet set up and everything. It’s interesting to see Amazon is a new option from a major player coming up and how they compare against each other.

Brian (00:28:02):
Yeah. Oh, the other thing I almost forgot he talked about is how they’re trying to address cart abandonment. Because most often cart abandonment appears whenever there’s a pause is how Omar framed it. And because of the ordering in which we normally do things, we normally have a whole series of selections. What is it that you want? How many do you want? Do you have any discount codes? Now tell us who you are. Give us all of this information about who you are at the very end when people are have the least interest in filling in form fields and they’re trying to combat that by entering earlier into the cycle of instead of buy with Amazon, pay it sign in with Amazon, and then that brings all of your information, all of your shipping addresses, all of that’s because even just using Amazon Pay, you get all of your Amazon wallet stuff, all of your addresses and things with you. So you can very quickly select, this is coming to me, this is going to my parents in a different state or what have you. But yeah, he sees this as becoming integrated even earlier in the stack so that you can sort of flip the script just trying to shop on Amazon where you’re already signed in, they already know who you are and you’re like, Hey, I want one of those. Click great. It’ll be there tomorrow. I’d also one of these, boop, it’s coming with the last thing you just said also tomorrow,

Katie (00:29:27):
Which sounds a lot like PayPal checkout. So it’s Amazon checkout in which it bypasses a lot of the traditional WooCommerce checkout page. You can often have a PayPal checkout button on the single product page, so you completely bypass the cart and checkout,

Robbie (00:29:43):
And

Katie (00:29:44):
Then you might just end up on a confirmation at the end back at WooCommerce.

Robbie (00:29:47):
So

Katie (00:29:47):
Again, it sounds like a really viable alternative to PayPal. And I know lots of people have been quite negative about PayPal this year in particular and are moving away from it, but I hadn’t until this session come

Robbie (00:30:02):
Up across

Katie (00:30:03):
Amazon as a major alternative. Interesting.

Brian (00:30:07):
Yeah, it’s fascinating to watch, and I appreciate the diversity of choices because that just makes everything better. That’s one of my favorite things about open source and open marketplaces that we get to enjoy here in the WooCommerce and WordPress worlds.

Robbie (00:30:23):
I agree too, Brian, and you really need diversity in payment choices, especially if you sell internationally, you better have diversity in your payment choices because there are just some payment choices that don’t work for certain countries. And so you have to have alternatives. So always give it, I always tell my clients at least two, but if you could do three or more and it not get cluttered and confuse the customer, then that’s what I think you should do. Okay. So the next one, I actually had a meeting, so I didn’t get to go to this one. So now I’m really waiting for this recap from you, Brian, which is transforming the mattress business in Latin America. So tell us about that talk.

Brian (00:30:58):
Yeah, that was a case study that fell in my lap courtesy of my open call for speakers, and I’m glad that it did. So Vito was the presenter for that, and he’s the IT director at Calm and Simple, and they set out to radically change how people buy mattresses in Latin America. And on its surface, it didn’t sound totally transformative and revolutionary to me here in the US where we’ve got podcast ads that have been overrun with Casper and thread and needle and on and on and on and on. Tough to needle all of these different mattress companies. They’re like, you buy our stuff, we’ll send it straight to your door, no problem. But that hasn’t spread across the world yet. And they set out and solved this problem from scratch basically. So it was very frustrating to try and buy a mattress at all in Latin America.

(00:32:00):
And they were frustrated, why is all of this so difficult and how do we make it better? And they basically worked from first principles of like, all right, well, let’s create a store and see what the buying process is like, okay, well now let’s see how we can fix the shipping process. And so they built custom tons of integrations to handle product selection, shipping payments, and then utilized a lot of detailed analytics and AI tech to help optimize their inventory management, streamline their logistics, and then ultimately surpass their customer expectations. It was really cool to think that they went from like, we’ve never sold mattresses before or done any of this to now we are the leading experts in being able to deliver incredible customer experiences with local deliveries that no other company can touch. So I love those kinds of stories.

BobWP (00:33:04):
I think the thing that, what I really liked about it was we are talking to more and more to people all around the world and through that I’ve heard so many barriers depending on the culture and that some of these agencies or these businesses are actually starting to look at creative ways that just we’re not just in the US bubble here, and yeah, we can do this and do that, but at the same time start looking at those strategically and saying, Hey, there is hope or there is a way to do this. Somebody just needs to take the time to figure it out. And that is what struck me the most about it. And anything that talks about anything in other countries or they’re bringing in what we or other countries may take as, yeah, this is everyday stuff to see that bring value to another country and yeah, hey, finally sell mattresses. So it was cool.

Robbie (00:34:10):
I think too that some of what we’re seeing with this adoption, you’re talking about Bob in other countries too, I still feel if we had to thank the pandemic for anything, I think that when we went through that pandemic as a world, not just as a country or a few countries, it was a worldwide event that we just all experienced and shared together and it changed things. It changed the way we thought about buying things and the way we thought about getting things to our house. And so I think that we’re still seeing that businesses are, one, they’re just trying to also future-proof themselves in case something similar happens or whatever, but they are now thinking not of let me build a storefront and have people come in and buy things. They are thinking, is there another way that we can do this? And I think we’re seeing a big trend worldwide, not just us, but worldwide about this. And like I said, I don’t want to thank anything about the pandemic, but I guess that there were some things that came out of it that are good on the technology front. It’s making us embrace things that we might not have and especially in countries where that might not have been the first thought of how to do this.

Brian (00:35:22):
Yeah. It also reminded me, there was an interview that I heard on Indie Hackers at the start of the pandemic that was about a company called, I think the name was Crave Cookies, where a brother and sister teamed up to sell fresh baked chocolate chip cookies just within their own zip code. And so customers can come to the store, they can buy cookies, and 20 minutes later they have fresh baked cookies in their hands. And this isn’t to say that they were just baking cookies as orders. They were baking cookies all day long. Your orders come in and you get attached to the nearest fresh order. And so he had to solve all kinds of problems for like, well, how do we determine the fastest shipping route? How do we bundle orders together so that we’re not going from this side of town all the way over to this side of town and back again so that someone’s ending up with cold cookies?

(00:36:21):
And again, I love case studies like these, and they ended up ballooning to a quarter million dollars per month in sales for just fresh baked chocolate chip cookies just within a small radius just because beyond that radius, you can’t ship a warm baked cookie outside of it. It’s not possible. You’re either sending them an undercooked cookie or a cold cookie, and so they’re on this small local space and then just cranking out tech like, well, yeah, we could solve this problem. And it is just inspiring to me is the punchline to that. I love it. It makes me want to do something.

Katie (00:37:06):
It’s amazing. And I think mattresses is a really interesting use case because traditionally they were always bought in a shop and a very, very traditional type of product that didn’t really work very well, sold online, certainly not with any options, and then returned just a nightmare. So it’s really interesting that they’ve solved the problem. And I started noticing that a few years ago, but I didn’t make the connection to the pandemic that you just mentioned, Robbie, which is really interesting because I suppose suddenly people had to buy things like mattresses online, but they wanted to be able to choose the hardness level and all of those different things that people want in a mattress which will last them 10 years or something. So somebody did have to solve the problem both in terms of their logistics and also how to fulfill that on the WooCommerce website that they’re using.

(00:38:00):
I suppose I’ve been quite caught up in the restaurant side of things because as a plugin company, one of our plugins in particular, everybody started using it for restaurants because restaurants had to take orders online. So all these restaurants were like, quick, we need a WooCommerce site, we need to take online orders because we cannot serve customers in person. It’s just take out now. And I hadn’t thought about the other kind of physical products that had somehow transformed because of the pandemic. So really interesting to learn about that use case. And as you say, Brian, things like cookies as well and the local side of things,

Speaker 5 (00:38:37):
Bringing that online for the first time.

Robbie (00:38:40):
And I think the other thing that we’re seeing, Katie, is that it hasn’t changed. And the interesting thing is you had all these local restaurants that had to go online and do ordering online for pickup or delivery, and they’re still seeing the same amount of online ordering for pickup and delivery. Even though they now have returning customers in their physical spaces, they are still equally seeing as much delivery as they were during the pandemic. Most of them that I’ve talked to anyway, that they’re seeing the same amount and which I think is crazy. So what that really means is they’ve just increased their sales because they now have another source of sales that they’re doing because they also got back their in-person sales. So it is quite interesting, and I think that, I mean, Amazon always is one of the inventors out there writing. So we had them do the Amazon wardrobe because there were so many people who were like, I need clothes, but I don’t know what size this is going to come in and it fit me or whatever. And so then you started seeing Amazon do things like Amazon Wardrobe where you can get those clothes in. You have so many days so you could try them on and you either return them or they bill you if you’ve kept them. And so we saw a lot of new kind of concepts with things that we didn’t always typically buy online, happen during the pandemic and just kind of take off and not go anywhere. They’re still there today and people are using them.

BobWP (00:40:01):
We’ve all gotten very comfortable with it.

Robbie (00:40:03):
We have,

BobWP (00:40:04):
It’s like, why get in the car now? Why do this? I mean, it trained a lot of people in a new way, and when it ended, it’s like, yeah, I can do this, but maybe my time out now can be doing other things, not necessarily wandering around stores shopping, doing those things that I never really kind of thrill out of in the first place or something. So yeah, it’s a habit that we’ve grown very used to and it

Robbie (00:40:36):
Exactly we do. So that brings us to the last session, attract and Delight customers with these shipping trends, which kind of does fit into what we’re talking about here too as well, but the shipping trends that Kish, I believe Chris, who showed us. So Brian, give us our high level view and then let’s chat about it.

Brian (00:40:55):
Yeah, so the session immediately prior to this one for anyone who skipped over that to join us here, Chris provided a bunch of data backed insights to demonstrate consumer behavior over the past year and then used this data to give us actionable advice that can ideally save money for both merchants and customers so that everyone ends up being happier for these transactions having taken place. And he specifically, he gave us three different calls to action, basically help customers or I guess the things that consumers have shown they care about the most based on the data. Number one is saving on shipping costs, and the solution here is to offer delayed shipping for less money. Amazon has been doing this quite successfully over the last year. They’ll offer digital credits for prime members and things like that. So hey, if you delay this, you can get extra ebook credits or Amazon rentals or whatever.

(00:41:58):
And turns out most people don’t need to have the thing on same day or next day or within two days, but many people still want the thing within four to seven days, seven days at the absolute maximum. And so perhaps you can give customers this option during checkout of like, Hey, if you’d like to delay your shipping by two days, you can save 10% on your order or whatever scale makes sense for what you’re selling. Number two, the thing we were just talking about making returns easy and free. The Amazon wardrobe example that you mentioned, Robbie, I don’t know if this is the right thing, in fact, we just did this in our house. We bought a Halloween costume for my Middlest and he wanted to dress as link from the Zelda series, and it was unclear if he needed one size costume or the next size costume right at the size that they said was in between.

(00:42:57):
I’m like, well, let’s buy both. We’ll try on whichever one comes first, and if they are far enough apart, we can theoretically, and in fact, we did cancel the second order, so it didn’t even get charged. We didn’t have to worry about the logistics, but if it had been shipped to us, returns are super easy. And so Chris’s recommendation there was to partner with shipping carriers to manage the return. Many shipping carriers will provide this. In fact, you can see this being used by Amazon extensively and many large retailers are like, just take your stuff to the UPS store, no further questions asked what? Yeah, or take it to in the us we have Kohl’s or so many other big box stores. They’re like, yeah, just bring us the stuff and we’ll process the return done deal. And when you can say that to customers of like, Hey, returns are free and easy, it makes them less hesitant to buy something that they’re unsure about.

(00:43:55):
And then the final point, which goes hand in hand with the first point is to over communicate your package delivery status. According to Christian’s stats, most people wanted to hear daily updates of Where’s my order? Where’s my package? Even if it’s not necessarily making much progress, just sitting with status updates like, Hey, we’re still packing your order, or, Hey, your order has arrived at the pickup facility and so on. And so working with whatever shipping provider you’re using to give those daily updates to your customers goes a really long way in helping them feel good and not stressed about what they bought.

Robbie (00:44:35):
I totally agree about that, by the way, as a customer, I love having all those updates. So as I buy things, I want to know, you did get my order right? Oh, you are working on my order, right? It is on its way, right? I mean, I think anytime that you’re designing a shop for yourself or a client, whatever, think about yourself as the customer and what would you want? Would you want to have those daily updates? Yeah, I would. Now some people don’t, but I would. I’m like, please tell me everything about it. Tell me when I’m getting it to the minute. I want to know when it’s there. I mean, I love now a lot of the deliveries, not just Amazon, Amazon’s great about it, but some of the other people now, when they leave that package on your front porch, they take a picture and you get a picture like, Hey, your package is there. Oh my gosh, it’s like Christmas. You’re just like, Ooh, I got to go get the package on the front porch. And so I think thinking of it as yourself as a customer and thinking about what they want, but his insights are really affirming that. So if you think that, Hey, I think I’d like to get these daily, he’s just affirmed it by showing you that these are the trends that are out there that customers overall in general are looking for. So I think that’s a cool thing.

Brian (00:45:44):
He has access to tons of data that we don’t, because as the, hang on, let me make my notes. I don’t want to misquote myself here. The VP of strategic partnerships at Octane. Octane is a parent company behind ShipStation and shipping Easy and stamps.com and six other major shipping carrier service providers. And so he’s got his finger on the pulse basically.

Robbie (00:46:10):
Awesome. Yes. And I love text updates, by the way. I’m a big, big proponent of text updates. So Katie, Katie, Katie, I don’t think you’re like, no, no. How funny. How funny. No,

Katie (00:46:24):
No, do not tell me. I don’t care. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I agree with the first two points. Everyone wants to save on shipping costs. They might not be in a rush. Returns essential because how often do you buy online? And it either doesn’t fit or it’s just not what it looked like in the picture. It’s not the quality. You have to get returns easy or people don’t want to take the risk. But I order a lot online, often very minor things like a bottle of shampoo or something. I don’t care if it’s on the way, it’ll turn up. And even some big things as I bought a house this year, I’ve ordered big things too. I do not have time to be told about every little detail. So it drives me mad to get all these updates and on my phone, how dare they insist on my mobile number?

(00:47:18):
I do not want them to have my mobile, but they won’t let you place the order without it. And then they phone you to say that this bottle of shampoo is on its way. It’s like, no, I’m working. So you may have noticed that I don’t like these updates. Which brings me to an idea for people building WooCommerce stores, which is why not give the customer a choice? You can just see for me and Robbie that people want different things and I accept Chris’s research that the majority are more in Robbie’s side, which I could acknowledge, but not everybody wants that. So it would be quite nice to allow people to have that choice to have minimal updates or constant reassurance that it is not been forgotten and it’s on its way and whatever. So that’s a gap. And another gap I’ve noticed in WooCommerce with the communication is communicating the shipping information when in my opinion, the customer wants it.

(00:48:20):
Because unless you create a static page or something like that for shipping, which is usually linked to in the footer and quite not that obvious, you actually only see it on the checkout, maybe the cart if you’ve enabled the shipping calculator on the cart page, but you have to add products to the cart to find out the shipping, but you haven’t made a decision to buy because you haven’t found out the shipping yet, and that’s part of your decision. So again, I’d say that it’s a good idea to make that information more prominent. I don’t know, in a tab on the product page or something like that before they’ve made that decision to buy it.

BobWP (00:48:58):
Yeah. We have one carrier that actually will let you know when they’re minutes away, they send a text and they say, we are just a few minutes away. We’ll be at your door soon.

Katie (00:49:11):
I know not to answer the door then

Robbie (00:49:15):
How funny. And I love it. They’re like, we are three stops from your house. Yes. Okay, good. How funny. I’m

Katie (00:49:23):
Like, stop telling me I’m busy,

Robbie (00:49:26):
By the way. I also, again, I always like to look at the Giants such as Amazon and just see what are the things they do. And I can tell you every single product that you look on, Amazon, if you glance over, it’ll tell you when this could be there, how quickly could you get this product? And I think that that’s also a really cool feature that you could put in and just have, even if it’s just a rough estimate, I still think that that is something that encourages customers to say, oh yeah, well, I could get this within this time. Oh, that’d be great. And so I do think having some sort of, even if it’s just that this typically can get there in so many days, but then just change that to so many days to this date, because I think that that is more impactful for the user seeing the date versus so many days because now they’ve got to do the math, so do the math for them, and then they’re like, oh, okay, I could have that by Saturday. Great, okay, I can wear it on Sunday. Fantastic.

Katie (00:50:26):
And it’s not just things for yourself either. Gifts are a huge one, and there are all sorts of products that might be bought as a gift where that date matters, even if it is for yourself, if it’s for a particular event, you need that dress for a party on Monday. You need to know otherwise what you’re going to do if the product doesn’t arrive for Mother’s Day or something. So there are things like delivery slots, plugins, and those sorts of things that you can install to allow the user to choose a guaranteed time or something like that. Or even just use the standard shipping settings to have a guaranteed next day option, which again is more expensive back to the first point from this talk, more expensive than standard shipping. And then at least people can, you’re catering to everybody, the people that are willing to wait and want that saving as a result. And the people that are really in a rush need that guarantee.

Robbie (00:51:21):
Absolutely. Alright, well, we’ve gone through all of the sessions today, and as Katie said at the very beginning, we also wanted to just give you guys a little update on do the Woo and some of the changes that are happening at Do the Woo. So I’m going to have Bob tell us about that.

BobWP (00:51:35):
Well, let’s see. How much can I tell you and how much can’t I tell you leading up to a total redesign and new look of the site coming in December? Well, for those of you that don’t know, what do the Woo or you haven’t listened to do the Woo? We have a team of about, I think 12 or 13 hosts right now, and each one of them does different shows. So there’s product shows and development centric shows and agency centric shows, and we’re actually looking at that and it’s become a bit of a mishmash of shows because each show has its own host, they have their own personality and people are actually starting to kind of fall in love with certain shows and maybe not so much the other shows. So looking at all that, we’ve decided to create what we call series of shows under Do the Woos.

(00:52:33):
So there will be anything from, like I’ve said, for example, Robbie is on the Woo agency chat and Katie’s on the Woo product chat and obviously you can guess who comes in. We have agency owners come in and we have product builders come in, and then we have several others amongst that. And also we’re adding several more shows that are going to be a little bit more WordPress focused or broadly WordPress. We’ll have shows on, oh, I’m trying to think. Enterprise we’ll have, we’re going to have a lot. So what essentially is going to be happening is a mix of things. We’ll have several of these hosts handling their different shows. You’ll be able to eventually subscribe to those shows. So if you like Katie and you want to listen to Katie and you don’t care about me or Robbie, you can subscribe to Katie’s podcast and get that delivered each time they do a podcast.

(00:53:39):
And I think the most exciting part of it is we’ve built a, I’m going to say a network, but a community where a lot of people are now coming in and doing one-off shows. We have an agency chat where we have two agency owners come in, basically have a conversation between themselves. So it’s not just a show with hosts, it’s a show for the community. So if Brian said, Hey, Bob, I want to bring in somebody, I want to bring in somebody from Amazon because we had a great conversation. I want to carry that conversation on. I would say, well, I will slot you into one of our shows. You’ll come in into the one off, you’ll be the two guest hosts. It’ll be your show, you talk about what you want, and that’s it. So we’re building that up and it’s a lot of working pieces, but it’s also pretty exciting because kind of podcast, as Brian said, I’ve been doing this since I think 2014, and this is probably the most exciting time in podcasting.

(00:54:50):
I’ve found it’s a bit different than the traditional podcasting. And what I love is that these hosts actually put up with me and they bring their own personalities. They make every guest comfortable. I got to give a little kudos here, or actually a lot because I would say about 80% of the people that come on our podcasts have never been on a podcast before. A lot of them are developers and they’re just, they’ve never done it. And I would say close to a hundred percent every time afterwards say how much fun they have, they connect with hosts, maybe they say, when’s the next time I can come back? And that is the comfort level the hosts bring to the guests when they come on. It’s very conversational, it’s very laid back, but also they get a lot of information. They find that sweet spot, they carry it on versus just saying, Hey, I have this list of questions that Bob gave me.

(00:55:50):
I got to ask the guests that. It’s like, no, each one of these hosts, it’s their show and they run with it. So there’s a lot of exciting stuff. The relaunch of the site’s going to be rather huge in a sense. I can’t say any more than that, but I’m excited. And I would just say, anybody here that wants to beyond on podcasts, let us know. If you want to maybe do a show you’ve been thinking, what would it be like to do a podcast? Come on, be a host, bring somebody on you want to have a conversation with, and yeah, have fun.

Robbie (00:56:27):
Yes, and we as hosts, we actually know a little bit more of the behind the scenes, and so there are really a lot of cool things coming. But that was a great overview there, Bob. So I hope everyone, if you haven’t ever listened to do the Woo that you will give it a go. And if you have, but you only listen to certain ones, try some of the other shows too. And it’ll be easier now to see which is what type of show, so that way you can kind of bounce around and see what fits your likes and needs the most. Brian, thank you so much also for always including Do the Woo with esh. It’s fantastic. And go ahead and we’ll let you close us out here for the day.

Brian (00:57:03):
Yeah, perfect. Again, Bob and Katie and Robbie and all of the Do the Woo hosts that we’ve gotten to see yesterday, that we will see tomorrow, and that haven’t been on screen yet here, thank you for this tremendous service that you provide to the community and showing up and sharing the interesting stories with all of us. I love it. I appreciate that we get to sort of join forces here at the end of WSEs each day because there’s a healthy amount of overlap between what we’re doing. You’re out there every week putting things out. I’m putting lots of weeks into one really concentrated effort, and so it’s fun to try and bridge that gap a bit. So thank you all for joining us today. Thank you especially to everyone here from Do the Woo. I appreciate you all. Is there anything you wanted to add before I send everybody on their merry way for the day?

BobWP (00:57:56):
No, I just want to thank you Brian. Brian approached us and asked us to be a partner again this year, and it’s an absolute pleasure working with Brian whenever I can. So really appreciate that. And I know the whole team feels that way, and that’s why I typically have no problem getting them to come on and do these end of day recaps.

Robbie (00:58:17):
Yeah, well it’s a fantastic initiative doing something specifically for the Wu community, so it’s perfect. Yeah. And thank you for also offering people to be able to subscribe, to watch it later, because we’re also busy. And so I love that the flexibility is there to just say, okay, I’ll watch these later. So thank you for providing that service. I love it.

Brian (00:58:39):
My pleasure. That like you looking towards how do I behave and what do I prefer? A customer or consumer? I like to deliver those same experiences. So I am also frequently too busy to tune in, live for when something happens. And for ESH in particular, we’re talking to a global audience. I’m broadcasting at what’s convenient to me here in the Eastern time zone in the us. I know this is not a good time for a significant part of the globe Word sesh. My sister event that I also run, for anybody who’s a WordPress professional, I cater to that each day is timed to match the time zones of the different regions of the world. But that just compounds the problem, right? It means that really only one of the three days of broadcast is good for you and the other two are right out. And so same deal, right?

(00:59:32):
Make the recordings available so you can watch so that everybody can actually enjoy this and participate regardless of where they are in the world, regardless of their current financial means. And then for long-term access, they can come and join me at WP Sessions and help financially support my ability to keep doing this year over year over year. So it’s a pleasure. And on that, thank you all in the audience for joining us today. We are so glad that you were here. We hope that you had at least as half as much fun as we had. Take care, everybody.