What Headless eCommerce Means for WordPress and BigCommerce

Brad:
Welcome back to another episode of Do the Woo podcast, episode number 26. We have a special one for you today because Bob is not here. It’s me, just me, your favorite co-host, Brad Williams. That’s okay. Bob’s unable to make it today, but we’re still charging ahead. We’ve got a great guest I’m very excited about, so let’s go ahead and bring him on. His name is Topher DeRosia.

Topher:
Hello?

Brad:
Hello. Hey, Topher, how’s it going?

Topher:
Going great.

Brad:
Excited. I’m—

Topher:
On a podcast.

Brad:
You’re on a podcast with me and not Bob. Great. And—

Topher:
Not Bob.

Brad:
Sorry to disappoint because I know this is the Bob WP hour. That’s right.

Topher:
I’ve been on Bob’s podcast before. I’ve never been on one with you.

Brad:
Well, all right. Now, when we round out the show here, I want your honest opinion on who you like better, okay? No pressure. But I’m excited about having you on, Topher, and why don’t you just quickly give everyone a high-level bio, who you are, what you do, and then we’ll dig into it from there.

Topher:
Sure. I have been a web developer for 25 years now. My wife says from back before when there were pictures on the internet. I’ve been a WordPress developer since 2010, so we’re coming up on, well, I guess it’s right about nine years, right about now. I live in Michigan, married, two kids, two dogs, little house. I currently work for BigCommerce as a WordPress developer evangelist, which means I have to go to WordCamps, share beers with my friends, and tell ’em about it.

Brad:
So first question, where do I apply? No, I think it’s great, and that’s one of the reasons I said I’m very excited about this show. This is obviously a WooCommerce-focused podcast, but you are in an interesting role because you have a very heavy WordPress background. Since 2010, you’ve been involved in a number of things, including HeroPress, and now you’re an advocate for BigCommerce, which is not a WordPress-specific plugin. However, it integrates very well with WordPress. We’re going to talk about that, but I thought it’d be fun to have you on because we talk a lot about WooCommerce, and WooCommerce is great, but it’s not the only player on the block. BigCommerce has been growing significantly in the space, and if anyone here has attended a WordCamp of any size, you’ve probably seen BigCommerce as a sponsor and a lot of their literature and booths. I know they were at WordCamp US last year and things like that.

So it’s definitely been growing in the WordPress-specific space, and I thought it’d be fun to have you on to talk about that, to talk about not only the growth we’ve seen around BigCommerce integrations with WordPress but also how it stands and lines up against WooCommerce. I think a lot of people out there would be interested in that. So let’s kick it off. From your own words, what is BigCommerce? Really break it down for the audience. What is it? How does it essentially compare to WooCommerce? Probably the number one question you get, and we’ll go from there.

Topher:
How’s it different? Sure. Traditionally, BigCommerce is an e-commerce SaaS. You go to our website, you pay $30 a month, and you have a store. We’ve been doing that for 10 years, and it’s a great business and things are awesome, but it has its own issues, and we’re always trying to solve those issues. One of the issues is that our blogging system, our built-in blogging, was really, really simplistic. Regularly people would say, “Can I install WordPress inside BigCommerce?” and of course the answer is no. But what we found out is that’s the case for all e-commerce SaaS products. There is not one with good blogging, and since content marketing is a huge part of e-commerce, that’s a big problem.
Another issue that came up was people would come to us saying, “Hey, we don’t like our old e-commerce solution. We want to try BigCommerce.” We’d say, “Well, what is your old one?” And they’d say, “Well, we’re on WooCommerce and we’re on WordPress.” And the issue is that they were scaling out. That’s the primary reason people leave WooCommerce for anything else, really—they scale out. Once you fill up that orders table and your users’ table and it just goes bananas, then it’s not worth throwing more money at RAM and CPU. So people were leaving WordPress because WooCommerce was failing them, and we said, “Well, what if we were able to take care of the e-commerce part of that? Then you can stay on WordPress, keep your 10 years of SEO, and solve for the real problem, which is e-commerce, as opposed to your content management system.”

So there were two reasons. Another reason is we have a great API. Partly planned, partly coincidental, we just, over the years, put the resources into it. We had some large companies build some big things on our API and come to us and say, “Look what we built.” And we were like, “Whoa, that’s amazing. We never even thought of that.”

So a couple of years ago, the president of the company said, “We need better buy buttons. We need to make it so people can embed buy buttons in their WordPress site.” And somebody said, “Hey, well, what if we just made a full-on WordPress plugin and made it so you could just go all the way and embed everything in WordPress?” And he said, “Brilliant, go.” That’s one of the things I love about our president. When somebody comes with a good idea, he just says, “Here’s all the resources you need. Just go make it happen.” So we did that. We hired Modern Tribe and XWP, both at the same time, and they put in a lot of work. Now we have a WordPress plugin that is API-driven, has our SaaS on the backend, and it’s very fast. It’s inexpensive, works great, and is very secure.

There’s a whole lot to recommend it, and that’s where we are today. Did I answer that question properly?

Brad:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the big thing that stands out for me—you mentioned scaling, and that’s always a good problem to have, right? It means something’s working. Your store’s taking off, orders are coming in, people are finding your products or your services. You’re having to scale up servers and resources, things like that. Great problem to have. But I think your point’s very valid. That is an area where people can struggle as stores grow because the expenditures around servers and supporting that increase significantly as your store grows. It’s really no different from a website that’s very successful and getting a lot of traffic. The biggest difference is there’s money exchanging hands—obvious difference, I guess—transactions, which can certainly cost quite a bit to support.
I know BigCommerce, a tagline you like to describe the service with is “headless commerce within WordPress.” I know headless is all the buzz and has been for—

Speaker 5:
Right?

Brad:
—for the last few years. I feel like a lot of people come to us and say, “I need a headless website.” And we’re like, “Okay, well, what are you trying to do?” “Well, it’s to promote a new product.” “Well, why does it need to be headless?” So I like the idea of headless in certain situations where it makes sense. Why don’t you touch on—or maybe you can expand on that—how BigCommerce, I think you alluded to this a little bit in your description, but what makes it headless in the sense of headless commerce?

Topher:
At its most simple, it means that you’re just doing e-commerce over the API. We wrote a plugin for WordPress to operate for that, but we also have a contract with Acquia, and they wrote a module—what does Drupal call plugins? Modules?

Brad:
Yeah, modules.

Topher:
So there’s a BigCommerce module for Drupal now, and e-commerce is basically the e-commerce of Drupal. Anybody who wants to can write their own store in any language they want against our API. We have several known React stores in the wild where people just wrote their own in React and hit the API where they needed it to list products and do a cart and all that stuff. You could get crazy and do it in Perl. I’ve talked to some Joomla developers, and so far everybody thinks it’s a wonderful idea. As soon as everybody throws a lot of money at them, they’ll do it right away. Isn’t that how all ideas—

Brad:
Oh, yeah.

Topher:
Great idea if you want to pay for it. I recently talked to somebody who’s big in the Django world with Python, and she’s very excited. She’s written her own e-commerce from scratch, like a WooCommerce-style thing, and is not very happy

with it. So she’s excited to basically let somebody else take care of the e-commerce, and that’s what it’s really all about.

Right before WordCamp Europe, I pinged Morten Rand-Hendriksen and said, “Hey, can I interview you while we’re at Europe?” And he said, “Yeah, but you’re not going to like what I have to say.” I said, “Why, you hate e-commerce?” He said, “No, I just think there should not be any e-commerce in WordPress ever.” I said, “Why? What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, WordPress makes things so easy, so simple, that people get the idea that e-commerce is simple and easy, and it’s not. It’s inherently not. It’s inherently dangerous. You’re storing other people’s financial data. You are storing just an enormous amount of things that you should not be in WordPress.”

And I said, “Well, now you’re preaching to the choir because that’s what BigCommerce for WordPress is all about. All that stuff gets stored on our servers. The only thing in WordPress is a custom post type of your products, so it’s not that big a deal.” So what headless really means is BigCommerce does what it’s best at—e-commerce—and you get to do what you are best at, which is building websites, and you can merge them together in any way you want.

Brad:
Yeah, I think that’s one area that really stood out for me. I had the same impression when I first started learning about BigCommerce—really dug into it to understand it and the differences. I had the same kind of assumption, that yeah, it’s just another service that’s going to push things into WordPress where they maybe shouldn’t be.

That approach that BigCommerce has taken, which I really like, is like you said, it’s headless. So here’s our service that is kind of the backbone powering your store. It is your store, right? It’s a third-party service, which is BigCommerce, and you can interact with it through our API. You can use our plugin, you can build something headless—our platform is at your disposal. However you want to integrate it into your site, or not, even the whole checkout process. There are a number of different ways you can do that, which I really liked because I felt that it lined up with the WordPress way of doing things, which was a lot of flexibility. It’s not just, “Use it this way, or it doesn’t work for you.” You can use it however you see fit for your business.

Whereas on the flip side, you have a plugin for WordPress and a lot of information on integration and stuff like that. And then on the flip side, I look at things like Spotify where they’ve taken the approach of, “WordPress is great, but if you’re going to use Spotify, you really need to be on our website, using our platform. You can promote your products on WordPress, but ultimately, we want to bring you back over to our platform.” It’s a very different business approach, a very different strategy—almost polar opposites, if you ask me.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, I agree.

Brad:
I’m curious, you mentioned that your president loved the idea and made the decision to build it this way, so it could be easily integrated with WordPress and other platforms. I’m curious what went into that decision versus the kind of Shopify approach, which I think is more the traditional approach of, “If you want to use our platform, you need to come to our website.”

Topher:
Right.

Brad:
I’m curious what went into that, if you’re seeing really good success and results from that, and just what some of the feedback’s been.

Topher:
Yeah, we are, and some of it was surprising to me. I expected new store owners to just jump on it and be really happy about it, but one of the directions that I saw a lot of traffic that really surprised me was existing customers being able to do more than one store now because we have what we call channels. You have your store, and then you can also push your products to Amazon and eBay and Facebook and Instagram, and those are channels that we created. Then you just put your credentials in and you can use them. But now with headless, each—I don’t want to say head—each, whatever it is, each WordPress instance is a channel, and the customer gets to make as many as they want.
So you’ve got your BigCommerce store, and you can install five WordPress stores, all on the same account. Very large customers, enterprise-level people who might be selling toothpaste, for example, along with everything else, are able to make branded microsites selling five things or 10 things, and they can make as many stores as they want.

We had somebody just come out of the blue and say, “Hi, I am a new customer, and I would like to set up a 200-node WordPress multi-site with each one being a store.” And I was like, “Great. I’m happy for you that you have that many stores. I don’t know how that works, but it works.” It works just fine. Another example would be somebody who sells sports memorabilia. They can set up a football site and a baseball site, etc. And then somebody else just mentioned to me the other day the idea of selling competing products. For example, here in Michigan, we have Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, and people who sell to fans usually sell both, but not in the same store. That’s just rude.

Brad:
I would bet it’s not in the same store.

Topher:
So they can put up their MSU store and their U of M store off the same account, off the same inventory, pushing the same stuff to Amazon, all that stuff. And if you sell out of a hat on Amazon, it takes it off your WordPress site, or vice versa. We had a lot of people who were already customers get very excited about the new flexibility to be able to do this kind of thing.

Brad:
Yeah, it is pretty wild when you think of the various possibilities. Ultimately, when you have a robust API, that’s the reason you have it, right? Because the sky’s the limit. Anytime I think of APIs, the number one example I like to bring up is Twitter. Twitter’s obviously massive, and everybody knows about it. One of the reasons Twitter, in my opinion, was so popular early on is because they had a very accessible API and encouraged third-party services, apps, tools, whatever, to use it, to integrate with it, and it broke it.

Topher:
Yeah.

Brad:
Now that’s back then; today’s probably a different story. But it got a lot of these apps out there. It got people that were like, “Okay, I’m interested in using Twitter, but I could use it in the way that I wanted,” to find the app or the service that worked for me versus this kind of prepackaged service, “and you use it the way we tell you or you don’t use it.”
So I love seeing a really robust API because the possibilities are just endless for what your clients, your customers, even your partners can do with it. I think another area that is really interesting and something that I would bet a lot of shop owners, when they first start out—if you’re starting your first online store, your first business online—you may not realize the impact or importance of it initially, but you certainly will at some point. Things like compliancy, like PCI compliance.

Topher:
Oh, yes.

Brad:
That’s a big one. That can get people in a lot of trouble if they don’t know what they’re doing, if they don’t understand the rules and regulations around it.

Topher:
Back when I was a freelancer, I had a number of clients who came to me and said, “Hey, we need to be PCI compliant.” I’m like, “Well, I’m a web developer. I can figure it out.” No, no. PCI compliance only leads to tears.

Brad:
Yeah, it’s been around forever. I mean, back when I was at my job before WebDevStudios, I was the IT director at a big e-commerce store, and PCI compliance was a thing back then, even though it was probably more simplified than it is now. But that’s a big thing to make sure that what you’re doing is in compliance, to make sure that your customers are protected, your data is secure, you’re only transmitting things that need to be transmitted, storing things that need to be stored. The days of just storing open, plain-text credit card information in your database are long gone—certainly should be, right? So it’s an area that I think people need to look at.

Can WooCommerce be PCI compliant? Sure. I would expect any e-commerce platform can. The question is, is it, and how do you keep it compliant without accidentally breaking that compliance with a new feature, tool, or something you’re integrating? Now, BigCommerce—correct me if I’m wrong—handles that compliance at the service level, so that’s something that, by and large, is just done, right? There’s really nothing they have to do there?

Topher:
There’s nothing to be done. We take care of it completely. And not only that, I didn’t realize this until I started working there, but there are different levels of PCI compliance. The ISO (International Standards Organization)

has started taking part, and we are at the highest level of ISO PCI compliance you can get.

Brad:
That’s great.

Topher:
And the other thing is, if you’re managing your own PCI compliance, you can never just rest on the fact that you’ve done it because it will change constantly. I know some hosts—SiteGround, for one—offer a specifically PCI-compliant server, which just means that at the server level, it’s compliant. Then it’s on you to manage all of your data, all the new data that comes in every single day forever. You have to look at it all the time. It’s not just something you can say, “Oh, yeah, we hired a committee, and they made us PCI compliant last year, and now we’re done.”

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point, and that is true for a lot of things. Accessibility comes to mind—just overall maintenance. I love the phrase that open-source or WordPress is free like a puppy is free. Yeah, it’s open-source. It’s free to download; it’s free to use. Whether you set up your site yourself or pay somebody, ultimately the software is free at the core. However, just like a puppy, there are ongoing costs that will always be there. You still have to feed that puppy and take care of it to make sure it’s healthy and good. It’s very similar with accessibility, compliance, and even getting into things like GDPR and really taking care of your users’ data. It’s an ongoing task that will never be done. It can never be done.

Topher:
Absolutely.

Brad:
You always have to monitor it. The biggest thing I always preach about accessibility is you can make your website accessible top to bottom on day one—it’s great, it launched—but as soon as content editors get in there, that’s the quickest way to break that accessibility. They start uploading images with text or whatever, leaving out things within the content that makes that content accessible, and if you’re not policing it, you break that accessibility. Now you open yourself up to—who knows what, right?

Speaker 5:
Yeah.

Brad:
So I think it’s something that people may consider just in general, and this is not even necessarily WooCommerce or e-commerce-specific, but just website-specific—like the ongoing cost and understanding around those compliance regulations, things you need to do to protect yourself as a business. In this case, PCI compliance is a biggie. That’s a big one.

Topher:
Yep. It really is.

Brad:
So what else is going on at BigCommerce? Anything on the horizon? Any new services, features? Anything you’re excited to talk about or want to touch on?

Topher:
It’s interesting. It’s hard for me to look too far ahead because things are coming so fast. I remember when Netscape 1.0 came out, and then a month later 1.1 came out, and it had an entirely new set of features. A few months later, 2.0 came out, and they invented tables, and you could align images to the right and things like that. Every single release changed the web, and it was amazing and exciting. It was a really big deal.

It sort of feels like that with the BigCommerce plugin right now. Every release we do is some big new feature, and we’re like, “Wow, that’s amazing. I didn’t think about the fact that was going to happen.” So I can’t give you specifics about what’s coming except that everything is coming—and it’s coming quickly and it’s amazing and fast.

Brad:
Everything. I like it. Everything. I think that’s a good summary of the web in general—everything is changing all the time. Just be ready for change. There are some things that we’re doing with WordPress that we aren’t necessarily doing with Core as quickly. We’ve wanted for a long time to do multicurrency and multilingual, and it’s in the repos. They’re working on it in Core, but we realized quite quickly that with WordPress, we could ramp it up extremely quickly. In fact, we have some people using it in beta right now, where they basically set up multiple channels—I talked about channels before, and I said that a channel was a WordPress site. But now we’ve made it so you can have multiple channels per WordPress site, and those channels are languages or currencies.
We have one site doing both at the same time—multilingual—and they chose to use GeoIP stuff to figure out where people are coming from, dynamically switching the channel, and serving them the proper currency and language. Our core doesn’t do that. You’d have to put work into just about anything else to make it do that, so that’s really exciting.

Brad:
Yeah, that is cool. I know some hosting companies have ways you can integrate that a little bit—geolocation detection, things like that, for location detection and then serving up certain content based on that. But yeah, I think having something more officially in Core, rather than everyone trying to find their own solution, would be great. Like you said, I know they’re working toward the localization piece, but that’s a big one. Even at our company, a lot of the sites we build have multilingual components. It’s becoming more and more popular, especially as the world’s becoming more and more remote and accessible via online. You’ve got to make sure you’re getting the content out to as many people as you can, and the way to do that is proper localization in various languages to support anybody that comes to your site—especially on e-commerce. The last thing you want to do is send someone away from a product they want to buy because they can’t read the description.

Topher:
Right. When I went to WordCamp London, I was just telling people I bought a product. They were like, “Oh, yeah, that’s cool, more e-commerce, another one.” And then I said, “Yeah, and we’re working on multicurrency,” and everybody’s eyes lit up. “Oh, really? Nobody else has solved it.” Well, you can get add-ons through WooCommerce, and Shopify does it a little bit and stuff like that, but I said, “Yeah, we’ve got this figured out, and we’re going to do this in WordPress.” Everybody’s very excited. I didn’t realize—being in the US with our one giant currency—that multicurrency would be such a big deal.

Brad:
Yeah, that’s interesting.

Topher:
But even in Europe with the Euro, there are lots of countries that don’t use the Euro, and they’re excited.

Brad:
What about cryptocurrency? Can I pay with Bitcoin yet through your service?

Topher:
I’m not sure, but I’ll bet we have 256 payment gateways. No, that’s the wrong number. We have over 100 payment gateways and 256 payment methods, which is where Bitcoin might come in. You get to choose whatever ones you want when you sign up, which is a big differentiator for us from Shopify. With Shopify, if you want to use something other than their blessed checkout thing, you have to pay extra on top of whatever the payment gateway charges. We don’t, for any payment gateway. You just pick whatever one you want.

Brad:
That’s a lot of gateways. I think we’re still way out from cryptocurrency becoming a day-to-day payment method for most people. Could it get there? Who knows? Like you said, everything changes very quickly.

Topher:
If somebody were going to try and do it on their store, it’d be somebody with a WordPress site.

Brad:
I wouldn’t doubt it. Hey, you want people to pay you however they want to pay you, right?

Speaker 5:
That’s it.

Brad:
That’s why most people still use PayPal even though they don’t really like PayPal. It’s just easy, and people have it. Very cool.

Topher:
I’m looking right now. I just did a quick search, and we do have an entire support section set up for cryptocurrency. It looks like the answer is no right now.

Brad:
We’ll have to keep an eye on that and see if it changes in the future. I would imagine if enough people are requesting it, it will get pushed up higher on the priority list, but it’s obviously a much newer technology that most people are not super comfortable with today. But who knows what the future holds?

Topher:
And if you have any, you’ll want to hold onto it because next month it’s going to be worth a hundred million dollars.

Brad:
Is it? Well, I’m looking forward to that! Cool. What else? Anything else you want to mention while we’re here? Any topics we didn’t cover on the BigCommerce front?

Topher:
Oh boy. Let’s see. I am going to be at PressNomics, WordCamp Sacramento, and WordCamp US, and anybody who wants to can come track me down and ask me all the questions they want. What else is good stuff? We do a new release about every three weeks, and as I mentioned before, they’re usually pretty substantial. These aren’t just little bug-fix releases. We’re on GitHub, so you can follow the GitHub repo if you want. Actually, you can get early versions if you want. Oh, yeah, one more great thing—owning your content. I’m a big fan of WordPress because you get to own your content as opposed to something like Medium or whatever.

Early on, I was a bit nervous when I was looking at becoming an employee of BigCommerce. I was like, “Well, what about my content? Do I get to own my content?” We like to call it a transparent SaaS because your content does sit on our servers instead of your own, which is a little spooky. But you can export all of it at any time and take it anywhere you want and do whatever you want with it. Unless there’s a giant earthquake or the world ends—and then you wouldn’t care anyway—your data is always available to you, so you still own it. You’re just keeping it in a rental facility.

Brad:
Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s certainly something that we all preach in the WordPress space for good reason, and open-source in general—just own your content. We’ve seen Medium as a good example of a service that promised a lot, and they’ve changed their model. I don’t even know how many times now, and it’s very different today than when they started out, it seems, anyways. There are a number of services that have just up and shut down, and your content’s gone. So yeah, great point about owning your content. That is very important. Even if you’re just, like you said, kind of temporarily renting it out in another space, you can always get to it in some manner.

Topher:
And we do that with WordPress too. You own your own content, but it’s sitting on a server in Chicago or LA or London or whatever.

Brad:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I think to sum it up for me—obviously this is a WooCommerce show, and we’ve talked a lot about BigCommerce and some of the advantages it brings as a headless commerce option within WordPress. At the end of the day, I look at this— the two platforms that we really talk about and promote and push for the clients within my company are WooCommerce and BigCommerce. I think there are pros and cons to each, just like anything in tech, and certainly along the lines of your website. There’s always going to be pros and cons with “maybe I should use this plugin or this service or this app or this platform.”

My point is, you should sit down and make a list of what your goals are for your store, your website, and what the real deal-breaker items are and the nice-to-haves. Really prioritize that list, then find the platform and setup that you feel is going to work best—whether it’s WooCommerce, whether it’s BigCommerce.

Topher:
Absolutely.

Brad:
Make sure it’s going to work best for you, at least to get your site and your service off the ground. It’s just a pros and cons list. I love sitting down and doing that when I’m trying to debate a couple of services or a couple of options. It’s not always clear just by looking at talking points on a website or what someone in a support forum is saying or even someone like me on a podcast is saying.

So it helps to sit down and really look at it like, “Is headless commerce the way you want to go? Does an API excite you, or is that scary? How do you best get your site off the floor? What kind of payment gateways do you need? Shipping, integration options?” Map it all out, and generally speaking, there will be one that is a clear winner, and that should be the direction you go.

I think BigCommerce is a great product. It’s great to see them investing in the WordPress space. There are other platforms—e-commerce platforms—that don’t seem to do that, so I really respect them for not just wanting to be a part of the WordPress world in the sense that it’s the largest CMS out there, so of course they want to be in it, but actually looking to improve the platform and the experience. It feels like they’re coming at it more in the WordPress way, if you will, versus just as a service they’re trying to get people to join. So I definitely—

Topher:
Respect that. That was something that encouraged me when I was looking at employment there. They specifically said, “We are not here to kill WooCommerce. We are here to supplement WooCommerce and to help people who are struggling with it to do something else.”

Brad:
Yeah, that’s a good option.

Topher:
They specifically said, “We want to be community members. We want to take part. We want to do things the WordPress way.” They didn’t know that way. They’re not WordPress people. That’s why they hired me. Specifically, I do as much internal training about the WordPress way as I do going to WordCamps and talking to people, and I can see how it has changed how we do things at the entire company—how we communicate with people and deal with developers and things like that.
We’ve had developer partners forever, for years, but it’s been a very, very formal relationship. Now, it’s all my friends who are freelancers calling in, saying, “Hey, Topher said we can do this thing. Can we do this thing?” And they’re like, “Well, wait, wait.” We’re all growing, and we’re all figuring out how to merge the very corporate setup of BigCommerce with the very not corporate setup of WordPress.

Brad:
Yeah. Well, it seems like you’ve had some good success so far. So definitely best of luck. You mentioned a couple of events you’re going to be at. Anywhere else people can see you outside of PressNomics? You said WordCamp US and WordCamp Sacramento?

Topher:
Yep. That’s it for the moment, for the year. I have hopes for perhaps Boise and Seattle. And then we’re going to start the clock again in January and figure out where I’m going to go for the whole year. I should probably post somewhere.

Brad:
We’re in the final stretch now. We’re rolling into fall. This is a couple of event seasons, and then it gets pretty quiet into the new year as the holidays hit.

Topher:
December is really quiet.

Brad:
I don’t think there are US camps.

Topher:
It’s a tough month to be going to a conference.

Brad:
It really is. It’s sandwiched between Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Hanukkah, and all the other holidays. Cool. If you’ve got to make it to one of those events, definitely track down Topher. He’ll be happy to answer all your BigCommerce questions, I’m sure. Where can people find you online if they want to ping you? Maybe on Twitter or a website? Some way they can reach out?

Topher:
Yeah, you can email me at topher@bigcommerce.com. I use the handle T0pher1Kenobi with a number one in the middle pretty much everywhere—on WordPress Slack, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, anywhere. Just Google for T0pher1Kenobi, and you will find me.

Brad:
There it is. Well, reach out if you have any questions on BigCommerce, WordPress, and what they can do to help with your store or future store. It’s definitely a cool option. Check it out.
As much as—hey, I thought of one more thing to talk about, if we have time.

Topher:
Sure.

Brad:
Yeah, absolutely.

Topher:
We recently made the decision to completely support the sale of CBD on our platform, and it has been a big deal in the last three or four months for pretty much every e-commerce platform to make a decision either for or against. As far as I know, we’re the only ones that are 100% supporting it in every way. There was a poorly worded WooCommerce announcement about it. Shopify has decided, “No, we’re not going to do it.” Magento, of course, doesn’t really care, but we’re all in.
We’re talking to payment gateways about smoothing out historical problems with that, and we have some stores selling very well with it now.

Brad:
Yeah, that actually is an interesting topic. I’m glad you brought it up because I know CBD is a little confusing. It seems like, by and large, in most states, it’s legal to sell. It’s not always clear—I think some states are still a little iffy on whether it’s legal or not. I know WooCommerce, for example, put out a post that basically said you can sell it as long as you’re not tapping into an Automattic-run service via Jetpack or something like that, which is—

Topher:
Pretty important if you care about Stripe or TaxJar.

Brad:
Right. So if you’re going to sell a new product that is kind of along the lines of CBD or something that’s not legal in every state, obviously you need to make sure you know what you’re doing. You need to consult legal and make sure the platform you’re on, you understand what they will or will not allow. The last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of time and money on a platform, go live, and then have a lawyer come knocking, saying what you’re doing is illegal or you can’t use it or whatever. You’ve already invested all that time and money in it. So that’s a good point. I think CBDs are ultimately going to be legal everywhere, just like marijuana will be legal everywhere at some point. But for now, there is this confusing gray area in a lot of states.

Topher:
To

that point, a couple of other great features about BigCommerce are we have 24/7 phone support, and we have e-commerce coaches available to our customers. If you have a question about it, you can just call us and have a nice long conversation with an expert about whatever topic you want. As far as I know, there are not any other WordPress plugins of any genre that offer 24/7 phone support.

Brad:
I would think not. Maybe at the hosting level, but not at the plugin or product level. Cool point. This was a great show. I definitely appreciate you coming on, Topher. It’s been fun to talk about and look at another platform and the direction and ideas behind what you’re building over at BigCommerce and how that can complement a WordPress site. I really like the idea of WordPress not being the only platform anyone can ever run—I think WordPress is also an amazing secondary platform depending on your setup.

We’re seeing a lot of that on the enterprise level, where WordPress has a lot of strength at rolling out quick, agile sites—marketing sites, things like that—very quick, very rapidly. But other areas may not be the best fit for it, but it can work just great in a secondary setup. So finding tools and services that complement WordPress—I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more of that.

So I appreciate you coming on, Topher. I’ll wrap it up here. We’ll get Bob back on the next show. Bob, hopefully, I did you good here. Bob WP. Again, Topher, thanks for coming on. I’m Brad Williams. You can find me on Twitter at WilliamsBA, and we will be back in two weeks with another episode of Do the Woo. See ya.