Using Jetpack with Your WooCommerce Online Store

BobWP:
Do the Woo podcast, everything WooCommerce. Hey everybody, Bob WP here, and well, we are here with another Do the Woo podcast. What’s great about this one is, let me say two words, Jetpack WooCommerce. I’m going to kind of leave it at that now. In order to really chat about this, I wanted to bring in somebody from the source—big guns here. We’re not going third party or fourth party here. We’re going right to the source, and I’m talking with Nicole Kohler today from Automattic. How are you doing, Nicole?

Nicole:
I am great. How are you?

BobWP:
Doing good. Just plugging away at all this content, and this is something that I don’t know… I love where it’s going, and I know that you’ve been more involved with Jetpack on the side of Automattic since you’re both WooCommerce and Automattic now. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing in that space right now, and then we’ll get into the questions.

Nicole:
Yeah, absolutely. So I have been with Automattic since—it’s almost, it’s going to be three years really soon, which is really crazy.

BobWP:
Yeah, isn’t it?

Nicole:
Yeah, I joined as part of the WooCommerce acquisition, but I was the next to last person, I think, that joined before the acquisition. So I had six weeks, and then the acquisition was announced, and I was like, “Okay, this is my life now.” So I worked on a Woo marketing team for two years, and then about eight months ago, I made the switch to a Jetpack marketing team—well, Jetpack growth team instead. There are a couple of different reasons for that, but Jetpack is a really big area of opportunity for Automattic, and it’s also a really big area of focus for us because WooCommerce is kind of like this established product. It has a lot of people that understand its uses.

It’s the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. It’s really successful. Jetpack, on the other hand, some people don’t necessarily understand what it’s for. They think it has a lot of features. They might think that it slows down their site, or they have some bad experiences with it. And for me, I saw that as there being a lot of opportunity for me to join our growth team and work on some content, work on some marketing there, and try to help us as we improve our features and improve our offering to make what we’re doing clearer and better communicate with our customers. So like I said, I’ve been on the growth team for about eight months now, and it’s been a really interesting adventure, let’s say that.

BobWP:
I always like that word—interesting. We use that a lot in different ways. But yeah, and I totally get what you mean. I mean, having been in the WordPress space, Jetpack’s always been there, and I’ve seen the people during times—they’re like, “Oh, this,” there’s drama going around things, and I’ve always just found it is kind of one of those—it’s just been there. It’s grown, it’s changed a lot. There have been a lot of cool features added, and for me, it’s been a perspective of, I didn’t ever think, “Oh man, is this slowing down my site? Is it overwhelming? Why should I use this?” There’s always been a reason I look at it, and even when I was teaching and working with clients, there were times that it was just a perfect solution. So let me go with that into the questions here because I have a few things I want to touch on. Now, I know that recently the onboarding of WooCommerce integrated—well, really integrated with Jetpack. Can you just encapsulate for those that may be new to WooCommerce or thinking about WooCommerce, what you have done there?

Nicole:
Yeah, absolutely. So about—I think a year and a half ago when I was still on the WooCommerce side, we really started looking at this, and it was called WooCommerce Services. And at the gist of it, what this is, is WooCommerce using Jetpack’s infrastructure to provide some hosted services that make simple tasks a lot easier for store owners and store developers. The simple tasks are things like tax calculation, pulling real-time UPS or USPS shipping rates, getting discounted shipping labels—things that you might otherwise have to get third-party plugins or pay a provider to get. Like I said, we’re using Jetpack’s infrastructure to deliver those things to you. They’re fully integrated into your store, and the only requirement is that you keep Jetpack installed to get those things. So I kind of named everything we have right now—it’s tax, it’s shipping rates, and it’s discounted shipping labels. That’s what you can get when you go through the onboarding flow and opt-in for what we’re calling WooCommerce Services provided by Jetpack.

BobWP:
Now with that, keeping that in mind, and you’ve already kind of answered it in a way, I like to put you in a scenario where you’re at a WordCamp, and I know that a lot of times you are actually working the booth for Jetpack. So this is probably nothing new to you, this question. No, but I always am curious because you do have this moment in time that you can basically convince somebody, or at least explain it to them. If somebody comes up to you at your booth and they are just starting their first WooCommerce online store, and it’s nothing huge, it’s just a moderate store with some products—I mean it’s not rocket science—they’re doing it themselves, and they ask you, “Would you recommend I use Jetpack and can you tell me why?” What do you tell them? Because I’m sure that even though there can be so many variables there, maybe they’ve told you, “I’m doing 20 products. I am shipping most of them. Most of my sales are within the U.S., blah, blah, blah.” How do you answer that?

Nicole:
Yeah, I think the really awesome thing about what we’re doing by integrating Jetpack into this onboarding flow is, especially for those brand-new store owners, if this is their first e-commerce experience or they’re not sure what plugins to use or who to turn to get shipping labels or tax rates or things like that, it kind of removes the decision—per—am I saying that right? Yeah, it makes that easier. So rather than have to dive into the extension directory on WooCommerce.com or go to the .org plugin directory or go reading about a bunch of different articles, we’re presenting these choices to you and saying, “Look, the information in here comes from third-party people that we trust.” So the tax information comes from TaxJar, the USPS shipping rates come directly from USPS. All you have to do is click to enable them. So it makes that setup process so much easier. If you eventually outgrow what we’re providing with WooCommerce Services—if you add a lot more products, if you start shipping internationally—that’s totally awesome. You can turn off those services, you can disconnect Jetpack if it comes to that, and just use something else. I think, like I said, it just makes that setup process so much quicker, and you don’t have to stop everything you’re doing setting up your store to figure out how to handle taxes or how to handle shipping rates or like, “Oh my God, how do I get shipping labels? I don’t understand this.” Setting up an online store is so challenging as it is, especially for people who don’t have a lot of time, or maybe this is their second or even third job, or they have families and intense responsibilities during the daytime or the nighttime. And I think that anything that we can do, whether it’s services or Jetpack as it is as a whole, I mean, to make their lives easier as they’re doing this is really, really helpful.

BobWP:
And you touched on that a little bit—or you’ve touched on this a little bit—and the next couple of questions may have some overlap. But for those that aren’t new—they’re an existing user—and they’re considering adding Jetpack, they already have their WooCommerce store in place, now they’re looking at what Jetpack has to offer, and they’re thinking, “Okay, I have these other plugins that do that,” and maybe they’re also looking at what Jetpack has to offer and maybe it’s certain services through their hosting, maybe they feel like the hosting has enough security and they don’t need that. Do you think they really understand—I mean, it’s kind of a hard thing to envision—is do I go ahead and move to Jetpack, it’s nice and consolidated, or do I still keep all these pieces? Is there any advice you can give in that decision-making, or is it just really based on what they have going at the time?

Nicole:
Yeah, the first thing I want to touch on there is you said, “Do they really understand what Jetpack is offering?” And I think up until very recently the answer was no because we haven’t done a great job communicating what differentiates Jetpack from what hosts provide and what third-party plugins provide and what even, in some cases, other Automattic products provide, like WooCommerce extensions. In some cases, some rare cases as things overlap, we’re trying to get a lot better at that, and we’re trying to point out what differentiates Jetpack’s features from the features that you might get from your host or from other plugins

or from things a developer might make for you or something along those lines. And in many cases, that comes down to specific aspects. So by the time that this podcast goes live, I can say this because it will be up on the website:

So our backup service has been rewritten completely from scratch, so we will have real-time backups for everyone. So every time that you make a change to your site, our service just makes a backup. And that’s something that most hosts don’t provide. It’s usually like a daily backup or maybe an every-few-hours backup, or in some cases it’s like a weekly backup depending on your host or what your settings are. Jetpack is actually going to have real-time backups for you. And the other differentiating factor there is that if you find a mistake—if you’re reviewing your site’s activity log and you’re like, “Oh, whoops, I didn’t mean to do that thing three hours ago, and now my feed is completely ruined”—you can restore to that point in time using the backup we created there. So as long as we’re doing a really good job explaining that, I think that people will understand that, “Oh yes, my host isn’t offering that. To me, that is a completely differentiating factor, and I think that’s something worth paying for.” The other thing I want to bring up is that people will outgrow our services in a lot of cases. We have things that are, I think, meant for entry-level bloggers, entry-level website owners. One of those things is like our subscriptions module that allows people to have visitors who sign up with WordPress.com accounts receive posts in their email. So anytime the site owner makes a new post or new page, someone who subscribes with their WordPress.com account gets an email and they can read the post from there. That is something that we find a lot of people outgrow, and they start asking us, “Can I integrate with MailChimp?” Yes, we actually have support for MailChimp. “Can I integrate with this service? Can I integrate with that service?” And we’re totally fine with that. Subscriptions isn’t going to be a viable long-term solution for a lot of people because it is limited to WordPress.com accounts. It is limited to—you can only put it in certain areas of your site, like certain widgetized areas. Your list can only grow so big in some cases. Like I did my support rotation last week, and we ran into a situation—I saw a ticket where there was someone who had tens of thousands of subscribers, and we were like, “We have never seen this.” So we have to do manual pushes to sync their subscriber information with their site. And at that point, we want to keep supporting them, but probably in that case, a third-party method like MailChimp or something—Constant Contact even—would be a better solution for them. And that’s just one example. If someone does use Jetpack for a while and feels like, “Oh, this isn’t really serving my needs anymore,” you can just toggle that feature off, and it’s totally fine. You can keep using the plugin for whatever else you want to keep using it for, and go explore the wonderful WordPress ecosystem and find out what else is out there. So I hope that answered your question.

BobWP:
It does, and it’s really a good segue into the second question, which you’ve again touched on a bit here. But first of all, clarification before I get into that. So the incremental backup that you can, every time you make a change, that’s going to be available to everyone that’s on WordPress.com. Is that what you’re saying? Or is it to specific plans? Something I want to talk about next and how I’m using it.

Nicole:
Yes. By the time that this goes up—as of right now, Bob’s actually hearing this for the first time—so we will have real-time backups available for all of our paid plans, so Personal, Premium, and Professional users. Free users won’t have access to backups, which is how it is right now. But free users will have access to our activity log so they can at least see what’s going on on their site—specific events that have happened. So a new post was published, or this user logged in, or this user had trouble logging in. There are over a hundred events that are actually recorded in that log, and we’re working to add some more, depending on what plugins we get requests for or what—probably Automattic products first. For WooCommerce events, I think we already have some WooCommerce events in there like new product published or product edited or something along those lines. So that everyone will have access to, but to clarify, real-time backups will be available for all three paid plans.

BobWP:
Okay, interesting. And I’ll just tell you my scenario that I’ve used. Like I said, I’ve had Jetpack most of the time on my site activated. There have been a few times I’ve taken it off, and then I put it back on. And one of the things was that incremental backup because I had—and I’m going to admit, I believe I had won or gotten a free one of the top-level tiered plans that had that in there for sure. And what was really interesting about it is I wrote a post calling “Backing Up My Backups,” and it was that I actually—I’m on WP Engine, and they do their daily backups, and I can go in and do a manual one. Then I’m also with ManageWP, where I had an account there, so I have another backup going. Then I had VaultPress and the Jetpack, where I really loved it because of those incremental backups. Every time I made a change, there were a couple of times it really saved my butt. It was like I just lost something, and my brain was gone, and what—where was I? I was flying off into the ozone, and oh, I can go in there, and it was there. It was right there. It was bam, it’s back. And I mean, that was, to me, priceless compared to all the other backups I had in place. Now, with that said, I mean, you said that it’s going to be all plans. I’ve always had at least the Personal plan—that’s been my mainstay on this. I feel like I need something else. Do you find that there are—and this is probably a really tough question to answer because you may not even have the stats to back it up—is there a lot more full-solution users that are using more pieces of that, or more modules of Jetpack versus people like me who sometimes I may just have three or four modules activated because it’s exactly as you said—something came along, it was something I needed more power to or needed more features to. It replaced something, I turned that off, but I still left Jetpack on. Are you finding more people are willing to do that piece of it where, “Yeah, I’ll turn off this and that and just keep it in there and use as needed”? Or are more people just saying, “Hey, this is so cool, I can use a lot of this,” and then like you said, they may move on later on? I know that’s kind of a roundabout question, but…

Nicole:
No, it’s okay. I think what I’ve at least found through reading some comments on our site, talking to people at WordCamps and other events, and then hearing feedback from our Happiness Engineers and people on our various teams, a lot of people come to Jetpack for a very specific reason, at least up until this point. So someone will tell them maybe at a local WordPress meetup or at a WordCamp, “Oh yeah, you want to back up your site? Well, Jetpack can do that,” and they’ll be like, “Oh, cool, I’m going to get this Jetpack thing because it will back up my site.” And that’s the only view they have of Jetpack—it gives you backups. Or they’ll be like, “I need social media sharing,” or “I need subscriptions,” or “I need this other thing.” I had someone at a recent local WordPress meetup go, “Wait, Jetpack does widget visibility options? I need that right now!” And completely just tunnel-visioned, did not care about any of the other features. That was the only thing he cared about, which is cool, that’s fine. But up until now, that’s been really common. People are going, “Jetpack does this one thing that I need, I’m going to install it.” And they don’t really either enable the other features or they don’t care about them. So this really powerful toolkit is just hanging out on their site, and they might one day stumble into it and go, “Wait, it can do this? Oh, I’m going to try this now.” And there’s this process of self-discovery, upon which they might contact our Happiness Engineers and be like, “I need help doing this thing because I just discovered it on my own,” or they might read our blog now and be like, “Oh, I didn’t know I could do this too.”

But what we’re trying to do to kind of avoid this sort of piecemealing—maybe not paying for a plan because everything they can get is free—or only paying for a plan, which I think is worse—so paying for a plan and not utilizing every feature, I think that’s way worse. We made the plugin free for a reason—there’s no reason to charge for a lot of what’s in there—but people who are paying just for backups and then not using everything else that they get along with that? Oh my gosh, no!

You need to know what we’re doing. You have at your fingertips—you might be using other conflicting plugins and not even realize it. So we are trying to kind of rethink our messaging—trying to update our messaging so that people understand that Jetpack is not just a plugin that does X, Y, and Z. It’s not just a bucket of features smashed into one piece of code, whatever you want to call it. I think I’ve even said this to you before—it’s a WordPress toolkit, and it’s meant to provide the best WordPress experience possible for your site. And here’s a bunch of things that it does to give you that. And we’re trying to push the most valuable features to the front with that updated messaging. So backup, security, free themes, design tools, and make people aware that when they’re choosing Jetpack, they’re not just getting this one thing they may have heard about. They’re also getting these other really valuable things too. And they should take the time to understand what they have and how they could utilize it, and maybe how they could improve their entire site and improve their experience with WordPress, not just help themselves with this one thing that they need. If they do need just that one thing and that’s all they install Jetpack for, and they turn off every other feature, that’s totally fine. And honestly, if you get a personal plan and all you want from it is backups and you don’t utilize anything else in it, that’s totally fine. It’s still cheaper than a lot of other backup solutions out there. So we can’t control your life. But I do really want people to be aware that Jetpack is so much more than what you may have heard about it. And if you can take a little bit of time to explore the features, read the screens that pop up when you update it, and find out what we’ve added or what’s new in your plan, you can really unlock some amazing stuff with it. So that was also a roundabout answer, I think.

BobWP:
Well, I had somebody ask me, and I think it was after this onboarding—even with the online, all the different stuff from WooCommerce—and they asked me, “Bob, can you give me an analogy of what Jetpack is? Some real-world analogy?” And I sat there for a few minutes and I thought, “Okay, so think of your car. You buy a car, you sit in there, and you have a radio, you have air conditioning, you have GPS, you have all these different things. Well, nothing really wears anything on the car.” I mean, they say, “Okay, air conditioning takes a bit more gas.” Well, it’s not going to take gas unless it’s on, or your mileage is going to go down because of air conditioning, or there’s some other factor. Nothing’s going to happen until you’ve activated that. I said, “You’ve got all these features, all these different things, and they all kind of work by themselves, and you’re going to use them as you need them. You’re not going to use air conditioning for a certain amount of months during a certain time of the year, and then you’re going to discover things about your car that are kind of cool. You didn’t really go through the manual and you think, ‘Oh, what’s this little thing down here?’ And you go, ‘Wow, that’s something I could use.’” And it was interesting. It was kind of a weird analogy in a way, but the person said, “Yeah, that makes more sense. And I’ve never quite heard it that way.” And that was just off the top of my head analogy. If I would’ve thought longer and harder, I probably would’ve come up with something better. But it is kind of in the sense that way because, and I’ll confess that there are many times in the past I think of having used Jetpack and found little gems in there. And one of them was the widget visibility. I—I can’t remember when I first started using Jetpack and what I was—I didn’t even really tell one time I was actually looking for something to do that specifically with, and I thought, “Well, by God, there it is right in there.” And even though I saw it in the widget when I had opened it up, it was just I was tunnel vision, not thinking about it. But there are a lot of gems. And like I said, I like it because there are times I’ve actually had to remove a plugin for one reason or another, and I’ve used Jetpack to temporarily fill in until I could find something that totally replaced that first one because maybe it became outdated or something else happened to it. So it’s always been a little friend to my site hanging around in the corner there. Now I know you’ve already given some insight into the future, which by the time this is released, that great new thing with the backups. Anything else you can share with us? I know a lot of it’s on the lowdown or however you call it, and I know Matt will be listening and making sure you don’t expose anything that shouldn’t be shared. But is there anything on the horizon you can hint towards or even say generally something we might look forward to? Or is it pretty much sit back, wait, good things are coming your way?

Nicole:
Oh no, there are two things I can share.

BobWP:
Okay, cool.

Nicole:
One of which is definite, and then one of which is sort of an “ay, sort of thing.” Again, by the time this goes up and people are listening to it, we will have moved our Elasticsearch integration out of beta, and it will be available to all Professional plan customers. So the big advantage there for WooCommerce store owners or developers who are on the Professional plan is that they can replace the default WordPress site search with Elasticsearch. And if you have a lot of products or a lot of content, that will give you faster search results and more relevant search results. We’ve been working on this integration really, really hard for about three months now. There’s an entire Jetpack search team that has been refining it, taking all of the bug reports, working directly with people who are experimenting with it, with large sites, with WooCommerce stores, and they’ve been doing a lot of really hard work on it. So that is one thing that, when I was at WooConf last year, I did mention that to a few people in passing and eyes just lit up. People were just like—

BobWP:
Yes!

Nicole:
“I want that thing.”

BobWP:
That’s huge.

Nicole:
Yeah. Yeah. So that will be available to all the Professional plan customers. It’s out of beta obviously. We’re still going to be expecting feedback and wanting feedback on that if there’s something that isn’t working the way that you wanted to. But we anticipate that if you upgrade to a Professional plan for that, you will be getting access to Elasticsearch for, I believe, much less than you would if you had to install it yourself or get it from another provider or something along those lines. And then, of course, you get all the other Jetpack goodies with it. So it’s a really, really good deal, I think.

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s very cool. And the hint?

Nicole:
Yes, the hint. The hint is we’re also looking at what we can do specifically to make Jetpack and WooCommerce kind of like this appealing bundle. So we’ve talked about—I don’t think it’s a problem for me to say this—we’ve talked about having a Jetpack plan just for store owners or developers, and what can we do? What could we put in that plan to make Jetpack more useful for people who are working with WooCommerce? Is it bundled extensions so they’re installed when they set up their store, and then it reduces that decision paralysis even further and they have all these things immediately? Is it a coupon, or is it credit to the extension marketplace so they can get things for free that they would normally have to pay for, and it makes their experience even better? Is it by only things in the Professional plan because we want people to get Professional to get Elasticsearch, or is that not right for new store owners? So the hint is we’ve been working on this for a while and we feel like we’re getting close to releasing some stuff, like some perks for people who want to use WooCommerce and Jetpack together, but we are still working on it, so bear with us.

BobWP:
Oh yeah, yeah. It sounds pretty exciting and cool though.

Nicole:
But the point is, we do want people who are setting up their stores to look at Jetpack as a useful solution for not just backups and not just WooCommerce Services—the tax rates and the shipping labels—but also other things that they might need like sharing icons on their pages or social media promotion, subscriptions. We want them to see Jetpack as a full solution for them that they can get at a lower cost and with lower hassle than other solutions out there. And then, like I said before, if they outgrow it, that’s totally fine. Just toggle those features off and it won’t slow down your site because we work on that a lot too.

BobWP:
Well, that sounds, like I said, very exciting. Some good stuff coming down the road, and I know I’m keeping my eyes out. I’ll probably have to have you come on again on the Do the Woo as things progress. Especially, I’ll, like I said, keep my eyes on what’s being released, and you’re working on stuff, and we may need to have you come back and give us a full update on

all the cool stuff at some point or other. So yeah.

Nicole:
Excellent.

BobWP:
Alright.

Nicole:
Well, I’m always happy to come on and ramble about anything you want me to ramble about.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’ll be sure and become a regular pester for you. Okay, well, I’m going to let you go. I know you have plenty to do and keeping all that Jetpack stuff happy and running, and I know people can go and see Jetpack, what’s going on. If people want to connect with you personally, where can they find you?

Nicole:
Sure. So probably the best way to find me is on Twitter, it’s twitter.com/nicoleckohler. I post quite a bit of nonsense on there. It’s not always WordPress-related, but occasionally there will be some content marketing gems on there. You can also follow my adventures on my latest talks and guest posts and podcast appearances on my website, which is nicoleckohler.com. And occasionally I will publish something on the Jetpack blog, which is jetpack.com/blog.

BobWP:
Excellent. Well, thank you for taking the time, and we’ll just be looking forward to all the new and exciting stuff down the road when it comes to Jetpack and WooCommerce. So again, thanks and have a wonderful day.

Nicole:
Thanks, you too, Bob