From WordPress Plugin to WooCommerce Extension

Mark: Hey, my name’s Mark Westguard and I’m pleased to be co-hosting Do The Woo Podcast today. I’m here with Lesley Sim, from Newsletter Glue and we’re going to be talking today about WooCommerce extensions and how Lesley can progress to potentially releasing a WooCommerce extension for her product Newsletter Glue. Hey Lesley, how are you?

Lesley: Hey, Mark, super good. Bob has abandoned us today. So just you and me.

To start, a bit of background on Newsletter Glue

Mark: That’s it. Bob’s in the background letting us do our thing. So it’s a lot of trust. So I just want to get a little bit more background about Newsletter Glue, just let the audience know about who we are and what we do. We’re both plugin developers. So do you want to give us a bit more background about Newsletter Glue and what it does and how it’s such a wonderful product?

Lesley: Yeah, thanks. So Newsletter Glue does kind of what it says on the label. It glues newsletters to WordPress. So if you’ve got an email service provider, we currently integrate with 12. So MailChimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, a whole bunch of others, then you don’t have to migrate off of them. If you’ve got all of your segments and all that set up, instead you just use us to glue your email to WordPress and then you can use us as a email builder and start writing your emails directly from WordPress. Especially if you’re already using the block editor which we rely on, it’s significantly faster. You don’t have to do all of the cross posting, copy and paste images, all of that painful stuff and your newsletter archive is inside of WordPress already. And if your staff is non-technical and strapped for time which everybody is, then having them just work out of WordPress without having to hop back and forth just greatly increases the chances of your newsletter going out on time consistently and saves everybody’s sanity.

Mark: Great. So is the idea that the newsletter is actually built within WordPress itself and then you can then push that to these third party platforms?

Lesley: Yeah, that’s right. So we connect via API. So you do everything in WordPress. We’ve put in insane amount of work to make sure the email HTML kind of all works perfectly because email’s notoriously finicky to build. And so you write normally in the block editor and then we magically transform it into email ready HTML for you.

Mark: That’s fantastic because I know some of these email platforms, the email editor can be a little bit finicky to play around with and takes a bit of time to get used to. My agency uses a product called Dotdigital but we’ve also used a lot of other email platforms. And sometimes my clients can get a little bit confused with building the actual email itself and the HTML can get a bit messed up and we have to come in and help them fix it. So being able to do that within WordPress, within a familiar environment, that’s great. And what are some of the integrations that you said that you had that you can link that up with?

Lesley: So I’m going to probably forget some, but right now it’s MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, Sendinblue.

Mark: So all the big ones.

Lesley: Yeah, exactly.

What makes WS Form stand out

Mark: Yeah. Well, so I run WS Form. We’re a form plugin and funnily enough we integrate in with the same plugins you do as well but from a completely different angle. So we’re more of the signup side. It is one of the things that we can do. So we hook up with the same integrations. We can push anything from a simple email address through to a lot more information about a user, maybe first name, last name company, and a lot of other stuff that they do. That’s just one side of our plugin. Obviously we’re fully fledged form plugin that enables conditional logic and a lot of the other stuff like that.

And so one of the things that we did is we recognized that people wanted to be able to put those forms on product pages. So that’s where we then started developing our WooCommerce extension and then got that put into the WooCommerce store. We can come onto that a little bit later. So I understand that you are considering putting your foot into the WooCommerce store as well. What is your idea around Newsletter Glue and putting your products within that environment, within that store?

Lesley: Well, wait a minute. So before we talk about that stuff, I kind of a million and one form plugins out there in the market. And what’s the cool features or the things that make customers choose you?

Mark: I think where we’ve found a niche is in building quite complex WordPress forms using just a drag and drop no code environment. One of the reasons we developed WS Form originally was that we are an agency and we found working with a lot of the form plugins that were out there to be a little bit difficult and it was kind of like putting an alien on a webpage every time you put a form on a page and there was a lot of work to get that styled up and work in the way that you wanted to. So we developed WS Form with the ability to put a form on a page, not have to do so much styling on it and also not have to do so much custom code around that to get it working.

So one simple example would be adding a repeater to a form. Maybe you want to have the ability to do first name, last name, email address, and be able to repeat that. Perhaps you want to have a guest list. And some form plugin’s you have to write a lot of custom code to actually make that happen. So we’ve pulled in all that functionality and it’s just a case of clicking a checkbox in WS Form to make that work. Also integrations, you do integrations yourselves. We wanted to go full hog on integration. So doing bidirectional integration with forms.

With WS Form, if I connect to MailChimp for example, and I want to create a form for MailChimp, it will automatically pull in all of your custom fields, all the fields that you have on a particular list and it’ll build that form for you. And it’s fully mapped and ready to go. So it’s literally a one click process. I know a lot of people hate that term one click, single click, but it really does do it in one click and it’s bidirectional as well. So if you wanted to create an edit profile form where people could edit their name or edit their preferences, what list they want to be able to subscribe to, it can do that. So it can pull the data in and actually push the data back to MailChimp.

Lesley: That feature’s kind of cool to me. So let’s say I have a MailChimp account and I hate the way the current update your preferences, what do you call it, page. I think it’s called preference center or something, looks like in standard MailChimp. So what I can do is use you guys and build that entirety in WordPress and then you kind of in the up update your preferences to send that link to the WordPress site instead and then all that kind of works perfect and seamlessly. That’s super cool.

Mark: Yeah. And our forms could actually output native HTML in three different frameworks. So if your theme is using Bootstrap or foundation, we actually output native HTML for that which makes it super easy to style those. And then we have a fall back framework as well which is our own, which is just a real simple framework for styling forms. We actually tie in with WordPress styling features so you can adjust the fonts and colors and everything else. That’s one of the things our developers like is how clean our code is and also how accessible our code is as well. So we’ve taken quite a bit of time to make sure that our forms are accessible. We’ve worked with a lot of people in the accessibility realm to make our forms more accessible and we continually working on that.

It’s quite a field as you know. So the thing with WS Form is it’s not a product I can describe in 30 seconds. There’s just so much that it can do. As a form plugin, that’s what it has to do. It’s got to be able to apply to a lot of different use case scenarios. And that’s certainly been a challenge for us in building the products, just making sure it can do these things but in a no code environment. We say no code but we do have codes and filters that people can tie into if they want to and people often do. So that’s kind of where we are as a product. Obviously after this, we can tell people where they can learn more about it and find more information about it.

Lesley: Yeah. So WooCommerce.

In the beginning, extending WS Form to WooCommerce

Mark: Yeah, WooCommerce. So for us, we saw other form plugins were doing it and we felt that we could offer a better product. And one of the things I would say was it was really a separate product in itself rather than just being an extension. There was a lot of work that went into it. Of all of our add-ons that we have, it’s probably the most complex one that we have out there. There was a lot of work that went into producing that plugin. Some people will write to me and say, why is that not included with WS Form? Why does it just not come with a product?

And really it’s a separate project that we manage and sell as a result. So for us, it was kind of a natural thing to do. It was a product that we saw other form plugins had and we wanted to join that bandwagon and offer a better solution for that. One of the nice things about what we’ve done is that pretty much everything in WS Form can now be put on a product. So even signatures and file uploads and repeaters and conditional logic.

Lesley: Oh, wow.

Mark: I think the only field we opted not to include was a recapture because it just didn’t work well with WooCommerce itself, and I think WooCommerce has a massive library of hooks and functions that you can tie into to achieve what you want to do. And For us there was a little bit of hacking going on to make it work and get it working properly. And there’s certain things that developers have to do to make sure it works. The minimum thing is you need an add to cart button. Other than that, everything else works. But so it was a learning curve having to learn all the WooCommerce ins and outs and go through their documentation to work out what we needed to do. So tell us a little bit more about how you’d want to build something from Newsletter Glue and what that would look like.

Extending Newsletter Glue to Woo, growing audience and customer base

Lesley: Yeah. So with us, I first looked at WooCommerce kind of, I guess, as a way to grow my audience, grow my customer base. And obviously WooCommerce is probably one of the biggest, fastest growing niches in WordPress right now. So it was kind of an obvious place to look at.

What I was really excited about was building. I guess, making it easy to build something like a recommended products newsletter. So being able to filter lots of different things. So for example, auto-generate a whole bunch of segments based on WooCommerce products, and then kind of include slash exclude those products or those segments to create really specific, personalized newsletters. So that’s kind of what I was planning to build. And even just talking about it, I’m still really excited about that prospect.

Mark: There’s a lot you could do with that, for sure.

Lesley: Yeah. I think so.

Mark: Particularly on maybe cross selling that you would traditionally do within the card itself, you could actually push that as an email and you’ve got all that data there. Are there any third party WooCommerce extensions that are already out there that you could use to your advantage as part of that process such as cross selling add-ons and things like that.

Lesley: So I think the tricky thing with us is that any block, for example, that currently exists, it’s almost not worth it for us to just use that already, just because we would have to make that email HTML compatible. And sometimes it’s easier to build our own than to play catch up, like constantly kind of monitoring what they’re building and then making that optimized.

Putting your extension on the WooCommerce marketplace

Mark: There are a lot of extensions in that WooCommerce store and there is conflict between them. Not just between ours and others, but there are, I forget how many extensions there are in store now. But we have people coming to us saying I’m using X, Y, and Z extension, and doesn’t seem to be working with the WS Form one. And when I look at it, I can see sometimes there can be something that we can do to make that work. Other times there are some extensions that don’t really follow the rules properly for want of a better phrase that can cause other extensions to break, not just ours, but sometimes that’s something that you definitely need to think about when developing a WooCommerce extension is just try and follow their rules and methodologies as much as possible when building that.

And I would say for us, on the whole, it’s been a positive experience. I was really delighted recently when WooCommerce increased the commission back to us when something is sold. It used to be 60, 40. 40% go into them, 60% coming to us. And they changed that to a 70, 30 model. So they increased the commission back to the developer.

Lesley: Did they change it for everybody or limited?

Mark: I think so. I can’t speak definitively on that, but I’m pretty sure that was a blanket change that they made. The other thing that they changed was originally, we were only allowed to sell through the WooCommerce channel. So we could only sell that extension through that channel. And they changed that so that you could sell it in other places.

Lesley: Oh, wow. That’s huge.

Mark: We’ve decided not to do that just because, for us, that would be managing two code bases really, because when you have your plug-in on the WooCommerce store, you have to use their upgrade process. So they have a bunch of libraries that you use to handle the upgrade of that extension. And I like using that. I like keeping it within that environment because it’s tied in with all the other WooCommerce extensions that are used, but you can, if you want, sell that same extension elsewhere, but then you’ve got to build a whole upgrade platform specifically for that plugin. So for us, we just kept it simple. And I think as a business, it’s just a great additional sales channel to have.

And if you’ve got a successful product that works well within that store and it’s doing good and people are using it and giving it good reviews, then it’s just a great ongoing sales channel for you. And it opens up a whole new realm of customers really, because obviously with ours, you have to have WS Form in order to be able to use it. So we will get a WS Form sale as a result of that extension. So I think therefore a lot of plugin developers is an attractive thing.

Lesley: So I feel before we go further down this rabbit hole, we should kind of take a step back and orientate our listeners or Bob’s listeners, so they don’t get annoyed.

Mark: Yeah, they’re not ours, unfortunately.

Breaking down the WooCommerce marketplace and selling on it

Lesley: These two randos who’ve hijacked the podcast. But yeah, let’s orientate them and tell them kind of what we’re planning to talk about, which we should have mentioned probably 20 minutes ago now. What it is the WooCommerce store is because I realized, I only found out what that was when I started doing my research. So starting from scratch, let’s pretend people have followed us thus far. So we wanted to talk a little bit about, I guess, business and tech and hurdles that are involved in building a WooCommerce extension. So in Mark’s case, he’s built a WooCommerce extension with WSForm. And then as we just talked about, I’m planning to build a WooCommerce extension with Newsletter Glue, and there are a whole bunch of other WooCommerce extensions out there, not just with forms, not just with newsletters there are upsell plugins, what else?

Checkout builder plugins, booking plugins, a million and one different things. And so the store that Mark was talking about is you can go to WooCommerce.com/products. And what you’ll see there is an extension store and it’s paid plugins, which is the big, big difference between WordPress.org and Woocommerce.com/products. So I found the WooCommerce extension store really interesting because there isn’t something, there isn’t any equivalent in the WordPress.org world. And people have talked about it for a long time, but it’s never really come to pass. And so in a big picture kind of a way, it’s interesting to see what the WooCommerce store is like and how, if we had a paid plugin store for the whole WordPress ecosystem, maybe you could look something like this. And I think it’s kind of cool to think about that and think about how that might potentially work for the rest of the ecosystem.

Mark: So yeah, the WooCommerce store is paid. So people will pay for those add-ons. You get to choose how you want to price your extension. So when you sign up for that, you can choose what you want to do. We chose 49,99, which seemed to be the lower end of a lot of what these extensions are being charged for. And it’s an annual subscription. I don’t know if want to learn a more about the support side of that as well, which is quite interesting. They have their own support platform for the WooCommerce extension. Now obviously WooCommerce have a lot of their own extensions on there. They either have the subscription, the membership, et cetera, et cetera. If a support inquiry comes through for your extension, they will actually forward that to you through to whatever support platform you are using.

We use Zendesk, it’s a common support system on there and they’ll forward through all the information they get about the users. So obviously the name, email address, but it’ll also give you some background about what plugins have they got installed, all the technical information that they get sent through as a result of a support ticket coming through. And then ultimately you just handle that ticket yourself, which is nice. So they just kind of hand it off. Now, one of the things I have noticed a little bit, now and then people will ask for a refund because it doesn’t do what they thought it would do, or maybe they’re having some trouble with it. And the refunds are done by WooCommerce themselves, not by us.

So sometimes the support team will accidentally send those refunds requests through to us. I’ve had cases where two or three times it’s come through from the same person. So I have to let WooCommerce know, no, no, no, this customer’s looking for a refund, not for some support. But on the whole, the support is incredibly smooth and works great. So really it’s just an extension of the support that you are doing at the moment.

Lesley: So I’m looking at the WooCommerce store and clicking on a random extension and trying to get to the support. And it seems like it just goes to Woocommerce.com/contact-us. So that’s unexpected.

Mark: Yeah. They changed the look and feel of the WooCommerce extension pages recently. It used to be a little bit more obvious where you could read about the documentation stuff, but they’ve moved it to the right hand side of the page I believe. Obviously if your RTL be on the other side, but you get to write your own documentation about the extension that you’re building. So there are kind of two user interfaces that you use as a WooCommerce extension builder. So there’s one which is about the product, which shows you how many products you’ve sold, what your sales stats are. And also the ability to upload new versions. In a moment, we should talk about how those WooCommerce extensions are actually approved by WooCommerce as well because they have a process for that. And then there’s a separate documentation side of things, which is almost, I think they recently moved it to the block editor. It used to just be classic editor, but they moved it to block editor now. And you just really write your documentation as a normal blog and maintain that yourself.

Lesley: And so you can’t link it directly to a private documentation place, can you?

Mark: I mean, I guess you could, because you can put a link within the product description about that, but the way ours works that I know is the documentation itself is actually on the WooCommerce site itself. We link from that documentation page to our knowledge base pages. So when we’re talking about adding price fields and things like that, we have links off to our knowledge base, which you can do, but the actual core documentation resides on WooCommerce itself. And then when you’re building your WeeCommerce extension, they will have you run a passer on the code to make sure that it abides by all the programming guidelines that WordPress likes. So making sure that you’re using, user style notation on things and making sure that your tabs and spaces are in the correct places within your code so that it follows their conventions.

They show you how to set that up on your own computer. So when you’re developing it, you can run the passer and make sure that you don’t get any errors coming back. You want to make sure that those are all corrected before you push your code to WooCommerce itself. But then it’s just really a case of uploading the codes, and then they run their own checks on their end. And once that has been checked and everything is fine, they then push the new version live. It’s all done online. You get email confirmations letting you know how that process is going. And it’s super simple. So it’s really a whole, a developer for WooCommerce extension, everything is self-service, there’s really nobody that you touch other than the initial stages of getting your plugin approved.

Lesley: Right. And that’s, I guess, very similar to the process of getting your plugin approved on the WordPress.org repository as well, right?

Mark: Yeah. Very, very similar process. I’m trying to remember what I went through when I initially submitted the extension to the directory, but I think it was just a case of filling out a form, letting them know what the extension does. They do a code review themselves, and they’ll run through it. That’s probably the most hair raising part, is you’re sending your code through and hoping that they’re going to approve it. But as long as your code’s not doing anything malicious and you’ve got good security in there and you’ve done your due diligence and they’ve got rules on how to do things.

The WooCommerce plugin developers Slack channel

And obviously they want you to, as much as possible, use all the WooCommerce and WordPress functionality. So you’re not writing your own code. For example, for making an HTTP request or whatever, just using whatever functions they’ve got. Because obviously, I mean, doing that, your code’s going to be a lot more secure anyway. Once that’s done, I did have some interaction with the WooCommerce team initially, because they were asking about pricing and stuff like that, but they were all super helpful. It was all done through Slack.

Lesley: So it’s like the WooCommerce Slack.

Mark: Yeah, they’ve got an area specifically for plugin developers.

Lesley: How does one go to sign up or get an account with the WooCommerce slack?

Mark: I think they send you a link and then you just add their channel. It’s relatively straightforward. So once you’re on that Slack channel, you want to stay on that Slack channel as well, because sometimes they will get inquiries about your extension through that. And they’ll say, “Hey mark, can your extension do this?” And that’s mainly for presales questions. So not so much support once they’ve had it, but some people will say, can it do this? And you’ll be asked to respond to that. I get very, very few inquiries through that channel. So it’s fairly infrequent that we get that. The bigger extension developers get a lot of traffic through that Slack channel. But yeah, it’s not too many, maybe a few week just asking some presales questions much like they would with your own plugin extensions.

So on the whole, it’s a very well oiled machine. Very, very easy to do. I think the toughest part really is building the plugin, building the extension and getting it to do what you want. And the advice I would give would be just making sure that you follow all those guidelines as much as possible, making sure that you’re not going to be in conflict with some of the bigger extensions that are out there. For us, things like popup, plugins, extensions were, like when you can click a quick view on a product and it opens up in a popup maybe from a catalog list view, that was something that we have to do some work on to make sure it worked properly. And we still, to this day, we have people coming through saying I’d love it to be able to work with this extension. Can you work on that? And we do a license key exchange with that developer and we’ll work to get that work in. So it’s definitely an ongoing process, for sure, on things that we have to continue develop for.

Thanks to our Pod Friends PeachPay and LearnDash

Would Mark use the marketplace again?

Lesley: Yeah. When you first started thinking about getting on the WooCommerce store, because this was something that I had to consider as well. Did I even want to be on the store in the first place? I mean, I have no idea the exact number of plugins or extensions that are on here, but I imagine for every one that’s on here, there are probably 10 or a hundred that aren’t listed. Some of the stuff that you mentioned earlier about profit sharing going from 60, 40 to 70, 30, and being allowed to sell your plugin elsewhere, stuff like that. To be honest, it’s not super clearly. I remember going into it and mostly kind of hearing from other developers about their experiences and then being a bit scared off from being on it, just because of how kind of strict they were.

And, at the time, how much of the profit that they took. So I’d love to hear kind of your well, considerations when you went in and then how it’s turned out so far and whether if you could do it again, would you just go on or would you do go it alone?

Mark: I think the key thing to remember here is that if you are on that WooCommerce extension, for want of a better word, the marketplace there, you’ve got a captive audience of people looking to buy an extension, which is just worth its weight in gold for you to be able to go out and reach those customers. Particularly as a small plugin company, as I assume you are like me. It’s very, very expensive to reach those types of people. So for me, the WooCommerce extension, we make a little bit of money from it, but it’s really kind of a marketing mechanism for us. It enables us to reach a wider audience and pretty much everybody that buys our extension, I guess we’re different from some extensions that don’t require another plugin to work, but for us, our extension requires WS Form in order to be able to work.

So we get that sale as a result of that, which is something that you guys as well would benefit from. Yeah, I mean the 60, 40 was a little bit steep when we first did it, but the 70, 30 made it even more attractive, but really, we still made some good money from it. We get a lot of customers coming through and people learn about our product as a result of going onto the WooCommerce store. And the way that the WooCommerce store works is I believe you’re allowed to assign your plugin to up to five different categories. So that’s an important thing that you want to have a think about. And they recently changed their categories from what they were, but you’ll need to have a look at those categories that they offer and work out where specifically you want your extension to be. And I would definitely lean towards looking at the more popular categories rather than the more niche categories, because you’re going to get more traffic coming through those.

Lesley: I would’ve guessed the other way around actually.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, obviously you want to be in ones that are relevant to what you’re doing, but if you can find a broader category, then you’re going to see more traffic coming through it. Obviously, I don’t know the algorithm on the WooCommerce store, but I have noticed the more sales I’ve had the further up the list I start to appear. And I guess maybe that’s similar to the free plug-in directory. They very heavily lean on total installs as to where you appear in the search results. So I’m not sure how that works on the WooCommerce extension store, but as we have been on there longer and longer, I’ve noticed that we’ve worked our way up the list a little bit. We don’t get many reviews on that. I don’t think people are even aware that you can do reviews on a lot of these pages.

I think they sit right at the bottom of the WooCommerce extension pages. I think we’ve had one five star review, but I don’t think they put the reviews on until you’ve had 2, 3, 4 reviews. And maybe I should encourage my users to give us a review so that we can get that actually added to the page itself. And that may well influence those results as well. I don’t know, but we can only guess, but yeah, on the whole, it’s been a great experience for us. We’ve increased our sales on our plugin as a result of reaching that larger audience. I’ve had no trouble being in that store at all, that the team that are behind that are incredibly helpful.

Lesley: Nice.

Mark: They like to communicate through the Slack channel and they’re quite happy to do direct messages with you to help you out with stuff. So, super helpful. And on the whole, it’s been a positive experience.

Lesley: Cool, so I’m guessing if you could do it again, you’d definitely do it the same way.

Mark: Yeah. I don’t think I want to do it right now. It was a lot work.. I mean, it’s difficult to come up with an extension for that store. There’s just so much in there that people have already covered, all the kind of low hanging fruit has been done and done very well. You find that when you’re building these WooCommerce extensions, you’re tying in with a lot of their filters and hooks. So there’s a big learning curve there in learning all of their documentation and how their documentation works, but it’s all there. You can find it all. A lot of people have done this before as well, and you can look at their code and see how they did it.

Obviously the code is GPL. So you can go in the code and have a look at how other people have interacted with these hooks and filters and work out how you want to do that yourself. But I think on the face of it, I think you’ve got a great idea here. I mean, I love the concept of Newsletter Glue, and I think tying that in with WooCommerce could be fantastic, particularly on the… I love the angle of being able to send out dynamic newsletters to people, segmented newsletters that would include a set of products that relate to certain people’s interests. I think that would be fantastic. And a really powerful tool.

Examples of use cases for WS Form’s WooCommerce extension

Lesley: Yeah, thanks. I should have asked this earlier, but what does your WooCommerce extension do exactly? What are some of the popular use cases?

Mark: Popular use cases are things like personalizing products. So we have quite a popular tutorial on our site about building a customizable T-shirt. So you can choose the t-shirt color, you can put text on there. Some people have even gone as far as using image uploads to put an image over the T-shirt. So that’s quite a popular use case. We can do everything from, I think, this is one of the things that Bob picked up on actually, he said that the WS Form extension is really a number of different WooCommerce extensions bundled into one. So you’ve got your name, your price extension, where people can customize the price of a product, or maybe use that as a donation feature. We can do that with WS Form. What we’ve got to do is put just a price field on a product with a zero price on the regular price of the product.

And you’ve instantly got a donation plugin set up, so you can do very simple stuff like that. You can do customization, you can do, if somebody’s maybe doing a booking product, they can put a list of the people that are going to be on that booking directly into the product itself. Our signature can actually be used on the product itself. So if you want someone to approve something before that is added to the cart, you can do that if you’ve got their signature. If you go to WooCommerce.WSform.com, we actually have a demo page and you can see some of the use cases there. So we’ve got a bunch of different stuff. And then we have the ability to do calculators as well. So people can use our fields to actually calculate a product price.

So we have some people that have even used it for creating a store for ordering blinds for your windows. So you can choose your window dimensions, choose the type of blind that you want. And our calculated features within WS Form then work out the final price for that before it’s added to the cart. So everything from simple use case through to quite complex stuff.

Lesley: Nice. I’m just at the site itself, WooCommerce. WSform.com and playing around and it’s pretty cool.

Mark: The t-shirt one’s quite fun actually. So we hope to extend that because we have a lot of people asking about product customization and being able to put images over products and text over products and things like that.

Lesley: So my Twitter handle is Lesley underscore pizza. And so I’m very attracted to the pizza customizer here that you’ve got.

Mark: So you choose your toppings and it adds the price to the pizza up.

Lesley: So I chose my size, chose my sauce, cheeses. And then it shows it being added on the image as well, which is really cool.

Mark: Yeah and that’s done with SVG layers. So what we do is we create an SVG and the SVG contains all the different toppings of the pizza within it. And then as you click check boxes on the form, that’s adding to the price, but it’s also firing some JavaScript to then show or hide those layers within the SVG itself, and that could be applied to all kinds of different things. The T-shirt demo does the same thing. We have a layer that actually colors the T-shirt and it’s just changing the hex color of that layer to make that work.

Lesley: And is that all done no code, or not?

Mark: So those ones need a little bit of code because you need some JavaScript to be able to switch those layers on and off. The actual form itself is all no code but we have the ability with our conditional logic to say, if this is checked, then run this JavaScript. Within the JavaScript itself, we enable people to be able to use our WS Form variables so they can dynamically take what has been clicked on in the checkbox and then apply that to their JavaScript. So, as I said, we’re no code 90% of the time, 10% of the time you are adding your own code on top of that to make it do some fancy things, if you want to. But that’s certainly an area we want to grow on because we’ve had a lot of people asking, how do I make this work with a can of drink or any kind of customization that they want to do.

So the more tutorials you can offer to help people out with that, the better, the documentation side of it is obviously a large part of the work and making sure that people understand how to use your product. We still have trouble to this day with people just installing the extension and expecting it to do everything. And they don’t realize you’ve got to install WS Form or how to do certain things. So just steering people in the right direction, making it clear in the documentation about what you need to do and the steps you need to take to get it working all helps and cuts down on your support ultimately.

Lesley: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s something like when you look at the WooCommerce store, it’s not immediately obvious for a lot of these plugins that you need a separate plugin in order to make it work.

Look at the documentation

Mark: And one of the things I would recommend with the documentation is look at some of the other documentation that people have put together because there is some markup you can use within the documentation just to build simple boxes to highlight things. They even support putting videos on your pages. So we made a short video about how to use the extension and that can certainly help as well.

Lesley: Are you just talking about the main product site or are you talking about separate documentation?

Mark: Actually, yeah. If you go to the actual WooCommerce extension store and you click on our particular extension and others, they have a video introduction that you can put in. I think it’s just a video tag.

Lesley: So when you’re saying documentation, you mean the product page is that right?

Mark: Yeah, there’s the product page and then there’s also a separate document page as well. So the actual documentation for the extension, which is handled on a WooCommerce server. On the right hand side, you’ll see there’s a documentation button which is kind of hidden away. It used to be a lot more obvious, but the documentation page is a WooCommerce block page that you can manage and maintain yourself. And in that you can use pretty much any of the core block features to write your manual page, which is pretty cool. So yeah, we added a video to that to make things easier. And the nice thing about that documentation page as well is they automatically create a menu on the right hand side which is based upon the headings that you use. So as long as you’re using H2, H3, H4 et cetera, it automatically builds that documentation page up for you.

Pricing your WooCommerce extension

Lesley: Nice. So I was talking to a friend recently who also has WooCommerce on his brain and he was, I think, I can’t remember who he was talking to, but I think he was talking about, or he kind of realized that there were a lot of Shopify merchants moving over to WooCommerce and generally being surprised at how cheap things were and almost being suspicious about the price, because in Shopify, don’t know why they’re call apps. I think they’re called apps. So apps on Shopify are a hundred bucks a month, 200 bucks a month and so on and in WooCommerce it’s a hundred bucks a year, 200 bucks a year.

If you’ve been in the WordPress development world for even a second, you would’ve heard lots of people talking on both sides. You hear people on one side saying things like getting more expensive, but then you hear on the other side, plugin developers talking about how hard it is to make a living building plug-ins just because it’s criminally cheap, especially if you compare it to Shopify or any of these other platforms. So I’d love to hear kind of how… You mentioned yours is going for $49 a year as an extension. And I know WS Form, you also have to pay for it to begin with. And then you have to additionally pay the $49. So I’d love to hear kind of how you came up with that.

And then also kind of what your thoughts are with regards to Shopify people with the big wallets, hoping to spend some money WooCommerce and then being disappointed. All that cash, burning a hole in their pockets.

Mark: I think some people are going the other way as well. I know Yoast for example, have their traditionally WordPress world and they’ve gone to Shopify and probably you’re loving it. It’s funny. I actually tried to, I approached WIX about putting Ws Form on WIX and they just, they were not accepting applications for form plugins because there are just so many of them. I think we’re in two different environments. So in Shopify, people are used to paying for it. They go on Shopify, they know they’re going to pay a monthly fee. They know they’re going to pay for the extensions.

I’ve had some clients on my agency side go from WooCommerce to Shopify. They kind of liked how easy Shopify was, didn’t have to worry about hosting or anything like that. But it’s more expensive particularly on their enterprise platform is incredibly expensive. For me, again, it’s a case of the thing that I think I value the most with the WooCommerce extension, because I have WS Form as well is the introduction of new customers to it. So I even have people complaining about the cost of WS Form for 59 bucks a year. It’s $5 a month and I provide, I think, great support for that product.

Lesley: I mean, it’s not even support, right? You’re providing a great product.

Mark: Yeah. And it’s a full time job. We have to pay people to do it. And obviously with support, you get some people that need a bit more of a handhold and some people that just get it and get on with it. So you benefit from that side of it. But I would say with our price and what we did, we looked at the other extensions that were on there and I undercut them just a little bit to make it more attractive. I was just getting into it at that point. Everybody tells me I need to increase the price of my plugin, including the WooCommerce extension. And I’m kind of nervous to do that because I’ve found a sweet spot. I’m happy with where I am right now, but I’m always getting my hand slapped saying Mark, triple the price of the plugins.

But it’s really down to you and where you feel comfortable. Some of the extensions on there, even the WooCommerce ones, are two, $300 a year, like the subscription membership plugins are quite expensive, but there’s a lot of work that goes into maintaining those and I can see why they cost what they do. With mine, I don’t have the worry about having to update the extension too frequently, because I’m not tied in with payment plugins and other things like that. It’s just tied in with my plugin. So the maintenance on it, once I built it, was relatively low. It’s more supporting it for me, supporting people using it and helping them get the most of it. So we went with $49, I had a look at the other extensions that are out there that did similar things and that’s kind of where I came up with that price, may increase it in the future.

We’ve got inflation and everything else going on right now that makes life a little bit harder. But I mean it’s been, for me, it’s more of a marketing channel than anything I think, in terms of the commercial side of it, obviously producing a good product and maintaining that. But out of that $49, what do I get back? Maybe 35, $40 back from it. The fact that I get the sale with the main plugin is worth it. I guess, because I’m not a plugin that just relies solely on the sales from the extension itself. That’s probably one, a little bit cheaper than the other ones that are out there.

Lesley: Cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m at your pricing page now and so it looks like the only way to purchase the WooCommerce is via WooCommerce itself. So you kind of link to the WooCommerce product page on your WS Form.com/pricing page. But I can’t, for example, just buy one of the agency freelance or personal pricing tiers and just kind of expect to have WooCommerce in there. Is that right?

Mark: Yeah, we keep that separate. Like I said, in order to bundle an extension in with your own product, then you’ve really got to have a separate code base for it. So we use Easy Digital Downloads for our sales.

Lesley: Yeah, we do too.

Mark: And it has its own licensing class. As you know, you add to your plugin to handle all the updates. So you’d have to have a version with that and then you’d have to have a version that includes WooCommerce, updating methods on there. The WooCommerce update methodology is super simple. They will give you, almost like a serial number, like a hash, and you add that to the header of your plugin and it then handles everything else for you. So that’s super easy to maintain. So I opted just to keep it that way and keep them separate and it works fine. We don’t get any complaints about it. If you want to buy the extension, you buy it through that means. We sell all of our add-ons out of cart anyway. So you can pay for them separately through our add-on page.

And it just kind of works the same way. We have it on there, on the add-ons page. So you can click on it to get to it. It’s just a different way of paying for it really. So rather than paying through our checkout, you use the WooCommerce checkout.

Lesley: But then there’s the agency and freelance ones where I can see there’s a whole bunch of integrations as well. Do they work as add-ons or?

Mark: Yeah. So basically if you buy our freelance or our agency edition, so we have a personal, which is a single site license and then you buy the add-ons out of cart, as you need them, we have a freelance edition, which is a 5-site license and that comes with a number of different features included. And then we have the agency edition, which has all of our add-ons on there. And it’s unlimited site licenses as well. So that’s kind of, if you want everything, that’s what you go for. But if you want the WooCommerce extension, that’s sold exclusively through the WooCommerce store because it ties in with WooCommerce itself and it’s their licensing mechanism.

Lesley: Do you ever get people buying the agency license thinking, oh, I’m going to get all the integrations, all the add-ons and then realizing, Nope, I don’t get the WooCommerce add-on with that?

Mark: We used to. Not so much now because we’ve made it clear that it’s a separate product. So very rarely do we have somebody doing that. A lot of the time we’ll just get people totally confused between our light and our pro version. They’re like, I’ve just paid for the pro version. Why are my pro features not appearing? You got to install the pro version. It’s just people that don’t read the documentation.

Lesley: You get that as well?

Mark: No, we don’t get much kickback on that at all. People are happy to go on the WooCommerce store and have all their WooCommerce extensions in one place. And I like the way they do their subscription based stuff in WooCommerce. You’ve got one page with all your subscriptions on it. And ours is then included as part of that. And I think by buying stuff through the WooCommerce extension store you know you’re getting a good product that’s been vetted by WordPress. And I think people like the fact that all those products have gone through that vetting process.

Lesley: Yeah, I think that trust factor makes a big difference, huh?

Mark: Yeah. For sure. I think it’s mandatory now for you to let people know where people can find you and tell us more about how we can learn more about Newsletter Glue.

Lesley: Yeah. So if you’re interested in Newsletter Glue, you can go to NewsletterGlue.com and we are at NewsletterGlue on Twitter as well. And I am at Lesley underscore pizza, L-E-S-L-E-Y underscore pizza on Twitter. So you can find me there. I might put a GIF up soon of me customizing Twitter pizza WS Form, which is super cool. So you should look out for that.

Mark: We found some synergy, Lesley with pizza. I love that.

Lesley: And Mark, where can people find you?

Mark: WS Form.com is our main website. If you want to learn more about the WooCommerce extension, you can go to WooCommerce.Wsform.com. I’m on Twitter at Westguard. The WS Form handle is at Ws underscore form as well.

Lesley: And I think we should let Bob out of the basement now and get out of his house.

Mark: We’ll untie him and let him out. But yeah, thanks so much, Lesley. It was great to chat to you and good luck with the Newsletter Glue and hopefully the extension. I hope to see the extension because I think it would be a great idea.

Lesley: Thanks Mark. And likewise, nice sharing with you too.