Choosing When to Use WooCommerce for an eCommerce Project

Robbie: Hello and welcome. I’m Robbie Adair. And joining me today because Robert decided he had to do things like go on vacation. So joining me today is Zach Stepek. And oh, I always say your last name wrong. Don’t I? Did I say it wrong again, Zach?

Zach: You do. It’s okay.

Robbie: Oh my goodness. It’s a Texas thing.

Zach: It’s okay. It happens. And I’ve got people from England that say Stepek, which is great. It doesn’t bother me, but Stepek is the appropriate way.

Robbie: Stepek. Yes. Okay. So we will say this properly now. That’s much better. So I’m very excited that you’re able to join me today, Zach. And we are going to chat because this is all about business. Biz chat is all about business for Do the Woo. And both of us are longtime agency owners. Whether it was in the WordPress space or not, we’ve both been working in agencies. And so I thought it would be really cool, let’s discuss kind of from an agency perspective, when you onboard a new client, when is it that you do recommend WooCommerce? When is it when you don’t recommend WooCommerce? And so let’s kind of go down that path and discuss this. Now, Zach, you’ve been obviously in the WordPress world longer than me. So I’d be interested hearing your point of view. Especially because you started using WooCommerce how long ago?

Zach: Version 1.1. I think. So really, really early on when WooThemes was still making themes. So I was using some of their themes with WooCommerce. Yeah, those were fun days. Those were definitely fun days. So my first WooCommerce site was actually for a record label I was a part of. And we were selling digital downloads of our tracks. And that’s how I got into WooCommerce.

Robbie: I was going to say, so WooCommerce, even at 1.1, had digital downloads in there.

Zach: Yeah, that was a feature from the beginning.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, I know we use that feature, so yay. Didn’t know it was that mature. So that’s good to know.

Zach: Yeah. It’s been around for a long time. And it was there at the fork from Jigoshop if I remember correctly.

The right fit, for the right client

Robbie: Awesome. So I can tell you, because my agency has worked in other platforms as I’m sure everybody knows. They hear this in here that I’ve worked in the Joomla world for quite some time. My training company also works in the Drupal world. So I’m in different platforms as well. And, but the thing that actually drew us over to WordPress was WooCommerce because we didn’t always have an answer for certain clients. And so that was what led us down the path to WooCommerce, which of course comes with WordPress. So that was what really kind of ground us into this arena. And what I mean by not the right fit and that’s one of the things I wanted us to talk about.

As an agency, you have tiny little clients that come to you and you have huge clients that come to you and then everything in between. Because right off the bat, with not every client is it like, “Hey yeah, we should build you a WordPress site. We should do a WooCommerce store. It should be customized to do this and that and the other,” because number one, if they’re small and especially startups, they don’t have the budget for that probably, nor do they have the full need for that. And there’s a lot of maintenance cost that comes into these type of builds. I mean, it’s not like we just build it and hand it over and go, you’re done now. That’s all it costs you. No. There’s nothing that happens afterwards.

And so when we have those small clients, I’m going to get the small clients out of the way really quickly because now I’m kind of off topic of WooCommerce I know. But there are times when we do recommend other options for those small clients. We’ve had artists and it’s like, yeah, maybe you just need an Etsy store. Or maybe they are a small little business and they’re trying to get some e-commerce. They don’t already have a need to tie into other systems or things like that. And so we may go the Ecwid route or… And by the way, I’m not putting any of these systems down. These all have their place, obviously, because they’re doing really well. They all have their place, Ecwid, Shopify. These are all hosted solutions that do lock you in to feature sets. They are not as customizable and they’re not as able to integrate with other systems. They do integrate some, I’m not going to say they don’t. But not like a full blown custom e-commerce.

And so we found that with our really small clients, even some of the just new to the online world clients, that’s what I’ll call them. They may have been a mom and pop shop for 40 years, but they’re new to the online and things like that, that it’s not always a fit to say, let me build you this monstrosity that you’re going to now own and have to take care of and pay someone to manage and things like that.

WooCommerce sites, large and small

Zach: Well, and I think the first thing that I want to bring up there is the whole concept that a WooCommerce site has to be a monstrosity. A lot of them are because of the way people build them. But it doesn’t have to be so WooCommerce by itself with nothing else other than a payment plugin can do a whole ton.

And with a free theme, like Storefront, which is the official WooCommerce theme, you can get really, really far. I’ve built gigantic sites on top of Storefront as a theme. So it’s not necessarily that they have to be monstrosity or they have to be overly complex. They become that way over time surely.

Robbie: We hope.

Not based on complexity, but from an administrative standpoint

Zach: But so do stores on most other platforms. So for me, when I’m looking at what platform is the right fit for a customer, it’s not based on the complexity of implementation as much as it is what they’re going to need from an administrative standpoint. So if I show them WordPress and WooCommerce, and they are confused by it, and they don’t like the process of going in and adding a product or what that feels like from an administrative standpoint, or going in and looking at orders and trying to see all the details of orders, then I may steer them to another platform just simply because it might be a better fit for them.

Robbie: And by the way, one of the things that what’s used to be, and I’ll say used to be a concern in this was that if we were going to build them a WordPress site and WooCommerce, we had to have account. We had to think about SSLs. There were other features there that you don’t have with the SAS product. But now we have wordpress.com that is pretty robust.

Zach: It’s definitely getting there and is great for people who are just starting out. There are other solutions from companies like Nexus, where if somebody is just starting out, they can start out for a lower monthly fee and have a lot of the features and functionality they might need. You can get started on a platform like Cloudways with an e-commerce starter package that installs WooCommerce. And then you’re looking at a little more on the admin side as far as you own your server and don’t have as much of a managed support, though they have good support at Cloudways.

Robbie: By the way, you’re making Robert smile on a beach with his pina colada somewhere because Cloudways was mentioned and he wasn’t even here.

The onboarding for WooCommerce

Zach: Of course I am. But there are a lot of options that make it easy to onboard with WooCommerce. And it is much less of a jump than it used to be. When I first started out with WooCommerce, you didn’t even have an onboarding wizard when you installed it. You were just left in the plugin. Here you go. You have these new menu items. Figure out what they do. And now when you install it, you are guided through those first steps of setting it up, getting your taxes set up, getting your first product built, getting your payment gateways chosen. All of that didn’t exist when I started in the WooCommerce space.

Robbie: That is true. And we interviewed someone on the round table about that from WooCommerce that just talking about how they have worked really hard trying to make that setup more seamless and easier. And it was really interesting last year because you how we are. All of our friends are like, “Hey, can I ask you a question about this?” Our family. And so I was having a get together. One of my friends was like, yeah, I need a WooCommerce store. And I was like, you know what? You install it. Let me sit here and watch you install it and see if you have questions and where your questions are and what they are. Because I thought, well, this is really an interesting perspective because normally we do it for the client.

And so I thought this will be really cool to watch her do this because she’s not a web developer. That’s not what she does. She’s an author and she’s going to sell her book. And so it’s like, okay, let’s take a look at this. And you know what? It was the WooCommerce part, that setup, she really had no problems. I mean, she did kind of ask me questions as she was going along just because I was there. But had I not been there, she would have just made the right selection I feel like. And so that was interesting to see someone doing it that doesn’t do this on a daily because that’s where I normally am in that world. And she did then though have, this was on my recommendation. I was like, “Hey, why don’t you try the Woo Payments now. This is new and let’s do this.”

And, but she had already had a Stripe account set up anyway. And so then doing the Woo thing, there got to be a little confusion that happened in that, that then required making phone calls. But I will say within a day she had straightened out the situation and it went between Woo’s support and Stripe’s support, but they got it resolved. And so I thought, well, wow. I mean, that does say a lot for how much it has improved because yeah. I think years ago, an author could not have just done this on their own in their own WordPress site.

Zach: No, absolutely not. It was an onboarding nightmare at first because it was designed for developers. It was designed for those of us who are implementers and builders to use to create stores. And as store owners have increasingly been the people to install and build their initial stores, the product has had to shift to fit its market. So that onboarding wizard was born out of necessity. It was born out of the fact that more and more frequently we see store owners going in and they’re building their own store before they contact a developer or an agency in any way. And that’s why I started my first agency in this space was to serve the store owners who had started their stores by themselves and were now at the point where they needed help to push to that next level. And that’s the mission I’m still on to this day with my new agency, with Mighty Swarm. That’s what I do.

Robbie: And I will give you a little shout out here too, because we’ve hired your agency and you have helped us with some complicated projects. And so yes. So if anybody’s looking for that kind of help, ping Zach.

The key differentiator between WooCommerce and most other platforms is that with WooCommerce, you can build anything

Zach: Well, thank you. But yeah. That was the whole point, is that store owners were starting out and then they didn’t know where to go once they got to a certain point. But the key is now they can start out and they can build from nothing and build what they want. And that’s the key difference. The key differentiator between WooCommerce and most other platforms is that with WooCommerce, you can build anything. And you’re not inside somebody else’s black box. You’re not limited by what that platform says you can do. And to be clear, the black box isn’t always a bad thing. I’ve had clients where that’s the right place for them because if they’re given too much control or too much levity to do what they want, they break everything. And that’s just because they are curious and want to do things and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not saying that that’s their fault. But that curiosity leads to problems.

Robbie: Yes. It definitely can. I’m sometimes hesitant it to make a login for my client. I’m like, oh really? I don’t know. Let me think about this a minute. Let me back this whole thing up right this minute and make a note. This was before the client had access.

Zach: Right. Well, and that’s the beautiful thing about being able to give a client a staging environment and say, here is where you can play and figure out what you want to do and figure out where you want to go.

But it’s a place where they can break things without breaking their production site. So that’s kind of the whole point of having a staging environment where things can be experimental, where they can install that new plugin they want to try, but they can install it without shutting down their means of making money if something goes wrong. Because that’s the key. That’s the big thing. That’s what we want. We want them to stay online and make money. That’s what they want. That’s their primary goal. And so giving them this sandbox that they can play in and where we can test new things as we’re getting them built and developed helps to eliminate the possibility of impacting their sales flow.

Robbie: Absolutely. I was also thinking about, because you were talking about just where WooCommerce out of the box is feature rich and it is. And then of course there’s all the plugins that are around it. So we have a very deep well to dig in there to find unique things. And then plus, you can always customize things. You can do your own customizations to it. So remember I said that that Woo is what drew us over to WP. And that’s because in the other spaces, we couldn’t find an e-commerce plugin or extension or module, whichever platform you’re on, terminology. We could not find one that was feature rich, had great support. And so that was why we started looking elsewhere. And I know that there’s great controversy, and we won’t go in on this, about that WooCommerce is under Automattic’s umbrella. But to me, it was a benefit.

I was like, hey, I know this is going to work properly with WordPress. I mean, because it’s under that umbrella and it was feature rich. And so with all our research, we were still staying in a CMS world, this was the one that we felt most comfortable recommending and taking clients on a long time journey with. The support was there. And that was sometimes we’d find great extensions in Joomla, but it was small teams or infrequent updates, things like that. And so not that they weren’t good products and I never want to say that. It’s just that maybe we didn’t feel as secure in recommending it to our client for long term. And so that was what drew us over here. And WooCommerce is, I mean, wow. If you compare it even to some of the SAS e-commerce products, it has almost everything and then plus some, I feel like.

Zach: Yeah. It definitely does.

Robbie: Yeah. And so I always feel comfortable as I know you do feel comfortable recommending WooCommerce to people. And I think that that, as an agency owner, that’s important that you have a sense of comfort because you’re putting your own reputation out there by saying, yeah. Okay. Here’s what I recommend. And this is the direction I think we should go in. But I’ve always felt this was an okay one for me to recommend.

The specific use cases for WooCommerce

Zach: Well, and let’s talk a little bit about some of the specific use cases where WooCommerce just make sense where other platforms may not. So with a SaaS platform like Shopify or BigCommerce, they’re really focused on selling products, physical products generally that are fulfilled. That’s kind of their thing. And so they’re not really good at operating outside of that. So digital downloads. WooCommerce, light years ahead in support, in my opinion, for digital downloads and digital products. Up until recently, subscriptions were very broken as an experience in platforms like Shopify. Shopify didn’t have built-in support with their payment system to capture a payment token and then recharge it later. So there were solutions, but they required going offsite to check out. And so I liken that to you’re driving a car and when you turn your turn signal on to turn into a parking lot at your destination, your entire dashboard disappears.

Robbie: I agree with you on that. From a user perspective, I agree with you on that.

Zach: Yeah. It was a broken experience. You turn the turn signal on, start turning into your destination parking lot and the entire car changes in front of you. Not the greatest experience, but it worked for the customers that needed it at the time on those platforms. But we’ve had WooCommerce subscriptions this whole time. And so we’ve been working on deep subscription-based web websites for a long time. And there’s a lot of expertise in the WooCommerce space on how to do that and do it well.

Robbie: Yes. And what I also appreciate about it too, is that area exists, but it’s very easy in the WooCommerce world to have both worlds existing at the same time, digital downloads, hard products and it’s easy to set all of that up.

Zach: Yeah. Having a mixed use store is a very easy thing, something where you’re fulfilling two or three dozen physical products. And then you’re doing a few dozen digital products or, I mean, in the case you’re talking about, I think you’re talking about courses.

Robbie: Of course. Or membership access. And then maybe I would like to also sell a n ebook that’s a digital download. And maybe I would also like to sell a physical book that I’m going to ship to someone. Yes. And I can mix that all together in WooCommerce if I want to.

Zach: Yep. And you can even have the ebook be a variation on the book, on the physical book, which is great because then you have a single page where somebody can go and they can choose the physical product that gets shipped to them. They can choose the ebook that gets digitally delivered. Or if you’re using bundles, you can give them an option to buy both.

Robbie: Yes, absolutely. Upsell possibilities are great. Yes.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Iconic & Mode Effect

A platform that grows because of its flexibility

Zach: And that level of flexibility is why it’s such a great platform that just keeps growing is because it gives people the ability to build what they want to build. There are companies that are running meal subscriptions on top of WooCommerce. Why? Because they can build that how they want to. And there are a lot of those companies have experiences on their front end that are not driven entirely by their WordPress theme. Because that’s a very unique experience. So when you get to the product page, you may be going into a single page application that’s written entirely in JavaScript, whether that be React or Vue, making your decisions there. And because WordPress and WooCommerce have a vast amount of capability with both the REST API and with the GraphQL plugin, you can dive into building a headless experience as part of your site and have it talk to all the systems that are already there that are running for WooCommerce and WordPress in the background.

So that level of flexibility has led to companies making really custom experiences on top of WooCommerce. Whereas with a platform like Shopify, you can do that. You can build a headless Shopify store. There’s something called the Storefront API that allows you to build a headless Shopify store. But you’re still operating within their black box. So hopefully you can make that work with the way their products work and you can make that product mix work in a way that you get the order in the manner that you want. But you’re limited by how those things are supposed to work together. So that’s really the beauty of WooCommerce is this lack of limitation. It’s also the curse of WooCommerce is this lack of limitation. So it is a double edged sword because if you can do anything, you will do anything.

Robbie: That is true.

Zach: And some of the things that come across my doorstep are things I never thought anybody would or should do. But they did them and now we have to figure out how to make them scale. So that’s really where I come in is how do we make this custom code or this custom implementation work when the company is on Shark Tank or when the company has a Black Friday sale that is doing really well? How do I prepare store owners for those types of scenarios? And that is where these SaaS products actually do really well is in scale. Why? Because they have the ability to underwrite the scale needs of a single site with the payments they’re receiving from hundreds of others. So that’s how those SaaS companies get away with letting you scale to whatever level you can hit because they have other companies that don’t need the scale that you might need that are paying the same amount you are.

Robbie: Yes. They already have an underutilized, huge infrastructure there. And so they can take hits like that with that. Whereas, yes, exactly. If your company has its own site and like you said, you go on Shark Tank and all of a sudden you get 10,000 times the amount of traffic as you normally would get, that hosting plan hasn’t been tested for that. You don’t know if it’s going to hold it or not. And yes. And which is interesting too, because I know we are having more and more hosts that I feel like are prepping for that. They have dedicated hosting accounts that are for e-commerce and for scalability. And I think that they are expensive though, typically. And so a company has to weigh the, is it worth the money for that comfort level? Well, they need that comfort level.

In other words, is this company ever going to be on Shark Tank? Or are they ever going to have some sort of sale that does generate that type of traffic? Which, again, is where agencies I feel like really play a major part for the clients because the agencies should be able to listen to their needs and kind of formulate the plan of, okay, well, if you’re telling me this and you’ve got these plans on the horizon, then we need to plan for X. Of course, as we know, that’s not usually when you get those clients. You get the clients when everything went down because it didn’t work.

Zach: Yeah. That’s generally when I get the call is, oh, well we sent 400,000 emails out to people yesterday and our site is down. Okay. Or the thing that really pushed me into diving deep into WooCommerce performance was my friend Noah calling me on Thanksgiving Day after an interview with him. He was interviewed by Jeff Joniak, the voice of the Chicago Bears in the Chicago Bear’s locker room set during an interview that was aired during the Bears-Packers Thanksgiving Day game. He had done nothing to prepare for that traffic. So he was on a VPS that had his email on it, too. And the mail spool for sending outgoing emails for new orders crashed the entire website.

Robbie: Oh, no.

Zach: But these are things that, as a store owner, you’re not going to think are things you need to worry about until you have to. And that’s why we’re here talking about this. Because we want to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Customer communication is key for potential problems or challenges

Robbie: Yeah. And when agencies are talking to new clients, they should present that these are possible problems that could come up. So that the client needs to keep them informed of things that might be coming up and then create that relationship with the client so they do call you hopefully not on Thanksgiving. But so that they do call and say, “Hey, we’ve got something coming up. Can we handle if it happens and it does get us a lot of traffic?” Yes, absolutely.

Zach: Yeah. So I mentioned subscriptions. Memberships, another big area where WooCommerce makes a lot of sense. Learning management systems, big area where WooCommerce makes sense. Booking and booking-based websites, whether that’s time-based booking or it’s an accommodation-based booking, WooCommerce can do all of that. So if you own a bed and breakfast and you want a website that allows people to book time, you can use WooCommerce for that, with a couple of extensions. So really just those areas where you need that type of flexibility, there are custom built solutions already there that you can leverage to power that for your store. And that’s where the real benefit of a platform like WooCommerce comes in.

Robbie: Totally agree on that. And one more thing that I would like to add to what I, and this kind of ties in Zach, the project you were helping me with, and that is with Gutenberg], which we all know, as Matt said, Gutenberg is like I want more cowbell. So Gutenberg is going to be a very important going forward, whether you like it or not. And we’re not here to discuss that. We’re just saying it is very important. And with the blocks and WooCommerce getting more and more blocks out there, even third parties creating more and more blocks out there for WooCommerce, it is I feel like opening WooCommerce up to even the more headless situation that you were talking about in the fact that you can use React on those Gutenberg blocks so they can be very interactive.

You can also then pull this data all out of WordPress using those beautiful APIs and connect over to React mobile apps, things like that. And that just broadens the space even more. And then that even makes more sense of using WordPress with WooCommerce is you’re just opening yourself up to a very flexible system to integrate to other things. And you can also pull data. So if it’s a large client and they have an inventory that’s internal that has four million tiny parts or something, no one wants to enter that in. But you can create connections and you can auto enter that information in, and then give yourself a public facing e-commerce experience. And so I just think that, and that’s something that, could you work with a Shopify to do that? Probably, maybe. But you’re now at that point, you’re also having to find someone who’s very customized in that space. Whereas this space is very large. The WordPress, WooCommerce, the builder community is very large.

And so I think that is also another reason why, as an agency, I feel comfortable if I lead a client down the WordPress WooCommerce path, I feel comfortable that even if they decide they don’t like me tomorrow, I know they can find support out there. Whereas if you built some and we’ve done some things in the past for clients. We’re very, very custom. I mean, they were super custom to the point that, I couldn’t find somebody to take over those projects. You know what I mean? And sometimes that’s just what you have to do. That’s what the client asks for. And that’s what you have to build.

But that’s never a good, in my opinion, it’s never a good position as an agency. Some agencies may say, no, it’s great. They can’t go. They’re trapped. But that, to me, I don’t like that idea because it could be the other way. What if I just don’t want to do my agency anymore? I wouldn’t want to leave people stranded. So I like having something that has such a big community behind it. And WordPress and WooCommerce, it’s just, it’s the biggest of the communities, in my opinion.

WooCommerce and Shopify costs

I mean, Shopify is big, but you see the percentages. The percentage difference is massive.

Zach: Yeah. I mean, Shopify has a lot of big brands as well like we do, and in the WooCommerce space. But that’s the majority of who’s using Shopify. It’s not generally the smaller brands that are just starting out that are on their $300 a month plan. It’s they might be on the $29 a month plan. But one other benefit that if you’re an agency owner and you’re talking about WooCommerce with a client, this might be something worthwhile to know. Shopify’s plans are $29, $79 and $299 a month, depending on which one you pick. And that’s not talking about Shopify Plus, which starts at $2,000 a month. So that $29 a month plan, the way that they make their money is that they sell Shopify Payments, Shopify Pay or Shop Pay now is what they call it. They keep shortening the name. Every time they do a revision. It was Shopify Payments. Then it was Shopify Pay. And now it’s just Shop Pay.

But that is their partnership, similar to what WooCommerce has done with Stripe, with WooCommerce Payments. But Shopify does things a little differently WooCommerce does. WooCommerce is an open source platform. And as such, WooCommerce does not in any way dictate what payment method or payment processor you can use. Shopify, on the other hand, does. And if you choose to use something other than Shopify Payments on their basic plan, which is $29 a month, you pay an additional two points, two percents over what your payment processing fee is. So instead of 2.9% plus 30 cents, you’re looking at 4.9% plus 30 cents to be able to use PayPal on your Shopify store.

And that changes based on what tier you’re on. So on the $79 plan, it’s an extra percentage point. And on the $299 plan, it’s an extra half a point. But that’s still a lot of money. If you’re are giving away two percent of every sale, or even one percent of every sale, if you’re doing a million dollars a month in sales on Shopify, and you are using PayPal as half of that, that’s $500,000 that is being processed through PayPal. And you’re losing one percent of that if you’re on the $79 plan. If you’re on the $29 plan, you’re losing two percent of that.

Robbie: Yeah. That could really add up quickly.

Zach: It does. It adds up very quickly. So that’s a key differentiator between Shopify in particular and WooCommerce is that, sure, using WooCommerce Payments is great. It’s awesome. It’s a great experience. It’s fully integrated into the WooCommerce admin. You don’t have to go anywhere else to see your transactions. The refund experience is better than with pretty much anything else, just simply because of how integrated it is. But if you choose not to use it, you’re not going to get penalized for not using it. And that is a huge difference.

Robbie: I totally agree with that. Yes. Which that all comes back to thank you open source, I mean.

Clients don’t care and don’t want to hear about community drama

And again, we all know there’s lots of controversy around open source as well.

Zach: Of course there is.

Robbie: Yeah. There’s always going to be controversy in everything. That’s what I try to always tell people. I’m like, geez. If there’s not controversy, that means it’s stagnant and nothing’s happening anyway.

Zach: Well, and the thing that I encourage other WooCommerce builders and people in the WordPress community to remember is that most of the WP drama is just in our community. It’s not outside of our community. And nobody outside of it cares about it. Our customers don’t even care. They just don’t. And it’s our job to provide the solution that’s the best fit, regardless of what drama our platform has.

Robbie: Absolutely. As well as, by the way, we don’t want all our clients knowing the drama.

Zach: No.

Robbie: Please let’s keep them out of that.

Zach: Look at the Magento community since Adobe acquired it. Adobe acquired Magento and turned it into Adobe Commerce Cloud. And there’s still an open source version of Magento, but how much do you hear about it now? Not much. Not as much as you used to. And so there’s drama in every platform. But there are very, very successful Magento stores out there. So despite that drama, they’re able to do really good business and make a ton of money. They’re under contract with Adobe to use a lot of their tools to do that, but they’re making money. So it’s really just what the best fit is. You’ve got SAP with Hybris. You’ve got all of these other platforms that are out there that we don’t even talk about just because they’re Oracle and SAP and all of those are a bit out there as far as how big you have to be for those to make sense.

And, but they have their place, too. And at certain levels for certain customers, I might actually recommend one of those platforms because it might be the better fit. Salesforce might be the better fit. It just depends on who the company is and what their existing technology stack is. If I had a company come to me tomorrow and everything they did was in Salesforce, I would tell them to look at Salesforce Commerce Cloud first and WooCommerce second, because their entire world is already being run by Salesforce Tower. And if their entire world is already there and they already are in that ecosystem, then it makes sense to stay in that ecosystem.

Recommend the right solution for you client, all the time

Robbie: Absolutely. And I think that’s really one of the biggest takeaways as a agency owner that I would hope the agency owners would take away from this I should say, let me reverse that, is that it is all about recommending the right thing for your client. It may not be the thing that you do or specialize in. And so it may mean that you’re actually sending a client elsewhere. And that’s okay because there’s so much work out there that you couldn’t do it all. Even if it came to you, you couldn’t do it all. So it just makes sense that sometimes you send a client somewhere else because it is not your specialty. Because just like you said, if that was the case and everything was in there in Salesforce, then I would say, let’s see if we can’t find someone that can help you stay in that ecosystem there, that whole world that you’re already in, because my agency might not best fit for that.

Or it could be that your agency does say, you know what? Hey, you’re brand new to your business and you have no web presence. You think you want to sell online? Maybe we start you with an Ecwid store and see how this goes and give it six months and see if you’re selling. And then we decide if we need a bigger presence online, things like that. In which case you may want to do that internal in your agency. And because that’s a client that you could grow into something else.

Or you may say, I only do WooCommerce. But that doesn’t mean you should take every client that comes to you. Like I said, you should evaluate what they need, decide if it is a great fit for them. And if so, move forward with it. If it’s not, don’t just do a disservice to them. Send them where they should go if you don’t do that.

And I do agree that some agencies, that’s their total focus and that’s great. I think some agencies, that’s their one to focus. Then you just stick with your one focus and that’s great. My agency has been, we’ve always kind of been diversified anyway. But we do have particular areas that we are more I would call us expert level in than others. And if there are things that we don’t do, I have no problem sending someone to someone I might know. If I have a good recommendation, I’ll recommend them out to someone. If I don’t, I’ll say this is what you need to try and find. I don’t know anyone who does it. And so I think as builders out there, it’s a good, decent way to run an agency. It’s all about delivering the proper solution to your clients, whether that proper solution gives you more business or not.

Zach: Yep. Yeah. I mean, there’s another agency in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, that if I had somebody that was using something like Hybris or wanted to use Hybris, I would send them over to that agency because that’s one of their specialties. And that is the right move in those cases. And even that company is a part of Capgemini now, but they’re still doing SsP Hybris work and they’re still doing high end Magento work. And if I had somebody that was looking for that, then in a heartbeat, I’d send it over there because they’re really good at what they do. There’s a reason they’re one of the larger agency vendors at IRCE every year because they’re good.

So it’s all about developing, as an agency owner, those relationships so that when you have something like that come up, you can say, “Oh, well I may not be the right fit for this, but I know who is.” And in that way, you’re still serving your client. And even if you’re not the one that’s doing the work, then you still have a client that’s really happy with where you sent them, where you knew you could trust to send them. And that’s a huge thing.

Because that goodwill comes back because when they’re talking to their store owner friend who really wants WooCommerce, then they’re going to turn around and they’re going to send that project to you because you sent them to the place that they were best fit for.

Robbie: 100%. I truly believe that. Karma. And karma is not only in our personal lives, it’s in our business lives. That’s why I say you need to be kind to people. You need to give good solutions to people, the best that you, to your knowledge. And just because it’s the best of your knowledge doesn’t mean it will be the best solution probably, but it’s the best solution you know. And that’s the best you can do I feel like is you just have to make a real, honest answer to your clients, to their needs. And if you don’t have an answer, that’s also an honest answer. I’ve had people who needed certain things and I’m like, this is what you need, but I have no idea how to do it myself, as well as I have no idea who to send you to.

Zach: You hear this fake it until you make it thing a lot. And guess what? No, there are times where that makes sense. There are times where it’s okay to admit to the client that you are going to have to learn pieces of it to get it done. And they know that that’s a risk factor and you tell them that upfront. But fake it until you make it is not a real business strategy.

Robbie: No, it is not.

Zach: Because that’s just going to be faking it until you tick your client off. Right?

Robbie: Yes. Now I do say what you said though. You can be honest with clients. If you really want to try something and you don’t have the experience, you should be honest with that client about that and say, “Look, this is something we haven’t done. We have these skill sets that should apply to that, but we haven’t done this. And we’re willing to take it on, but you have to know that it could take us longer or it could, whatever. I might have to hire an outside contractor and pay a little more on that.” And so and if it’s a long term client, a lot of times they’re like, that’s fine. We’re willing to go along this ride with you. And so and then you may increase your skillset internally. So it’s you can do those things, but like you said, you have to be honest with a client.

Don’t tell the client you can do it when you’re going to have to turn around and open up YouTube and figure it out. That’s never a good way to go. You’re going to feel so uncomfortable anyway, it’s not going to be a good project. So I think that’s probably our best takeaway I think that we can give people out of this is just be a kind person. Try to give your best solutions out there to your clients. And I think your agency will go great that way because it is all about how you treat people and how you act is going to be the way your success goes.

Zach: Yeah. I’m actually, I’m glad we went down this road and talked about what we did. I mean, I had suggested that we do an entire episode about how awesome Bob is, but he didn’t like that idea. I think the vomiting emoji in response to that tells me exactly how he felt about it.

Robbie: That’s why we have to lock him in a closet when we want to talk about him. It’s okay.

Zach: Right. Exactly. But I will say that this turned out to be a really good episode and I’m glad that I was able to fill in for Robert and that we were able to do this.

Robbie: It was.

Zach: Yeah, it was fun. I think we’ve had a great conversation and I would fill in for Robert anytime. So Robert, anytime you want to go on vacation, I’ve got your back.

Robbie: Don’t tell him that. He’ll be going every week now. Thanks Zach. But yes, I would love to have you come back any time you want to. So all right. Well, we are going to wrap this up today, guys. Thank you for joining us.