Three WooCommerce Tips for Simplifying the Complex

Tips from the Atarim Web Agency Summit

Deployment Automation

My name is Maciek Palmowski and you probably know me from Buddy or WP Owls. The tip I wanted to share today goes like this: invest in your CI/CD pipeline or in automated deployments. That means almost the same. Probably some of you think that creating a whole pipeline and a complete testing suit will take a lot of time and money and that it’s just not worth it. I can assure you that, while it does take a bit of both, in the long run you’ll see why it was a good investment.

Let me describe it with some example. Prohibiting your users from buying something on your store because of a bug that you just pushed to production is one of the worst things that can happen. With a decent testing suit you’ll catch more of those bugs early on, instead of production. Less bugs mean that your development team can concentrate on developing new features, rather than fixing stuff on production, which is rather stressful and no one likes to do this.

So in the result, everyone will be happy. You as a store owner will be happy because your store is just working, the new features are being added on time, and you can see that clients are making more and more purchases without any problems. Developers will be happy because they can concentrate on the fun stuff, on adding those new features, on adding some cool integrations, rather than doing those fixes on production and, for example, on checking some things that can be automated. Also, the clients will be happy because they won’t find any problems during shopping.

Thank you. I hope that this tip was useful and I hope you will come and join me at my session, Why WordPress Agencies Should Use Deployment Automation.

Streamlining Checkout

Hi I’m David Mainayar, co-founder at PeachPay and co author at Woo Weekly.

My tip to WooCommerce builders is simply to not forget about the checkout and payment experience. Cart abandonment and failed payments are two problems that regularly remain unaddressed but both are preventable. Conversion optimized fast, simple and stable checkout window, complete with the leading payment gateways, wallets and buy now pay later solutions can go a long way toward addressing these issues.

This checkout window should be accessible by button, click straight from product pages, the cart page, the mini side bar cart and beyond. Perhaps even on the homepage or gallery page. The button as well as the window itself should be customizable on a no code basis. Everything from the button, text, color border radius page, visibility to the checkout fields, product recommendations and payment methods that appear in the checkout window itself in regard to product recommendations.

The upsells, cross-sells and related products that appear in this window should all be easily configured, thereby ensuring that in addition to increased conversions, the merchant can expect a lift in average order value. This checkout window should be flexible enough to act as the one stop shop checkout option for those merchants who decide the checkout page is no longer necessary but seamless enough to act as a supplementary express check out option for those merchants who still need a little bit of convincing about whether checkout windows are the future.

Thank you and I hope you come and join me in my session, The Future of Online Checkout and Payments.

Avoid the Noise, Listen to What Matters

Hey, it’s Nev with nevharris.com. I want you to imagine something. Imagine right now you’re on the beach and you got some friends and you got a raft and you all want to go out into the ocean. But this isn’t your average day at the beach. The waves are eight to 10 feet high and the water at 60 degrees. And you’re thinking to yourself, “That’s not warm, but that’s not cold.” Well, water takes heat away from our body 24 times faster than air. So you get hypothermia in like an hour or two. Now I didn’t even mention the wind. So the wind here is a really strong sea breeze. And it’s so strong because the way beach is set up, it channels the wind to rip across the area you’re doing this, causing all sorts of issues. And now you’re like, “Oh, wow, no.”

But you go into the water and when you get to the point where the waves are breaking, it’s covered with uneven rocks. And it’s so easy to break an ankle there. And now you’re thinking to yourself, “Nev. I don’t want to go on this trip.” And you’re right. You don’t, unless you want to be a Navy SEAL, because this is part of Navy SEAL training, figuring out how to get that boat through those waves. And how they do it is using something called a coxswain. Weird word, I know. And she doesn’t row. She sits in the front of the boat and her only job, only job, is the count. She just counts. Now he isn’t the weakest or the most junior person on the team. He’s actually the leader of the team. And he has the most important role, but he doesn’t row. He just counts. He doesn’t worry about the temperature, the wind, the rocks, he just counts. She doesn’t worry about the direction, she just counts.

Now they are the only ones that are actually looking where they’re headed, but they aren’t steering. And you’re like, “Oh, okay.” Now let’s think of our typical boss or leader. They’re telling each individual what to do. “You do this, you do this, you do this this way. You do this like this.” And even when they’re working. And then they’ll even start micromanaging things. They’ll be sitting there barking out little orders, not barking, but saying little orders left and right. And getting involved in the minutia of the products and everything like that. And I know a lot of you do this, even though you shouldn’t, they often just do the work themselves.

They often just say, “Ah, that’ll only take five minutes. I’ll just do it.” Two hours later… But imagine the chaos, if the coxswain actually acted like this. I mean, if he started going and saying, “Hey, Sally, I need you to row 12% harder. And Rick cut it back a little bit man.” And saying, “Oh, the wind is this temperature.” And it would just be nutty. And you’re thinking to yourself, “Cool story, bro. But building WooCommerce websites is often far more complex.” And I would definitely agree with that. And that’s why you often have cost overruns and missed deadlines and all sorts of other unpleasant crap that happens.

But here’s the key you could use Account to simplify the complex. All right. So Account, it allows five guys to quickly and consistently get a raft through a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. So here’s the key takeaway. Here’s the main point to all this. Avoid the noise. Measure what matters.

I told you that whole story with lots of details, but the only thing a SEAL would care about is, “Five guys, one boat, let’s do it.” That story I told you, 90% of the details I gave you, 90% of the time I spent telling that story was noise, not what mattered, but that’s how we run our agency sometimes. When we’re running our agency, we’re surrounded constantly with data, but most of it is noise. And it’s why most agency owners waste tons of time being completely confused by their numbers, if they’re even brave enough to look at them, because they don’t know how to sort the crap from the good to actually get insight into their business, because all of them seem to matter somehow. What we need to do is avoid all of that noise and figure out what really matters so that we can measure it.

So here’s a trick. For many agencies I work with, I show them how to take five minutes a day, to check what I call the golden number. And that’s all they need to keep their agency running efficiently and profitable. Now you’re like, what is this number? This is your team’s total hours. The total number of hours you pay your team, divided by your team’s billable hours. So it’s how much you’re paying your team and how much you’re getting to bill for what you’re paying your team. So if that number drops, so track that over period of time. And if that number drops, you’ll know that there’s something you need to look into now for bigger WooCommerce shops or if you’re doing a bigger WooCommerce site, and say, you’re not doing 20 of these a month and it’s a longer, more complex process.

I’ve found that some of these agencies do better by tracking the time they bent on this current project versus the time that an average project of that type takes. So then they know exactly on a day-to-day basis are they tracking to hit their goal, or is something going wrong? Because a small deviation today leads to a large missed deadline in the future. Those are my tips. Thanks for listening. And I hope you come join me at my session. I’ll be talking about managing cashflow. And it’s the most popular talk I’ve ever given. So it’s a good one. See you then.

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