Scaling WooCommerce Operations with Automation

Katie Keith:
Welcome to do the Woo, the podcast where we talk all things WooCommerce. I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins.

James Kemp:
And I’m James Kemp, the core products manager for WooCommerce. Today we’re going to talk about how to scale your WooCommerce operations with automations.

Katie Keith:
So, hey other James, James Collins, thanks so much for coming on. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your work with WooCommerce?

James Collins:
Yeah, thanks Katie. My name’s James Collins. I’m managing partner at Tectalic. We’ve been working with merchants, getting them online and helping them manage their stores for customers. Coming up on two decades now and we started using WooCommerce in about 2012, shortly after it was released and yeah, had a lot of fun doing that. And then in early in 2013 we were looking for ways to get WooCommerce integrated into WooCommerce, looking for ways to get different systems integrated into WooCommerce and we came across Zapier, the automation platform. So we worked with Wuhan Zapier and launched the Zapier integration for WooCommerce back then. And yeah, so it’s still running today. Lots of people using it and it helps them connect 9,000 different apps into WooCommerce and helps them with all their automations and a lot of their needs to keep their store running efficiently.

James Kemp:
It’s awesome. I use Zapier quite a lot. It’s a very, very cool tool. Thanks to everyone who’s already submitted a question. I’m not sure how many questions we have. Katie, I’m sure you’re.

Katie Keith:
There was one that I said I’d read out. I will look it up for later.

James Kemp:
Amazing. If you’re watching live, feel free to submit any questions as they come to mind. You can use whatever chat tool you’re watching the live stream on. Definitely interested to hear loads about automation, particularly with Zapier and hopefully kind of outside that space as well. I think there’s tons of automated automation opportunities with WooCommerce and E commerce in general. So yeah, please leave your questions as comments.

Katie Keith:
Yep. And before we get into the conversation, I’d like to invite you to subscribe. Do the Woo is part of the existing Open Channels network, but it’s a new podcast that we just started in January and you need to subscribe to it individually. So if you don’t already, then go to dothewoo.com or we’ve got a new website that was just launched and updated today actually. So go on dothewoo.com and subscribe in all the places that you watch podcasts.

James Kemp:
Yeah. So shall we dive in? James? I think to start with, I’d like to know a bit more about the Zapier plugin that you have actually. But what are some sort of real examples of automated workflows that maybe you see a lot of your customers using specifically with Zapier, but also outside of that, that maybe Zapier doesn’t quite enable? I’m sure there’s plenty of like feature requests that you’ve seen for this. This type of thing.

James Collins:
Yeah, there’s a lot of different possibilities, I think, and there’s many different ways to do automations around an e Commerce or WooCommerce store. I think some of the really practical examples and good place to start are repetitive, predictable tasks that the merchant might find themselves doing regularly. Yeah, the more often they need to do those tasks, the better return on investment they’re going to get for setting up an automation. So simple things like sending all of your orders across to your accounting software, Xero, QuickBooks, those kind of platforms, so you’ve got your orders flowing across as invoices. That’s a real time saver. It’s something that no one really wants to do when they’re getting into business. It’s never the reason and they’re running a store, but it’s often something they have to do to make all the books work. So that’s a really common example. And I’d say in a similar kind of vein, there’s a surprising number of people these days that are often needing to make sure their WooCommerce product stock levels are kept up to date from a different system. So in the reverse direction, in this case, people might have their inventory levels in Xero or somewhere else where they’re managing all their inventory and they need to make sure WooCommerce kept up to date with that. So that’s another really common example too. Whenever your inventory levels are changing in one system, then getting Your products in WooCommerce updated accordingly. So you’re avoiding that bad customer experience of oh, I ordered a thing but it’s not in stock and it’s going to take two months. I’m really sorry about that kind of scenario. So they’re probably just the two main ones off the top of my head that we see quite regularly and a lot of others as well. There’s plenty of opportunities once you start looking around automations. There’s yeah, plenty of opportunities there but I think good place to start those repetitive predictable tasks that you tend to do more often. The, the other tasks that require a bit more manual thought and those kind of things, they’re not often the best place to start. Starting simple and then working your way up from there as you get a feel for it is generally how we recommend people approach it. So.

James Kemp:
So do you find that it’s mainly like merchant side automations that people are primarily automating or are there customer side? Like you know, my customers added XYZ products to the car, maybe three days later we send them an offer for something like that. That kind of automation I guess might be deemed as like marketing automation to some level.

James Collins:
Yeah, there’s a whole spectrum really, isn’t there? You touched on marketing automation. You’ve got the order f. Order fulfillment automation, you’ve got the whole customer service flow when people are got questions about their orders and, and refunds and exchanges and all those kind of things. So there’s yeah, a lot of different areas there that there’s possibilities to introduce some automation into. So yeah, there’s some really good solutions beyond Zapier as well. Really good solutions for those abandoned cart scenarios, that kind of thing. That, that’s a use case that we haven’t focused on much with the Zapier integration so far. There’s some really other you know, great solutions out there that do a great job of that. So we’re more focused on the, on. On the, the order management, the product management, the customer management, that side of things instead. And yeah, so yeah, there’s a lot of, a lot of good possibilities in there. Automate Woo and other solutions like that do a really good job already with the, with the marketing automation and the abandoned cart scenarios I think as well.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I know mail poets are a good example as well of sort of abandoned cart functionality.

James Collins:
Yep.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. So are you kind of saying that for the sort of merchant logic and integrations and so on then using something like Zapi is a good bet. Whereas for something specialized like sending emails then maybe go for a dedicated platform for that.

James Collins:
Yeah, it depends. I think if you’re not already using Zapier, I think as soon as you have a look at it, you’ll probably be quite surprised at how many of your existing apps that you’re using already day to day in your business. Are already Zapier enabled as well. Obviously WooCommerce is one of those, but the Mailchimps and a lot of those other software solutions that you’re already using, a lot of them are Zapier enabled now. I think when we launched the integration in 2013, off the top of my head, I think Zappy had about 200 apps that it supported. Now it’s more than 9,000 as well. So yeah, there’s a, there’s a lot on there. We were pretty early days being the 220something, I think it was early on. But yeah, there’s just, there’s a lot on there and I think once you get the hang of how it works, then it’s easier to find more and more opportunities to use it in Woocommerce and E commerce and even beyond that, just in other parts of your business as well.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, it is quite incredible. I use Zapier a lot. I’m using it less than I used to, which we’ll get to. But I love the way they’ve integrated with AI because you don’t even need to now look through their database of zaps or triggers or whatever. You can just type in what you want and it will literally set up the entire automation for you. And it does that pretty well now. A year or so ago it didn’t do a lot, but now it really is doing a good job. So I think in many ways the limit is your imagination because you can do such a lot, you just need to have the idea to do it in the first place.

James Kemp:
I think something cool that you can do now in Zapier as well with AI is not just create the thing, but you can have an AI step within whatever your automation is. So I use it a lot for communication because I get a lot of pings and messages from people and I kind of feed it all into an AI and summarize what action is required from me and like feed that into my to do list. So there’s like a, a single location for multiple sources of notifications. So yeah, I can imagine. Maybe there’s some automations that utilize AI in some way. James, I don’t know if you’ve seen anyone doing that using like Zapier’s built in AI.

James Collins:
Yeah, I have. I think probably one of the examples that first comes to mind would be a zap that’s responding to every paid order that comes through WooCommerce. Most west, most WooCommerce users are probably familiar with the order notes field that’s on the checkout and when you’ve been running a store for a while, it’s quite surprising the variety of comments that come through as part of an order, where some. Where a customer’s type something in the order notes field. So I’ve seen examples there where people are using an AI step in their zap to sort of interpret and understand more about the sentiment of what the person’s asking for and then doing different things accordingly there. So if it tends to be more of a request amount around a shipment, delaying it for a week or two or leaving a parcel on a porch, those sorts of comments are quite different to the other kind of notes that might flow through there. So, yeah, having an AI step in the zap, you’re getting that. You’re getting the repeatable, reliable part of adding your order into something like Xero and then you’re getting using AI for just little parts of the automation as well. So you’re kind of getting best of both worlds there. I’d say there’s the, yeah, the robust nature of a zap where fields are mapped directly across in a predictable way and then you’re using AI for little parts of it that can benefit from a little bit less of a structured thing and a bit more of an intelligent interpretation of what something might mean and then doing a different action accordingly because of that. So, yeah, that’s probably the first example that comes to mind there.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I do that with quite a lot of my zaps where there’ll be a ChatGPT step as part of the zap, where the AI is processing the data that the previous steps have got and then will take actions accordingly. But that brings us to the question of why do we need Zapier at all? Or something similar like N8N or whatever. Why do we need a structure, structured automation that you build step by step when you can automate so much with pure AI now?

James Collins:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. I think really one of the benefits of Zapier is the sheer number of apps that are connected in there. A lot, a lot of the AI integrations in ChatGPT or Claude that the number of apps in there is growing slowly over time or growing quickly, depending on how you measure it. But yeah, they don’t have the, they don’t have the breadth of apps in there yet that something like Zapier supports. And if, if you’re an organization that’s already been using Zapier, you’ve probably already got your Slack workspace and a whole lot of different things already connected to your zapier account. So the simple act of sort of integrating your Zapier account into your Claude or your ChatGPT session and all of a sudden it’s got access to the different apps and connections on Zapier that you’ve already been using in the past and then from there. So it’s sort of like you’re managing one kind of connection into your AI via zapier and then from there opting in your, your existing Zapier connections to your different apps as well from there. So that sort of simplifies it. Rather than having to mess with a whole lot of different MCPs or more complex ways of getting other apps talking to AI, you can sort of just manage the one connection and, and can get you up and running a lot quicker that way as well. And it’s all managed from a central kind of place at Zapier’s end as well. So yeah, that’s one reason why you might do that, I think. And yet some depending on what you’re doing, for example, like I mentioned earlier, the getting your orders into an accounting system, that needs to be done in a predictable, reliable way with no margin for error in a sense. Otherwise that’s when you end up needing to apologize a lot to your bookkeeper.

Katie Keith:
When, yeah, sometimes you don’t want AI to be putting its stamp on things.

James Collins:
You want a specific number going from here to here in two different systems. You don’t always want that number to be potentially translated or misinterpreted by an AI model and changing a number from one to another. So yeah, it’s best of both worlds. I think there’s sort of not two very different looking solutions, but when you mesh them together in a way where you’re using the repeatable benefit of a zap that’s set up and then specific AI steps in there, that’s kind of the best of both worlds. And I think, Katie, you mentioned how easy you found it in the last few months to set up a zap as well. I’ve really noticed that too. We used to spend a lot of our time explaining to customers over the last decade how to set up a zap and how to map a field from here to here. It used to feel quite overwhelming for many users and then we get a lot less questions around configuring zaps and things these days. Because I think a lot of that’s to do with that AI prompt you get from Zapier at the start. When you go to configure your first automation, you can Just tell it what kind of automation you want. I want to go from Woocommerce to Xero whenever I receive an order needed invoice in Xero and it’s going to do a really good job of pre configuring that zap for you. So it’s much easier to set those up now than it was before too. So that’s a big benefit I think these days.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think you touched on the sort of deterministic nature of Zapier where you maybe don’t get that with an AI tool or I imagine you probably could get some level of determinism from an AI tool, but it’s a lot more work to set something like that up. Like it’s a lot more of a technical job to set up an agent that performs a specific task the same way every single time. Whereas I think with something like Zapier you don’t even need AI involved in that process. And it can be truly deterministic based on the data coming in, the expected data that it processes and then puts out again. So it could be much more reliable. But I expect that we’ll start to see maybe AI make more of an appearance in Zaps rather than it just being a step. Maybe some of the steps that you can create in Zapier have new ways to kind of process the data that’s coming in. Um, so you don’t. So if you have like multiple sources with slightly different variations of, you know, the name of a price field, for example, maybe the AI can determine that rather than having to hard code like a fixed parameter for that. We’ll see it change over time.

James Collins:
Yeah, a deterministic process is really good until something varies outside of the expectation and then the whole thing can fall over. So yeah, there’s a definitely a lot of benefit to be had by using AI cleverly in the process too can be a lot more flexible and adaptive when things are changing slightly with the data that’s flowing through.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, and another thing with using pure AI is that its scheduling generally isn’t very good at the moment. For example, the scheduling in Claude Cowork is really not very advanced. I think it’s still research preview stuff stage. It kind of works, but you have to be at your computer, then it takes over your whole computer and distracts you while you’re trying to work. And I believe that Claude code added routines last week, but I haven’t found or used that yet. So probably in a few months it will be better at automations in that sense. But at the moment it’s not quite there yet. And I really like the point you made about how these integrations are already there in Zapier, because it is a real pain to go research from MCP and then figuring out how to host it. And as a non technical person I get really stuck on that. So it is nice to use a platform that just has everything pre integrated.

James Collins:
Yep, for sure.

James Kemp:
There’s also Claude. I don’t know what the official name is, but I’m going to say Claude Cloud agents, which are similar to the agents that can run on a schedule on your computer, but they can now

James Collins:
run like in the cloud.

James Kemp:
So you don’t have to be, you know, your computer doesn’t have to be on, they’re just spun up and I believe you can schedule them as well. So like you say, I think they’re definitely moving in that sort of direction, like more kind of autonomous scheduled tasks versus, you know, me as a merchant going and asking for it to send my last 10, you know, orders over to zero or something like that.

James Collins:
There’s a lot of things that are, that happen in. On a WooCommerce store where you might not want to be doing a scheduled based approach that Katie was mentioning, you’re more likely wanting things to happen automatically as soon as something happens in your store. So as soon as a product goes out of stock, for example, if it, if it’s above a particular amount, then you might want to notify certain members of your team pretty quickly so they can act accordingly, that kind of thing. Or for orders going through, getting orders added into a CRM automatically and your customers updated in the CRM. Those kind of things, you want them happening even if you’re on the road with your laptop closed. You don’t want them running on a schedule, you want them happening in real time behind the scenes. So just the next time you open up those other systems, the data is already there. The magic’s happening already as well.

James Kemp:
I think the other thing is Zapier, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t, unless you tell it to, it doesn’t store any of the data that it’s processing. Whereas AI could be, unless you turn it off. Like could be, you know, training their models based on the data you’re passing through it, or it’s not potentially as secure, you know, it has to be sent and processed by something that understands it. Whereas Zapier, like I was saying, is more deterministic. It’s just basing it on, on the input it receives in the, in the structured input. So something to consider.

James Collins:
Yeah, and I mean we’ve talked a lot about Zapier already. There’s obviously, and we mentioned other ones like Automate Woo as well, other things in there. Direct integrations are often a pretty good way of going too. There’s a lot of extensions in the Woo marketplace for a direct connection from WooCommerce to Xero for example, and it’s designed to do that, that automation for you. But a lot of the time, as soon as you want to vary that automation a little bit, a lot of the time you end up just find end up in a place where it’s not quite as configurable as you want or there’s a certain nuance that you want to handle there and the configurability isn’t there. And I think that’s really one of the key benefits of something like Zapier, where you’re in control of what the automation looks like from end to end. And more and more you can use AI to help you adapt and configure that in the first place and evolve it over time as well. So I’d say that the level of technical expertise needed to set up an automation on Zapier now, compared to a year or two ago, it’s a lot more accessible to a lot more people now, I think because of that natural language input to help you get the automation set up in the first place. And that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s. Realistically, it’s only, it’s only a good thing. You don’t want to spend hours and hours banging your head against a wall configuring an automation. You want to be able to talk about it at a high level, get and get the whole automation set up and turn it on and then just hopefully never have to think about it again because it just keeps working behind the scenes. So. And yeah, the Zapier platform continues to evolve over time. I remember a few years back that their homepage was talking all about zaps and workflows and automations and now it’s a lot more focused on AI and agents and MCP and all of those different tools. So even though the it’s still got the automations there, they’re still a really critical part of it. But over time the platform’s evolving at Zapier’s end. And really, yeah, we’re focused on making sure WooCommerce works well with Zapier. Zapier is focused on making sure their whole platform works well and they’ve got a lot of other partners to making sure all the other integrations on there just continue to evolve and work and try and support as many of the new features on zapier as possible and in our case, as many of the new features in WooCommerce as possible too. So things like over the years we’ve added support for WooCommerce subscriptions into the Zapier connector as well, and bookings and memberships. So it’s not just core WooCommerce constructs, it’s not just orders and products and customers that you can manage. It’s membership records, subscription records, all those other parts too. So we sort of, we keep a pretty close eye on what extensions seem to be quite popular in the, in the WooCommerce marketplace and what our users are asking for, if there’s gaps there. And we try, and we’re trying to make it a one size fits all kind of solution for WooCommerce merchants, not just the ones using plain WooCommerce without a whole lot of other add ons. Really the benefit of WooCommerce is you’ve got a lot of other extensions to choose from and if you can use a, an automation tool like zapier, which is now also an AI automation tool as well, then yeah, our hope is that saves merchants a lot of time and we do a fair bit of work with agencies or developers as well. That’s the other part of it too. There’s a lot of, a lot of those users that are setting up WooCommerce for their clients too. And for them they could learn a lot of different direct connection solutions out there or they could just master one tool like zapier and then they can reuse that again and again and again for a lot of the clients that they’re working with as well. So that’s probably another benefit, benefit in there as well, I would say.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think one of the nice things about zapier as well, I realize we’ve talked a lot about zapier, but one of the cool things that it does is it has a step that you can use where you can process with code like the, the input data that you’ve got, which is quite nice. So you can essentially run like any script against the input data that you’ve, you’re getting, which, which is very useful I found, for capturing even data from like a HTML document or you know, reformatting or reprocessing the data that you’re getting into to turn it into a consistent format, which is quite nice

James Kemp:
woocommerce.com have you used other tools like N8N much? I assume your primary focus is Zapier because that’s your extension, but how do tools like Nan compare?

James Collins:
Yeah, I’ll admit we’ve spent a lot of focus on Zapier over the last 11, 12, 13 years since we launched it. Don’t have direct experience with N8N, apart from I’ve been hearing it mentioned quite a lot over the last few years as well. So clearly there’s a compelling use case there for merchants as well. But I think for the people out there that haven’t done any automation for their WooCommerce store yet. Regardless of whether you end up going with something like Zapier or N8N or some some other automation thing, I think the the key first step is to just find something small and repeatable that you can automate, save yourself some time. It’s not just the time saving, it’s the reducing the human error factor I think too. So setting something up with whatever your automation tool of choice is, experiment with it, learn, learn from it, and I’m pretty confident you’re going to end up seeing benefits very quickly. And I guess I suggested also focusing on the things that you have to do most often is a good starting point. Having said that, the reverse is also true. I think the tasks that you only have to do fairly rarely or regularly, they’re the ones that are the hardest to remember how to actually do them too. So they can be also a good place to start too, if you need if it’s hard to remember how to do something because you only have to do it once a month, that often feels like maybe it’s not worth automating but actually set it up once. Yeah, fast forward a month, you’re probably not going to feel like it’s giving you too much benefit. But over the months after that, and as the years go through, it just keeps happening. You’re getting your monthly report on the first of the month automatically, that kind of thing. It’s a. Yeah, you can save a lot of time and spend time in your business doing what you’re actually there to be doing, providing value in whatever way that is. Often it’s not the value isn’t you moving data from one place to another and compiling reports. If you can automate some of those flows so you can just really provide value, then that’s a big win for you and the business that you’re working in or the business that you own. I think Katie can probably talk a lot to that too. Anything that can save her time in her business by automating, then she can focus on a lot of different areas instead.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, all I do these days is set up automations which probably is a bad thing. Taken over my entire role. But think how much time it will save me in the future. We will see. Yeah, I’ve tested N8N and also I think it’s called make the other one. When I wanted to set up a particular automation it was really complex and they’re all kind of the same thing to be honest. They all allow you to do that structured flow exactly like Zapier where you’ll pull in different integrations, process the data from previous steps and maybe add an AI step as we’ve discussed. So they’re kind of much of a muchness really. I haven’t done a direct comparison on which has the most integrations for example, because surely it would take a long time for something newer like N8N to get 9,000 integrations. But N8N seems to have a lot of buzz around it, particularly in the developer community. And I’ve noticed that it seems to be the go to for YouTubers who are making videos about this stuff. So maybe they’re just really good at influencer marketing or something like that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, it’d be interesting to see what, what the main differences are. It definitely seems the main difference from my memory is that N8N kind of goes sideways and Zapier goes down. I don’t know if that’s a key selling point.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, it’s a different ui but they’re essentially the same thing.

James Kemp:
Yeah, they’re kind of node based automations. Interested to talk about mcps? I know Zapier has an MCP available. And James, I’m wondering if you have or know of like the use cases for that. I assume it’s more for setting up and managing existing or creating new zaps rather than actually processing any data.

James Collins:
Yeah, Zapier’s MCP solutions really evolved over the last few months as well. So the good news is basically any app on zapier and any action that’s on zapier, you can now point connect into an MCP setup. So in the case of the WooCommerce integration on Zapier, we’ve got different actions, for example, for finding an order in your store, updating an order, changing an order status to something, those, those, all those actions that you might be using in your actual Zap workflows. You can now utilize as many of those as you want inside Zapier’s MCP solution as well. So we find a lot of one. One simple example. We have a lot of merchants that we’ve worked with over the years. They actually, a lot of them don’t regularly, or they don’t regularly log into their WooCommerce dashboard at all. Often they’re, they’re receiving an email when they get a new order, the standard new order received email from WooCommerce and they’re doing their fulfillment for a lot of the smaller merchants that they’re actually not even taking that step to go into their store and mark the order as completed. So the customer gets told that the order’s on their way. So that’s something that ideally they should be doing from a customer experience point of view, communicating with the customer that their order’s on their way. But a lot of them forget to do that. They’re focused on getting the products out the door and they leave it at that. So one use case is that I was experimenting with the other day is connecting up Zapier’s MCP to something like a Claude chat session. I did that the other day in the Zapier MCP. I configured it to, to allow some of the WooCommerce actions that we want to use. So in this case, the use case is basically the merchant’s going to, they know about the three orders that have come through from yesterday. They’re packing and shipping them today. And then they can literally, in a Claude chat window, say, mark yesterday’s orders is completed and Claude and via the zapier MCP can look at all your orders that have come through from yesterday and changed their status to completed or slightly more advanced example of you could Say ad tracking number X, Y, Z to the last order from James that we received yesterday, that kind of use case and Zapier, MCP and Claude together will usually figure out a way of just doing that for you automatically. So the merchant doesn’t even necessarily need to log into their WooCommerce store to do some of those order management tasks. They can do that in natural language with Claud or, or ChatGPT or others as well.

James Kemp:
So that’s interesting, I guess I assume it’s like that you install one MCP and then it has access to any of these like tasks or tools they usually call them. So it’s essentially another input mechanism. So it’s taking your language, your natural, you know, chat, and processing that then through a zap. Because I was wondering, like, comparatively, you know, WooCommerce has an MCP as well, so you could, you could do the same thing through the WooCommerce MCP, but what you could do differently with Zapier is take the input and you know, process it in multiple different ways. Like maybe you’ve run it through some other tool first and then it goes over there and then, you know, connects two other tools together. So I guess you could do more, more advanced things just via natural language, which is interesting. Yeah.

James Collins:
And those kind of use cases, really, there’s a lot of, it’s a space that’s changing at a pretty rapid pace too. So there’s a lot of shiny, interesting looking use cases that seem good. But then the key question is are they actually useful for a merchant or someone managing a store? That’s the key question. And is it something they, they will reliably do again and again and again because it feels easy enough and does it work well enough for them? So that combination of just automated workflows that are more deterministic, maybe with a few AI steps in there to inject a little bit of extra logic and then the other approach of using something like Zapier’s MCP or WooCommerce’s MCP and being able to do basic store management tasks by just talking to your favorite chat provider, they can be used for different things, get the best of both worlds, I think. They the deterministic use cases and the other ones too. So yeah, there’s a lot of possibilities there, I think. And I guess you mentioned the WooCommerce MCP. There’s a lot been happening in that space, as you would well know, more than we would probably. But yeah, me as a user of AI, I’ve been using it quite a bit in the last year or two, probably like you two both have as well. And having to configure a dozen different MCPs to talk to your different apps and making that work in a, in a ChatGPT session, on a phone and on your computer, that kind of thing. It can be quite frustrating having to configure all those mcps different independently and authenticate them. Whereas using something like Zapier’s MCP, you’re adding in one MCP into your chat session, chat setup, and then from there the rest is configured at the Zapier and you just, you’re just saying which apps am I already using on Zapier? Do you want to make them available via that specific MCP? And then which actions out of those apps do you want to enable on there? And then with something like Claude, it’s well, these actions, I’m happy for them to run without approval. Things like finding orders or products, those kind of things, or other ones where they’re actually changing data in your store. You might set them up to require your approval each time for a little while until you’ve got more confidence that it all works well and then at that point just always allowing them as well. But yeah, I think the simplicity of managing one MCP connection and having WooCommerce as part of that slack any of the other apps that you’re already using that you probably already got connected up to Zapier, having them all via the one MCP connection can be a real time saver for people, I think.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, let’s think about the cost side of things. Like I’ve had a Zapier subscription for years. I know that they have got a free plan for simpler like single steps, apps or whatever. And suddenly it got really expensive when I started adding AI steps because of the extra processing and so on. No, it wasn’t. It was the number of, what do you call them, tasks, the number of little jobs that Zapier does, it charges you by. And when I got to the AI side of things, it somehow got really complicated. And so how would somebody decide on the most cost effective way to set something up? Whether that’s Zapier directly doing something in AI, something that’s self hosted versus a SaaS like Zapier. How do people juggle all those costs and make a decision?

James Collins:
Yeah, great question. It’s an important one. Obviously doing something in a business only makes sense if it’s going to be viable. The return on investment needs to be there. I think I can see one point that Ian has touched on in the chat. He’s suggesting that Zapier is typically a lot cheaper for common tasks compared to something like Claude. Because yeah, obviously if you’re doing your basic automations in Zapier, it’s task based sort of pricing with your from memory might be your first hundred tasks a month included in that free plan and then needing the $20 a month plan after that as well. But that kind of pricing is often cheaper than eating away at your, your Claude or ChatGPT plan. The usage limits on those seem to be coming anecdotally, seem to be coming down over time at the moment. Especially something like Claude where they’ve got so many new users in, they’re really struggling and they seem, you seem to run out of your usage limit in a, in a chat window a lot quicker now than you were a few months back. That seems to be my personal experience at the moment too. So yeah, doing something like Zapier with the task based sort of pricing tiers, there is more often than not going to be cheaper, I would say more often than not as well. But yeah, you do need to run those calculations a little bit I think, to make sure you don’t want to automate just for the sake of it and then get a nasty surprise at the end of a month. But yeah, I think looking at it through that lens of being able to reduce human errors and saving time so you can spend your time elsewhere, it’s that opportunity cost trying to somehow quantify what that opportunity cost of all those hours that you would have spent in the month doing something manually, what’s that benefit to the business compared to the, the 20, 30, $40 a month you might need to spend on setting up an automation for it? That’s really, that’s the kind of equation you’ve got to do in your own head, I think really, isn’t it?

James Kemp:
Yeah, and I guess the, the true benefit of something like Zapier is connecting your one app to multiple apps. So like if, if your goal is to just have one integration that okay, I want to send all my orders to my accounting software of choice, then maybe the direct integration to do that is better than using Zapier, whereas Zapier would be more appropriate if you want to do that and you also want to do these, you know, 10 other automations that you want to manage in one place. So I think that’s a consideration as well is like what do you want to automate and what’s the most cost effective way to do that? And at what point, you know, does, at what point is it better to just do the thing manually versus actually automate it? And I think that comes through experimentation and doing the thing, seeing what the automation looks like.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, and getting more experience with it as well. Because initially it’s not too bad to set something up now because of the AI, but when you’re less familiar it can take a lot of time to set up an automation and then you think it would be two years worth of doing the job manually before I’ve made this time back. But then when you’ve done lots of automations, you’re getting pretty quick and you know what the gotchas are that you can avoid next time. So it then becomes more efficient.

James Collins:
Yeah, and I think in addition to that, for a long time Zapier’s had Zap templates available too. So often the best place to start searching something like Zapier Woocommerce to whatever your other app is that you want to integrate with doing, doing a search online for that you can. Zapier’s got thousands and thousands of templates they’re trying to, they’re creating pre, pre populated automations there that are a starting point for you and you can reconfigure them or tweak them from there as well. So you’ve got the natural language based approach of just prompting on how to set up a zap, but you’ve also got the zap templates as well. Both of those are a lot easier than trying to start from scratch and trying to manually click and drag and drop steps and configure the field mappings like you needed to do. That was really the only way of doing it a long time ago, but these days, yeah, it’s a lot easier than that, I’d say. And yeah, cost wise overall, I think it’s funny, isn’t it? You probably struggle to find someone these days to talk to that they’re not spending 20 or $30 a month on an AI subscription. That’s such a really common starting point for someone there as well. Spending a similar amount on, on an automation tool that’s going to help you with your, your deterministic sort of workflows and automations, but also your, your AI agent. They’ve got. Zappy’s got an AI agent solution as well. That’s still fairly early days, but has come a long way as well. Yeah, there’s a lot of different possibilities out there, but take that first step, give it a try, I think is a good way of approaching it and start small and build up from there. And in our experience, I think we, the reason we spotted the Zapier tool all those years ago was we were in our own business, we were looking for ways to do some automations and we came across Zapier and started using it internally for a few different workflows. And then we realized, you know what, WooCommerce back then wasn’t one of the apps that it supported. And we thought, well, seems like a no brainer. Woocommerce is growing in popularity. Let’s make sure that that’s supported by Zapier on there as well. And yeah, probably every few months we’re finding a different thing we can automate in our business using Zapier as well, even just separate to the WooCommerce connection in there. So yeah, it’s a, it’s a pretty big tool these days with a lot of different possibilities. So it’s a great place to start for people, I would say.

James Kemp:
How many zaps are you running? O.

James Collins:
Good question. I don’t know. Off the top of my head, I’d say we’d have at least 100 zaps turned on to help us automate things inside Tectalic, I would say. I mean, and in terms of the WooCommerce specifics from memory, I think there’s about 30,000 active WooCommerce stores that are using the Zapier integration and we see a couple of million tasks flowing through that solution every week on Zapier as well. So yeah, people out there are using it and finding it useful and we’re trying to find ways to improve it too. We’ve always tried to. We get feature requests from the zapier end because they help Woocommerce merchants trying to use the zapier tool. And then. And we get feature requests and support requests from the woocommerce end as well. So meshing all those together, figuring out what things are worth building next and trying to keep it simple for people to use by not adding too many options but also supporting quite a few use cases. That’s the sort of the line we’ve been trying to walk over the years. And yeah, in the meantime, Zapi has improved itself as well and really embrace the AI age as well. So yeah, it’s a pretty good, great place to start for people. Even if there’s people listening that haven’t got a WooCommerce store of their own or not they’re not involved in store management, just have a look at it, using it for Automations in your own business and I’m sure you’ll find ways in there to save you time, that’s for sure.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, absolutely. We don’t run WooCommerce because we use easy digital downloads and I’ve got got probably 20 zaps so I, I don’t win the race on that but we’ve got a lot set up that automate various things from marketing to what happens when an affiliate signs up and stuff with the customers.

James Kemp:
Yes.

James Collins:
Is Edd connected up to Zapier then? I’m not sure if that one off

Katie Keith:
the top of my head, but yeah, there is one. It’s so many years this Automations they run themselves so it’s years since I looked. But I think there is an EDP Zapier thing which we’ve got set up. But sometimes I’ve used hacky solutions like some of my zaps. You know their email parser where it reads an email that comes to you and you run it through their mailbox and then based on the contents of the email something happens. So for example, when I get a new sale notification email that goes through Zapier which picks out what their license tier is and sends them an email if they got a priority support license. So it will say congratulations, you get priority support. Here’s how to request the priority support that goes through a Zapier email parser which is a really hacky way to do it. But it’s been working for years.

James Collins:
Yeah, the email parser option or even their webhook option as well. A lot of apps out there, even if they don’t work with Zapier, they might have an option to send data to a webhook address when a certain event happens. So you can often get data into Zapier that way as well. That’s another, another way of doing it. But yeah, we’re definitely using the email parser or auto forwarding emails in from, from a Gmail mailbox, that kind of thing or just using the, the Google Mail connector in Zapier as well that of course that’s been there for quite a while too. But yeah, there’s a lot of information that flows through your inbox that needs a predictable reliable thing done to it in certain cases. So starting with those emails too like you just mentioned, Katie. Yep, great place to start with Automations too.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, Help Scout’s a good example of one way you need to use the webhook and then you can bring your Help Scout data in which helps to automate support.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. Well James, it’s been awesome having you on the show. I think there’s so much you can do with automation now and I think, you know, as this new era of technology evolves, there’s going to be so much more that we can do as well. So definitely appreciate you coming on and talking about how Zapier can help and how your extension helps as well.

James Collins:
Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks very much for your time.

Katie Keith:
Our next episode will be a special Checkout Summit Wrap up panel which will be on Wednesday 29th April with Rodolfo the organizer plus attendees Patrick Rauland and Remkus de Vries. I should learn how to say his surname. So yeah, hopefully we will see you before then at Checkout Summit. But if not, then check out the wrap up panel and discover what you missed.

James Kemp:
No pun intended. Please subscribe to do the woo. We’re on dothewoo.com we’re on YouTube as do the Woo podcast and we’re on X as Dothewoo. Thank you for watching and see you next time.