Matt Mullenweg Discusses Challenges and Growth in Modern Ecommerce

Katie Keith:
Welcome to the relaunch episode of Do the Woo, the podcast where we’ll be talking all things WooCommerce. I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2.

James Kemp:
And I’m James Kemp, core product manager at WooCommerce. And as you can see, we were going to do a fancy reveal, but Matt is in the room already, so that our special guest today is Matt Mullenweg, and we’re going to be talking to him about his vision for the future of WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. So thank you, Matt, so much for coming on. I’m sure that everybody watching already knows who you are. So could you introduce yourself in the context of your work with WooCommerce, because people know you’re the CEO of the company that WooCommerce is now part of, but they don’t necessarily know the details of your involvement and the history of it.

Matt Mullenweg:
Sure. So, gosh, yes, as you said, I’m the CEO of Automattic, and WooCommerce is one of the products of Automatic. So I work really closely with Beau Lebens who leads. He’s the artistic director of the WooCommerce Maison. We have some funny titles inside of Automatic. The gosh, how it started was, you know, I always have thought about WordPress as an operating system. And so I want to study, like, previously successful operating systems. And so I read a lot of computer history books and of course, study the history of Microsoft. And I felt like WordPress was our Windows. You know, we had the platform, but we hadn’t yet found the killer app on top of it. The thing that both, you know, there’s a ton of demand for and also elevates the platform itself. So that was Microsoft Office for Windows. Right. Like, when Office came along, that sort of like, blew up Windows. And as I. So I just started like, really digging into the, you know, tens of thousands of plugins and themes that were out there and looking for trends and seeing what people were using and, like, listening to the community at work camps and things like that. And commerce as a category started to stand out. And within that category because there were a number of commerce solutions, WooCommerce really started to be like something, yeah, I’d known about. And Automatic I actually looked at before, but started to take pretty seriously. And I believe 2015, you know, we. We reached an agreement with the Woo founders to have them, you know, acquire them and have their team join. And there were 43 people at the time. The team was only a few Developers, though it was only like three developers and honestly some of the code wasn’t as performant or scalable or other things, but I was like, okay, well Automattic has some of the best engineers in the world, so we can definitely fix all the engineering stuff. Woo has nailed the community and the branding and the user experience and all this other stuff, which is actually kind of harder. And so let’s bring the best of what we’ve learned from building, like WordPress, WordPress.com, everything we’ve done at Automattic and start to apply it, apply that playbook to Woo. And that was 2015, so about a little over 10 years ago. And it’s been exciting. Right. I think, you know, we don’t talk about the Woo stat as much, but I think something like 8% of all websites in the world now run WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
Wow.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I remember the 10 year anniversary, I guess it was last year now in 2025, and a surprising number of the people who came over with that acquisition was still thriving and working on WooCommerce and in other areas of Automattic as well, which was nice to see.

Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah. The team’s hundreds of people now, obviously, and the community has grown so, so, so much. It’s been very, very exciting to be a part of. And also it was humbling. Much in the same way I was humbled by Tumblr in Woo. I was like, oh, we’ve been doing CMS for a while. How hard could commerce be? But commerce has a multifactorial complexity, especially as you go international with payments and shipping and inventory and returns. And there’s so much because it really bridges for some stores, the physical and the digital world.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. And there’s so many different combinations of apps and plugins and things that people are using different hosting software that there’s. I couldn’t imagine how many different variations of WooCommerce exist in the world.

Matt Mullenweg:
No two are alike.

James Kemp:
Exactly. Yeah. Well, yeah, thanks to everyone who has submitted questions beforehand on social media for Matt. We’re going to walk through a lot of them and see what, you know, Matt’s vision for the future of WooCommerce is. And also feel free to ask any additional questions as we’re talking that you would like us to put forward to Matt.

Katie Keith:
Yep. And before we get into the Q and A, do the Woo is essentially a new podcast. It’s part of the Open Channels network, which is now much wider than just Woo. So that’s why we’ve relaunched do the Woo as a dedicated WooCommerce podcast within open channels. So that means it has all of its own channels like the YouTube and Apple and Spotify and all of that. So wherever you watch these things, please subscribe there and wherever you’re watching now as well.

James Kemp:
Yeah, we received a ton of questions which we’re not going to be able to get to all of them today. But what we would like to do is put to map the most pressing questions that we felt, you know, his, his vision and input would be great to hear. And then Katie and I, and potentially someone else from WooCommerce will do a follow up episode in a few weeks to try and answer the remaining questions.

Katie Keith:
Yep. And we thought, let’s start with WooCommerce’s competitive advantage and the wider landscape that it sits in, because a lot of people are talking about that and the big competitors that are in the e commerce world both within and outside of WordPress. Now after that we’re going to talk about the use experience of WooCommerce, the community, its features and priorities and finally we’re going to ask Matt about his long term vision for it. So we’re going to try and slot the live questions into that structure. So first of all, we’ve got a question from Robin Peterson from Food Plugins, which is, what is WooCommerce’s biggest existential threat, internal or external? And what are you doing about it right now?

Matt Mullenweg:
Hmm, this is a good question. So with a product like at the scale of WooCommerce, they never actually killed by competitors. So I would say the biggest threat is internal. When products like that fail, it’s always because of execution. People think it’s competitors, but it’s not. So I would say the biggest risk is our ability to execute against what we’re hearing from the community and what we know that the software needs and the roadmap. Now the competitive landscape is interesting. Certainly it’s with a company like Shopify. And a product like Shopify forces us to really bring our best stuff because you know what, Shopify is really good. They’re quite impressive and they’re, you know, six, seven thousand people with a bajillion dollars. Now some people might look at that and say, oh wow, you know, WooCommerce has no chance. But actually this sort of David versus Goliath thing is exactly where WordPress was in like 2008, 2009. You know, if, if money was all you needed to create great software. Right. Like we’d all be using Windows on our phone. But you know, really like software built for love, not just money. And the community approach of something like WooCommerce can be very, very compelling. And then of course, in 2026, the first question you have to ask yourself when you’re choosing anything is, am I choosing software which increases my freedom or decreases my freedom? Which is fundamentally the question, am I choosing open source or not? So really, before you look at any features or anything else, I think you need to choose how you’d like your freedom scale to balance and what direction you want to go there. And open source, what differentiates WooCommerce from others in the market? Other great E commerce things out there, E commerce features on WIX or Squarespace or Shopify or whatever there is, is it increases your freedom. And especially in the age of AI, I think feature differentiations are going to start to fade a little bit, right? So Shopify has a feature that WooCommerce doesn’t have. Maybe before, you know, you’d have to wait for the Woo team to build it or someone to make a plugin or something like that. But now obviously that cost is going down. If you’re pretty good with cloud code, you could probably whip something up yourself. And by the way, there’s thousands of other developers out there using it. So like, I think we’re going to start to see sort of the feature differentiations between things start to fade a little bit. And so really what you’re choosing is a community, a platform and like I said that freedom stance.

James Kemp:
Awesome. Yeah, that’s a good answer. I think the AI angle is going to change a lot of things and it’s moving very quickly and I think those changes are just going to keep compiling over the coming years. So that’ll be cool to see. The next question we have is from Nick McLaughlin. Hopefully I said his surname right. He says, what are WooCommerce’s competitive advantages and how do they set Woo up for success in the next five years? And I think this touches on what you were just saying about open source.

Matt Mullenweg:
Just then, so I’m going to repeat it. Biggest competitive advantage is freedom. If you care about freedom, if you want more liberty, autonomy, if you want sovereign software, Woo is the best ecommerce platform in the world to provide that. And the second I would say is Woo’s open and infinitely extensible nature. So we’re in an interesting period right now where because you can kind of one shot generate software, you get kind of this. It’s an incredible rush. Like if you’ve done this with AI, and you tell it to make something or even like on telex, you tell it to make like a doom block or something like what just happened? I just created do from some words I typed in a box. And that is very, very exciting. However, I think while there’ll be like applications of that, I do feel like where we’ll see the plurality of usage and commerce and interaction is going to be with malleable software. And I apologize, this isn’t a term I came up with. I saw some designers say it, I’m forgetting their name. But this idea like malleable versus generated software. So where you take something that is already there, it’s been built by humans and has the craft and security and all the things that come from the decades of investments, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands maybe at this point of person hours have been built into the engineering, the craft and the security and the platform of Woo. And then you create malleable software on top of that so you can customize it. This is of course what makes WordPress great and WooCommerce as well is that with the hooks and filters and actions and everything, you can modify pretty much everything for better and worse. Of course we know how this creates complexity and everything like that. But ultimately I feel like that freedom, that creativity which is enabled just allows for faster evolution. For Shopify to get better, Tobi has to have a good idea. I’m saying Tobi as a stand in for everyone at Shopify. Right? I can’t ship a new feature to Shopify. They have a platform as well. But it’s more limited right now for WooCommerce to get better. That could be the biggest idiot in the world. In fact I am. So the beauty is that not just the WooCommerce developers, but everyone in the community can make it better or just make it better for them. This needs to be better for everyone. And that sort of personalization I think is again the question was the advantages. So you know, again there’s reasons to own, to rent an apartment versus own a house. Sometimes it’s convenient and it’s nice to use something kind of off the rack and if you fit into it, you know, more power to you. Actually one of my great blessings in life is I am very much a men’s medium. So like I, I can walk into a store and pick up a suit. I had to the other day because I, I was going to a funeral so I didn’t have a black suit. So they would go in and get something off the rack and it, it Fit quite well. I have other friends who have different proportions. You know, if they don’t get something tailored, it looks ridiculous on them. So if you can get the off the rack, that’s pretty cool. And if you’re happy with that, great. So off the rack software can be fun, but at the moment that you need any personalization or you want it to be more better fit to you and tailored, that’s when I think open source really starts to shine and a platform like WooCommerce gets there. Now what do we need to get better at? And maybe this is an existential threat is education. I think one of the biggest opportunities for WordPress and WooCommerce is education. And that’s why I’m so excited about, like the WordPress education credits program. You know, what we’re. I’m calling 26 the year of the meetup, actually going to be doing a ton to enable meetups, to make meetups better, to get meetup organizers better, you know, material and support and everything like that. And of course, media ladder into Word camps, which as we know, are part of the magic of the whole WordPress community. But, but really what that fundamentally is, is like there’s this. I’m sorry, this is a long answer, but we’re probably hitting a few other questions as well that I read. When you think about it fundamentally, like how ideas spread or how innovation spreads, it’s usually like a see, do, teach, right? That’s kind of the three things that are exciting. You see something that’s exciting to you, it’s a store or someone making something or someone doing something, you’re like, oh, I could do that. This is how I got started blogging, right? There are all these blogs out there. I was like, oh, this is just a normal dude like me. Like, I could blog. I thought to have a website or to publish, you had to be like a journalist or like, you know, have certifications or an editor. And it turns out, no, I’m dating myself. But in like early 2000s, like, this was an innovative idea. Anyone could start a blog. And so having people see what they can do with WooCommerce is really, really important. That’s why things like the showcase and demos are great. Then you do it yourself, right? That’s the next level, which is very exciting. So you kind of learn from that, what you saw, and you do it yourself. And then the final, where you reach, like ultimate status is when you teach someone else to do it, right? When you pass it on. And when you think about it, like WordPress and WooCommerce even hasn’t grown because like our competitors, we spent billions of dollars on, you know, it’s grown because of that C2 teach, which is also kind of like word of mouth, you know, I’m sure many people listening here can imagine what their introduction to WordPress or WooCommerce was. And it might have been you just came across the website and figured it all out yourself. But for a lot of people, you probably had a friend or maybe an influencer online who said, hey, look at this, check this out. That was your entree into the community.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, well, you’ve talked about the open source side of things. So that leads us into a question that somebody else had, which is about the relationship between like WooCommerce and people choosing other WordPress plugins that also are obviously open source. So Rodolfo from Business Bloomer and Checkout Summit, I don’t know why I’ve written E Commerce there says, what can we learn from SureCart, FluentCart, EDD and the other E Commerce commerce plugins given? I suppose that they equally have that freedom of open source.

Matt Mullenweg:
Oh well, the beauty of that is, you know, what we can learn is they can also exchange code. They can use WooCommerce code and WooCommerce could use their code. So I think that, you know, being able to be inspired and share and, you know, between products is like part of what accelerates the cycle of innovation. So if there’s something specific, I don’t have anything specific to say about any of those particular products except that I’m really glad they exist.

James Kemp:
I wanted to touch on your point earlier about just the extensibility of WooCommerce and that being one of the main reasons that people would want to choose it is the kind of flexibility and the freedom you have to not only build on top of it, but contribute code to it. That’s something that we’re really focusing on at WooCommerce is making the platform, the underlying code of WooCommerce to be very. It should have all of the base features that you would expect and work in a consistent way that you can extend on top of. So if someone chooses one person’s bulk editor plugin, they could easily switch to another one and it would work in a similar way with the underlying logic being the same. So that kind of ability to choose to pick and choose which extensions you use on top of WooCommerce is something that we want to make very reliable for the people installing WordPress and using WordPress and WooCommerce. So, yeah, I just wanted to touch on that. But moving on to user experience, we have a question here from Ian, and I know he said online how to say his surname. And it’s not how I would say it.

Katie Keith:
It’s Meisner, not Meisner.

James Kemp:
Meisner lands on WooCommerce.com what is the ideal path for them to get started and what are the biggest obstacles?

Matt Mullenweg:
Oh, that’s a good question. Well, I guess kind of the first fork in the road there would be, you know, do it myself versus do it for me. So, you know, hopefully@woocommerce.com, they. They get excited about the possibilities of the platform and see examples of stores like them that are very successful or increase their business or increase their conversions by, you know, utilizing some of the things on there. And so either they go the direction of, like, going to one of the partner web hosts, which are not just automatic ones, by the way. We point to others and get signed up with WooCommerce configured and everything like that, and you can start to go through the Configuring WooCommerce process. I’ll be the first to admit that that’s a bit heavier than the WordPress process, and so someone will have to have some motivation. Now, I’ll also say that AI is raising people’s ability to make it through these things, right? Because they just put a ChatGPT window next to it and say, I’m stuck. What do I do? Or, gosh, even now we’re having the browsers that have these AI agents built in, which I talked about at WordCamp US and State of the Word. You can actually have the AI just kind of watch it, do stuff for you. You can say, build me this and it’ll start to, like, navigate WooCommerce and do and do it and you can see it do it, which is also kind of like, again, making that do it yourself path way more accessible. So pre AI, I would have said probably 95% of the time they go to a developer or consultants and, you know, we link to some great things there. We have agency partners. There’s great platforms like Codable and of course, the big ones like Upwork and everything. Like, it’s one of the great things about the WordPress and WooCommerce community is there’s so many people who are fluent in it. And so you can really find someone who’s a great match for you, whether that’s in your language or in your country or whatever it is that’s important to you or they have a portfolio that matches what you want to build. There’s a great ecosystem, that two sided marketplace. So that would be one possible path. That percentage is probably going to come down in terms of total numbers, but I think the total demand for third party developers is going to go up, right? So maybe let’s say AI makes it so only, you know, let’s just say half, so half of people can do it themselves versus hiring a developer. So you think, okay, if there were obviously a finite number of WU stores being created, that would mean less work for third party developers. But actually what’s going to happen is there’ll be more demand for stores being created in general. And so there might be some dips and valleys in there, but ultimately like if I go out 10 years, there’s going to be way more like Woo jobs than there are today.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I totally agree that it’s a big benefit of Woo how many people are fluent in it. For example, we use easy digital Downloads on the Barn 2 site and it can be very difficult when we need to find an expert or hire somebody that’s already experienced in that. With Woo, it’s really, really easy. There are so many people that have all different skill levels, all different price ranges, so you can find an expert that easily. Which brings us onto the community section where we have another question from Ian, who asks, what does healthy collaboration look like between the platform and the community?

Matt Mullenweg:
Oh, I think it looks like what Woo has done for the past 10 years and before even the acquisition. You know, I always say, I usually say this for WordPress, but I think it applies to Woo equally well. Its success has been predicated on how closely has that collaboration with the community, what that looks like. And gosh, there’s so many examples of things like I talk about Wapu. I would have never approved Wapu and how amazing is like Wapu for the WordPress community? Like that. That is something that comes up from the community. The cool thing about Open source is that community happens whether you want it to or not, right people? Because people just publish plugins or fork the software, whatever happened, like, so you kind of get. One thing I love about Open source is that it kind of forces you, if you’re the steward of the software, it keeps you honest, you know, because it’s very natural market forces that, you know, if unless you’re like the most stubborn person in the world or blind, you’ll just like wake up one day and be like, okay, everyone’s using this plugin. We should Just build it in decor, whatever it is that that’s happening. Or every time I go to work camp, 10 people tell me this. So you know those sorts of things. So what that looks like in the future is, you know, if I had to say something I’d like to see more of this year in terms of collaboration is I’d love to see more talks at WordCamps around WooCommerce. I’d love to see more either dedicated WooCommerce meetups, which, you know, WooCommerce does have its own meetup.com thing, or like topics like how do we teach more broader WordPress developers how they can learn woo. And how that actually probably increases their economic value in the marketplace. Right. One nice thing about working in the e commerce world, like we said, there’s a store that’s making 5 million bucks a year. They’re making, let’s say they’re making 5 million bucks a year from their website. Like they’re going to want, you know, feel comfortable investing in that. So if you think of what their threshold is versus like you know, someone else building a website, a coffee shop. You build a website for the coffee shop. They’re making most of the money from people coming to the door. The website’s nice to have but you know, of their revenue, how much will they spend? It’s called half a percent, 1% on the website or like an e commerce store, both the revenue might be higher but also like the percent they’re willing to reinvest into their infrastructure and their website and development and customization and everything is probably much higher. Hosting, you know, they’ll want to pay for more performant hosting and invest in those things. So you know, we track 30 something billion of GMV happening through WooCommerce and actual numbers higher than that because we don’t, we’re not able to track everything. So when you imagine like the economic opportunity for doing things in the WordPress ecosystem, it’s pretty huge, I would say bigger than WordPress actually.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. I think it touches on a point why I’ve always said, you know, I started as a WooCommerce plugin developer and I chose that route because the types of clients we were getting were the ones that had money to spend on this stuff because their store relied on, you know, transactions going through it. And that’s how I kind of fell into the, the E commerce side of things. So it’s definitely true that it’s a, it’s a profitable area of WordPress and of any like online business. I would say I’ll touch quickly on the healthy collaboration as well, because there’s. There’s a couple of projects where we have collaborate, collaborated. Last year, one being the accessibility project that we had for WooCommerce. We collaborated with Equalize Digital, and that was just a case of, you know, myself and Amber getting in touch and talking about what that might look like. And that’s, you know, came to fruition. WooCommerce is now fully accessible, which is awesome on the front end. And another example is we worked with Becker at Kestrel on scoping out what shipping fulfillments might look like in WooCommerce. And that is also a feature that Becker heavily helped to scope out. What they’ve been hearing from customers and clients around what people want. And that work is now also in WooCommerce Core behind a feature flag, but it’s there to be used and tested. So I’d love to see more stuff like that, just more collaboration of what people are seeing in the ecosystem and just putting that out there to someone like me or any other product person at WooCommerce so we can talk about it. GitHub is a great place to do that. The next question you actually touched on already was from Rodolfo, and he said, is there going to be any more WooCommerce or is there going to be more WooCommerce coverage at flagship WordCamps? It sounds like you think there should be.

Matt Mullenweg:
Oh, should is relative. So if people want it, there will be. So I’d say, like, you know, be the change you want to see in the world. If you want more WooCommerce at WordCamps, if you are listening to this podcast, you probably could be a speaker. So make the pitch. And if you’re helping to organize a word Camp, you know, understand your audience, obviously, like, look at who’s coming. And I do think that with, you know, almost a quarter of all WordPress websites using WooCommerce, like, you know, maybe something like a quarter of sessions at WordCamp should be about WooCommerce, WooCommerce more broadly. Like you said, there’s other solutions as well. I think that’s great. As long as things are open source, they’re welcome at WordCamps.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, well, that’s what I would have thought. The last few flagship WordCamps that I’ve been to, I have submitted a talk about e Commerce or WooCommerce. I’ve tried both. And a talk about myself, like, my story. And my story is always the one that’s been accepted like WordCamp I think Asia last year, but there’s been three or four and nobody accepts my e commerce talks, which I think are really interesting. So I’m a bit concerned about why that is because all the data you said is totally correct about how many sites use WooCommerce and E commerce. Generally that’s where the money is. And yet I am finding it really hard to spread the word about WooCommerce and e commerce at WordCamps and I don’t know why that is.

Matt Mullenweg:
Well, Katie, your story is really good.

Katie Keith:
But everyone’s heard it. I think e commerce is more interesting these days.

Matt Mullenweg:
Okay, well then don’t submit it and just submit the e commerce or submit it and do a little bait and switch when it’s like my story actually turned it into an e commerce talk.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, but yeah, I agree. That’s definitely needed. Whoever does the talks, there should be much more representation at WordCamps.

Matt Mullenweg:
Well, and I’ll keep that in mind. You know the WordCamp I’m most active in choosing the content for is WordCamp US. So as that comes around and I look at things, I’ll keep that in mind.

Katie Keith:
So the next group of questions are about the features and upcoming priorities of WooCommerce. So the first one there was from Ian. Again, WooCommerce has intentionally served merchants, product builders and agencies. Are their goals and targets aligned to those segments and how are they prioritized?

Matt Mullenweg:
Merchants, product builders and agencies? Yes, there are goals tied to each one of those. How are they prioritized off the dome? Not certain right now. James might be able to answer this better, but those are, I would say, some of the big Personas that as we build things in Woo, you try to. Well, often, sometimes when we build things, it addresses all of Them, but as we make it more usable or something like that, that benefits everyone. But yeah, there’s definitely been some, I would say some more specific outreach around like growing the agency program or other things like that. I also saw a feedback that there’s work camps might not want pitches for a specific product. I think I agree. And I would say that once a product also becomes a platform itself like WordPress and if you go to WordPress plugins directory, there’s hundreds or thousands of WooCommerce plugins, it’s okay, you know. You know, once it becomes not just about itself, but actually something that a lot of people could build on, that’s okay for a working app.

James Kemp:
Interesting. Yeah, yeah, that’s a fair point. You don’t want to promote a specific product, I guess. But Yeah, I mean WooCommerce is, is huge at this point, so it deserves.

Matt Mullenweg:
To be talked about and people want solutions, so.

James Kemp:
Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
I’ve always found that on Reddit actually they block a lot of comments when you provide a solution to the question because it looks like promotion, but actually it solves the issue that they were having but sidetracked.

Katie Keith:
Often a product does. Yeah. So we’ve got a couple of follow up comments of people watching live about the word count discussion. So let’s do that before we move on to more pre submitted questions. So Dave has said suggested next flagship a separate room for E Commerce. I would love to see that. That would make a lot of sense actually.

James Kemp:
That would be cool to see.

Matt Mullenweg:
Yeah. You know what, I’ll tease something as well, which is this could be an interesting year to have a dedicated woo event again.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, well, we got a couple of independent events popping up, which is interesting. So we’ve just had, well, it was kind of, I think WordCamp affiliated e commerce day for WordPress in Porto, which James and I both spoke at. And then we’ve got Checkout Summit in Sicily in April. So it’s interesting to see that community interest is growing in the E Commerce side of things. And Checkout Summit is specifically WooCommerce rather than E Commerce as well. So I am liking that direction.

Matt Mullenweg:
There hasn’t been a WooConf in a few years and I think this would be a cool year to see another one.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. And we got a comment from Brent.

Matt Mullenweg:
This is what I addressed earlier. This is the one I was responding to. If it’s a platform and there’s like hundreds of plugins in the directory on top of it, I think that sort of. It’s a Spectrum, but that’s where it makes it a little bit more okay, I would say, to talk about or a lot more okay to talk about a specific, you know, plugin or solution or things.

James Kemp:
Awesome. Was that all the questions that you had, Katie? Yeah, I think it’s worth touching on the prioritization point because I think I can speak to that a bit more. One of the focuses this year will be that every release should have something beneficial for each one of those target groups of people. And to more clearly put that out there in writing, this, this feature or this enhancement is specifically targeted at this group of people or group of users. So I think we’ll definitely see a lot more of that this year, which, which will be great to see. We have a question from Ian. Of course, our list of questions are all from Ian. If developer resources were not a constraint, what would you do? So what would unlock the biggest leap forward? So if you had unlimited developer resources, where would you put them?

Matt Mullenweg:
That is a really good question. And Ian, I’ll say that it’s very prescient with this idea of intelligence being on tap with AI agents we’re seeing. If you’re listening to this and you haven’t been clawed code pilled yet, take some time. Nothing else from this podcast. Take some time, go through some tutorials, install claw code. By the way, it’s not just for code. You can use it for any other files on your computer. You can use it with your notes, you can use it with so much. I saw some crazy stuff with it being hooked up to Playground and Beeper today. Like you can do some really, really neat things. And that kind of is an under unlimited developer resource in some ways that we haven’t seen. And it is the 1.0 version and the capabilities that are coming out this year as the new Nvidia chips come online, all the new data centers you heard about get built. You know, especially some of the Elon Musk stuff, which is moving very quickly, but also the investments from Google, Meta, everyone, like anthropic, like we’re going to see some. If you thought last year was exciting from an AI point of view, I think this will actually be the year that is a little more jaw dropping. So January 14th, Mark, mark my words.

James Kemp:
There to touch on the Claude code they just released in the Claude desktop app, something called Claude Coworkers, which is Claude code under the hood. You set it up, you choose a folder to run it in, and it runs in exactly the same way as Claude code. But it’s a lot Less technical. It’s not a CLI based interface which is very useful for non code based work where Claude code seemingly excels, which I don’t think was the expectation when they released it. So yeah, definitely worth checking out.

Matt Mullenweg:
It’s just going to get better. So yeah, this also, you know, back to the brilliance of Ian’s question is it’s almost like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy thing. Like the answer, when you can have any answer, like what you ask and what you build is really important. And so, you know, I would pick, I mean honestly I would pick what WooCommerce’s roadmap is because that was kind of the, you know, it’s not that we have unlimited developer resources, but we do have, you know, pretty active process. Of the hundreds of people who work on WooCommerce and the investments that are happening into the scalability, you know, the sort of idea of the interface being more radically accessible and kind of unifying some of the things that are right now like sort of some classical WordPress interfaces, but could be like maybe like reduce people’s clicks, reduce kind of the friction they have when they’re running the store day to day. Earlier there was a mention of merchants. I would say very much the merchant experience is on my mind. And sort of like if you’re running a store every day, what do you do 10 times or 100 times? And how can we make that a little bit smoother? And again, every click you can remove, every sort of way you can sand the edges of that experience multiplies because people are doing it hundreds of times a day themselves and of course millions of times a day across the WooCommerce. WooCommerce system checkouts already getting a lot better. But of course anything in the checkout is a multiplier for the, for our ecosystem. It’s already there. There’s probably some things in stripe link or shop checkout that we don’t match yet. And for some stores or some geographies and so that could be improved for main ones like us stuff, I think it’s prepared now in terms of conversions, performance, you can always be faster, always be faster. There’s no one who says I would love this website to load slower. Yeah.

Katie Keith:
Well that brings us quite nicely to the next question, which is what are the top milestones WooCommerce will deliver in 2026? Which is from Robin James.

Matt Mullenweg:
I feel like we should point to a WooCommerce blog post or something here. Is there an official resource I don’t want to.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I mean, BO actually published, I believe it was late last year and I’m sure Brent in the comments will be able to drop a link in. But his vision for 2026 for WooCommerce, which is something that we’re really sticking to. And I think one of the. So the quality is high on the list, performance is high on the list, builder experience is high on the list, as well as merchant experience, which is always high on the list. And also I think, you know, evolving with the AI ecosystem as it moves and just adapting to that. Integrating things like the Stripe Agentic Commerce protocol and the new Google UCP protocol that they announced and just really working and refining those experiences are always top of mind. Hopefully Brent can drop in a link to the relevant blog post from Beau, but yeah, that should be sufficient, I would have thought.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, you mentioned the builder experience. We’ve got a live comment from Jerry who says, is there any roadmap for the block editor on the single product?

James Kemp:
There has been a lot of. So I guess the block. There’s two ways you could understand this question. One is kind of using the new interface, what we call data forms, as the interface for the product editor, which is one experience and that replaces the whole experience of the product editor. And the other one is the. The block editor existing as a way to update the product description, which the way I read that question is more in line with that.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think so. Like creating multi column layouts with blocks and things like that for the product page instead of just the template based layout we’re used to.

James Kemp:
Yeah, and I would say there’s no official roadmap, but it’s something that for me is high priority to. To dig into. Like that experience of using the editor to customize your product pages is just awesome. It’s much more flexible and impressive than a standard text editor. Matt, I don’t know if you had any thoughts on that.

Matt Mullenweg:
No, it sounds good. I apologize. I am not the biggest WooCommerce expert in the world, which is funny. Thank you for having me start your show. I think about it a lot more from the sort of like broader ecosystem and the strategy and those things I can speak to probably a little more, or the future of development and computing and those sorts of things. But for a specific question like that, I think James is a much better person to answer. Or Bo if he was here.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, agreed. There was quite a lot of questions that were really specific that when we went through them we thought actually we’ve got James, the core Product manager as a host we don’t need. Whereas for this interview we wanted to go high level and talk about the wider vision and the future bigger picture stuff. So that’s what we were expecting.

Matt Mullenweg:
And sorry about that for the audience but you know, either James or like other guests I think could do some more of those like super deep dives. So think of this as like the appetizer for do the Woo episodes to go much, much deeper.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it’s just really great to hear what you envision E Commerce or WooCommerce could be. So I think we’ve touched on that quite a lot, which is interesting.

Matt Mullenweg:
I did see a few questions coming about UCP, so I’ll speak to that and someone’s like, why weren’t you part of the announcement or whatever that is.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. Any update on UCP which just Google recently launched. How will WooCommerce move forwards with this?

Matt Mullenweg:
So I mean without speaking specifically to UCP, I will say that it is funny given how much bigger and more money they have, that Shopify is kind of scared of WooCommerce. So often they will negotiate to be sort of an exclusive day of launch announcement. And if you notice with like the Stripe stuff, I mean we were there on day one but it didn’t get announced a few days later or if they just negotiated for us to find out about when everyone else does, it’ll come really quickly, so don’t worry about that. It’ll all be supported. The second thing I’ll say though is that and there was an article in the information about this a few days ago is that these things are not being used at all. It’s very telling that almost a year after some of this stuff was first announced, there have been almost no, no one talking about how many transactions have gone through this. And it was like a headline feature like the Stripe conference and the Shopify thing and all this sort of stuff, the CEOs are there and it’s moving the stock prices and like, so it’s, it’s very interesting. This happens in software kind of frequently is occasionally there’s something that everyone’s like, oh, that is the best idea ever in the world. And it gets a ton of hype and a ton of everything and then once it kind of lands in the world, users are like, nope, doesn’t fit or there’s something missing. Now I’m not saying that agenda commerce 10 years from now won’t be like a double digit percentage of commerce or something like, you know, we’ll probably figure this out. But it might also be, you know, the Google Glass or one of these things that where you can put a bajillion dollars into and it seems like the coolest idea. But like when it meets the reality of real world, there’s something about it that just kind of like doesn’t make it gel.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I agree there’s some barriers that are going to put people off things like buying in AI. Well, how about buying multiple things in order to get free shipping? Just having one product recommended isn’t that relevant. James and I discussed this in the Q and A at E Commerce Day that there’s a few things that need to really change about the nature of people shopping before it gets that widespread adoption.

Matt Mullenweg:
And in the Information article I found it very fascinating because with Woo, you know, some of this stuff is a little tricky to support because we don’t host every Woo store in the world. So providing like a universal catalog for every Woo product in the world is like kind of tricky. I mean there’s ways to do it certainly if they sync with Jetpack or if we build some sort of crawler or opt in thing, like we can centralize some stuff. But it turns out even Shopify, who I would assume this was much easier for, has huge data issues. And it’s because people run their stores in different ways. They might say something is in stock when it’s really not, or there might be different shipping variations or there might be, you know, there’s just different ways that people show product variations when they might not exist. Or you know, there’s all sorts of stuff out there that apparently even for Shopify, which host and has all the data, you know, it’s all on their servers, sort of normalizing it in a way that’s accessible to the users in a way that’s also useful and accurate and true. Inside the chat interface has been a bigger challenge than certainly I would have imagined. So that’s been something surprising to me as well. The information is like a paid site, but maybe someone can, like actually someone should. I’m surprised a WordPress news site hasn’t covered this yet. So maybe request for a blog post for someone to summarize some of the stuff from that information article.

James Kemp:
I think another point to consider is just how quickly AI is evolving. To kind of set a standard protocol now is challenging, but a worthy exploration for sure. But yeah, our teams are digging into both ACP and UCP and I’m sure if you keep an eye on the developer blog that we will have some information about that very soon.

Matt Mullenweg:
If I had to make a bet, well, I guess I will. A prediction. It’s the amount of commerce that’ll happen from people just in a chat interface versus the amount of commerce that will happen from AI agents driving browsers. And so using the normal website, the normal human interface. But some of that might be more like the autofill might be better with AI or finding the product or navigating the site like those sorts of things. Maybe even discovery of the product might be driven by the AI. That second part will be way, way, way bigger.

James Kemp:
Yeah, discovery is an interesting one because I always use AI now to recommend products to me, but it’s still not great. So I use Claude most of the time and it’s still not great at actually providing a link to the product on any specific store. So it will say like you want this product and it would just be the name of the product and then I then have to go and search for it.

Matt Mullenweg:
I would say Anthropic is the worst at that actually. Yes. AI Perplexity and Gemini Google have gotten really, really good at linking the sites.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And I think we’ll see that evolve over time. But yeah, part of that experience is like reading the reviews yourself and like Katie was saying, you know, comparing free shipping costs and getting discount codes and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it’s definitely a challenge, but something I’m looking forward to seeing how that shapes up this year. And I think it’s going to shape up pretty quickly at the rate things are going. We have a question which I’m not sure if you’ll be able to answer from Tommy on X. He says are there any plans to bring back WOO Express? It was an easy way to onboard less technical clients that don’t know what hosting, et cetera are, but still want the flexibility of WOO and the scalability.

Matt Mullenweg:
Of WordPress.com oh, what I will say is that, you know, just like every other WordPress host in the world on WordPress.com we’re making a ton of investment into sort of making things easier and not that onboarding. One thing people don’t realize is now every paid plan on WordPress.com supports full plugins and themes. So even the four buck a month one, you get the full WordPress.com scalability, the platform of WP Cloud on every single paid plan. So there’s not the two tiers of paid plans anymore. Which kind of puts us in a similar category to every other web host in the world. Right. You pay for it you get full WordPress now that capability and our, you know, sort of the, the very, very deep technical investments we’ve made that done to make that scalable performance secure. Everything like WordPress.com sites basically never get hacked. You know, you don’t have to worry about security in the same way that you might on a host that does not invest as much in the security. Those sorts of things are available and were very much thinking about tailored experiences by the way, not just for WooCommerce but also other plugins. So other plugins that all the other E commerce plugins in the WordPress community, anything on WordPress.com I want it to be kind of one click easy and in fact just, you know how there’s blueprints for playgrounds where you can kind of like pre configure something. I think we’re going to start to see that become more common in preconfiguring a hosting setup as well. Yeah.

Katie Keith:
So you’re kind of saying it’s not really needed because things have moved on more generally with WordPress.com and the different options and so on.

Matt Mullenweg:
Well, and no, I think it’s something like it still might be needed.

Katie Keith:
I mean so it will express whether that’s needed.

Matt Mullenweg:
Oh yeah. Well, so to get the scalability and everything, you don’t need it anymore. Scalability, security upgrades, everything. The onboarding experience I think could definitely still be very much improved. So that’s something I still do think is needed.

James Kemp:
So yeah, and it was touched on in Porto. Having WooCommerce installed in WordPress is very much like you have a plugin installed. WordPress is the main site and you have this kind of E commerce section. And I think what something like Woo Express offered was a flip of that where you’ve got this, this E Commerce admin experience versus a WordPress with e commerce. So I do feel like that side of things is needed and I think that’ll be interesting to see.

Matt Mullenweg:
And when you put it like that, I almost feel like it should just be a setting in the plugin.

James Kemp:
Right, yeah, that’s been discussed.

Matt Mullenweg:
Woo is a minor thing for some things, some sites it’s the whole thing and in which case I know there’s. It is tricky because a lot of plugins fight for real estate in the sort of navigation, the sort of standard chrome of WordPress but I think with user control again, you know, it might be aggressive to do this by default or something. Yeah. In the plugin. But like you know, having it be like so people know what they’re doing. They can switch it on and off and like, you know, for a plugin with the sort of surface area of Woo, certainly putting things at top level navigation, I think is okay. You have a few things there. And two, you can imagine something where it does become a bit more primary. Now that said, I say, like, don’t, don’t completely hide the word presto. People still are going to have pages and blogs and everything like that and it’s nice to have the dashboard where they see the news and get involved with the community and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, cool. I think we’re coming up on time. So how would you like to wrap it up?

Katie Keith:
Let’s wrap it up with one more question about the future, which feels like a good ending. So let’s go to Robin’s question, which is long term, what does WooCommerce look like in three plus years?

James Kemp:
Oh.

Matt Mullenweg:
So things I’m certain of, it’ll be faster. Making a ton of investments in performance. Updates will be seamless. I deal with a lot of things in the world, so despite people’s perceptions of me, it actually takes a lot to get me truly riled up. But the one thing that will do that without fail is when an update breaks a site. To me, that is the worst thing you could ever do with software. It makes me furious. Totally unacceptable. And it needs to happen zero times. And it’s possible. It’s hard, but it’s possible. And I think not just Woo, but every WordPress plugin developer has a responsibility to really put in the work, to make updates as seamless as possible. Otherwise once you lose that trust in updates, it’s gone. So I’ll say that updates will be frequent and seamless and the interface will be much, much more, much, much more modern in the sense that it’ll feel a lot more like a sort of modern app. And by the way, WordPress is going to evolve alongside that. So we’re doing some fun stuff to sort of spruce up the WordPress admin a bit as well. And so Woo will both benefit from that and I think build on top of it as well.

James Kemp:
Awesome. The update point is very relevant. Do you feel like that’s something that needs to happen at the plugin level or at the WordPress hosting level as well?

Matt Mullenweg:
That’s a good question. I think there’s work at every level, sort of like a defense in depth. This is idea in security. Like you don’t just want one layer of security, you want multiple things because one of them’s probably going to fail inevitably. So then you have all these other layers in place that still makes sure the bad thing doesn’t happen, the fatal thing doesn’t happen. So I do really appreciate at the hosting level, you know, the investments people make into auto rollbacks or some even do it like with visual testing on the front end and stuff like that. And of course providing an ability for users to do that on demand. Is that sort of undo button beautiful? That’s very important as a last resort. I think the other important thing, and this is also getting easier with AI, is testing and sort of like having a great beta program, getting things out there in the world, doing automated testing on various, you know, since you can get to know, I’m sure you or feedback from your users and what the most common things they use WooCommerce with or your plugin with is like. How are you testing that? If you’re a developer, are you testing the beta versions of both WordPress and WooCommerce? So finding any changes that might either you need to update for or that maybe, you know, the core platform needs to be informed that they mess something up because they missed some edge case or some API you were using. So that it is. It’s going to take a village. But we’ve done it with WordPress, you know, now for, you know, knocking on wood. But, but for many the we’ve had many, many, many years of a very smooth update process and you know, for also hundreds of millions or billions of times now for plugins and themes as well. But of course Core has become, I think rightly so, very trusted for upgrades.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on and also thanks to everybody who submitted questions.

Matt Mullenweg:
I really appreciate it and congrats on this new format, new show, everything. I will definitely be a listener and watcher and can’t wait to see what you all do.

James Kemp:
Amazing. Thank you. Next month we have James LePage joining us. We’re going to be talking about how well the title is AI meets Woo and how AI is already reshaping E commerce. So pop that in your calendar. It’s on Tuesday 10th February at the same time? No, an hour earlier. It’s an hour before ET and 5pm CET and hopefully there won’t be any technical issues on that one.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, we’ll be experts by then. And after that, James and I will be back every month to discuss a different area of WooCommerce. So please subscribe. This is a new podcast. All our accounts are new, so even if you subscribe to open channels. You also need to subscribe to do the woo. So subscribe@dothedewoo.com and that’s where you’ve got all the links to the different places where you can watch or listen. Thanks for watching. Bye.

James Kemp:
Thank you.