Enterprise WooCommerce and Hosting

Brad:
And we are back with another episode of Do the Woo, episode 23. I’m your co-host, Brad Williams. I’m joined by my partner in crime, Mr. BobWP. Bob, what’s happening?

BobWP:
Hey, not much. Just hanging here and looking forward to having our guest on. He’s very new to podcasting, so I’m pretty excited to see how he handles it.

Brad:
I am excited as well. So we’ve decided that the quality of content we’ve been producing was a little bit too good. So we decided to actually take it down a couple of notches, and we invited Matt Medeiros on the show to help us accomplish that goal this week. So Matt Medeiros, welcome to the show.

Matt:
I’m sorry, I thought I signed up for the eCommerceFuel podcast. This is Do the Woo. Alright, I gotta go.

Brad:
We’re doing Do the Woo. We’re doing the Woo and Pre-show. I showed you the dance moves that Bob and I generally like to do to kind of warm up. Unfortunately, we don’t have video anymore, so the audience will just have to take our word for it that we have a little warm-up dance that we like to do, and it went pretty well. But Matt, for the few people out there who maybe don’t know who you are, who haven’t heard one of your 15 different podcasts or read one of your 15 different websites, why don’t you give everybody a quick intro about you?

Matt:
Yeah, MattReport.com. It’s where I do a podcast all about WordPress, and you can find me during the day at Pagely.com selling managed WordPress hosting to enterprises.

Brad:
There it is. And a little disclaimer: Matt and I have a podcast that we like to do once a year called The Random Show, maybe a little more frequently than once a year, but you can check that out over at RandomShow.net. And we like to just talk tech, pop culture, some WordPress, all sorts of…

Matt:
Documentaries…

Brad:
Documentaries, space. It’s random—randomly released and random topics. But this topic’s about WooCommerce, eCommerce, and the web. So we thought we’d bring you on and dive into some interesting topics today. So where do you want to kick it off, Bob?

BobWP:
Actually, I wanted to ask Matt a question around his, actually, his full-time job before we dive into it. So, Pagely Enterprise—how much are your, I guess, give us some perspective on the eCommerce space at Pagely. I’d just be interested to hear client-wise—not necessarily specifically client-wise—but just some general background on how you guys pull into the eCommerce space.

Matt:
So for WooCommerce in particular, as we all know listening to this podcast, it’s not the easiest beast to tame at the floor level. WooCommerce does eat up a lot of resources as you scale. Many folks who are coming to Pagely for eCommerce are either high-traffic sites in both a marketing capacity, where they have a high-traffic marketing blog and then they sell merchandise, or they’re a traditional eCommerce store with just lots of traffic. The way we handle it is our particular value add to the market. So Pagely is well-known for just being super transparent and just being a pure AWS solutions-based web host. So, all we do is go to AWS, pull down whatever size server you need for your website, and whatever size database you need for all the database traffic. Primarily, we use Amazon Aurora RDS.

So, the shops that are coming to us, number one, they’re looking for that transparency. In other words, they don’t want any other layer of management on top of their hosting product. They just want to know, “Here’s the raw hardware we’re on. How do we optimize it for whatever their particular needs are?” And when a customer comes to us for eCommerce, those are the questions they’re asking. They’re asking about speed, performance, and optimization. And that’s what Pagely delivers from a human value, from a DevOps value. We take all of that critical thinking away from the customer and say, “Hey, don’t worry about scale, because as you scale, you just ask us, ‘What does the memory look like? What does the CPU usage look like? How do we optimize queries to the database?’ Let Pagely’s DevOps team—which again, they’re really well-known for—handle all of that critical thinking, and you just focus on the growth of the business.”

And when we do get into a territory where Pagely draws the line is writing lines of code. And when we get to that point, quite often we just recommend other great partners, like the other man on the show right now, WebDevStudios, where we say, “Hey look, we’ve optimized it from the server level, from the hardware level, from the infrastructure level. Now the customer needs to—they have this custom plugin that they developed 10 years ago—they need to rip that out and put something else in its place.” And then we hand them over to WebDevStudios, and WebDev comes in and does their magic with better code and stuff like that.

Brad:
I’m starting to like Matt a little bit more.

BobWP:
Oh yeah, I was going to say, see, I’m rubbing the friction the right way here. I want to make sure we don’t get too random or… random. No, but seriously, that’s cool because I just always want to hear the perspective, because in the world of hosting, we’re filled with all kinds of hosts and… yeah. Go ahead.

Matt:
Yeah, I was just going to say one last note about the future—it’s not even predictions; it’s already here—and of course Brad knows this is REST API, headless WordPress, headless CMS. We’ve ventured into that space with a handful of portfolio customers, getting them the right technology for headless or just making requests to WooCommerce but with a different front-end powered by some other CMS. That is our new-ish product that hasn’t really released yet but should be coming soon, NorthStack.com, where we’ll be able to do much more beyond WordPress. And then in the future, whatever other eCommerce platforms might exist, so Gatsby, Jekyll, static sites—that’s a thing again, just to have a static site—and that’s how we’re solving some of those more unique requests around eCommerce these days.

Brad:
What kind of trends are you seeing in terms of the type of software people use for eCommerce? So obviously, this is a WooCommerce-focused podcast. We talk a lot about WooCommerce; we love WooCommerce. There are a lot of options out there, a lot of really good options to get stores to market quicker, just scale stores. There’s Shopify, there’s BigCommerce, there’s Magento. I mean, there are just a lot of options. WooCommerce is a great tool, but are you seeing trends? Are more and more people becoming open to hosting or powering their eCommerce platform through WooCommerce? Or are you seeing people move away from WooCommerce? Anything that stands out that might be a trend kind of moving forward?

Matt:
The expense of running WooCommerce is definitely getting more visible as these shops are growing, at least from the particular vantage point that I have at Pagely. There’s more stuff happening in WordPress and WooCommerce, and the technology expense is getting higher to run all the things people are doing. So, for the newbies listening to the show, people are like, “Well, people just come to the website, they buy a product, they check out.” Yeah, that’s fine on a small scale, but as you guys know and some of your other listeners know, once you get to scale, there’s reporting that runs. There are import-exports for sites that have tens of thousands of SKUs. Anybody who’s running search, implementing Elasticsearch—there’s a lot of other tech that’s eating up the resources of your stack.

So, we’re seeing that and we’re looking at customers saying, “How about that Shopify thing? How about we just run WordPress as what it’s really great at—publishing and marketing and product site—and then we’ll just use Shopify as our secondary instance of the eCommerce site?” Sad to say that I see a lot of people shopping Shopify for a WooCommerce alternative, or outright moving to Shopify when things are just getting far too complex inside of WooCommerce. BigCommerce, of course, another presence on the scene, is certainly making their push to solidify themselves with web hosts, and they’re knocking on our door all the time. I’ve been in talks with them to sort of partner up and make them an alternative to WooCommerce.

Brad:
And they’re big in that headless commerce space. I mean, that’s the whole deal.

Matt:
So Brad, as you and I sort of always put on the old tinfoil hats on our shows and the stuff that we do, I’m very interested to see with all of this push to Gutenberg and all the resources going to Gutenberg in WordPress proper, man, what is going to happen with WooCommerce? Because that is just this elephant in the room. For those who are like, “Well, Gutenberg is just this monetization thing to make Automattic more money”—by the way, they own WooCommerce—what the heck is going on with that? When is this just going to be the end-all-be-all of eCommerce

? So, we’ll see.

Brad:
Yeah, and we’ve talked about it on the show where there have been some integrations with Gutenberg into WooCommerce. There are block components that are shipping that. It’s pretty early days, I think, with some of that, but they’re definitely experimenting and even releasing some of the code around that. But it’s a fair point. I mean, I think the idea of—to your point about costs around WooCommerce at scale—it’s kind of like you have to sit down and really put together a matrix of what’s important to you and your business, right? Because there’s the cost of growing it, scaling it, supporting it, the cost of developing it, and growing the features and functionality of your website like you would have with any website.

Moving over to something like Shopify—while it takes a lot of those scaling headaches away—you also lose a lot of that customization and control over your store. You can customize quite a bit of it, but at a certain point, you’re going to hit a wall of what you’re allowed to do. Whereas with WooCommerce, it is open source, it is completely extensible, and there is no wall. There’s no ceiling. It’s just a matter of how much time and money you want to sink into it to really tailor that platform to your experience. And there’s no right answer. I think it’s all, like you said, very unique to the business and their goals, but it’s something people need to factor in—maybe not on day one of running a store, but when that store starts to become successful and they realize this is going to work and is growing and they need to think about where they’re going to be in 2, 3, 5, 10 years down the road. They need to sit down and really think about, “Is this the platform we want to be on? Yes or no? Here’s the pros, here’s the cons.” Because moving off an eCommerce site when you’re massively successful—whether you’re going to WooCommerce or moving away from it—is a massive undertaking.

Matt:
Oh yeah, it’s a major decision to make, number one. And then there’s actually doing it. One of the things—not to monopolize the show about WooCommerce, but I guess that’s the point—is…

Brad:
Literally the show!

Matt:
…when you look at what Shopify—so if you think about growth and user adoption and what are the next steps for a business or an ecosystem, you look at Shopify and BigCommerce partnership programs. I mean, look at the effort that they put into partnership programs. Shopify has a massive marketplace, not so different from the plugin ecosystem, where there are people making millions of dollars in—I don’t know what Shopify calls them—but add-ons or whatever, the marketplace apps I guess they might call them. There’s a huge effort to cater to other people to make software for their marketplace. Whereas, you almost see the inverse with the WordPress ecosystem, where it’s like the Death Star starting to hover over the planet. Now the sun’s going away and we’re like, “Oh, man, look at that Jetpack up there. It owns everything. It’s got all of these features, and they don’t really want to work with us to implement these features. They just want to own everything.” Which again, is just a different play in itself. It’s like, you can just show up and trust the name-brand WordPress and WooCommerce, or you go to a marketplace like Shopify and say, “Hey, there’s a million providers you can pick from here. Pick which one works for you,” like an app store ecosystem.

BobWP:
Again, I can attest to that with Shopify, because I know when—I think, I don’t know when it was—but it was quite some time ago, they reached out to me and we just talked a little bit back and forth, and I was in their partner program. They are very aggressive, and they do keep at you. I can see how they succeed in that because, I mean, they’re not annoyingly aggressive either, but they were very persistent. It was interesting, and I kind of angled off a bit just to add that into the mix, which didn’t really go anywhere for me at that particular point. But just looking at this whole thing and what we’re talking about, I just love that I talk and basically write about WooCommerce and all this stuff because if it changes, then I’ll just keep on talking and keep on writing.

Brad:
Yeah, to be fair, “Do the Shopify” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Do the Woo.”

BobWP:
Yeah, “Do the Shopify”—it’s like, no, that’s not going to…

Matt:
I’m going to start a show called “The Shopify Shuffle.” How about that?

Brad:
Shopify Shuffle? Please do. You can use some of those dance moves we did earlier. But I think to that last comment you made, Matt, this is something that I don’t think a lot of people are aware of—or maybe even care about initially. At some point, they probably will care when it starts to maybe impede or limit what they’re trying to do on either side. But I think initially it’s, whether Automattic is controlling it or whether it’s a more robust third-party add-on ecosystem, they probably don’t care. It really just comes down to, “What’s the cost? Does it do what I want it to do? How quickly can I start selling and get my store running?” Things like that.

But I think it’s a fair point that people need to spend some time researching these platforms and understanding them. Because if you’re going all in on a platform around your business and your goal is it’s a full-time business, your goal is to grow it and make it as successful as it can be, I think it’s important as a business owner to understand the strategy that the platform you’re going all in on is taking with this type of stuff. Because ultimately you’re going to be using these extensions or these… I would venture to bet there aren’t many WooCommerce stores that aren’t using at least one extension. I mean, I think you kind of have to, even just for a payment gateway. So, it’s pretty much a requirement these days, and by and large, many of them have 10, 20, 30 extensions running or add-ons. So, it’s something worth researching and understanding the ecosystem, the environment, the direction these different platforms are taking.

I mean, another good point is Shopify is very much about using their platform solely and not really wanting to integrate in a more headless way, like what BigCommerce is doing, where it’s like, “Hey, use WordPress if you want. We don’t care.” Or “Use some other front-end layer. We don’t care. We’ll just power the backend store experience.” Two very different approaches in how they’re marketing and running their product. Whereas WooCommerce is just open source. It’s like, do whatever you want with it. So, very different strategies, and I think it’s important people understand that.

Matt:
Imagine a customer on Shopify—and I don’t know what their numbers are—but a friend of mine, Jordan Gal, he runs the Bootstrapped Web podcast with Brian Casel. He has a SaaS company that sells in the Shopify marketplace, helps them do sort of like A/B comparison checkouts so you can optimize your checkouts—basically called CartHook. That’s his company. And the amount of money that he processes through just the customers that he has gets into the millions around any given month. Just imagine how much Shopify is pushing out. If they have a customer on Shopify that’s doing $10 million a month, that customer must be treated so much differently than another customer that’s doing a few hundred bucks a month.

Brad:
Oh, sure.

Matt:
And do they get access to optimize the platform and do all these other things? So I’m curious about how that plays out within Shopify and how they let their customers apply code, customize the platform. Again, if you’re doing tens of millions of dollars a month, are you just going to say no to that customer? “You can’t optimize your code.” No, they’re going to give special treatment, and I’m interested to know how that plays out there.

Brad:
Yeah, that’s a fair point. Obviously, Shopify’s making some decent money off that larger customer versus the person who’s probably on their lowest-tier package. So yeah, that’s a fair point too. I think it’s just doing due diligence, sitting down and really figuring out what’s going to be best for you. You’d be surprised how many stores we talk to that are running Magento, and they have 15 specialized products. That’s it. I’m like, “Why are you on Magento? That’s enterprise-level, multi-warehouse, multimillion-dollar level.” Yes, you can run small stores, but it’s so much overkill for what you need. You could literally have a $20-a-month, $30-a-month Shopify or spin up your own WooCommerce with a couple extensions and be fine. And it’s because they just heard, “Oh yeah, I guess I should be on Magento. I’ll just use Magento.” It’s wild.

BobWP:
The Do the Woo podcast is brought to you by Liquid Web. Looking for top-notch hosting for your WooCommerce site? They have a ton to offer you. Plus, you’ll get 33% off your first six months of any popular WooCommerce plan using the code BobWP. This is a limited-time offer, so head on over

to liquidweb.com. And a special thanks to Liquid Web for helping us Do the Woo. Now, back to the show. Well, why don’t we move into some of these other stories?

Brad:
Speaking of multimillion-dollar…

BobWP:
Sales, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of, yeah. So I shared a little link here that talks about that thing that happened—oh, I don’t know when it was. It wasn’t too long ago. Prime Day with Amazon.

Brad:
It was last week.

BobWP:
Yeah, last week. Basically, in a nutshell, yes, they made a lot of money again, and they talked about pretty much increases in everything, including Prime members. So were you guys… Okay, who bought? Actually, everything I bought was the day after Prime was over because nothing I wanted was on sale. Did anybody shop Prime? I did not.

Brad:
I did. I mean, it’s one of those things—obviously, if you’re buying anything Amazon, it’s a good day to buy something, whether it be Echo or Fire Stick or anything that’s an Amazon product. They’re all on sale—Blink camera systems, which I love. I actually bought a new Echo to replace my first-gen. The very first one I got has been a little finicky, so I was like, “You know what? They were like $50. I’ll just buy a new one. They’re smaller, they’re better, the speakers are a little better.” So I definitely took advantage—bought a couple other small things. I don’t even remember what, to be honest. But I definitely… I think, I feel like—correct me if I’m wrong—but I bet you guys probably took a look, right? I mean, you mentioned nothing that you were interested in, Bob. Matt, did you take a look at all in those days or did you just say, “I’m not buying”?

Matt:
Yeah, I mean, I think I got an email. They were trying to upsell me on an Amazon Echo as well. Is that the bigger one? The Amazon Echo?

Brad:
Yeah, that’s kind of what you would call the original, yeah.

Matt:
So no, I didn’t buy anything after that.

Brad:
But what I think is really interesting about Prime Day, Bob—you have this article, which I’m sure you’re going to share—about how they sold, obviously, the biggest Prime Day ever. It’s also the first time they’ve done it over two days instead of one, so obviously that had an impact on how large it was. But the thing that is really interesting to me about Prime Day is one of the reasons they started doing Prime Day is because July is historically the worst sales month for online sales. It’s the middle of summer, people are on vacations, kids are out of school, people just aren’t online as much, generally speaking. So that’s just across the board, not just Amazon—it’s just eCommerce. July is the slowest month of the year.

So now they came up with this Prime Day idea. They’ve really energized online shopping in the middle of the worst month of the year, basically the opposite of Black Friday—six months or whatever down the calendar. But now you’re seeing all of these stores do it, right? All these eCommerce stores, and the article even touches on that—how all of the online stores had big sales on that day. So this is evolving. Prime Day will always be there, but this is evolving into a summer Black Friday, if you will, the opposite end, halfway through the year approximately from when the holiday shopping is. Now, I expect in the next few years it gets… there’s some kind of term that we call it, outside of just being an Amazon-specific shopping day, and it’s just known. It’s the middle of the summer. It’s a big online shopping day, and all the stores are going to start taking advantage of it. People are online these days and they’re shopping really hardcore. The numbers prove it, so take advantage of it. I think it’s cool.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think it’d be interesting to see—I mean, they listed Walmart, Target, eBay, Macy’s, Best Buy as some of the other ones running. I didn’t have a chance to look those up as well, but I bet it’s… and a little bit more comparison shopping during that time versus just saying, “Okay, is Amazon the best deal here?” Oh, well, if so-and-so is going to have something… and of course, I don’t know if they were running exactly at the same time. It would be interesting to see what those comparison prices were like, but yeah, it’s…

Brad:
100,000 laptops, 200,000 televisions.

Matt:
Yeah, it’s…

Brad:
Crazy. The scale is amazing.

Matt:
Yeah.

Brad:
I bought a new car. I joined the minivan club.

Speaker 4:
Oh no.

Matt:
Yeah, I bought a minivan. It’s a Honda, and I got an email from them saying if I activate my HondaLink—which is like OnStar, if you’re familiar with OnStar, Honda’s alternative or whatever—I can actually get products delivered to my car. They’ll open up my car and put the products in it from Amazon.

Brad:
Really?

Matt:
Yeah.

Brad:
Wow. I mean, intrusive but cool, I guess. Certainly, I’d rather do that than my house, which I know is also a thing they’re trying to do now. “Yeah, come on in my house and drop a package off.” I don’t think so.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think I actually saw a video somewhere that was showing an Amazon person delivering—somebody had filmed it. They just basically opened it up, put it in there, and gone. Yeah.

Brad:
Amazon has changed the game time and time again with online shopping. I mean, even within this article, it mentioned—which many of us know—that they’re defaulting to one-day shipping now for many locations for Prime, if you have a Prime account, which is again, insane. And it’s funny because it’s gotten to the point—my wife ordered something. It was a leash for our dog; she ate the other leash, had to get a new leash—and she’s like, “Well, the other leash was still okay, but I don’t need this tomorrow.” She ordered it on Saturday. She’s like, “I don’t need this tomorrow.” But it was like, the option was free tomorrow on a Sunday or slow shipping, wait a couple weeks, which was also free. And she’s like, “Well, of course, I’m going to pick one-day.” She’s like, “I don’t want to wait two weeks, but I don’t need it on a Sunday.” And those were the only two options. It didn’t cost any more. It’s getting to the point where I don’t want to complain about one-day shipping, but I mean, we didn’t need to burden someone with bringing a dog leash to us on a Sunday, you know what I mean? It could have waited until later in the week.

Matt:
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO did—I think it was a couple of weeks ago—I think the title, you can find it on YouTube, the title was “Warehouses” or something like that. And the amount of warehouse workers now, for any company—like a Walmart or Verizon—they just outsource to these large warehouse companies that do all the logistics for them, unlike Amazon, which owns it, of course. They own the distribution centers. And they just had real testimonials from people who were just like, “I was on my feet for 16 hours a day.” And they have little iPhones—where it looks like iPhones—that would tell you, “Alright, pick up this dog leash in aisle 20.” And then all of a sudden, the next person ordered something else that’s in aisle 120, so it’s like you’re going to walk all the way down there and grab that. And then they time people, and you can’t take breaks and all of this stuff. It’s just like, man, what is it coming to for just one-day delivery?

Brad:
There were a lot of people boycotting Prime Day—workers and consumers—for that very reason.

Matt:
One other thing sort of on the note of that and what we were previously talking about, I think last month or a couple of weeks ago, Shopify announced that they’ll have their own fulfillment for products. So now it’s really taking on Amazon, which is just another interesting sort of feather in their cap against all this eCommerce stuff.

BobWP:
Yeah, wow. So what’s the next thing, Brad? I know you added something in here that you found.

Brad:
Yeah, I came across this interesting article. So keeping on the topic of online sales—obviously that’s what we talk about on the show—but basically big retailers and how they’re affected. I came across this article. Essentially, a group of online retailers—eCommerce sites—are petitioning the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether eCommerce sites are covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA. And it’s one that, when I first saw it, I thought this was dealt with a decade ago. Then I started doing some more research and realized it hasn’t officially been dealt with.

Basically, what is happening is there are millions of Americans that live with various accessibility

problems—visual impairments, things like that—that are on the internet. So, the idea is that we want to make the web accessible to everybody. And to do that, you have to put some kind of special considerations into how you build a website—how it’s navigated, how labels exist and describe things. You can imagine if someone’s using a browser and they have a visual impairment, the browser’s reading the screen to them—it has to be set up a certain way that it works and makes sense. By and large, there are many, many, many websites out there that aren’t accessible—maybe a little bit, but maybe not at all.

So one of the challenges is, while the web has a set of accessibility guidelines you’re probably familiar with—the WCAG 2.0 and more recently the 2.1 standards—the government, the US government in this case, hasn’t officially weighed in to say, “Yes, eCommerce retailers have to follow that,” or “Yes, they are part of the ADA or fall under the ADA.” And the ADA was set up prior to the internet really taking off or becoming a thing. So it’s very specific to things like more physical things—when you would visit a building, like ramps instead of just stairs, handrails by toilets, things like that that we all are kind of accustomed to seeing.

So, the problem is there’s a bit of a blurry line. They’re not sure what they should follow, how they should follow it, and they really want the Supreme Court to come in and say, “This is the guideline, whether it’s WCAG or something else, this is what you’re required to follow as an online retailer.” Because there’s a lot of lawsuits kind of happening, and it’s not clear—it’s a little fuzzy. I think the most famous case, at least the one that immediately came to mind, was the Target.com one from about a decade ago, where Target was sued because their website wasn’t accessible, and they settled. Now, they’re one of the most accessible sites out there in terms of large-scale retailers. But, interesting topic. I mean, what do you guys think? Do you feel like websites, eCommerce sites specifically, should be required to be fully accessible by absolutely everybody under the law? Do you feel like it’s something that the government shouldn’t have to weigh in on, and it should just be “do the right thing”? Or does it kind of fall in some other area? What are your thoughts?

Matt:
I’m curious about how this all plays out in a WordPress world, where we’re still—I don’t know if “struggling” is the right word—but we’re still dealing with getting WordPress itself accessible, and then the themes that people are choosing. How does that impact it? So, I agree that, yeah, if these are the laws and these are the guidelines that were approved and this is stopping people from going and purchasing something, then that’s not fair. But how does this impact hundreds of thousands—I don’t even know—of eCommerce people that are just selling things online as a hobby, as a side gig, as a small part of their business? How the heck are they even going to come to terms with that and upgrade their sites? It’s like every year…

Brad:
I think that’s who would probably be impacted the most because…

Matt:
Yeah, and it’s always that small business with these big things.

Brad:
It does cost money to get to that point, right? Yes, you can have an amazing-looking website—it’s very responsive, it works across all devices—but that doesn’t mean it’s accessible, right? There’s another step—multiple steps—you need to take to get it accessible and to pass these guidelines or the testing around the guidelines. Obviously, big businesses—Target, Amazon—Target’s kind of leading the charge there. Even Amazon isn’t fully accessible in certain areas. So even the big boys that have billions of dollars in profit can’t even get there. How is a small business that maybe is struggling to get by going to get there?

I’m a big proponent of accessibility. Every website we build, we run through accessibility testing, whether it’s a requirement from the client or not, just because we truly believe that the web should be accessible by everybody. And I also think maybe it’s also a part of the open-source mentality as well. But it’s something we firmly believe in. Now, whether our clients agree to certain things or not is another story. Sometimes there might be some color clashing that they’ve heard our concerns and say, “You have to do it anyways.” But at least we brought that to the table. It is a very important topic. And I hope that—I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe the government does need to get involved because people aren’t following the guidelines. What else do you do? Just say, “Well, if it’s accessible, you can buy stuff, but if not, I guess you shop somewhere else”? I don’t know.

Matt:
And then what happens to, again, the hundreds of thousands of small eCommerce sites that can’t upgrade WordPress, let’s say, or WooCommerce to be accessible? Or their sites? They just say, “Screw it. I’ll go to Shopify. It is accessible,” right? And now we start losing the market share on that front because people just say, “Well, I can’t do it myself. WordPress isn’t up to par. WooCommerce isn’t, this theme isn’t. I’m just going to go to a closed-source CMS over there and give my rights to them.” So, it’s a tough…

BobWP:
Yeah, I like the quote in here that somebody said, “It’s straightforward enough to measure the height of a restroom grab bar to test its ADA compliance. It’s far more complex to accurately measure or predict how a specific website will interact with a specific assistive technology and its user,” which is—I mean, that says a lot there, because that goes back to the small business and how far they take this. And even places like Shopify, what they can do. How many small businesses will have second thoughts? Even, do I start? Maybe they have a brick-and-mortar shop and they’ve got everything covered because they have a certain audience that comes in, and yeah, it’s black and white there. But will they go, “I don’t know if I want to even get online because there are just too many variables now they’re throwing at us that we have to meet”? And can they actually… yeah, can they afford it, and do they have the resources?

Brad:
And it’s not always as simple as saying, “Well, like Shopify, for example, yes, Shopify can do a lot to make the experience accessible.” But if I have the ability to modify content, I can break that compliance because I could upload an image that has red text on a green background. I could not include alt text on an image. I could do a number of things that would essentially break the accessibility of that page or that site, even if Shopify’s doing everything else correctly behind the scenes. So it’s not as easy as just saying, “Go on a platform, it’s accessible,” because as soon as you can modify content, you can mess up the accessibility of that site. It is a tricky one. I honestly think, since it’s kind of back out there in the spotlight and it’s gaining a lot of traction, the lawsuits are increasing year after year. I think this is something we’re going to be hearing more about, and I think for good reason. So, we’ll have to keep our eyes on the topic and see what comes of it, but hopefully we can figure it out.

Again, I believe the entire web should be fully accessible. The question is, how can we get there for big and small sites?

BobWP:
Interesting stuff. Now, the last article—somebody shared this on Twitter, and I don’t know why it caught my eye. I just clicked on it because I hadn’t really ever read anything quite like this or seen anything—and I’m sure maybe you two are more familiar with this—but it was called “Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites.” How it starts out is, “Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.”

Going through this thing, I will definitely put the link in there. And what I found really interesting is that a lot of this… they’re showing 50% of the WordPress plugins do this. I mean, that’s what they sell on, which is kind of ironic in a sense. But when you think of certain ways that you’re doing things—maybe it’s how you do it—but one of the things was the simple popup that says… one of them they looked at was where it says, “Yes, I want to make a million dollars,” “No, I suck. I’m going to go lie in a gutter and die.” That’s extreme, and that’s not one of the examples they showed. But have you—both of you, being in this—have you ever really come across this kind of thing before, or an actual study on this? What are your thoughts on it?

Brad:
What do you think, Matt?

Matt:
Well, I mean, I’m just going through these examples. I mean, I’ve…

Brad:
Seen all of these.

Matt:
Yeah, I’ve seen all of these. I feel like I’m pretty aware of it, and it’s just like when you see them add things to the cart, my immediate thing is just to go

delete it. I already know what you’re doing. You’re adding this stuff here. But man, just when you see the different examples, I just get worried for people who don’t know about this stuff. There’s a famous one that actually hit my wife and my sister-in-law. I think if you just Google—which should be illegal, by the way, Google should really not allow it—but if you Google “Massachusetts mass license renewal,” somebody is buying an AdWord for that, and you go to a site that looks like you’re buying the mass renewal for your license, and it’s like five bucks. It actually happened to my friend too. He went and bought it, and all it is is a guide on how to renew your license. And it’s like, how is this even legal? It shouldn’t even be legal. And right at the bottom of the site, you go back to the site, it’s like, “If you want a refund, click this link.” They know that they’re doing this trickery. But it…

Brad:
Did you have a big family meeting after that, Matt, and be like, “We need to talk about web safety”?

Matt:
Yeah, this is why I don’t let my wife use my laptop. I got her her own laptop. “You just use that one,” because I’ll watch her Google things, and it’s always the ad—it’s always the first click. And I’m like, “What are you doing? Never click anything up here!” Unless it’s like a competitor, and then you want to just burn their ad credits.

Brad:
Well, to be fair, Google’s made it so the ads don’t stand out like they used to, right? The background color is the same. So that’s obviously intentional too. But yeah, I’ve seen all of these. And honestly, it’s not just a website thing. The one that stood out was this countdown timer where it’s like, “Offer ends in… Call in the next 15 minutes.” I see this on TV all the time, where they’re like, “Call in the next 15 minutes to get this deal.” And I’ve always wanted to call at 16 minutes or 17 minutes just to see—I know we all know the deal’s still there—but just to see if they say, “Well, that 15 minutes is up. Sorry, you should’ve called us.” But that’s not going to happen. It’s just shady stuff. Definitely a lot of it’s a gray area. I think some things should certainly be illegal. Automatically adding something else to your cart? That should never be allowed. That absolutely should be illegal.

I think some of this stuff, like urgency, I don’t know. It’s such a gray area, but you see it so much. It’s like we kind of joke and laugh about it because everybody’s doing it. And the sites they’re pointing out aren’t no-name sites. They’re calling out JC Penney and these other pretty large sites that are doing this stuff. So this is what people look at. I always tell people when they’re launching new eCommerce sites, “Don’t reinvent the wheel. Look at what everybody else is doing.” They’ve already spent tons of money on R&D to know the “add” button should be this color and this size and above the fold and all that. That’s how it should be. So, I’m sure a lot of people are looking at what these larger websites are doing and mimicking it, assuming it’s going to work. And by and large, it probably does.

Matt:
And this is nothing compared to what is happening with our data. So even when you’re making these purchases, what these companies do with our data after a purchase or credit card companies selling our data, losing our data—this is nothing compared to what happens there. And if you listen to a few popular podcasts—I don’t even want to say the name of the company, but I can’t remember it anyway—they’re selling a Chrome add-on, where as you’re shopping, if you hit a shopping site, it’ll automatically apply a discounted code or coupon code. So they advertise that as “Never miss a discount code! Just add this to your web… Add this to your Chrome browser.” I’m like, man! The tagline’s always like, “It’s free! It just adds a discount to all these products.” It’s like, all they’re doing is scooping up all of that information—your buying decisions, the websites that you go to. That’s all that is. But people eat it up because they’re like, “Oh, I don’t even have to look for a coupon code anymore.” Which means now the big retailers probably have to offer fewer discounts, because if they had a 25% coupon out in the wild now, well, if somebody’s got this add-on installed in their Chrome browser, we only have to give this person 10% off. And they’ll never go and look for another coupon because they automatically think that the best discount is through this add-on. So they’ll never go look for a bigger discount or find a coupon they can double up with. Never mind the fact that all this data is probably getting sold.

BobWP:
Yeah, those are very popular. I know one of them specifically. I know that one. And yeah, it’s definitely… But I saw it, and I thought, yeah, great. I’m just over here…

Brad:
Uninstalling that extension right now.

Matt:
Whoopsie. I mean, you don’t have to listen to me. I’m just being theoretical over here, but I’m sure that’s what’s happening behind the scenes.

BobWP:
Yeah, I tested it out. I played with it a little bit. I was more curious to see what it was coming up with, and it was very… Yeah, I don’t know if it’s really, like you said, it wasn’t always finding the best one. A lot of times, it ended up being a little bit more of a rabbit hole, I thought, because you spend so much time focusing on that thing, you get lost in what you were even doing originally. Now you’re so focused on “What kind of discount can I get?” So yeah, there’s a lot of… I used it for about an hour playing around with it, and I thought, bye-bye. This is not going to…

Matt:
Yeah, I mean, once they get to millions of users using it and on their email list, they just have to turn to these people like a JC Penney and be like, “Hey, we’ve got a million people using this. If you want to offer a discount…” All it is is a sales mechanism and a promotion mechanism at that point. It’s the inverse. So now they just turn to the retailer and they say, “Hey, you want to email a million people and tell them you’ve got 10% off this weekend? You’re not selling anything?” Yeah, absolutely.

Brad:
That’s what they say: “If you’re not paying for something, if the user is not paying for something, who actually is?” Somebody has to be paying for something. Things don’t just work forever for free. Actually, what’s being sold is you—your data.

BobWP:
Exactly.

Brad:
Strap on those tinfoil hats, people. Matt’s here. But that’s a pretty legit one. That’s not very…

BobWP:
Yeah, pretty obvious, yeah.

Brad:
Yeah.

BobWP:
Alrighty. Well, I think we’ve covered it. What do you think, Brad? Anything else hanging there?

Brad:
Nope. That’s a good show. We’ve got a lot of good mini-topics. It’s probably one of our longer shows, to be honest. But that was a lot of fun. So let’s wrap it up here. Before we head out, Matt, where can people find you online?

Matt:
Hey, you can find me at MattReport.com, Pagely.com. And by the way, for folks who don’t know, I have a little free plugin in the WordPress repo, if you guys don’t mind if I throw an additional plug here. It’s called Easy Support Videos. If you want to add videos to your admin—if you’re a consultant and you’re setting up a WooCommerce site for somebody—you can embed helpful videos right in the admin of WordPress. And we have a new version coming out pretty soon, so check it out. It’s free—Easy Support Videos.

Brad:
Okay, you promoted a free product after we just talked about how free products are probably harvesting your data!

Matt:
We don’t harvest data. It’s all open-source. You can look at the code.

Brad:
I know, I’m just teasing. I’ll have to check that out for sure. What about any events? You got any events coming up in the near future that people might be able to see you at?

Matt:
You’ll see me in the hospital watching my wife give birth on August 15th to our third child.

Brad:
Oh boy. Now you’re going to be outnumbered, so good luck. We’ll see you, hopefully, maybe next year, maybe…

Matt:
Yeah, maybe.

Brad:
Yeah, maybe if we’re lucky… never again!

Matt:
This might be the last podcast I ever do.

Brad:
This might be. What about you, Bob? What do you got going on? Any events coming up?

BobWP:
Nothing in

the near future. I guess I’ll give a plug. I am involved with Seattle WordCamp this year. I always go to that because that’s my local WordCamp, and I’ve been involved with that for several years. And they are calling for speakers right now. So if you want to check that out, you can just Google or find their WordCamp site. But yeah, if you want to come up to the Pacific Northwest, unfortunately, it’s a week after WordCamp US. So for a lot of people, that does kind of put a crimp in traveling because unless you’re a traveler that likes to bop around from week to week… But still, for those that are going to be staying home from WordCamp US because of Halloween, why don’t you wait the next weekend and come up to the Pacific Northwest, because it’s a pretty cool place despite the fact I’m here.

Matt:
I’ll try to get my brother to go to that one since he lives out there.

BobWP:
Yeah, do! And let me know because I’d like to meet the better—I mean, the other guy.

Matt:
Yeah, he does run a WordPress membership website, so he might be a good speaker too.

Brad:
Oh, there you go. You’ve got a good community up there—good WordPress community up there. So I’m sure it’ll be a great event.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Brad:
Very cool. Yeah, I don’t have any events coming up, but if anything does, you can track that on my Twitter, @WilliamsBA. Anything else, Bob?

BobWP:
Nope, I think that pretty much wraps it up. Well, I appreciate Matt joining us. It was good to have him on. I haven’t been on a podcast with him for quite a while, so going to have to get back into the groove of things here.

Matt:
Thanks for having me, gentlemen.

Brad:
Yeah, it was a fun show. Appreciate it, Matt. Thanks for coming. So until next time, we will see you on the next Do the Woo.