A Take on Ecommerce Alternatives

Zach: We’re going to be talking today about WooCommerce and WooCommerce competitors. I have a couple of great guests here with me today to help talk about this. We have Topher who I think most of you know, but Topher DeRosia is here with us today from Grand Rapids. How you doing today, Topher?

Topher: I’m doing great. I’m having a good time.

Zach: We’re joined by Luke Carbis and Luke, how are you doing today?

Luke: I’m perfect, Zach.

Zach: So we brought both of you on because we wanted to talk about this. Why isn’t there a competitor to WooCommerce yet? What is it that sets WooCommerce apart from the solutions that existed before it and the solutions that people have tried to build after it? And why do we think that WooCommerce has the ground swell that it does in comparison to the other options?

Luke: I mean, let’s start at the beginning and answer some of those first questions that you asked, which is where did WooCommerce from and what happened to the people who came before? And I guess I’ve been involved in eCommerce in the WordPress space since way back when I was writing plugins for WP eCommerce. Do you remember that?

Topher: I do remember that

Zach: I do as well.

Topher: I hated it so bad. I could hardly stand it,

Luke: It was buggy. Every release broke and it was the only eCommerce plugin and it was a plugin people love to hate. And it was great for me as a contractor because every new release said have new work fixing people’s broken websites. But after WP commerce came Jigoshop. And I remember spending months and months porting all of my plugins to Jigoshop. And it was exciting because Jigoshop was really well built. It was the really nice code base, lots of hooks and filters. And while Jigoshop was around, when it first released, let’s say there were rumors, there was some buzz that WooCommerece, sorry that Woo themes rather, Woo themes had been working on something in the background and was yet to unveil their big eCommerce thing that they’d been working on for ages and ages.

Luke: There was all this buzz around it. Then one day, it was probably maybe like six to 12 months after Jigoshop released, WooCommerce was launched by Woo Themes and it was a direct fork of Jigoshop with nothing but the name changed. I have this sort of visceral memory of being mind blown moment of just literally doing a fine replace in my plugins, changing JIGO_ and replacing it with WOO_ and all my plugins worked. And I was like, “Great. All right, well, I guess I’ll sell for all three of these platforms now. “

To me that’s how we got started. And I think really the only reason it got the initial bit of support that it did was because there was already a lot of Jigoshop out there. A lot of Jigoshop support that was easy to port over and the Woo Themes team had a name behind them. They were like a trusted brand. Whereas the Jigo team was new on the scene and WP eCommerce was really buggy.

Topher: So I got into to WordPress about 2010 and I was trying out e-commerce. I tried WPE e-commerce, I tried a theme called WordPress came out of Minneapolis. That was an e-commerce theme that it just had all the functionality rolled into the theme side. And I had never heard of Jigoshop until the Woo thing. I was like, “Oh, it’s a Fork.”

Zach: Well, and I think there are a couple of really important distinctions we can make in a minute there I’ll let you finish there, but let’s come back to that.

Topher: Well, we were also talking about competitors and around that time, maybe not long after that, I was chatting with a friend of mine named Pippin and he wanted to sell his plugins and he didn’t like the way Woo did digital at the time. And so he said, I think I’m just going to write my own little script here and it won’t do much. It’ll just sell my plugins. And I said, “Okay, that’s cool.” And three months later I’m like, “Hey, how’s it going?” He goes, “I think I’m onto something.” And a few months later, Easy Digital Downloads was released. That was, is it a direct competitor? It’s an e-commerce competitor. It’s a plugin.

Luke: I’d classify it.

Zach: I’d call it a competitor.

Topher: But of course it didn’t do any shipping or anything like that. They started down that road and then ripped it back out. They didn’t want to do that.

Luke: You’re talking in past tense, but I think it’s important to mention that EDD is still around. It doesn’t get the kind of support and updates that it used to. It seems maybe relegated to the back bench a little, but it’s great. I use it for a lot of stuff. Zach, do you disagree?

Zach: So I think as far as EDD goes, I know they’ve been working on a major version update for a while now.

Luke: I’m so happy to hear that.

Zach: And we had J trip on a couple episodes ago for our dev chat. So we were able to talk with him a little bit about that. And some of the development things that he’s worked on namely, a library that he worked on for wrapping custom tables in WordPress, which is kind of neat. But a lot of work has come from that and moving into more custom tables and EDD, which is nice to see.

Topher: I think part of the issue with EDD becoming less popular than it used to be. I don’t even know if it’s less popular, just less known. For a long time, it was really the only good digital eCommerce platform. Then Woo got at least decent at it and is now pretty good at it. And if you want to sell anything physical then EDD is not an option. So somebody who might have used EDD in the past is now going to go, “I want to sell hat along with my podcast.” Well, “Then we’re on move.”

Luke: Maybe notable that’s my reaction hearing about WooCommerce. And I think it’s got a bit of a reputation of being well, what else are you going to use?

Zach: I mean, I think that’s part of it. I think the other unfortunate things that we’ve seen are really bad information out there about what it can or cannot do. The reality is it can do pretty much anything as long as you architect it right. The key part is architecting it right. And that’s not easy to do all of the time. So I think that’s part of the reason why it’s has the popularity that it does. But before we get into that, I just want to go back and talk about the fork of Jigoshop that Woo themes did in 2011 and how both Koster and Jolly were employees. And they were offered a job by Woo themes to come and work on e-commerce at Woo themes. They built as the core developers of Jigoshop everything that Jigoshop was. WooThemes offered to buy the copyright at that time to Jigoshop so that they could just take over the project and Jigowatt rejected that offer.

So that’s why we ended up with a different plugin. That’s a really important piece of this whole thing. They did offer to collaborate and that was rejected. So rather than it all just being Jigoshop, they forked the code base and branded it as WooCommerce. So it is a little hard to understand from outside of the open source perspective because not a lot of people understand how forks even happen. But getting back to the other piece, if you’re looking to sell physical products, yes, WooCommerce has been the solution in the WordPress space for a while. There have been other options and we can talk about those a little bit. We can talk about things like Equid or the BigCommerce plugin for WordPress or any of these other things that have allowed for physical product sales in the WordPress space.

There was even a, I believe a Shopify buy button plugin that was built way back in the day by the team over at WebDev studios. And that allowed people to add things to a Shopify cart. It wasn’t the greatest interaction because they still were completely separate sites, the store was a separate URL.

Topher: There’s another one called WP Shopify. That’s much, much more modern and I would equate it with the BigCommerce one.

Luke: I think you could put eCommerce plugins for WordPress into two buckets. One is where the plugin tries to do all of the store management orders, all of your product descriptions, all of that sort of thing inside of the WordPress admin and the other is where there’s some separate service, separate site, separate SaaS where you do all of your eCommerce management and then use WordPress two embed, essentially your products and your cart.

Topher: Yes, I would agree. I think Woo is the only one that’s not that SaaS thing, but I feel strongly that it is moving that direction and that eventually they all will be.

Luke: Have you ever come across WP Easy Cart?

Topher: Yes, I have.

Luke: Maybe I’m just ruining my little idea here, but it’s a hybrid of both. It’s both a SaaS, but it’s also management inside of WordPress.

Topher: I think they’re all going to get to the point where all the heavy lifting is on a different server than your web server. And I like that.

Luke: I do too, because at the end of the day, WordPress was built as a blogging platform. It’s a content management system and all of the metaphors, all the layout in WordPress is about putting new content in the prime position and Gutenberg is heading even more so in that direction. When it comes to eCommerce, it’s a very different paradigm. Orders don’t make sense in having a content first approach. Products kind of do, but they’re so reliant on other metadata aspects. From the beginning, the interface for eCommerce in the WordPress admin always felt jammed in. It always felt hacked together to try and make it work to me anyway. Now WooCommerce is getting better at that. I think as WordPress becomes more reactfull, I’m sure there’s some sort of verb there, it opens more opportunities to do that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, I think that a purpose built eCommerce UI is going to win above something that’s been shoved into the WordPress admin.

Topher: Interestingly, I don’t know if you’ve ever used BigCommerce, but the first time I ever logged in there, my first thought was wow, somebody really likes WordPress. It felt very much like WordPress. Then they built a visual page builder and it looked exactly like Gutenberg. I thought, “Oh my goodness.” And they started working on it before Gutenberg. So it’s not like they were ripping it off. That’s just how you build a visual page builder. And I was very surprised how similar they all are.

Zach: I think that’s a big part of it. One of the big things that I’ve been talking about with WooCommerce, for what half a decade, if not more at this point, since probably 2014 at this point is making WooCommerce do as little as possible other than what it does at its core. And that’s how you keep it efficient and running well in its current state.

Luke: That flies in the face of, if you go out and ask people why they choose WooCommerce over any of the competitors, every time, no, most of the time, they’ll tell you it’s because of the ecosystem.

Topher: I know.

Luke: It’s because there’s so many plugins I can make it do whatever. But you’re absolutely right. Which is the less WooCommerce handles, the more efficient the faster side will be.

Zach: And that’s for a number of reasons. It’s one, the fact that post queries are stupidly slow and so accessing orders or even products is very difficult at times if you have really complex queries. So then the size of your database server matters a lot, but what does that mean when you’re on a shared hosting environment where you have no control over your database server and it’s in the same location as the web server. So in its current iteration, doesn’t lend itself to scaling to the types of levels that I’ve dealt with without really looking at that separation of concerns. And there are plenty of plugins that separate concerns well. There are things like the shipping plugins that connect to a third party SaaS, those separate concerns really well, but that’s not the norm in the space.

And some of the things that WooCommerce has invested in at this point are not that. MailPoet is not that. WooCommerce Payments is not that right. It’s bringing more functionality into the admin than outside of the admin.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Iconic and Weglot

Zach: Now, one of the things we wanted to make sure we did here is we wanted to make sure we were comparing apples to apples, but are there other apples? What is actually something that’s a direct competitor to WooCommerce as it sits right now. We’ve mentioned that in the digital download space, EDD has been and will continue to be a competitor in that space. If you need to do software licensing or any of those things, EDD does that really, really well. And there are really big marketplaces that run on top of EDD.

Luke: I think you have to mention WP EasyCart. They have a pricing strategy that I think puts it out of reach of a lot of people. They have a free-ish tier that’s 2% of your eCommerce store revenue, which is interesting, but doesn’t make sense above $1,400 a month or so. So I haven’t had a lot of time with that plugin, but it seems to be directly taking Woo on.

Zach: That’s definitely one that I saw in my research for this episode. There’s also a sneak peak I found of something that Adam from CartFlows and Presto Player has been working on. That’s called Surecart.

Luke: Tell me.

Zach: And that’s a headless commerce platform with subscriptions and trials and prorated upgrades and downgrades and donations and one time payments and sales tax. And right now they have Stripe and PayPal support, but they’re working on Mecado and Razorpay and Molly and Paystack all of those other things.

Topher: As a SaaS. Is that an apple though?

Zach: So it’s a plugin and a SaaS. So it’s providing the full solution. Does the SaaS exist without the plugin? No. In this case, I would say it’s a hybrid of an apple. And then we have one that I in full disclosure, I’ve done a little bit of work on called North Commerce. And if you haven’t seen North Commerce, it really is looking to be a direct competitor to WooCommerce. The interesting thing we’re seeing is this ground swell that’s happening now is because WooCommerce has gotten as big as it has. Where now we’re starting to see this focus on some of what we have been seeing for years, but has not been as large of a priority simply because it was not as visible. And I think that’s really interesting, but it looks like from what we’re seeing here, WooCommerce doesn’t have a lot of direct competition in the physical product space yet.

Luke: Do you think Zach, that there is a market opportunity? Do you think that there’s enough people out there who are going to say, “Look, Topher, Zach, listen, I just want to sell a couple products, mate. I don’t ask for a lot. I just want to a simple eCommerce store. I don’t want to have to install this giant bohemoth of a code base that does everything. And I need a installer that prompts me to install a couple of dozen extra plugins and this and that and the other, I just want a simple theme. Give me a simple plugin and a simple payment gateway and we can call it a day.”

Zach: I think there’s room for that.

Topher: Normally I would have said yes, except for the fact that within the last five years we had it. It was iThemes commerce. It was simple. It, it was exactly what you just described and it did not sell. I know I teams got rid of it and the people that bought it, gave it a go and it didn’t work. That just wasn’t the market for it.

Luke: That’s really interesting.

Topher: Now they were trying to make a business from this. They were trying to make money off of it. If some bloke just threw it up on the repo and left it, maybe that would work.

Luke: I’ve been dabbling on this idea for a little while. Tell me what you think. It’s a bit of that hybrid approach. It’s not apples to apples. Where, you know Stripe , it has a whole eCommerce solution built into it. You can specify your products in Stripe and manage your orders in Stripe. And it doesn’t do everything that BigCommerce and Shopify and WooCommerce do, but it does enough. I had this thought like, what is the most simple, possible eCommerce plugin? If we got rid of as much as we could, what’s the most simple thing and it’s got to be Gutenberg first. That’s what I’m all about. And I realize that all we really need is a button, a block that puts in your Stripe button and you just in your settings for it, you just specify, “This is the product from the Stripe API and it buys the product.”

You can enter in the product image as a block or a patent in your editor, you can set it out however you like, but the plug in itself doesn’t do any of that. Maybe it adds a nice extra custom block in there for you to make it easy. But it’s essentially just a button. Does that exist?

Topher: Well, isn’t that what the PayPal buy buttons have been for years?

Zach: The Shopify buy button pretty much does the same thing too. But I think the problem with solutions like that and the reason that they don’t catch on is because people want the ability to have a persistent cart. Even in smaller stores. And so those solutions don’t always gain the traction that they could because of the lack of a persistent piece. If you were able to do that and have a persistent cart on the WordPress side that then transferred all of the details of the full order, I think you might have something on your hands.

Luke: That’s interesting. That’d be a fun approach. Take on the big guns.

Topher: There you go. Now you know what you’re doing this summer,

Zach: The summer project.

Luke: Summer is still months away.

Zach: That’s true. You could have it by summer. It might happen. So I guess, what’s realistic then? If we’ve defined that there are competitors and that just recently, some of them have started to emerge, but none of them are at the ground spoil or the level where WooCommerce as a platform is what’s realistic? Is there a space for a direct competitor that tries to do everything? Or are we looking at a situation where the best solution right now to compete is to niche down further and be a specialty plugin the way GiveWP is to EDD?

Luke: I think it’s worth saying that the solution that in earlier in the conversation that the outcome, we’re all zeroing in on, but we never actually said out loud is that maybe at a certain scale, you’ve got to be a SaaS in order for it to make sense.

Topher: I would agree completely.

Luke: So like we see examples with the SasS, they’re the only real competitors to WooCommerce. And then we also agree that WooCommerce is becoming more and more certified. So maybe at a certain scale, it needs to be a SaaS. So I think that’s one part of the puzzle.

Topher: There’s a slightly different angle. I was at we’re camp Europe in Berlin, and I interviewed Morton Rand Hendrickson, and he made the case. And I think I might agree with him that transactions should never occur on your web server or on a web server that you control or set up yourself or had anything to do with. The risk is so much higher than setting up an email list plugin. Your chances of losing the credit card data of 10,000 people that’s such a bigger risk than just having your site defaced. You know what I mean? So he was saying that eCommerce should only be done by a professional, a SaaS, but then as you know, he loves WordPress. So he was really liking the direction BigcCmmerce is taking where you use WordPress to make it look nice and arrange how things lay out and move around and all that kind of stuff.

But things like transactions and taxes and shipping and all of that are handled by professionals who know how to handle the security and data integrity and all that kind of stuff. So it makes me then ask, should we have a competitor for woo or should Woo instead change itself to become more like Shopify and BigCommerce and get it out of WordPress altogether.

Luke: Only if we’ve got another product available for people who don’t want a huge scale store. There’s got to be something out there for people who want to self-host and who aren’t concerned about massive scale. And Woo solves that at the moment. And like we’ve talked about it, there doesn’t seem to be anything else out there. As for the transaction piece, I definitely know what you’re talking about. Thankfully a lot the credit card data is safe because of that’s how payment processing works, but the amount of e-commerce clients that I probably still could log into their website, because I never took off the admin roles for me when I’ve been doing support work for them, whatever it is. And just being able to download lists of client data. That’s a bit of a problem, but I think you’ll have that anywhere where you go even on a SaaS.

Zach: I mean, even on Shopify or BigCommerce, if I’m a partner agency and I’m managing stores, I can log into them with a single click and get at the same data in most cases. I think the important distinction here is, yes, it’s important not to have the transactional piece happening on your website and that’s precisely why we recommend plugins for payment on WooCommerce that use hosted pay pages. Because it is significantly harder by orders of magnitude for hosted pay page to be scraped than other solutions. So Stripe by default and WooCommerce uses a hosted pay page. WooCommerce payments does even PayPal in the default configuration, Advanced will use a hosted pay page, whereas standard redirects you to the PayPal website. So I don’t think that’s as much of a concern as it seems to be when you look at it.

Luke: So coming back to WooCommerce as much as I love to hate it. And I really do love to hate it. I wouldn’t want to see it go away. I’d love to see a change in a number of ways, but for it to become completely SaaS, completely inaccessible to people who want to self host without any reliance on third parties, without any open source then I think that would be a real shame. And so I’m glad WooCommerce exists. And I think maybe we can use this episode as a bit of a flag and say, “Hey, where are the competitors? We want to see some more competitors.” I think there’s opportunities really for competitors. There’s got to be more people out there like me who just, I won’t even start an eCommerce website because I know that I want to self-host it and I don’t want to use WooCommerce and so I’m just not going to do it.

Topher: Makes sense.

Zach: I think that’s fair. I seem to have a desire to work on the hardest WooCommerce problems in the industry, which is a lot of fun, scaling to shark tank traffic levels and dealing with the uptime of million person email lists, that’s the kind of stuff that I enjoy. It’s fun trying to find solutions to that to me. Not everybody loves that chase of trying to make WooCommerce work at that level.

Luke: Well, there’s a difference too, isn’t there Zach? Between being a WooCommerce developer, being someone who knows their way around how to set up a WooCommerce site, create add-ons for WooCommerce, that sort of thing. And actually running a store day to day.

Zach: And that’s one of the differentiating factors in how I market myself. I’ve worked in eCommerce businesses, I’ve packed and shipped orders, I’ve set up picking strategies and warehouse designs, and all of the things that most people who are just working as developers in the eCommerce space haven’t really done. And I believe that having been in the trenches, doing that with a company as it was growing and then with other larger companies that did millions of dollars in sales per month, I got a glimpse into what integrations work really well in a large scale eCommerce operation, where you need to look at things like enterprise resource planning or shipping management or inventory management solutions that are outside of the platform and really looking at architecting the full solution rather than just the solution for what the front end of the website looks like.

Topher: I remember my first few months at BigCommerce, my only experience with eCommerce people were people like Woo users who really had a vague idea what was going on, PHP, Web servers, SSL, that kind of stuff. And I was meeting people with decades of eCommerce experience who had untold wisdom about how to sell online and all that stuff and had the famous clue how it actually worked under the hood. And it blew my mind. That was a thing that you could be amazing in eCommerce and have no idea how it works. You know what I mean?

Zach: I think that’s a really interesting observation. I find that a lot of store owners are jacks of all trades.They have to know a little about the product side, they have to know a little about the marketing side, the social media side, a little about the architecture side of how to build a website, but they don’t have to know all the intimate details.

And they can get really far on their own without knowing those details. It’s really interesting to see the industry continue to change and continue to grow. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens as WooCommerce starts to release custom tables and we see more of what WoCommerce is doing with Gutenberg. And some of the other things that are on the horizon that they’ve talked about publicly. I’m really interested to see where the platform goes. And I really want to see where these potential competitors land. So with that being said, we’re running out of time here. So why don’t we give both you Luke and you Topher a chance to have a final comment and just let everybody know where they can find you on the internet. So Luke, go ahead.

Luke: So you can find me at Carbis, C-A-R-B.is and I’m not really on social media. So please feel free to email me. My email address is Luke@C-A-R-B.is and I always reply to all my emails and would love to engage with you that way. My final thought on the matter is that I think there’s enormous opportunity, especially for long tail of websites that don’t have a requirement to operate at huge scale, especially in niche markets.

Topher: I’m Topher, you can find me at Topher, T-O-P-H-E-R the number one, Kenobe, K-E-N-O-B-E on pretty much every social platform out there. Twitter’s the one I’m on most. So that’s where you’ll find me most. I’m on a ton of Slacks. Most of the WordPress ones on the BigCommerce developer Slack, you can find me there if you want to talk to eCommerce, I work for Camber Creative. We do eCommerce on a wide variety of platforms. So you can look us up there. My belief is that eCommerce is going SaaS and I don’t know if we will long term see small open source eCommerce platforms.

Zach: I’m really interested to see where these other solutions like SureCart and North Commerce and WP EasyCart and all of these others that are in the space adjacent to WooCommerce go from here. I think it’s a space to keep an eye on. And I thank you both for joining me to have this conversation about a topic that’s both very important, but also I think not talked about enough. So I really appreciate your time today.

Topher: No problem. Happy to be here.

Luke: See you soon, Zach.