WooSesh, Custom Product Tables, Blocks and Facebook

BobWP:
Hey everybody. Alright. That is still just fine and dandy intro music, don’t you think, Brad?

Brad:
It’s uplifting. If that music doesn’t get you in a good mood, there’s no hope for you. I’m sorry.

BobWP:
Yeah, really?

Brad:
Yeah, it just makes me want to skip through a field of dandelions and sing about WooCommerce to the world.

BobWP:
Yeah, we’re going to do a video maybe at WordCamp US. We’ll find a video to do and we’ll talk about that later. Anyway, welcome everybody to Do the Woo, a podcast about everything WooCommerce. I’m BobWP and this is Brad W—I don’t know, should we give you a “P”?

Brad:
Brad W… Brad WP? I don’t want to infringe on any trademarks here, Bob. So just call me Brad.

BobWP:
Okay, Brad. So we took a bit of a summer hiatus, kind of a forced hiatus on my end, but we’re back in the saddle again. We’re back. What’s cool is we have a sponsor now, Liquid Web Hosting. I thought that’d be a perfect segue. Whoa. Yeah, that was worth some music there.

Brad:
Yeah, how about that little sponsor plug?

BobWP:
I like it. Alright, cool. Let’s actually start out, let’s kind of go right into a little bit of news about Liquid Web. They recently came out with a new plan, which they call the Beginner WooCommerce Managed Hosting Plan—a little bit better, maybe I should say, affordable price point for somebody starting a store. Yeah. What do you think about it, Brad?

Brad:
I like it. I definitely like the angle that Liquid Web is taking—not just managed WordPress, which they do offer, but they have a managed WooCommerce hosting plan and infrastructure, which I believe they released earlier this year or at the end of last year. So I certainly see the need for it, and I think it’s great. The challenge that a lot of people had, and probably they recognized, is the price point, which started out at $250 a month. In my opinion, that’s nothing compared to if you’re running an e-commerce site that’s actually making you money. What’s $250 to have a good platform? So I get it, but on the flip side, if part of the strategy is to compete with the likes of Shopify, you’re not going to do it at $250 a month—at least not starting out.

So I definitely like the fact that they rolled out the—what do they call it—the Beginner Plan, which is $39 a month, which is very reasonable. I think this is the type of plan that should really appeal to small mom-and-pop shops or anyone who’s just wanting to dip their toe into e-commerce and see if their idea could work or gain traction. It’s a pretty low investment to test that out. So I think this platform is now a direct Shopify competitor from a price point, and that’s what excites me. Now, when my friends and family ask me, “Hey, I want to set up an e-commerce store, what do you recommend?” I almost shamefully used to tell them Shopify.

BobWP:
Because…

Brad:
It’s cheap, it’s easy, and I don’t want to be the guy that’s responsible for setting them up on WooCommerce and supporting it. But now I feel like this is a plan where I could say, “Hey, I do think WooCommerce is a good option. Here’s a place you can get started at a reasonable price.”

BobWP:
And I think the fact that they have that scalability in place is great. They have those other plans, so it’s not a matter of, “Okay, I’m going to start on some hosting plan somewhere, and then if my site grows and becomes huge—basically, sales increase, traffic, all that stuff—it’s not like, ‘Okay, now where do I need to move it?’” If the existing host you’re on doesn’t quite fit the mold, here it’s like you’re already there. It seems like it’s a little bit more seamless, or at least the opportunity is there rather than freaking out. So it’s almost a good starting place, and then you can decide, “Okay, this is the level I want to stay at, but hey, things are growing, and maybe it’s time to bump it up.”

Brad:
Yeah, great starting place. There are a couple of limitations, which you’d expect on a smaller beginner plan. The most obvious one is the fact you can either have unlimited products or unlimited orders. What they mean by that is if you decide to have unlimited products, you’re limited to 150 unique orders per month. So there’s a cap, and when you hit that cap, it essentially shuts off the buying option. Your website’s still active, people can get all the information, but they can’t actually purchase. On the flip side, you could have unlimited orders, but only a limited number of products—15 products. So if you have a very small store, that’s a great option for you. It doesn’t matter how many products you sell, how many orders you have, but you can only have 15 products. So it is a great starting point with the hope that if you’re doing more than 150 orders a month, or honestly, if you have more than 15 products, you probably should be looking at something a little higher level than a beginner plan. So I do like the option there. It gives people a little bit of flexibility around that beginner plan, which is nice.

BobWP:
And it does give that beginner an opportunity to say, “Hey, I can start as a beginner. I don’t have to make a large investment upfront.”

Brad:
Yeah, it comes with some great add-ons too. Have you looked down the list of these features? These are features outside of just traditional WooCommerce, but features that are shipped with it—whether it be third-party products or services—but things like upsell, cross-sell, wishlist, and abandoned cart recovery, which I think is powered by Jilt. That’s a biggie. So if someone fills up a cart on your site, Jilt will actually follow up with them if they don’t make it through the checkout process. So assuming they’ve given you their email, it could say, “Hey, come on back, we’ll take off another 10 or 15%.” I gotta tell you, that works. It works very well. If people are putting stuff in their shopping cart, they’re on the edge of clicking that buy button. Sometimes a little coupon code can push them over the edge. So there’s a lot of value there. I’m really curious to see how well it does, how well it’s received. I’m actually going to—I’ll be honest, I have not gone through the platform recently. I did when they first announced it, but I’m going to take another look at it and go through what a user would expect if they’re setting up a store. I think that is the biggest factor in terms of whether it’s a true Shopify competitor. If it’s easy, if it’s intuitive, then I think we’ve got a winner here. So I like it.

BobWP:
I’ll actually be doing a post probably—I don’t know, it might be in a couple of weeks—where I’ll be walking through this particular hosting plan. I’ve already done it on the other WooCommerce side of things, and I have another one just on their managed hosting coming out. But this one—yeah, I definitely want to dive in there. I think the cool thing about the Jilt feature—one last comment—is I think a lot of people that start with a smaller site don’t really think, “Oh, I don’t even want to invest or get involved with this abandoned cart thing.” And it’s almost kind of pushing it a little bit in front of their face to say, “Hey, it’s here, let me give it a try.” And then, like you said, it works. I don’t think a lot of people new to this always understand how important it is, and this will give them the opportunity to see it for themselves.

Brad:
And it’s included. I mean, Jilt is a third-party service that you could integrate with your WooCommerce site hosted anywhere, or even other platforms, not just WooCommerce. It’s a pretty popular service for that very reason because if you pay whatever X amount a month and you can justify X number of sales a month because of it, it easily justifies whether you should be paying for that service or not. So it’s a really black-and-white add-on or feature—whether it works or not. It’s very clear to know whether something like that’s working. But in my experience, and my background prior to WordPress was all e-commerce, my experience is that it is a huge converter. And to get that with the $40 a month plan is pretty awesome. So I think it definitely raises the bar a bit for the competition between WooCommerce and Shopify and other e-commerce platforms, to be frank about it.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah, very cool stuff. So speaking of Woo—which we’re speaking of entirely—

Brad:
Which we’re dedicated to talking about.

BobWP:
Yeah, but…

Brad:
I like your seg

ues, Bob. I like your segues.

BobWP:
Yeah. Speaking of WooSesh—this is W-O-O-S-E-S-H. This is pretty cool because Brian, who had WordSesh—Brian Risen—he has taken, with Patrick Rolland, the idea of WordSesh, which is an online conference, and created WooSesh. From what I understand, this almost looks like—not a replacement, but something since WooConf has kind of been put on hold—the actual physical conference—that this is going to be kind of a holding place for the time being, and it looks pretty exciting. What do you think about it?

Brad:
I think it’s great. So this is basically like an extension of WordSesh, which is the online WordPress conference that I’ve been involved with since the start, and Brian just hosted the fifth WordSesh. What I love about this is the low barrier to entry. It’s online, so it makes it so much easier for really anyone around the globe to be involved, and you can really get as much out of this as you personally want, whether it’s just watching a few of the presentations or really participating and getting involved in some of the chats and Twitter conversations and things like that. So this is the first time they’ve done one specific to WooCommerce. But I love WordSesh and the idea around it because it’s just much easier to organize and produce than an actual event.

It’s open and accessible by anyone across the globe. And you look at the type of speaking talent—these aren’t just no-name speakers—these are people who have a big name specifically in the WooCommerce field. Chris Lema, obviously with Liquid Web, Brent Shepherd of Prospress, who, if you’re not familiar, they built the subscription extension for WooCommerce as well as Robot Ninja, which is a really cool automated WooCommerce testing suite. So if you run an update, it’ll make sure you didn’t break your checkout process automatically. I mean, Rebecca Gill, who’s the master of SEO, Cody Landefeld over at Mode Effect, which they specialize in WooCommerce. So these are some really big-name people in the WooCommerce space, and that’s just to name a few. The fact that you can literally sit at home on your couch and for a pretty minimal fee—it isn’t free—

BobWP:
Well, actually it is. It’s very interesting how they have it.

Brad:
Is it free?

BobWP:
Yeah. What they’re doing is you register for free, and if you show up for one specific session, then you’ll get access to all the other sessions—the recordings. I have a feeling it’ll go to a price point afterward if you want access. So definitely I’d say take advantage of it. It’s October 18th and 19th of this year, and yeah, it’s underwritten by WooCommerce, so the registration they’re saying would be $200, and you’re not having to pay that.

Brad:
Great. So you have literally no excuse not to participate in at least one presentation, if not all of them. I mean, that’s amazing that WooCommerce stepped up to help support that. Even if you’re not directly involved in WooCommerce and you’re just curious about it, there’s going to be a lot of great information to be had here. So definitely check it out. Like you said, if for some reason you can’t, there will always be the recordings that you can get to one way or another. But I’m excited; it’s going to be a cool event. I’d like to see more of these more often, whether it’s WooCommerce, whether it’s something else, whether it’s just WordSesh or WordPress in general. It’s just such a cool event to produce. I’m not saying it doesn’t take any work. It definitely takes a decent amount of work, but just compare it to an actual in-person event; it’s night and day. Love this stuff, hope to see more of it.

BobWP:
So anyway, the link is in there, but again, for everybody that’s just listening, WooSesh.com, you can just go pop on over there and register for free. Good stuff. I’m going to have you talk about this next one because absolutely I can kind of get it, but I’m not real good at getting it.

Brad:
Yes, I’ll take this one. WooCommerce Custom Product Tables Beta. So this might get a little bit geeky—a little bit, not too technical—but basically, there is an initiative. There’s a blog post from last month, which I’m sure we’ll share in the show notes on the WooCommerce blog, that talks about this initiative. Essentially, what they’re doing is building a plugin that you can activate alongside WooCommerce, and it will introduce custom database tables for the first pass, specifically around the products. So what does that mean, right? It sounds like a lot of gibberish, maybe.

BobWP:
I’m already zoning out here. I’m sorry.

Brad:
Let me reel you back in here, Bob. So WooCommerce, when you install that plugin, it does create a number of custom database tables. WordPress ships with certain tables where it stores data like your posts, your post meta, your users, your user meta, things like that—your options. WooCommerce creates some additional tables—quite a number of them, too—and it tracks things like orders and shipping and taxes and the WooCommerce logs. All these other things that WooCommerce needs to do are tracked in these current WooCommerce custom tables. What WooCommerce doesn’t do today is—or what it does do, I should say—is it stores product data and some other data, which I’ll mention in a minute, but specifically for this initiative, it stores product data in the posts table as custom post types. So just like your posts, just like your pages, maybe events or any kind of custom post types that you have—that’s where it’s storing its product data as well as the metadata associated with it in the post meta table. The challenge with that is around performance and scalability. Those tables get very, very big on a large website—a large store—and you’re going to run into performance issues. So this initiative is essentially extracting the product data out of the posts table and creating their own tables to work with that data.

So you can imagine it’s a pretty large undertaking because any part of WooCommerce that touches product data has to be hooked into and essentially repointed from the posts table over to these new product tables. So if you understand what I’m talking about, it’s a pretty big deal. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it, but talk to your technical contact. But it is a big deal. It’s a big undertaking, and it’s neat to see them pushing on this. A little bit of an example—they have in this blog post—they set up a store using WooCommerce as it stands today, just like you would download and install yourself, and they set up a store using WooCommerce plus the beta of this plugin. They set up a bunch of dummy data, put in about 70,000 orders into the system, a bunch of users, and about 500 products, and then did some load testing on it. They saw a 30% improvement on load times just from running this plugin. Nothing else. So just at a very basic test—almost a third faster. Anybody that knows anything about websites knows speed is king, right? So if your site’s slow, you’re going to have problems; you’re going to get dinged by the search engines, people might drop off and not order. So you need a really, really fast website, especially for e-commerce. So this is cool. It’s in beta. They talk about how you can download it and test it. It’s definitely recommended not to use this on production today, but cool to see that they’re thinking about this and how they can improve WooCommerce. This is kind of the first step to getting all that data out of posts because they also store some additional data like coupons and orders. So that’s the next phase—to work on getting those out once this is done. So if you’re into WooCommerce and performance, you definitely need to keep an eye on this. It’s a big deal.

BobWP:
And I think it is great because you pointed out that basically, it’s for speeding up your site. For the people who say, “Oh God, I don’t know what these tables do or anything,” they should still be excited just hearing that that effort is being made because, hey, if it increases speed, you don’t need to know all the technical details. You can leave that to somebody else, but you know that it’s going in the right direction. So good stuff. Thank you for explaining that. I get it to some point, having been around WordPress long enough, but I tend not to want to get it always to a point because it’s more than I need to know.

Brad:
It is a little more technical. And like I said, if you’re not technical, get this in front of your technical person. Who is it that manages your store? Who is it that installs plugins? Manages plugins? They need to see this, and they need to understand what this means. And this is not just a WooCommerce initiative. Easy Digital Downloads has been working on version 3.0, which is doing this exact same thing for Easy Digital Downloads. The reason we’re starting to see this more is because for years, the idea of creating custom tables in WordPress was frowned upon. It was frowned upon. It was meant to put everything into the posts table—just use the tables that are available through a standard WordPress installation and go from there. And anything outside of that was a bit frowned upon. But that has changed because of very reasons like this. At scale, the way that WordPress database is structured and the architecture around it, it doesn’t scale great because everything’s essentially in two tables—your posts and your post meta

table. So we’re seeing this on Easy Digital Downloads, we’re seeing this on WooCommerce. I can promise you we’re going to see this in some other areas too, because you’re not going to be able to beat the performance that this type of thing can produce. So very cool. It’s kind of under-the-hood stuff, but important stuff, right?

BobWP:
Yeah, good stuff. So we can’t go by without mentioning the G-word. It is just… yeah, it’s that Gutenberg thing. The reason I’m bringing that up is on WP Tavern, their blog, they wrote a post talking about PootlePress and their release of some storefront blocks, which are for the Storefront theme—the default theme, I should say, or kind of… it’s a default theme, I guess you’d call it, for WooCommerce. I know PootlePress has been in the WooCommerce space for quite some time, doing quite a few products there, and they’ve come out with some really cool stuff. This is interesting. I know that you had mentioned that, yeah, I mean, we kind of all expected it, but this is going to be a whole new little sector of the WooCommerce industry as Gutenberg rears its smiley head—I won’t say ugly—smiley head. We’re going to start seeing that more. Have you seen more of it out there, particularly, or is it just kind of all slithering in?

Brad:
I mean, it’s growing, right? This is definitely… just the idea of a Gutenberg—not even WooCommerce-specific, but Gutenberg blocks on the premium side of the house, like selling premium blocks—has been talked about and buzzed about since the announcement of Gutenberg. So we’re starting to see this. We’ve been seeing it most of the year—various people rolling out demos and videos and screenshots of various things they’re working on—some of it free, some of it going to be premium, and I think it’s a new commercial market for WordPress. We have a platform that powers a third of the internet, and we’re rolling out this massive new editor that changes everything, and we can extend that and create all these beautiful blocks and pieces of content. So it makes perfect sense. Start rolling out these premium blocks, whether it’s a theme or an add-on for your existing theme or whatever it may be. This is going to be a very big market. It’s inevitable, so people are getting in on the ground level. I think also what we’re seeing is the frustration around Gutenberg, because you can see one of the tweets from PootlePress in the WP Tavern article, which states that trying to develop for Gutenberg is like shooting at a fast-moving target. And this was 11, 12 days ago—

BobWP:
It wasn’t like six months ago.

Brad:
Right, and I agree. We have some internal frameworks we’re working on at WebDev, and from week to week, things break. They stop working; they have to be reworked. It’s just not in a stable spot right now, which is frustrating for anybody trying to release something as a final product. You just can’t. You can’t. And that’s why, again, I disagree with people launching Gutenberg sites that are of importance because it is a moving target, and I think it’s a bit irresponsible. But this is only going to get bigger. If you’re looking to get into the WordPress commercial space, this is probably the easiest place to get into right now—the most untapped place right now, or at least unsaturated—just because it’s so new and Gutenberg’s not official. So there’s a lot of opportunity to be one of those top-tier companies that people look at for premium Gutenberg stuff, and it looks like that’s exactly what PootlePress is trying to do.

BobWP:
I noticed their custom blocks—just to share with people if they don’t get over to the actual post—they have a product masonry grid, a category masonry block, a square product grid block, a slider block, WooCommerce default product, and a carousel block are the ones they’re starting with here. I know that I talked to somebody a while back when the first concept or the first idea of Gutenberg came out, and I was thinking, what does this do to the product page as far as how much flexibility and will, it’s kind of like a page builder—will people start getting a little too carried away, putting in too much content on the product page and taking away from actually worrying about a conversion because now they might be able to—

Brad:
It’s too easy. Making things too easy maybe isn’t always the best approach. Any kind of editor that gives you the ability to, like, “Hey, change the color of the text and the color of the background to whatever you want,” always scares me because I just think back to MySpace, right? Everybody had these crazy MySpace profiles… You know what I mean? Sometimes too much power is not a good thing.

BobWP:
Yeah, it can be, especially if you don’t have any design sense or you don’t have any sense of, actually, I guess you’d say, conversion—understanding the process. I think we were talking initially about what if somebody said, “Well, wouldn’t it be cool on a product page if I put the picture of the product, but I also put a video of the product and I put an audio to describe it?” I mean, you might think, “Okay, you want to reach all these different people,” but you may be putting too many options in there where they freeze, and they come there and think, “What do I do here?” and maybe they won’t even deal with it. So yeah, there’s going to be and will continue to be a lot of education and a lot of trial and error, and I’m sure little surprises along the way.

Wait. Alrighty. Well, I’m just going to touch on this one real quick, then we’re going to go into our new segment called “Our Little WooCommerce Tool Highlights.” We came across… and maybe just a quick thought on this… I came across on the eCommerceTimes.com site. The title was—oh, what was the title? Is the Thrill Gone for Many Facebook Users? But I think we kind of all know that, and I don’t want to stick on this subject for as many times as people have talked about it, but you really wonder if it’s going to make a big turn in the way people do online advertising for stores and stuff. In fact, I am going to be having, later in October, Rand Fishkin—formerly of Moz—on my other podcast. We’re going to be talking about social versus organic search and the whole thing around the e-commerce space because to me, it just seems like Facebook and social are becoming more the support—the interaction with customer-type platform—rather than actually making converted sales and stuff. Because it just… and with Facebook’s limitations and everything they’re doing, and they’re changing up all the time, it’s just—even paying for ads—you gotta wonder just how many people are really paying attention anymore.

Brad:
Yeah, man, social media these days is a very interesting topic, isn’t it?

For a number of reasons. Like you said, kind of burnout, I think, with a lot of the hostility and things like that around politics. You’re right, people are getting tired of it. A few years ago, people were getting tired of it because everybody’s on it. Everybody from their grandparents down to their 2-year-old niece or whatever is on it. It’s not this sacred space that it used to be, right? Literally, everybody’s on it. I think a lot of the reason people are still so active on it—and I’m guilty of this too—is because that’s how I interact with a good majority of my family. That’s how I share pictures of my son with my family—it’s through Facebook because it’s easy. They’re all there; they see it; they love seeing it. So that type of thing, I think, is what’s holding a lot of us to it a little bit closer than maybe we want to be. But yeah, I mean, from the ads perspective, from spending revenue—money on ads and whether it’s working or not—people are… I would imagine the trust in Facebook is at an all-time low.

So then they’re wondering if even what they’re seeing is legit. Is it real? Is it fake? Who knows? There’s been so many negative stories around it lately. We’re in a weird time with social media. I’m really curious to see how over the next couple of years it all shakes out—if we get past this or if maybe we learn that social media isn’t as good as we originally thought it was.

BobWP:
Yeah, for sure. So going to be interesting to see what happens. So anyway, woo. Tools. We’re going to talk about a couple of our… we’re just going to, every week, pull out something. I am pulling out… I was thinking with Gutenberg, I thought, well, is this really going to change up? But one of the things that I just wanted to mention was a free plugin for the WooCommerce Storefront theme—speaking of the Storefront theme earlier—called Homepage Control. The only reason I want to bring it up is it’s amazing how many people I talk to who just start using WooCommerce, and they use the Storefront theme, and they get very frustrated because that homepage kind of has these… God forbid I call them blocks, but these areas that are recent products, featured products, popular products, and there’s really… I mean, you either show them or they’re there, and there’s really not a lot of control. That Homepage Control actually lets you hide the ones you don’t want on the homepage, and they let you shift them around so you don’t have to go by the default order. It’s a simple little plugin. And depending on what happens with that homepage in future versions, you never know. But if you’re ever frustrated

with that homepage on your Storefront theme, just go—it’s on the WordPress.org repository, free for your use. And it works like a charm.

Brad:
Yeah. My turn, huh?

BobWP:
Yeah.

Brad:
My Woo tool pick of the week—or the show, I guess—is kind of related to what we were talking about earlier with the custom tables, but it’s a tool that they built to help them build that tool called WC Smooth Generator—WooCommerce Smooth Generator. It’s on GitHub. It’s free. And I love this—I love tools like this—but basically, it’s a very simple tool that allows you to generate fake WooCommerce data. So fake products, fake orders, fake customers. This helps you test your WooCommerce site, test it for scalability, test it for all sorts of stuff. With a couple of simple WP-CLI (command-line) commands, you can easily generate 50,000 products or 100,000 orders or 500,000 customers and make sure that the website you’re getting ready to launch and the host that you’re launching on, and your infrastructure and the total package is scalable and ready. Because the last thing you want is to have a thousand orders come in and your website not be able to handle it. So it’s a really cool way to, with just a couple of clicks, create that data and test things out at scale. Excellent stuff like this. So WC Smooth Generator is from the WooCommerce team, and it’s up on GitHub.

BobWP:
Okay, cool. Well, I’ll put both those links in there. SSo that’s it, Brad. I think we are out of here. What do you think?

Brad:
I like it. I like it.

BobWP:
Alright.

Brad:
Good show.

BobWP:
Okay. Take care, everybody.