Selling Your WordPress Products Using WooCommerce

BobWP:
Hey everyone, BobWP here. It’s 2020 and we’re back with Do the Woo. I have my wonderful and very brilliant co-host, Brad Williams, joining me in this new year. Hey, Brad, how are you doing?

Brad:
Hey, that’s me. I’m good. You survived the holidays. How are you doing, Bob? Did you have a good holiday?

BobWP:
Yeah, it was nice and mellow. Yeah, really good. Nothing too exciting, but that’s kind of how I roll these days. How about yourself?

Brad:
Light off some big fireworks out there?

BobWP:
Oh yeah, yeah. Actually, we were really stormy on January 1st, so hardly. I mean, January 1st, I’m thinking of the wrong holiday. We usually hear a bit of it around here. They actually had to cancel some of the stuff around here. They canceled it in Seattle because of the winds, and they just had their laser show at the Space Needle. So I mean, we weren’t there, obviously, but yeah. So how about yourself?

Brad:
Had a good time, the end of the year into the decade. Exciting, right? I always enjoy, definitely a little more low-key as I get older, just sitting in front of a fire watching the shows, the countdown shows I enjoy every year. So yeah, had a good time. Now we’re bringing in the Roaring Twenties as they’re calling it, apparently. Again.

BobWP:
A lot of odd comparisons to the 1920s, but we won’t… that’s for your random show. There’s a topic. Well, we have a very special guest joining us for our first show in 2020. Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains. Welcome to the show, Brad.

Brad T.:
Hey guys, thanks for having me.

BobWP:
Now, Brad has several plugins. He has a cool business, like I said, called deliciousbrains.com. Tell us a little bit more about that, and then we’ll dive into more of your experiences around WooCommerce and how your products play into that whole space.

Brad T.:
Sure, yeah, we’re a plugin shop, but last year we actually launched our first SaaS app called SpinupWP. So that’s basically a control panel for hosting WordPress on DigitalOcean, Linode, or any kind of cloud service provider. And we’ve got three plugins: WP Offload SES, for offloading your email sending to Amazon SES, WP Offload Media, for offloading your media to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or Google Cloud Platform, and then our flagship product, which is the one we launched with way back in 2013, is WP Migrate DB Pro. You can move your WordPress site from one place to another with that plugin. So we’re about nine people, fully remote as is the custom in the WordPress business world. And yeah, things are good.

BobWP:
Cool.

Brad:
I love your products, by the way.

Brad T.:
Oh, thank you.

Brad:
I mean, the thing that stands out about your products is they’re developer-focused, right? And that’s not typical. I mean, probably everybody we’ve had on this show, Bob, who sells some type of product, is certainly not building and selling products towards developers or people building sites. So your products are awesome, they’re developer-focused, and they’re done extremely well. And that’s what you have a reputation for—just really solid products that work and save people a lot of time and a lot of money. So I highly recommend them. We use them a lot at WebDev.

Brad T.:
Awesome. That’s great to hear, Brad.

BobWP:
I think what I’d like to start out with is, obviously, all these products I think are beneficial to a WooCommerce site, but I know from a little bit of a talk beforehand that you actually, your site has been using WooCommerce since it launched, and you’ve done a lot around that. And probably now, going on, it will soon be seven years you’ll be on WooCommerce, and you’ve survived, and we tip our hats for that. So tell us a little bit about when you started, what made you decide on Woo, and then kind of what magic you did with it in the beginning?

Brad T.:
Yeah. Well, when we started, I guess Woo was pretty new, but I’d been following the whole Jigoshop thing. I think I was using Jigoshop when I was consulting or something. Anyway, I was paying attention to the e-commerce space, and when WooCommerce came out, it was great. It was kind of a much-needed e-commerce system in the PHP world, let alone in the WordPress world. And at the time, I believe Pippin was just getting started with EDD. I had looked at that, and it kind of looked like that was going to be a better fit for us because Pippin was really looking at focusing on software people who were selling software, whereas WooCommerce was kind of like a multipurpose, and actually WooCommerce at that time was really more about selling things that you shipped. I think it still is mostly targeted towards that, but nonetheless, we decided to go with WooCommerce. It was just a bit further along, and we ended up writing. We used the WooSubscriptions add-on at the time and the Software add-on. And just before my renewal started to kick in in 2014, I tested out some stuff, and I wasn’t super happy with the way the Subscriptions add-on was working. So I basically hacked together a Subscriptions add-on over three or four weeks and replaced the WooSubscriptions add-on with that. And we’ve been running a custom Subscriptions add-on for WooCommerce since then, so since 2014. And for better or worse, I would say it has its pros and its cons. But I mean, the cons are, obviously, every time we update WooCommerce or any of the other third-party plugins, we have to really test it really well to make sure that our custom code hasn’t broken somehow, right? One of the big downsides I find with a WooCommerce site is you have so many plugins, and they all have interdependencies, and one plugin updates, and it could break the one over here that you’re not even thinking it could break. So that’s something that we’ve struggled with all along, but we’ve put acceptance tests in place over the past couple of years that have really helped with that. So it’s really taken a lot of the manual testing after we update, really taken a lot of the pressure off the developer to test every possible use case and not forget anything. So overall, I think we’re in good shape considering how little effort and resources we put into it. We’ve neglected our site historically over the years, and it’s only in the last couple of years where we’ve really had a developer who’s dedicated to cleaning up the site and just improving it gradually, in addition to adding new pages to the site and all the other things that we need done with the site. So yeah, it’s been a bit of a journey, I guess, with WooCommerce for us.

Brad:
Well, that is kind of the blessing and the curse, like you said, of having a really talented development team. When there’s not something that does exactly what you want, I think the natural response is, well, just build it. We’ll build it. And we’ve done that a lot over the years, and I’m very much against that now. We’re not building it. Someone else has got something that has to, or at least they’ll get us closer. And then, because like you said, now you’re, I don’t know, “stuck” is the right word, but you’re using that, the stuff you build in, that’s a hundred percent on you and your team to maintain, which isn’t always the worst thing, but I think people need to understand what that means. If you do that, how’s that look five years from now? Like you said, you did this back in 2013, 2014, whatever. Here you are five years later, and it’s still something you have to continually test and make sure it’s working. So just some factors people need to think about when they make that decision. But I’m curious now, we’re in 2020 now, are you using additional off-the-shelf extensions with WooCommerce to also handle some of those enhancements you’ve talked about in the past couple of years?

Brad T.:
Yeah. No, not really. We try to keep the system as simple as possible because like I said, anytime you add additional plugins, you’re adding more interdependencies, more complexities to the system, more likelihood of something breaking when an update occurs. The worst bug happens when you do an update, you run the acceptance test, you test it yourself, and everything seems fine, and then three months later you realize the recurring payments weren’t firing in some crazy situation or something. There’s just a lot of things that could possibly go wrong. I think at one point we updated our server, the software on our server, and for some reason, some PHP package, I think it was the XML package, didn’t get installed or something, which isn’t really required for most things, but WooCommerce was using it as part of their email system. So our emails just stopped sending out, and we weren’t paying attention to that at the time, and our sales started taking a hit, and we were like, what the heck’s going on? And we looked into it, and sure enough, it was that the emails weren’t being sent out, so people weren’t getting their renewal notices, so they weren’t renewing. So we ended up, we now monitor emails. Long story short.

Brad:
I was going to say, I bet you check those more often now.

Brad T.:
Yeah, I looked for an email monitoring service where you could just BCC your emails to, and if the pattern of emails changed, it would alert you or something. Couldn’t find anything that exists like that. Do you guys know of anything? Have you ever heard of something like that?

Brad:
No, I haven’t.

Brad T.:
Maybe no one cares about this except for me, right?

Brad:
It’s a new market segment. You never know. Next time we talk to you, it might be a new product, could be a bad idea.

Brad T.:
So.

Brad:
Has there been any…

BobWP:
… time that you’ve obviously, I bet there’ve been numerous times, you’ve considered getting off WooCommerce and maybe looking at other options, how close have you gotten and maybe what made you stay with WooCommerce?

Brad T.:
Yeah, I guess one thing I’ll say is that there are benefits to having custom code as well. So we’ve been able to experiment with a bunch of different business models in the WordPress space that are not typical for WordPress plugins. So for example, WP Offload Media, each tier of that product is based on the size of your media library. So if you have a thousand media items, you’re at the bottom tier, and then 5,000 and you’re at this tier, whatever. And so we’ve been able to experiment with these different models, which is something you wouldn’t be able to do if you weren’t working on your e-commerce system. If you kind of just bought something off the shelf and said, I’m not going to touch this. We’re not going to customize it, we’re just going to run our billing through it. And so I think there are benefits to doing the custom thing, but there are certainly downsides, right? All the maintenance and work you have to put into it. So I think overall, I don’t regret it though. I think custom is the way to go. We’re actually in the process right now of updating our pricing for WP Migrate DB Pro as well. And what we’re doing there is also atypical. We’re going to treat Migrate DB Pro more like a PHPStorm or MAMP or downloadable software kind of business model. And so instead of being limited to a certain number of sites, it’s going to be unlimited sites you’re going to be able to use the product on, but the pricing will work by functionality. So you pay more for more features, that kind of thing, which is kind of how it is already. So it’s not going to be a big change, but it’s going to be a step in the right direction for us.

BobWP:
One of the things I noticed that you had mentioned and kind of what I was talking about, building your own custom e-commerce site. Now I’m talking about something I absolutely have no idea what I’m talking about, so it may not sound… It’s always my favorite part of the show. Yeah. Brad just sits back and lets me do this, is you had mentioned that you had wanted to build your own custom e-commerce site in Laravel and get off WooCommerce. Does that kind of play into what you just said? I mean, what was the decision there, you said, “Ooh, now I’m seeing the light.” Maybe you didn’t say that, but kind of that.

Brad T.:
Yeah, I think the main reason I wanted to get off WooCommerce was the dependency, the interdependency thing, and the headache with updating it and worrying about something being broken that we haven’t tested. If we built our own e-commerce system in Laravel, there might be bugs that we work out, but over time you work out all those bugs, and then it just becomes stable, and any updates are only the updates that we make and no one else is pushing updates at us. So it has that kind of benefit. But also the downside is you don’t get any improvements. WooCommerce’s updates are generally new improvements for us. I think the updates aren’t that important because we’re using, we’re not using WooCommerce for example. I think the latest version that’s come out has a bunch of widgets or what do they call it, blocks that allow you to add products, and that just doesn’t apply to us. So that update, there’s very little in that update for us, and yet we still need to update it, we still need to test it. We still need to go through, jump through all the hoops. So I think that’s why I was leaning towards building our own, but WooCommerce has gotten better, a lot better, and there’s a lot of momentum behind it, especially in just the last two or three years. I’ve noticed a big… seems like an acceleration. And so now I am firmly behind WooCommerce, and I think if we were to put dev resources into building something, it would be a better software subscriptions add-on that mixes all, or just fixes up our custom code that we’ve written and bundles it up as a product and makes it available to people or something like that. That’s something we’ve tossed around as an idea that we might do in the future, but we keep coming back to how many people are out there that would want this. It’s not something we’ve done. We’ve really just tossed it around. We haven’t talked to people, we haven’t done any customer development or anything, so it’s a pie in the sky idea at this point.

Brad:
So I’m curious on the product side, going back to your products, obviously they’re not… your flagship WP Migrate DB Pro, it’s not specific to any type of WordPress setup per se, so I’d imagine there’s a lot of people that benefit in the WooCommerce space or e-commerce space within WordPress that get the benefit of using your plugin. I’m curious, do you have any sense of an idea of the breakdown of people that are using this on sites running WooCommerce? Do you track that granular type of stat with your customers?

Brad T.:
We do fairly recently. I think we started, it might be a year, maybe a year and a half ago. So we do have some stats on that, but I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head and I couldn’t even, I’d have to ask somebody to pull it out because we built a custom statistics app that, anyway, it’s all locked away in a MySQL database and needs to be queried. But I’ve recently, recently found a really great system for that, and now I can’t remember what it’s called. I’ll find it for you and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. But yeah, I found this great system. We looked and looked and looked for a system so that we wouldn’t have to build it ourselves and didn’t find anything. And then just two months ago, I found a great system for that. Someone actually recommended it to me for doing funnel analysis, so for setting up an e-commerce funnel, and I was like, oh. And then I dug into the tool and I’m like, oh, this is just a general analysis tool. You can send any event you want to this and a bunch of data and attributes and stuff. This is perfect. This is exactly what I needed for… I think the app markets itself as an analytics tool for apps, kind of like mobile apps. So it didn’t come up in my searches when I was searching initially.

Brad:
Yeah, I know this is definitely a tool I recommend. I know one of the challenges of having an e-commerce store is making updates on a live site. You want to try things, you want to test things, you want to see how they look before you push them live. And of course, you should have a development server, maybe even a staging server of some sort of playground that you can test on, break things. You don’t have to worry about breaking the process. But one of the challenges in e-commerce is just keeping that data in sync so that when you’re testing changes in a dev environment or a local environment, whatever that looks like, it’s working with your live products, working with your real data. And I think that’s a huge benefit to this product because you can easily pull down and sync all of your production data to your local box or your development environment. So that way when you’re testing out either a new feature or even an update of WooCommerce per se, or an extension or just trying some things, maybe some A/B testing and want to see how they might look before you push them live, you can sync that data with one or two clicks and it really saves a lot of time and is a huge value. So that’s another reason why I recommend the product, because if you’re not working with your live data, you’re asking for problems when it actually does go live, right? It happens all the time. So I think it’s something that people should be thinking about if not already, is a product like this, or to make sure that when you’re testing those features on your store in your dev environment or local environment, that you’re syncing that data. So it’s as in sync with production as you can possibly make it.

Brad T.:
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that’s kind of where the product came from in the first place. I was working at an agency and I needed to move a site from my dev environment to the staging environment, and I was just like, oh my God, this is painful. If I have to do this ever again manually, I’m going to tear my hair out. And so I just hacked together this little solution. Basically I took a backup plugin that was sitting on .org and just hacked away at it until it became a migration plugin and then stuck it on .org. And it just kind of developed a following on there. And it wasn’t until 2013 when I was looking to start a business that it occurred to me that there

might be something there, and then the rest is history. It really took off after that. People really latched onto it as the kind of missing tool in their tool belt for WordPress development. So it’s served us well.

Brad:
Yeah, it’s always cool to hear stories like that, something that comes out of necessity for the job that you were doing, the light bulb goes off and you’re like, wow, this is cool. This could be… there’s something to this. You know what I mean? And then from that point to where you’re at now, 5, 6, 7 years later, to have a really, really awesome business that a lot of people respect and a lot of really happy customers out there, I love stories like that.

Brad T.:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s cool. All the great stories tend to be the ones I like the most as well, the scratch your own itch ones, where the person had a problem, decided to solve it, and then turns out that other people also wanted that thing.

Brad:
Exactly.

BobWP:
Now, one other thing I wanted to… before we go on to any of the other stuff we want to talk about, is I’m always intrigued with what people are doing as far as trying to test out new checkout experiences. And something in your notes caught my eye because you said you’re launching a new one on spinupwp.com. Tell us a little bit about that because I just love to hear the different strategies and thoughts behind when somebody takes their checkout system and does something to it.

Brad T.:
So the problem we were trying to solve there is that when we launched the app initially, the eCommerce system is built into the app. So whatever app.domain.com is your typical app, and that’s where the e-commerce system lives. But the main site is on domain.com. So spinupwp.com was our main site. So when you go to the pricing page and you click buy now, you end up on app.spinupwp.com or whatever, and it looks different and that’s bad. As we all know, if there’s a break in the experience with e-commerce that is going to lower your conversion rate and then… I mean add, there’s all kinds of things wrong with that. You’re going across domain, so you’re going from one domain to the next, and there’s a bunch of issues there with Google Analytics. So there’s just a bunch of problems there. So what we wanted to do is take our checkout and move it onto the site, but still keep the whole system in the app. We didn’t want to launch WooCommerce on our main site or anything like that. So what we’ve done is we created APIs and we built basically the client on the site. So on spinupwp.com, you click buy now, and then a lightbox comes up very much like the Stripe lightbox that you’ve probably seen lots in the past where it’s just… you can still see the site kind of in the background, and then it’s just a kind of wizard experience where they fill out this little couple of form fields, click next, click next, click next, and then buy. And so it keeps them on the site. They don’t have to go across domains, and we can better track people that way and it should increase our conversion rate. I’m really hoping it increases our conversion rate. But yeah, we’re just on the eve of launching that, probably this week, so I’m looking forward to getting that out there.

Brad:
Very cool. Yeah, I’d love to… Real quick before we move on, just touch on your blog. I’m a big fan of content. Over at WebDev, we have a pretty active blog. We have forever. It’s always been a big part of our company, and I think there’s a lot of wins from that. Obviously it allows us to write cool things that we’re interested in, technical pieces we write about our company, but by and large, a lot of it’s just our team contributing thoughts and ideas and new technologies they’re experimenting with or things like that. It’s a content marketing strategy for our company. It puts us as thought leaders in the space, and it’s also, in my opinion, a really great way to give back. And your blog is also very well known within the WordPress and development communities because you have very consistent writing on your blog with a lot of really interesting technical topics that you cover. And I’d like to just hear a little bit about that, how that strategy is, and how that came to be. I feel like our blogs are always up there when people talk about blogs in the community that have a lot of really good technical chops to them.

Brad T.:
Yeah, I sometimes introduce our company as a blogging company that does WordPress products on the side. We spend so much effort, time, and effort writing blog posts. So I think it was back in 2015, we decided… 2015 or 2016, I can’t remember, but we decided like, “Hey, we really got to get on this content marketing train here. That’s how you do marketing.” And so we started writing blog posts on topics that interest us. So my whole dev team, we’re the writing staff, and we would just pick a topic, write about it, publish once a week, and we’ve been doing that ever since then. So we’ve got over 250 blog posts on our blog, and traffic just went up and to the right. We went from… I can’t even remember what the numbers are, but orders of magnitude went from almost nothing to 10 times what it was. And we’ve reaped the benefits of that traffic coming to our site, discovering us, opting into our email list, and then eventually getting warm to our brand and our authority on certain topics, and then maybe trying our products out and buying them and becoming customers. So that’s kind of the process. It’s very rare that you’re going to get someone coming from Google and reading one of your blog posts and then just buying your product immediately. I think that’s not really the way I look at content marketing working. I look at people coming from Google, finding your blog post, try to get them on an email list and then warm them up to your company, and then hopefully they’ll buy something. Maybe the next time you release a product or next time you release a version of your product, they’ll hear about it and say, “Oh, I should try that out. That sounds like something I would use.” And so I think it’s worked for us. Whenever we send an email that talks about our product, a new release of our product, we get a bump in sales. And I think that’s what’s happening there. So it’s been beneficial. The only problem is that we weren’t really paying attention to how SEO has changed over the years. And actually this past year, 2019, our traffic peaked in January and started to slide, and we’re down about 35% in our traffic to the WP Migrate DB Pro pages and to our blog pages. So if a blog post was getting 5,000 uniques a month or something, it’s down 35% right from there. So it’s a problem that we have to resolve, and I’ve been digging into it for the past couple of months, and our ideas about SEO have been really outdated and the way Google looks at content now, you can’t just have a blog and publish a new post every week and Google and just feed the Google monster and they’ll reward you for it. It doesn’t work like that anymore. Google… and it hasn’t worked like that for a while. From what I understand, it’s been a few years at least, and Google really wants you to curate a library now. They want you to manage the click depth of articles. So how many clicks does it take to get to a piece of content? They will push that one down in the search engine rankings because they prioritize things that are kind of the closest to your homepage. So right now, one of our blog posts that we wrote in 2016, it probably takes you nine clicks to get to it, right? Because you got to go through our homepage to the blog, then through the archives seven times to get to it. And Google just basically says that content is no longer relevant because it takes that many clicks to get to it. I mean, that’s one of the ranking factors, but it’s an important one apparently. So we’ve got a lot of work to do this year. We’ve just woken up to this, and so we’ve really got to reorganize our content, get it out of the blog, start surfacing it on our sales pages better and that kind of thing.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s something anyone can learn from because I like it, especially for our developers and engineers because it gives them a break from the grind of pushing code and shipping code. It allows them to maybe explore some new technologies or something that they’re interested in and dig a little deeper into it. And like you said, it’s a great marketing tool. It’s also a great way to give back. Obviously we put content out there in the hopes of brand recognition and thought leadership and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, it’s also teaching other people what you’re learning and things that you’ve learned. And even a lot of times getting feedback in the form of comments or responses on social of some different ways to look at stuff and think about stuff. But I am always surprised by the number of companies that don’t really… don’t do it. They publish anything maybe once a month, and it’s like just, “Hey, look at what we did.” It’s like, I don’t know. So I’ve always really respected that you guys pump out some really high-quality content very consistently, and I know a lot of people follow it.

Brad T.:
Do you have your team on a schedule? Do they have to write a new post every so often or…?

Brad:
There is a schedule

in terms of our publishing schedule; however, it’s really part of our… we have what we call a downtime policy, so when there’s gaps in between work and stuff, there’s things they can fall back on. And blogging, writing content is one of those items they could choose. So it’s less strict in terms of, “You, Bob, have to write one new fresh post a month.” It’s more kind of aligned with work schedules and gaps in client work and stuff like that. There are times when there’s a particular topic we’re interested in digging into more that we’ll assign it out and have somebody volunteer to push on it a little bit harder when things like Gatsby are blowing up and everybody wants to talk about Gatsby. So we dig into that, but it’s also, our team learns from it too, so we take those lessons learned and do internal training and stuff as well. So there’s a lot of wins around it.

Brad T.:
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. My team has been… I mean, we’ve been doing it for quite a few years now and kind of the same people, and we’re only six developers or five developers. And so you’re talking about a post… you have to write a post every month roughly, so it gets to be a bit much. So I decided that it’s high time that we hire an actual writer, someone who wants to write and isn’t being forced to write. And so we’re in the process now of trying to hire what I’m calling a developer writer. So a developer who wants to write full time, essentially, is the role, which is a weird thing, right? Sounds…

BobWP:
… like an oxymoron to me. Right, right.

Brad T.:
Yeah, exactly. I don’t expect it to be an easy thing…

Brad:
Good luck. I’m sure they’re out there, but good luck. You’ll find them.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’m impressed. I was looking because… and Brad knows this, I spend tons of my time with content and yeah, definitely. This is something I don’t see a lot of, especially on any sites that are plugin shops, putting this kind of depth into the content, even looking at some of the posts themselves, and I can still get this… I spent the last two weeks during the holidays just going in and tweaking content and creating some more links, interlinking, which I do a lot of, and working on my cornerstone content and all these different things. And it is… I admire any company that takes the time to put this much energy into it because I know just as somebody that does it almost full time what it takes, and Google is constantly messing with you, and you have to tweak it around, and sometimes it can be amazing what you find. You might think that something was very small and it makes a huge difference. And even keeping content fresh, I’m constantly updating old posts, looking at what’s really ranking and going in and adding more to it or updating it in one way or another. And it’s a constant battle.

Brad T.:
Yeah, yeah, it is. And it’s something you have to really pay attention to and keep on top of. Yeah, I was really surprised about the updating content thing because the way we’ve been operating is if we wanted to update, create an updated version of a post, we would just publish a new post with the content… it would be very different. It’d be different screenshots, different everything. We’ve done this with benchmark posts. We compared the performance of Varnish caching with Nginx FastCGI caching. And so I did that in 2016, and then Ash did the same post essentially, but with new benchmarks and new data in 2018. But it turns out Google doesn’t like that. They want you to update the original post and just get rid of the old content. And I think I took the idea of permalinks way too seriously where it’s supposed to be a permanent page that doesn’t change on the internet, an archive for future generations.

BobWP:
Yeah, actually I do a lot of my content… when I update, I actually take it off the grid for about an hour, and then I republish it with a new date, the current date. And that doesn’t affect anything as far as the traffic. I mean, especially if it’s a high-ranking post, it just kind of continues on its way, but it’s recognized as fresh content, kind of brings it to the surface again, in front of some new eyes too. So yeah, it’s definitely a lot of work. Yeah, and we could talk about content. Don’t get me started, please. We’ll go ahead and go off on too many tangents here. But yeah, so before we close out, I did have a couple… we want to get into the news a little bit more around here, and yeah, just a couple of things to share. WooCommerce 3.9, well, I could say it’s on the cusp. It may actually be out by the time the show is published, but either way, I know Brad, you’d said, yeah, hey, you got to update. Even though it’s not always features that you just say, well, I’m going to use, and I know one of the… well, probably the biggest thing to it this time as far as features is just adding a block that basically replicates a shop page. And yeah, it’s something… I kind of like it that they’re adding these in bit by bit rather than just slamming them in all the time. And then the big thing with the update on… as far as minimum PHP and WordPress requirements, and I’ll never understand PHP for as long as I live. Maybe I care less to understand about… I just kind of follow the crowd. But obviously this is quite a big thing and a lot of people had to be prepared for it. And just from your discussion and your talk around maintenance, Brad, it’s probably… I don’t know if that’s like, yes, that’s a great thing, or is that, whoa, is that kind of drawing some other challenges?

Brad T.:
Yeah, no, it’s definitely a good thing for anyone who works on WooCommerce. Now they could potentially use features in PHP 7.0, and that’s a great thing. The problem is I don’t believe WordPress has increased the minimum required version to anywhere near 7.0. So I’m not exactly sure what that means for the ability to use… I guess what it means is that if you’re doing custom work… we do our work on WooCommerce, we can use the latest and greatest anything because we know exactly what our version of PHP is going to be on our server. But if you’re developing add-ons for WooCommerce for general consumption, I guess you can now support any features in PHP 7.0 and below, which is certainly a good thing for those developers. Certainly a welcome update.

BobWP:
As an agency… the other Brad, is that at the level you are and with your clients, is that even ever a concern when something like this comes along as far as existing clients, but you pretty much have a handle on that and make sure they’re running on what they need to be running on?

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, most of the clients who work with are working with our recommendations. They’re going to be working on even newer versions of PHP, 7.2, 7.3. It’s not often we come across a client that is forced to use something less than 7.0. It does happen. You think about it, every once in a while we come across clients, it’s forced to support IE8 and you question why, but it’s usually a big corporation and for them to get those updates, it’s tough. It’s not…

Brad T.:
Just… I would’ve guessed government, that would’ve been my guess.

Brad:
Government and financial institutions are the two biggies that stand out because it’s tough for them to upgrade anything.

Brad T.:
My optometrist still uses Windows XP, I think.

Brad:
They had one of those… the local train station here in Philly, 30th Street Station, they had one of those tickers that would show you the trains, and it was running off of, I think they said, Windows 3.11. They finally were like, we have to switch it out for a digital board. And everybody was up in arms like, no, you can’t. They’re like, look, this thing runs Windows 3.11. We can’t update it. We have to switch it.

Brad T.:
My hardware store prints its receipts on dot matrix printers. I’m like, whenever I go in there to order some lumber or anything else, I’m just like, what year is this? I just get time warped.

Brad:
I mean, it’s out there, but we don’t run across it often. So obviously newer versions, there’s a lot more advancements. They’re still supported. They’re much, much, much faster. A lot of reasons to update.

BobWP:
Well, there’s a few other small things that people can check out if they haven’t already checked out in the update. And the other article that I came across… this article is about a month old because apparently nothing e-commerce wise happens during the holidays, which is kind of hilarious in its own way, but we’ll just touch on it briefly. But it was some research done based… some data based on CBD integration and it showed the difference between WooCommerce and Shopify and who is using what. And the data shows that 59% of those sites that are doing CBD are using Shopify, 41% WooCommerce. Does that… and especially I know Brad, I don’t know if you have any clients on Shopify or if you’ve had clients. I mean, does that surprise you? Does that sound about right? How do you guys feel about those numbers

?

Brad:
Doesn’t surprise me. Honestly, if I was surprised about anything, I would probably have guessed Shopify would be more… even more than that. Just because…

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s what I was wondering.

Brad:
Yeah, I feel like Shopify is all about like, yeah, you could sell CBD if it’s legal in your state. They have a whole bunch of pages about it, all this great information, FAQs, all that good stuff where WooCommerce is just confusing as hell. Well, you can, and it’s like… to the average user, what does it mean if I connect to WordPress.com’s services, then I can’t sell CBDs? It’s just confusing. You know what I mean? So I feel like just that alone, I think people would want to end up on Shopify because they have so much good content kind of encouraging them to do it if it’s legal in their state.

Brad T.:
Yeah, Shopify is Canadian, right? And weed’s legal up here.

Brad:
You guys love the wacky tobaccy.

Brad T.:
It’s all good. It’s all good, man. It’s…

BobWP:
All good.

Brad:
Don’t be long until Bob makes the trek. You’re pretty close to the Canadian border. What, you like a hundred miles or something? 50…

BobWP:
Yeah. Well, it’s legal here in Washington.

Brad:
Oh yeah. You don’t even have to leave your house.

BobWP:
I still got to get you that picture of the sign. That’s right. When we pull off to go home… it says, “Last chance to get weed.” So one of these days I’ll share that for you.

Brad:
See, by us, it’s fireworks. “Last chance to get fireworks.”

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s called the Weed Shack. So I haven’t been in it, but that’s always our last chance, apparently.

Brad:
Nice.

BobWP:
But anyway, well cool that… yeah, just wanted… it was interesting stats. I’ll put a link in to the article. People want to check it out more, but I felt kind of the same way that I was surprised it was that close, but obviously there’s… yeah, something’s working, right? So, alright, well that I think, is it? I think we’ve run a bit here, Brad, our guest… I keep going, Brad, Brad, Brad, Brad, Brad, Brad. It sounds like an echo, but appreciate you coming on. I’m going to have the other Brad kind of close this out here with a few things.

Brad:
Me? Brad? I’m confused.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah, you, Brad. Yeah, that Brad.

Brad:
The Brad, the other host. Cool. Yeah, let’s wrap it up. So Brad T, where can people find you online?

Brad T.:
Well, you nailed it. It’s Brad T on Twitter, and I guess you can find our blog at deliciousbrains.com and all our products are there as well. So there you go.

Brad:
Very cool. Any events or anything on the horizon here as we’re getting into the new year and I guess event season’s still a few months away, but any upcoming events people might be able to catch you at?

Brad T.:
We will be at WordCamp Europe in June. We will have a booth as… we’ll be there as SpinupWP. So trying to get that branding out there. And yeah, so stop on by and say hello if you’re at WordCamp Europe.

Brad:
I hope to make it. It’s in Portugal this year, right? Porto?

Brad T.:
Yeah, we’re doing our company retreat there as well. So we’re going to have the whole team in Portugal.

Brad:
And where do we apply to work at Delicious Brains?

Brad T.:
Yeah, we’re hiring right now. So yeah, check out our job postings.

Brad:
There you go. Over at deliciousbrains.com. Very cool. And as always, you can find me on Twitter, @williamsba. Bob, anything on the horizon for you?

BobWP:
Nothing really. Just been busy with the site. Kind of was the official launch Tuesday of kind of moving the site forward and focusing a little bit more on community and news around the Woo space. So I’m keeping my head down and on the keyboard doing all that good stuff.

Brad:
Very cool. I have no official… I’m hoping to make WordCamp Europe. I don’t know, it’s a little ways out. So now that the new year is here, I can actually start thinking about 2020. I don’t like to get too far ahead until we hit the new year, so nothing official for me yet, but I will give a quick plug to an announcement I made, which is a new book I’m going to have coming out called Professional WordPress Plugin Development, second edition. So the first one we wrote about nine years ago, if you can believe that. And I’ve been working with Justin Tadlock and John James Jacoby… Triple J is joining us for this version. So if you’re interested in building amazing plugins like Brad T over here and his team, it’s a great starting point and it’s a pretty deep dive. It starts though with the basics but gets pretty advanced pretty quick into how to build really elaborate professional WordPress plugins the right way. So check me out on Twitter. I got all sorts of links out for that. Should be out a little bit later this year. So pretty excited about that.

BobWP:
Cool. Congrats. Alright.

Brad T.:
Congrats, man. 10 years nearly for that book.

Brad:
I know it’s been a few years trying to get this thing moving forward, so I’m pretty excited to get it out. I get asked about that book more than any of the other ones, so I think it’ll be… it’s got to be pretty good. I’m excited about it. So keep an eye out for that. Definitely subscribe to the show. Where are we at? We’re over at bobwp.com, right Bob?

BobWP:
Right. And all the other great platforms, all your pod platforms, you can find us everywhere.

Brad:
Sign up for Woo News and become a friend of the show. All the links right there are right on bobwp.com. And with that, we’ll see you on the next show.

BobWP:
Alright, see you later.