Our First Q and A with the Core Product Manager for WooCommerce

BobWP:
Well, BobWP here, and I’m actually barging in on James’ show today because we decided to go a little bit of a different route. I’m not quite sure how this transpired, but we thought of a nice, good old WooCommerce community Q&A with James. James, how are you doing?

James:
Good, thanks, Bob. How are you?

BobWP:
Good, good, good. You ready for all these questions?

James:
Yeah, I think so. I’ll do my best.

BobWP:
Okay. Well, I want to dive right into it because I want to make sure we get as many of these covered. Now, a lot of these came—I think most of them did come—on X. So, we’d put a call out and said, “Hey, you’re going to be on the show. You got a question for me?” Well, our friend Rodolfo over at Business Bloomer, of course, he came in with several questions. So, we thought we’d kick off with Rodolfo. And I might mention that he also wrote a post just very recently on his blog at Business Bloomer that probably touches on some of this stuff. So maybe some of this will actually be answered. Let’s start with the first one. What’s the ETA for including popular plugins into…

James:
Core? Yeah, so some context on Rodolfo’s post actually is I announced on Friday, I think it was, that I’ve been made the product manager for core of WooCommerce. So rather than just focusing on specific areas of WooCommerce, like previously I was looking at order management, the goal is now that I will be overseeing all of core and just making sure that every team that’s working on core is aligned to some common vision.

And as a response to that, Rodolfo created this post of things that he would like to see happen in core. So, yeah, I haven’t read it yet; he’s only just posted it just before this recording. So, yeah, we will see if any of those questions are answered. But that’s a bit of context there.

One of the initiatives that we announced earlier this year, I think, was our plan to roll some of our premium extensions just into the core product for free. And we’ve actually seen that happen already. So in WooCommerce 9.4, we rolled the brands plugin into the core product. So now you can create or assign brands to specific products, and it’s the exact functionality of that premium plugin, but in core now.

So, further to that, we need to properly scope out the order in which we’re going to roll plugins in. But the goal is to make WooCommerce’s core product as usable as possible without having to extend it for simple things. So some of our products that you might see rolling into core would be Min/Max Quantities, Back in Stock Notifications, Shipment Tracking—we’re actually working on that already—Import/Export, which we should see coming in. And there’s a few more, but those are the more immediate ones that we’re looking at doing. And I will be leading that effort as well. So I’m going to be figuring out which order we do that in and probably posting that timeline publicly so that people are aware.

BobWP:
Okay, very cool. Yeah, I can see where it does one thing, does it good, but it is a lot more focused. And just to let everybody know, he has also offered some links for each of these questions, so I’ll make sure to put those in the show notes. I’ll even make it easier for you: I’ll put the question in, and then I will include the link that refers to part of his answer, so it’ll make it easier for you as a listener to go in.

So, his second question, now we’re on number two with Rodolfo: What’s the timeline for a new product editor?

James:
Yeah, so for this one, I reached out to Beau, who’s the head of engineering. I think he’s been on the show before, right?

BobWP:
Yes. Yeah, he wasn’t on too long ago going over the future roadmap.

James:
Yes. So, I wanted to get his position on where the new product editor is. Essentially, the progress on that has been slowed down quite a lot. I think the goal is to align a bit more with where core is heading. We didn’t want to diverge too much from what they were doing, and we found that there were things lacking in core WordPress that we knew were coming at some point that we wanted to utilize.

So, I would say that the new product editor currently is slowed down or paused, but what we are looking at doing is making short-term improvements to the existing product editor. This might include making it more visually appealing and, at the same time, improving the user experience of the current editor. Maybe some reorganization of the settings for a product and how they’re presented—just to make that existing flow really usable without necessarily diving into the kind of block editing experience that the new product editor would bring.

Beau has said that we’ve got some folks embedded who are working out the APIs, design patterns, and UX needed for a great experience, and they are expecting to come back to our product data work in the first half of 2025. Depending on what needs to change to match what we’ve just discussed, we’ll have a better idea of timing at that point. So that’s kind of a status update on that project.

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s good because I think, you know, you won’t always have a direct answer, but at least there’s an update and people can follow that a bit more and know what to expect. Well, Rodolfo is still asking questions like our dear Rodolfo always does. What’s the status of the settings refactoring project?

---

James:
So again, I approached Beau for this one. He said it’s still considered experimental, and there’s no specific timeline. As part of my role change that I mentioned earlier, looking at the settings experience is going to be part of that. So, I would expect that you’ll hear more about that—I would say probably early next year, we’ll try and put a plan in place for it.

BobWP:
I can picture Rodolfo at his computer, and he’s asking, “Where can we find the updated WooCommerce roadmap?” So, can you answer that one?

James:
Yeah. So, we do have a roadmap, which you can share a link to, but it’s developer.woocommerce.com/roadmap. Beau has said it doesn’t look like a traditional roadmap, so it’s not timeline-based but more of an exploration of the vision of WooCommerce.

I think—I’m just going to navigate to it so I don’t make up anything. One of the goals of the developer blog at the moment is to encourage anyone within WooCommerce—or hopefully a lot of the product managers—to post to this roadmap section about what they’re working on, the status of things, what’s coming, and so on. If you go there now, you’ll see a few posts asking for feedback on specific things we’re planning to work on, like WooCommerce text, and you’ll see a lot of posts about stuff that isn’t released yet.

So, it’s not a traditional “in five months we will release this; in six months we’ll do that.” One of our developer advocates, Brent—Bob, you can post his details—

BobWP:
Yeah.

James:
I’ll definitely do that.

BobWP:
There will be a lot of show notes and links in this one.

James:
Yes, for sure. Brent has added some comments saying we’d ideally like to create a detailed public roadmap in the future. I think that’s something I’ll be helping a lot with over the coming months as well. He doesn’t want it to just be dates and feature titles but a roadmap with depth and community involvement, which is an interesting approach.

So, right now, with the existing roadmap, we are focusing a lot more on transparency about the work that’s ongoing. And the goal here is to be a bit more public with what we’re working on—and I think a lot of people have seen that come to light over the past year or so—but also to provide ways for gathering feedback from the community, whether that’s the developer community or the merchant community. You can do that via the developer blog, GitHub, office hours, and whatever means necessary to kind of get in touch with us.

BobWP:
Yeah.

James:
Maybe not whatever means , but…

BobWP:
Yeah.

James:
Gotta be careful there. But very cool. I’ll make sure, as I do more on Do the Woo and certain posts, if anything ever addresses things like this, I’ll add comments on the blog and make sure it gets over to the Woo team.

BobWP:
Now the next and last question from Rodolfo—this is a question we get a lot on different shows: Any plans for bringing back WooConf?

James:
Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I’ve actually never been, even though I’ve been working with WooCommerce since its inception essentially. But yeah, I think we’re in need of a WooCommerce-themed event. We obviously have Esch, which is an awesome event that just wrapped up recently, right? It was the end or middle of last month. That always goes down really well, and it’s nice to have those kinds of focused sessions being given about WooCommerce specifically.

So, we don’t currently have any plans to bring back WooConf, but it is a sentiment internally that we would like to do that at some point. And maybe that would come back in an online form to start with. Something Brent has said is we are focusing a bit more on our events at the flagship events—so WordCamps—and we’re doing partner day events and things like that.

And if you recall, Bob, this year at WordCamp Europe, I arranged a meal for WooCommerce people, which was the first one we did. I think they replicated that again at WordCamp US, which was nice.

BobWP:
Yeah, I did go to one at WordCamp US too.

James:
Mm-hmm.

BobWP:
We had lots of good pizza at the one you put together.

James:
Yeah, I think we occupied pretty much the whole venue there.

BobWP:
Yeah.

James:
But yeah, I think the key thing is that we want to connect and be a bit more involved. That setup, I think, was really nice to be able to connect with particularly developers of WooCommerce. So yeah, the short answer is nothing planned, but it would be good.

BobWP:
Yeah.

James:
I think it’s smart.

BobWP:
Especially with the flagship WordCamps. And I don’t want to say to piggyback on them, but to really pull those kinds of specific events there. The biggest challenge I think for WooConf is doing it three times, four times a year. When it becomes regional—do it in the US, but what about the people in Asia? What about the people in Europe? So, Rodolfo, thank you for all those questions.

BobWP:
We’re going to go to one from Carolina—I believe she’s Carolina; I’m going to mess up her last name—but from Yoast. She is asking, “What about the 2025 compatibility?”

James:
Yeah, this is a short one, and it’s also touched on in another question, which I think is from Jamie Madden. So yeah, currently there are some things that aren’t quite supported, and it’s something that we’re working on. Testing and support is underway for that, and we plan to be fully compatible with 2025.

BobWP:
Yeah, and I don’t know… Why don’t we pop down to Jamie’s? Do you want me to pop down to that?

James:
Yes, go ahead, and we’ll go back up.

BobWP:
Now, Jamie Madden—you may know him on Twitter. I love Jamie; he can be a little snarky sometimes, but he’s great. His question was, “When can we finally see a new default Storefront theme that is from this century?”

James:
I mean, it’s a fair question. He has a point. I think Storefront—I’m not even sure how old it is, but I’m pretty sure it’s been around for a long while, for almost the length that WooCommerce has existed.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think so.

James:
And it’s worked well, but yeah, it predates full site editing. It’s before Gutenberg was a thing, so yeah, it’s in need of some TLC.

Earlier this year, we hired Ellen, who has worked in the WooCommerce theming space for quite some time. Again, Bob, you can link out to her previous themes. So we’ve hired Ellen to look specifically at theming for WooCommerce, and I reached out to her to kind of get an update on where we’re at specifically with a new default theme, whether that’s Storefront or not.

Her feedback was that the project is currently just starting, and she’s working on a timeline, but she doesn’t have one just yet. One thing she wanted to mention is that the developer blog and another colleague will be hosting a live Zoom event for Woo Block Themes on December 2nd. They will be talking about the Woo Starter Theme there, so that’s definitely one you should tune into if you’re interested in what’s going to happen with default theming within WooCommerce.

The other thing she said she’s going to do is write a post for the developer blog, as I mentioned earlier, and this will probably go into the roadmap area on the developer blog. She said she’d do that within the next two to three weeks.

Right now, they’re currently working on improvements for 2025, and the idea is that this will kickstart our own Woo Starter Theme. The goal here is not to replace Storefront but rather build a more modern system with components, for example, patterns, that can be used with multiple themes.

So instead of creating a theme that you install and activate, I think the goal is for WooCommerce to come bundled with patterns that you can implement into any theme. Those patterns would be for common sections that you would find on e-commerce sites. So we’d have all the kinds of hero patterns that you’d expect on an e-commerce homepage and then other patterns that implement WooCommerce blocks that we need to create or that already exist. This would give the person creating the website all the tools they need to build their website out of these blocks and patterns.

BobWP:
Yeah, very cool. Well, yeah, definitely I’ll put the link in for that webinar.

The next one comes from—I’m not sure, but the Twitter handle is “DryZeepZing,” so that’s who this is coming from. Anyway, they asked—or him or her—”Can you address concerns about the auto-renewal cancellation process?”

James:
Yeah, so initially I wasn’t quite sure what they meant, but I dug in a bit further by asking them. The issue they faced is that in the WooCommerce Marketplace, when they buy a premium plugin, there used to be a toggle that you could activate or deactivate to say whether that plugin auto-renewed at the end of its current period.

In an update—I’m not sure when—that was replaced with a different process to do the same thing. In the current instance of the Marketplace, you can cancel your subscription, which essentially does the same thing as telling it not to auto-renew. But I think the confusion there was this person and some others in the comments were concerned that canceling their subscription would mean that the plugin would instantly stop working, which isn’t the case.

If you cancel your subscription, the plugin continues to work for the length of that initial term. At the point when it would typically renew, you would just stop receiving updates and support. But for the initial period—typically 12 months—you will continue to get updates and support even if your subscription is canceled.

I think that’s what they weren’t aware of and wanted to clarify. It’s interesting that the terminology of canceling your subscription might be confusing, so we’ll try and implement some wording around that on the cancellation page to indicate that you won’t just instantly lose access to everything.

BobWP:
Interesting stuff. Cool. I’ll also put in the Twitter handles for these people who asked questions in case you want to go follow them because you can see they’re asking some very interesting questions, so they may ask more interesting questions on X. From Patrick Gallagher, he asked: “What’s the highest traffic/concurrent checkouts you’ve seen on WooCommerce?”

James:
Yeah, this was a tricky one to get hold of, mainly because I’m not sure that we are actively tracking that in any meaningful way. On sites that we host, we can get a better idea of that. For those sites, we have seen one particular site processing 10,000 renewals per hour for subscriptions as well as 30 orders per minute during sales. That might be during Black Friday sales, for example, which is quite impressive.

10,000 renewals per hour without slowing down the site is interesting. And another site is performing updates to their products in batches of 500,000, which again is an impressive stat. I can recall in my past web development career trying to update products—it can be a slow process. That kind of leads into the next question.

BobWP:
Yeah, and I was just going to make a note on that real quick. One of the ones you were talking about—the renewals per hour—we actually had them on the podcast, and they talked about that and performance. I might link that in. I think once we get our, you know, I’m hoping to get a better AI search into the site, others have been mentioned in other podcast shows, especially from developers and agencies.

So if I ever pull up more of those stats, I’ll share them with James, and he can put it in a little safe where it’s protected or whatever—wherever he puts that kind of stuff. As he said, there is another question here from Frederico Rianoso—I’m going to say it that way. I’m sorry if I butchered your last name. “When will bulk product updates become easier?”

James:
Yeah, so this is one that I’ve seen discussed in my time since joining. There are no concrete plans yet, but it is something that we are aware needs to be implemented. Particularly—and this is just from my experience of using WooCommerce—there are mechanisms to bulk update core products, so simple products, variable products, just using the WordPress tools that are built into bulk edit posts.

It’s not the nicest way to bulk edit products. The interface of that is… at best, and it doesn’t incorporate bulk editing variations. Just editing variations in general is not a particularly nice experience. So yeah, it’s something that we’re aware of and something that I will definitely be leaning into a bit more.

One of the goals we want to achieve is to make WooCommerce the best experience for merchants, but also the best experience for builders. Typically, in the past, when I’ve built WooCommerce websites for clients, they would ask the builder to import their initial list of products. We want to make that process as easy as possible.

I mentioned earlier that one of the plugins we’ll be rolling in is the CSV Importer, so that will help in some way. But I would like to make the UI for editing products in bulk more user-friendly anyway.

BobWP:
He goes on to ask another question: “Why don’t you use WooCommerce yourselves?”

James:
Yeah, so I actually followed up on that question because there are two ways to take it. When I think I reworded the question, he said, “Why don’t you use WooCommerce?” That could either be: “Why don’t I use WooCommerce personally?” But what he actually meant—and he clarified this—was: “Why doesn’t Woo use WooCommerce?”

The answer to that is: we do.

The WooCommerce Marketplace is run using WooCommerce as its platform for licensing, for selling the extensions in the marketplace. The product pages are all WooCommerce. The checkout is WooCommerce. It’s a massive site. There are tons of extensions; each extension is managed by a third party, so it’s a multi-vendor marketplace. It’s huge. There are tons of products, tons of reviews, and tons of orders that go through that site every day.

It’s a really good case study for WooCommerce.

Me personally—well, I have started setting up some shops to use WooCommerce in different ways. One of them is essentially a dropshipping site where I sell some of my photography prints, which is one of my hobbies.

The other one that I’ve not released yet, but I’ve started setting up, is a site to sell puzzle boxes. These are physical wooden puzzle boxes, which are sometimes described as “an escape room in a box.” The goal with that one is for it to be a subscription service, so I’m going to use the Subscriptions plugin. It also has the Gift Cards plugin on there.

I’m getting to use a lot of these extensions that we’re looking at, and I’ll experience using WooCommerce as a merchant.

Prior to that, when I was running Iconic, which is a WooCommerce extensions company—so we just made extensions for WooCommerce—just before I left there to join Woo, we actually transitioned the checkout and everything over to use WooCommerce.

Obviously, prior to that, I built websites for customers using WooCommerce. Me personally, I have quite a lot of experience building with WooCommerce, and I know it’s highly encouraged for us internally to create and use WooCommerce or just any products that Automattic owns.

BobWP:
Very cool. You do need to visit his new store and check out his photography because yeah, there’s some cool stuff there. Okay, so now the next question comes from our host of WBCHA, Katie Keith. Many of you know Katie, and she brought in the S-word. She wants to know, “What is Woo doing to stay ahead of Shopify when they have such a big budget?”

James:
Yeah, I think there’s quite a lot to unpack with that question, and it’s a tricky one to answer . I think with the changes that have come into play for me personally since last week, and also with the 2025 roadmap that was discussed with Beau, we should start to see a lot of how we’re planning to stay relevant and to compete with all these other e-commerce platforms.

We should start to see the idea of that formulate over the next few months. Like I said earlier, we really want to support users and businesses with specific needs, but also to support more heavily the developers and builders who are actually building the websites, and make it as straightforward for them as possible to spin up a website without being treated as a brand-new WooCommerce user.

I actually alluded to this on Twitter last week—or X, sorry—last week, and I asked the question: “Do you think that WooCommerce should have different experiences for builders versus merchants?” That was a mixed response. I further clarified that question by saying the concept I’m thinking about is: as a builder, when you set up WooCommerce, you don’t want to go in and do the typical onboarding that a merchant might see, or someone that isn’t familiar with WooCommerce.

Typically, as a builder, you have an idea of exactly what you need on your WooCommerce website, the settings that you need to configure, and you know the base starting point for any particular website.

What I’d like to look at is a way to configure a file that you can import or a CLI method that you can utilize to spin up a WooCommerce site with all of these settings pre-configured. It would, in turn, skip the typical onboarding process.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is how we utilize user roles. We have a shop manager role, and typically a user role in WordPress is just kind of limiting stuff or locking things down so they can’t modify core settings and essentially break the shop. But what I think would be interesting is that the shop manager role is more tailored to shop managers—not just limiting stuff but making the experience for them more meaningful and more useful.

That’s one of the things we want to do.

Another focus we’ve seen is being more open with what we’re working on. WooCommerce is an open-source plugin at its core, whereas Shopify is locked down, and they decide the direction. That’s something we’re focusing on—just allowing the community to have a voice on what’s useful for them.

That’s evident with Rodolfo’s post that he put out earlier today—just to say, “We’re listening.” I’m ready to take that feedback from the community and make it more actionable.

Something else I’ll be doing is speaking directly with merchants—high-volume merchants who are using WooCommerce every day—because the experience of being a merchant using WooCommerce is a lot different from a builder using WooCommerce. They’re in there managing orders, essentially. That’s what you’d expect them to be doing most days.

So yeah, I think the short of it is: we should see a lot more clarity and focus in 2025 with what our goals are and making that a bit more visible to people outside the organization.

BobWP:
Very cool. Very cool. And we have one more question. I don’t really have anything to add to that, but yeah, I do like that idea of using user roles. I know that we just did a bunch of stuff here on Do the Woo, giving certain people certain permissions and some custom permissions to do things. So, it’s pretty cool.

Thank you, Katie. You know, sometime you and James can come on and hash it out and have a fun conversation. Hey, maybe we’ll throw Rodolfo in there, and the three of you can . We’ll wait a while on that—we’ll give James a break.

BobWP:
Last question from Tommaso: “Why is it still not possible to hide paid shipping if the shopper qualifies for free shipping? It’s such a common scenario.”

James:
Yeah, it’s something I’ve seen mentioned before, actually. Also, I like the mix of questions we’ve had here. We’ve had some kind of high-level questions and some very specific ones. I’d class this as a very specific question.

I think we should be able to do that. One caveat that I noted in my comments is that the merchant may not always want to hide other shipping methods when free shipping becomes available.

The examples I gave were that maybe free shipping is like basic shipping, and it takes three to four days, but you might want to upsell express shipping or next-day shipping.

But yeah, I think it should be possible for the merchant to decide that. That would just look like a setting where, when you are configuring free shipping, you could say: “If free shipping is available, don’t show any other methods.” I think that makes sense to be a setting.

Definitely something I will look into, for sure.

Brent left some comments here as well, noting that it highlights why we’re expanding WooCommerce Core and rolling this kind of functionality into core by default. There are so many different use cases for how people use WooCommerce, and shipping is such an important part of the e-commerce experience.

BobWP:
Alrighty. Tommaso did ask one other question about the product editor, but that was answered in Rodolfo’s question. Thank you, everyone, for submitting these! If you did ask a question and it didn’t get on this one, more than likely James is still finding the answer or finding a good answer for you.

Hopefully, we can maybe do this off and on—put some questions out. These were really good questions. If you want to add to any of these, do go into the post and leave comments. Or if you have a question underlying what James said, you might want to leave that there as well.

I don’t want to get too much stuff piled on James’ calendar, but if there’s any feedback or if you just have a comment about it, I’d love to hear that. I’m sure that would help James even more to understand and be able to take some of that back to the team.

And again, public congrats on the new position at Woo, James. Pretty exciting. I think there are a lot of people excited that you are stepping into that spot because even prior to joining WooCommerce, you did amazing things for the community.

Looking forward to you being part of this show and bringing in some of the stuff directly from Woo, which I know makes people feel better and feel like they’re being listened to. So, that’s great.

James:
Yeah, I mean, they are being listened to. I would quite like to do this format more regularly. I think it’s a good opportunity to ask questions and get genuine answers for those questions.

I don’t know if I’d do it live—I think it’s nice for me to be able to go out and explore what the answers are for those questions. Like, I don’t know everything—I have to ask people. So it’s nice to have this list of questions that I can go and find answers for.

Maybe we can have an official way of asking questions that we can then build up a list for to put into an episode like this.

BobWP:
And we can also have people leave an audio question, and we could actually play their question during the podcast. So there are some options there.

This has been a great job, and yeah, let’s do this more for sure.

James:
Yeah. Thanks for jumping in as the MC.

BobWP:
Alright, no problem. Hey, you can count on me for that. I can ask the questions—now, answering them, I’ll leave that to you.

Well, everyone, thanks again. Do make sure to follow James on Twitter—or I guess I should call it X. Also, leave a comment or, if you have anything to say about what was discussed, go to the post and let us know.

If you’re on the Fediverse and you see this on Mastodon, you can reply to it there. That’ll come in as comments on the blog as well. Thanks for a great conversation. Thank you all, and thank you so much, James.

James:
Thank you.