WooCommerce Marketplace Hosting, Gutenberg Release Date and Voice Search

BobWP:
Hey everybody. That familiar tune means it’s time for Do the Woo with BobWP and BradWP. Hey Brad, how are you doing?

Brad:
I’m doing well. How are you doing, Bob?

BobWP:
Good. It looks like you have a little bit of a different background there. I’m not recognizing that.

Brad:
I do. I am back home in Indiana where I grew up, so I’m at my childhood home. I’m actually in the room where I first learned to work on a computer. I’m sitting at the desk where I learned to use a computer, which is kind of weird. My parents still have it, but I’m back home on the farm, as they say, which is actually a farm. So it’s a little bit of a different setup, but that’s the beautiful thing about what we do, right? As long as there’s internet, we can have some good conversations. So, good times.

BobWP:
Yeah. Sounds like fun. So anyway, yeah, we’re just perusing the Woo again this week. We were kind of looking around and wanted to mention that Liquid Web, WooCommerce managed hosting, is our sponsor, and they’re using an extension called (I hope I pronounce it right) Dokan, D-O-K-A-N. It’s a complete e-commerce solution for WordPress. And actually, before this, I didn’t even know it existed. I was looking at their homepage and it looks like they have all the bells and whistles as far as a marketplace. Probably one of the things— I mean, to me, the marketplace itself, doing one, seems like it’s got to be an incredible challenge in itself. Just coming up with the idea and pulling together vendors, something that’s a bit unique, I mean, with everything that’s out there. I think I remember someone asking me about two years ago; they had an idea for a marketplace and they were asking me what I thought it would cost to do a WooCommerce site.

Well, at that point they didn’t have this. And I just kind of, not being a developer, I would’ve loved to have your thoughts on it. I told them, “My guess is you’re probably looking at $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 at the least.” I had a feeling they had this long list. They sent me this email that was just incredible. And I said, “To have somebody do that, I’m just guessing, and I may even be out of the ballpark with this. This may go, I don’t know, to three, six figures, I don’t know.” And they really shut down that idea quickly. It was like, well, maybe this isn’t quite what I should do. I should think of something a little bit smaller. So you probably haven’t had an opportunity then to actually build one or—

Brad:
Be involved. Yeah, we haven’t built one. I know we’ve thrown out numbers and ballparks for people. We get a lot of, “What would it take to build eBay? What would it take to build Etsy?” It’s like, oh, well, a lot. That’s the short answer.

So yeah, the first thing you always do, like you mentioned, they’re running a particular plugin. When someone’s trying to do something really large, the first question is: Is there a plugin or a suite of plugins, or even a service you could tap into to offload or handle a lot of that workload? Do you have to reinvent the wheel? There’s no reason to. If something exists that’s tried and true and works right now, great. If something doesn’t, then the cost is going to go up dramatically. Now you’re talking custom development, and something of that size and scale is going to take some work. But if there’s something available that can get you 60%, 70%, 80% of the way there, then maybe it’s not out of the realm of possibility or outside of a typical budget they might have available. But yeah, generally speaking, if there’s not something available, it is going to be pretty involved.

I do like the idea. You’re right, it could be difficult to get started if you’re just trying to start from scratch. If you’re saying, “Hey, I want to build an Etsy-type site, but it sells something different. I just need to—maybe comic books—and now I want to find various comic book collectors to start stores on my site.” I do think that would be a challenge if you’re starting fresh. But if you’re already in a community or maybe already in retail in a sense, I think that’s an area that could be pretty big. I’ve been to a number of small local businesses where it’s—I’m not sure what you call them—but basically, it’s like they rent multiple businesses within one building, small little shops, very specific, a lot of artsy stuff, local, all local stuff. That would probably be perfect because then whoever’s running the overall building and the overall marketplace, real-life marketplace in the retail space, could essentially put this together for all the stores that are already there to benefit.

And then they all promote that network of stores. So I think that could be a really interesting space— the really small business world that a lot of us know in our local communities, those small business shops that we like to frequent that maybe don’t have a big online presence. Rather than doing it on their own and just having their own shop that’s its own little space on the web, partner with other stores and build a bigger marketplace and promote each other, which indirectly—well, indirectly would promote you. So there are some interesting opportunities, I think, with this marketplace idea and being able to do it at such a low price. I think we’ll start to see some of that come to life. So it’ll be pretty exciting to see.

BobWP:
Yeah, it almost reminds me of—I don’t know if you’ve been to Seattle, if you’ve gone to Pike Place Market.

Brad:
Yeah.

BobWP:
But that’s almost kind of—

Brad:
You’ve got to watch out for flying fish.

BobWP:
If they could do some kind of a VR experience online with the flying fish, that would be the key.

Brad:
It’s happening in VR now. Now it’s getting real fun. You could just go virtually, go in, and start shopping in the store.

BobWP:
Really grab a fish and throw it. There’s a concept here. Anyway, the other thing with Liquid Web that they did, just to mention, is they had the plans—I think they were starting for WooCommerce at about $249 a month. And then they went with the WooCommerce Beginner plan, which was $39 a month. And I think they were still kind of missing that middle area there. I know now they have a $99-a-month plan. I believe there are, like with both their plans, some limitations as far as the amount of sales and the number of products or transactions, I should say mostly. But still, I think it at least puts it in the grasp. And I know, listening to Lima talk, I saw him on a video somewhere—it might’ve been on Facebook—talking about this whole transition that people were looking for that sweet spot there. So that’ll be kind of interesting to see how that goes for them.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, most stores online, they don’t start out immediately selling millions of dollars of goods unless they’re an established brand already. Most stores are startups and they’re trying something new, and they’re going to start in the beginner phase, and they need a growth path that isn’t going from $39 to $500 a month because that’s too big of a step. So having these different plans and levels that are a smaller step, an easier step to make as they grow, I think makes it more enticing because it’s not as scary to say, oh, well, if this does start working—again, it’s a good problem to have when you have to upgrade, but you don’t want to be like, “Oh, I’m going from $40 to $500.” It’s like, “Oh, I go from $40 to $100.” That’s an easy step to take. It makes sense. And then from there, you go up to what, $150 or something.

So the only thing I would caution Liquid Web about a little bit—I think they do a good job of this—but anytime I see a lot of options, I get concerned because sometimes too many options are a bad thing. And I know, I’m sure they’ve had many conversations around this to think about because I like beer. So if you go to a bar and they have eight or ten different beers, that’s easy to make a selection. But if you go to one of these bars that has a hundred beers on draft, it’s overwhelming. And I can’t decide what I want because there are too many options. So I’m not saying they’re there yet. But I think as with anything where you have a service, you want to have enough options, but not too many. And that’s easier said than done, I think. Where is the magic line of, okay, this is the perfect number? I know they have a lot of data, I’m sure they’re using it to put these together, but I do feel like they have a full, kind of nice structure from start to professional and beyond with their current offerings as it stands today, which is a very good thing.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out for them. I know

that I’ve had a few people contact me or talk to me and say, well, this is good. This is more around the sweet spot for me right now. So hopefully that will fill a need. Well, it’s like all you hear about in the WordPress community anymore is Gutenberg. I mean, we need to create a Gutenberg sound effect. I don’t know what that would be, but I want you to think on that because we have to have one time to play the official Gutenberg sound effect. There’s got to be something.

Brad:
I will find something for that.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’m sure you will, depending on your mood at that moment. This one’s really appropriate to what we’re talking about—WooCommerce or e-commerce online stores—is the new release date that has been announced, and it’s been—maybe it’s petered out a little bit, but I think it was announced about, oh, I think a little over a week ago or so. I think the post on WP Tavern was about a week ago, and it oddly lands right smack dab in the holidays. So e-commerce sites and store owners and people that deal with that stuff are a little bit on edge, I would say. And I guess for me, I sit back, and I’m not in that space anymore. I can relate to it. I’ve been there. What were your initial thoughts? Because you obviously have some big sites out there that are running on WooCommerce, and when that came to light, what did you do? Just grab a cocktail and say, “Oh, wake me up in about two, three months”? There we go.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, the proposed release date is November 19th, which is just over a month away. And if you’re in the U.S., it probably immediately clicks what happens around November 19th, which is Thanksgiving. So that is the Monday before Thanksgiving in the U.S. And what happens the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year in the U.S., which is Black Friday. So the suggested release date is Monday, and the biggest shopping day of the year is Friday. That’s scary. So from not just a WordPress site but from an e-commerce site—whether it’s WooCommerce or another—Gutenberg is going to affect every WordPress site in one way or another. So it doesn’t matter what you’re doing; there’ll be an effect, for better or worse. So yeah, I do think—I understand why they’re pushing that date. They would love to have WordPress 5.0 released before WordCamp U.S., which is the beginning of December, but I think it’s absolutely insane to push and release this massive update.

Arguably one of the biggest updates WordPress has ever had, that will affect every single site, right before a major shopping day. And beyond that, even if you take the e-commerce piece out of it, it’s a major holiday, Thanksgiving weekend. It’s not just one day, but it’s a long weekend. Kids are out of school, people are with their families. It’s the biggest travel day of the year, I think, is the day before Thanksgiving. So people are just not going to be focused on this. And when I say people, I mean not only WordPress users but also the core contributors and developers of WordPress itself. It’s really a time that they shouldn’t be heads down in WordPress code. They should be unplugging for a little bit and spending time with their family. So now I understand WordPress is global. I think that’s one of the number one arguments: WordPress is global, so we can’t just rely on U.S. holidays.

I get that. But I think we can look at this from a couple of different angles, and I really think they’ve released a secondary release date should they not be able to hit the first, which is after the new year, which would be January 22nd. I think that’s a way more agreeable date for everybody. Get the major holidays behind us—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—Christmas is celebrated obviously outside the U.S., most countries, I think, celebrate New Year’s. So get all of that behind us. And then everyone can be laser-focused on getting Gutenberg out, making a smooth release as possible for the developers, for the support, for the people that are supporting the WordPress sites that are running these updates, for the hosts who are going to be managing these updates in some areas, as well as for the support that comes in. So I think it is risky. I really hope they go with the second date. I don’t think it should be released on the first date. I think that’s going to be a disaster.

BobWP:
Yeah, I wonder how many people actually have their sites set to auto-update on major releases.

Brad:
A lot of hosts are doing that now.

BobWP:
That’s—

Brad:
And they’re not waiting a week or two weeks or three weeks. They’re pushing them out pretty quickly, within a day or so. They’re pushing them out. So now, I think another argument is, well, you can have the Classic Editor enabled, ready to go, but I think we all make the assumption that everyone knows Gutenberg is coming. And that couldn’t be further from the truth because the majority of WordPress users have no idea Gutenberg is coming. No, they don’t. They’re not involved in the community. They don’t track WordPress news. To them, it’s just a website they log into and use to manage their content, to manage whatever that website’s supposed to do. They could care less about the software. They just want it to work. And imagine if the host auto-updates that, and they log in on Thursday evening, getting ready for Black Friday, and realize, oh, my entire editing experience is— I don’t know what’s going on here. What happened? What do I do? That’s the scary part. I think people just aren’t in the know, which is absolutely the majority.

BobWP:
Yeah, and I agree because I know that in the past, having worked with users and even a few who kind of every once in a while email me—clients that are still real basic—I’ll bring it up. Someone was talking about taking their WordPress blog down because they just don’t have time for it anymore. They wanted to do something else, and it was a good idea. And I actually told them, “You may want to do it before this date just because you’ll save some headaches because if you’re already planning this, we’re going to have to do something with it or whatever. I am not sure how it’s going to—I’m going to have to spend time in there,” which I wasn’t really doing anymore. And so yeah, there’s a handful of people I know personally that were longtime clients, and I bet you they haven’t a clue. A couple of them I mentioned— one guy wanted me to do some training with him, and I said, “Well, you may want to wait because something new is coming around the bend, changing.” Yeah. I said, “It’s going to be different, and I’m going to be teaching you something that’s going to be like, okay, you’ll probably choose to make that history.”

So you take that to the online store and even the small stores—I mean, I can imagine there are a lot of stores that provide a decent flow of income for these people, but they don’t spend a ton of time beyond that. Maybe that store is a little side thing. Maybe it’s an appendage of their brick and mortar. Who knows what? And they’re just kind of going with the flow. And even if they go in their editor in the dashboard and see the thing about Gutenberg, a lot of people just kind of, oh yeah, oh, that’s just another WordPress thing coming. I mean, they just kind of have that—because it is, it’s like when your iPhone updates or other software updates—to them, it’s pretty much the same thing with WordPress. It’s just another tool they use, and it updates every once in a while, and they’re not going to put in a beta and play with it, that’s for sure.

Brad:
Right. Yeah, it’s not a high priority. And ultimately, I want Gutenberg to be successful. I think we all do, right?

BobWP:
Oh yeah.

Brad:
I see the value of Gutenberg in the WordPress space and the software, and we all want it to be successful. So I think it comes down to what they say about first impressions: you only get one shot. So really, if WordPress kind of falls on its face with this release, that’s going to be very bad for WordPress. And it may be very hard to recover, if at all. Imagine if Gutenberg is responsible for—and this is just hypothetical—but imagine it’s responsible for affecting sales on Black Friday. That could be— I mean, for many stores, Black Friday is the day that sets the stage for the sales for the whole year, and that is a make-it-or-break-it day for them. A bad day could potentially tank a company.

So having the software fail on that particular day of all days would be bad. And I think it would give a lot of people pause on whether WordPress is what they want to be using going forward. If they do something like this where they really didn’t think about it and they pushed this out just to have this great press release for an event or something, are they really thinking about what’s best for the users? So I really feel like that first impression is so important, especially for this release with how

big of a change is coming. I guess another option would be to just disable it. Rather than opting out, make it opt-in for WordPress 5.0. Give a nice little notice up there that says, “Hey, there’s a new editing experience, it’s available. You want to try it?” Yes. And it flips it over, and you can revert back at any point if you don’t like it. I would love that. That would be great—opt-in. But right now, they’re talking about opt-out, where it’ll be on by default and you’ll actually have to install the other plugin to disable it. So that’s a concern. But we’ll see. As it gets closer, we’ll obviously keep our finger on the pulse there, and I kind of expect it’ll get pushed to the second date, but nobody really knows until it happens.

BobWP:
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. I just had to actually talk to somebody because I’m doing a presentation at WordCamp Portland, and it’s the opening for the beginner track. So it’s real WordPress basics. And one of the things I was going to show them is pages and posts, and I’m thinking, okay, now what do I do? What do I show them without going down the Gutenberg rabbit hole? I don’t want my whole presentation to be around Gutenberg, so I have to mention it, but I don’t want to open it up and have everybody pass out or start screaming questions and thinking, okay, okay, now I’ve got 30 minutes left. Here’s what we’re going to do in 30 minutes. We’re going to talk about anything else but Gutenberg. So I’m kind of struggling with that right now, deciding the route to go, just because it’s kind of right on that cusp where I’m not sure it is an opportunity to give everybody a warning, but I don’t want to get entrenched in it.

Brad:
Yeah.

BobWP:
So that is Gutenberg. One other thing—I thought we would throw in one other little thing, and this has indirect relevance to WooCommerce, and it’s more online shopping and all that good stuff. I’d recently done a podcast with Rand Fishkin. I don’t know if everybody knows Rand, but he’s one of the founders of SEOmoz, huge in the search engine space, and he’s got a new business going. One of the questions I asked him, and it was all around e-commerce, was voice search. How is voice search going to really affect e-commerce? And is it going to actually kind of push its way into organic search? Are people going to— is it going to not replace it, but is it going to become just as popular? And in a nutshell, he said voice search will not cannibalize organic search. And what he said was that really, when you think about—you’re looking for a product and perhaps you’re thinking of, okay, I need some new speakers for my computer.

You don’t sit there and say, “Look for speakers for my computer.” You don’t do that. You don’t verbally say that. You instead will get on, do a search, start to research it, see what works best, look at reviews, do the whole process. It’s not going to really replace organic search in that sense because voice search is really for that immediate looking for something specific, like a definition of something or what’s the capital of this country or this state or whatever. So really, he felt that organic search is still going to be the king—or queen, or whatever I want to say—of people looking for products and services to buy when they’re shopping.

Brad:
I mean, I don’t personally use voice search. I do have a number of Amazon Echo devices that I yell at all the time, but I don’t use voice search beyond that. And it is, like you said, it’s basic kind of commands like play music or conversions if I’m cooking or something from teaspoons to whatever—cups or vice versa—things like that. Add stuff to the shopping list. It’s not “research headphones and come back with the best one you found.” Now, there probably would be an argument for once AI, I think, gets better in terms of search. So you could say, “Find me the best wireless headphones for my computer.”

BobWP:
Yeah, right.

Brad:
Okay. “I know, I know what you like. I know what you do. I’m smart. I’m a computer, and let me go out and compile the top five that I think would fit you, Brad, personally, based on everything I know about you.” There probably is an argument for that, but I think that’s a ways out. Will it get here eventually? Probably, but I don’t think we’re close to that. So I agree. I search just like you said—when I’m looking for products, I’ll type in “wireless headset reviews,” start digging through there, and go through the various rabbit holes of review sites, looking up Amazon reviews, and maybe throw a question on Twitter to see what people recommend or Facebook or something. Yeah, it’s not something I use. It’s not something I know of really—I don’t know if I know anybody that uses voice search regularly.

BobWP:
I think it’s just a little early for that. You know what I mean? I think it’s early. I think we’ll see.

Brad:
Right. And I think it’s a mix of both, because you take, for example, restaurants. If you’re walking down the street and you’re by the Metropolitan Museum, you might say, “Show me Mexican restaurants by the Metropolitan Museum.” But if you’re at home and you’re planning to travel to the Metropolitan Museum, you’re likely to get on and actually Google it and do an organic search to see what restaurants are around there, and you have a little bit more time. So it’s almost—in some instances, for example, that one—it’s kind of a mix depending on where you are and what your needs are at that time.

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s true. I think that’s true.

So anyway, well, we always end it with a couple of Woo sites and a couple of tools. Woo sites. What did you come up with? We looked for WooCommerce sites built on WooCommerce, that might interest people and that are pretty cool and all that good stuff.

Brad:
Yeah. So I brought one to the table this week, and this is a good example of a large-scale WooCommerce site. This—full disclaimer—my company, WebDevStudios, built this site and launched it. It’s for a company called H-E-B. If you live in the Southwest United States, you’re probably very familiar with H-E-B. It’s a massive grocery store chain. And they also have another brand called Central Market. If you’re not familiar with it, think of it like a Whole Foods-style store. So we built a site, centralmarket.com, which is 100% WooCommerce. It’s essentially a massive grocery store website powered by WooCommerce.

It’s big. There are a lot of various sections, as you can imagine, for different types of food and produce and meats and things like that. You can search for availability at the various locations. You can actually do online ordering, pick up at the store, things like that. So it’s a great example of WooCommerce at scale because this is a massive company that has a large user base that uses the grocery store day in and day out. So it’s a great example of just a large brand that has put full stock in WooCommerce. So I love it. It’s a beautiful site. It was a very large project—a very challenging and fun project. And overall, we’re super proud of it. So check it out, centralmarket.com.

BobWP:
Very cool. And I want to share—actually, this is from one of my first—my other podcasts, one of my first guests way back. I don’t even know if it’s been a year, a couple of years. It’s called Xero Shoes, X-E-R-O Shoes. And the reason I bring it up is yes, it’s built on WooCommerce. They kind of have some cool shoes. There’s the guy who has his whole reasoning behind this particular site, and what he created was that going barefoot really is healthy for your feet, but you need a little bit of support. And that’s what his shoes, a lot of his shoes are doing, is giving you the—especially a lot of the sandals—are giving you the opportunity to be active and feel like you’re going barefoot, that type of thing. And I noticed since the podcast, he’s grown his product line quite a bit and stuff, but I’ll put a link to it.

And it was an interesting talk with him, and I should have him back on my other podcast because he did share a lot of his challenges with WooCommerce and why he loved WooCommerce. But he did end up doing a lot of—and this was back a ways too—and when he built this, he was doing a lot of customization. I mean, he had to do a lot of customization because a lot of stuff was not in place. So anyway, yeah, it’s X-E-R-O Shoes.com. You can check it out, and I’ll put a link to the podcast too, even though it’s a little bit old, it’s still interesting to hear. So to me, it’s always interesting to hear the shop owner’s perspective when they’ve been involved with the build. I mean, he did hire people to do it, but he’s very much into that part of it too.

So great guy to listen to. But anyway, and our tools. What tool did I put down? Auto Optimize. The only reason I did this is when I moved actually my site to Liquid Web, it was one of the plugins they had already installed or they’d recommended, and I used it on my site because whenever you go to PageSpeed Rank and all that stuff and look at things, that stuff just boggles my mind because they say, “Oh, here’s how to fix it.” And then they list all this crap that I don’t understand, and it’s like, “Do this, do that.” And I’m like, ah. Anyway, it’s a free plugin on WordPress.com. It really does good work. I mean, when I installed it, I already noticed improvements. I mean, it was like just that plugin alone did some improvements on my site. So it is worth checking out. I think it’s fairly straightforward. There isn’t a lot of setup to it, but yeah, I mean you probably need other things in place too, but it’s a great supportive piece for your site, and I know they really push that with WooCommerce sites too, so it’s a pretty cool little plugin.

Brad:
Yeah, very cool. My tool—actually, it’s a tutorial that was published on WPBeginner. Yesterday, Syed Balkhi, a good friend, basically shared “13 Ways to Recover WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Sales.” So on average, about 60% to 80% of people who add a product to a shopping cart do not end up buying that product. So you can imagine, if you can just convert a small percentage of those users to customers, that can make up a good chunk of your sales or can bring in those sales that you might’ve otherwise lost. So they go through kind of 13 different tips from exit-intent popups to obviously making sure your site is speedy, to making sure the cart link is visible and easy to find, avoiding hidden costs with shipping and things like that, which I think we can all agree is a real annoyance if you get all the way to the end and realize, oh, shipping’s going to be more than the product cost, enabling guest checkout, things like that. So it’s a really good tutorial of things you can do to help decrease the number of users that add things to the cart and never actually purchase. So that can directly affect your bottom line. So it’s a really nice article. Check it out over on WPBeginner, and we’ll have a link in the notes.

BobWP:
Very cool. Yeah, always good stuff over there. So it sounds definitely worth checking out. That’s it. Yeah, when we come back, we’ll even be closer to possible—well, not that much closer, I guess it’s still a ways from Gutenberg, but we’ll see if anything has transpired or what else has—I know there are other things that have erupted in the community around it too, as well, but we won’t get into that. So I think that’s it. I hope you have a good time on the farm. Are there any animals out there?

Brad:
No. There used to be horses, but they’re long gone.

BobWP:
They’re long gone. A couple of cats if that counts.

Brad:
Yeah.

BobWP:
Okay, well that’s it. A cat farm. Good enough. All right. Okay, well everybody, join us in a couple of weeks and we’ll be back, and yeah, just keep on doing the Woo. Thanks, Brad.

Brad:
Thank you, Bob. See you, everybody.