Perspectives on Open Source and Proprietory Ecommerce Platforms

BobWP:
Hey everyone, welcome back to Do the Woo, show number 27. I’m BobWP, and I am joined by my partner in crime, Brad Williams. Hey, Brad, how are you doing?

Brad:
Hey, hey, Bob. Welcome back.

BobWP:
Yeah, I missed last week, and I noticed somebody actually shared it or something and said, “Oh, you’ve got to go listen to Bob talk to Topher.” And I’m thinking, wait a minute. Okay. Anyway.

Brad:
You did a great job with Topher, Bob.

BobWP:
Yeah, I did, from afar, so… well, cool. Having our guest, which a few people know, we like to bring on unknowns in the WordPress space occasionally. So I thought we would invite Brian Krogsgard to join us. Hey, Brian, how are you doing?

Brian:
Hey guys, I appreciate y’all having me.

BobWP:
What is Brian doing these days? I mean, first of all, tell people kind of what you do, and let’s just go with it and talk a little Woo after you tell us all about your background and what you’re up to.

Brian:
Sure. Well, if people don’t know my history, I’ve been in WordPress for a long time. I’ve been doing WordPress e-commerce since 2011. My first WooCommerce site was actually being built as a Jigoshop site, and I transitioned it to WooCommerce as soon as it forked. I decided to go with Mike and Jay, which was kind of my policy to say, “I’m going with the guys that developed this initially.” So I was a very, very early user of WooCommerce. I did client work for several years, but for four years or more now, I’ve been full-time on Post Status, a membership website that uses WooCommerce and extensions like Subscriptions and Memberships to run the site. My day-to-day isn’t in development anymore. Every couple of months, I try to get all my stuff in order, get my workflow and local development environment straight, and dig into the code for a day or two.

For the most part, these days from an e-commerce perspective, I’m using the software as a consumer running my website, which is geared towards WordPress news and all that kind of stuff. I follow along with what’s happening in the land of e-commerce. For most of 2019, I’ve also been doing contract work with SkyVerge, a company in the space that makes WooCommerce Memberships, but I’ve mainly worked on their Jilt side, which is a software service for managing email marketing for e-commerce stores. It handles all types of marketing emails, from automations based on segments to abandoned cart emails, which was the original purpose. Now, it even handles customer receipts and newsletters, so you could fully replace MailChimp if your store is fully e-commerce. I’m sort of a blend between product and marketing on that side, using the product, figuring out tweaks, making tickets for developers, and also working on the marketing side. Still mostly doing Post Status and running my own store, so I’m getting a blend of using e-commerce on my own side and then digging into a SaaS focused around e-commerce, which has been a lot of fun.

Brad:
So it’s safe to say you like WordPress.

Brian:
I like WordPress. Always have, Brad—just like you. Not quite as long as you, though; you were at it a couple years before me.

Brad:
Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I got into it maybe around 2006 or ’07 when I started using it and then digging into it. But it’s always fun talking to people that have a history, especially a history with WooCommerce going back to Jigoshop. For those of you who aren’t familiar, WooCommerce was a fork of Jigoshop, which is essentially the open-source way of copying something and going in a different direction. It was a big deal when that happened. If I remember right, it was around WordCamp San Francisco time, which was the precursor to WordCamp US, the big WordCamp in the United States at the time. When WooThemes forked it into WooCommerce, there were two sides, and you kind of had to pick which side to be on. But by and large, it seems like WooCommerce came out on top in terms of adoption and usage. It looks like you made the right decision there. I think. How did you feel about that at the time? I’m curious. Knowing that the lead devs left and went over to WooThemes, did that affect you? Did you not care? Did you give it some deep thought?

Brian:
I knew the team at WooThemes pretty well at the time, and I felt like whatever e-commerce play they were going to make would probably be pretty good. It’s interesting; at the time, what I really wanted from e-commerce with WordPress was something simpler than the options that existed. Funny enough, the difference between developer experience and e-commerce scalability was where there was a divergence. The two main options were WP eCommerce and Shopp (with two Ps and an E, I think), but those were pretty scalable e-commerce systems. They had already decided to do things that were unpopular at the time, like putting all that order data in their own custom tables.

The developer experience, though, wasn’t as good because you had to do raw MySQL queries and things that weren’t as friendly to us WordPress developers who just wanted to query posts with WP_Query to get products or orders. When WooCommerce forked Jigoshop, it was already structured in a way that WordPress developers would be comfortable with—templating, theming, and all that stuff. Over time, as it grew more popular and big enough, it became clear that it wasn’t very scalable. WooCommerce has been working on those problems for several years now.

At the time, I loved that ease of use, being able to develop e-commerce just like I knew how to develop WordPress websites with custom post types and normal WordPress APIs. I didn’t worry about scalability; I was building small websites, and the agency I worked for had a proprietary CMS that had e-commerce for almost 15 years. My job was to figure out how we could do this in WordPress, and WooCommerce was the best way to make that possible for our team. I had confidence that WooThemes would support and manage WooCommerce better than Jigowatt, the agency behind Jigoshop. So, I followed the developers and went with the team. We put a bunch of sites on WooCommerce in those early days.

BobWP:
That’s interesting because that was my story too. I bought my first WooThemes product in 2009, so I was using a lot of WooThemes with clients for a few years and got to know the people there. When WooCommerce came out, I thought, “Hey, I’m not into e-commerce, but maybe it’s time to get into it because I’ve always liked their product on the theme side.” So I dove into it right around the time they released it. It’s funny; I actually did an e-commerce site before my WordPress life. I did a stock photo site with a service called “Shopping Cart” or something like that. That experience was interesting and brought me right back around when WooCommerce came out.

Brad:
Hearing WP eCommerce and Shopp mentioned is fun because I haven’t even heard those plugins mentioned in probably years, to be honest. It’s hard to remember back then, but if you think about it, custom post types had only been in WordPress core for maybe a year. WP eCommerce and Shopp were out well before things like custom post types and other features developers are used to now. They were building an e-commerce platform on top of a blogging platform, and the code was a bit messy. I never felt truly confident that they were a platform I’d want to put a client on for any real volume. Back then, I always told people that WordPress wasn’t built well for e-commerce, though it certainly has come a long way today with WooCommerce. But the landscape was very different then, and WooCommerce was a game-changer. With WooThemes behind it, the size WooThemes was, and the resources they put into it, they were taking it very seriously. It was clear that this wasn’t just a couple of devs hacking away; it was a full-blown team pushing and iterating fast, building it out quickly. That was a real game-changer for e-commerce with WordPress.

Brian:
And it’s funny to think back. At the time, developers smarter than me were realistic. They were like, “This is not a very productive platform for scalable e-commerce.” They were right, but it didn’t matter because WordPress, even though it was initially built for blogs, was the easiest way to get a CMS, and WooCommerce did the same for e-commerce. WooThemes was constantly being asked by their customers for an e-commerce theme. So when they initially talked about it, they were going to release an e-commerce theme that could also handle e-commerce functionality. But they were way in over their heads, so forking Jigoshop and hiring those two guys was their way of saying, “We’re going to take this seriously.” At the time, people who knew development were skeptical, but it has been amazing to see the work they’ve done. WooCommerce brought branding, marketing, and community from day one, which gave it an edge over everything else.

If you look back, there were other attempts like Cart66 or PHP Commerce, but none of them quite made it. E-commerce

people knew Magento was dominant, but it was challenging to use. So, people wanted an e-commerce solution in WordPress that was as easy as WordPress itself, and that’s the hole they filled. It totally blew up. It’s incredible to see where it’s gone.

Brad:
Yeah, it really has. Circling back to Post Status and the fact that you’re a big voice in the WordPress world with your articles, podcasts, and discussions, I’m curious how you’ve seen the maturity and adoption of WooCommerce grow over the years, especially in the last four or five years as you’ve been doing this full time. Not just within the WordPress world, but outside of it too—what’s the perception of WooCommerce and e-commerce within WordPress? How have you seen that growth?

Brian:
I think there are a couple of common misconceptions: the WordPress community doesn’t fully understand the e-commerce world, and the e-commerce world doesn’t realize how popular WooCommerce has become within a certain demographic. I’ll say outright that the most important e-commerce platform globally is Shopify, and it’s not close. Shopify has a dominant marketplace position, especially with new or e-commerce-only stores and larger businesses using Shopify Plus. But WooCommerce is the no-brainer for what I’d call “bolt-on” stores where you want to add e-commerce but already have a CMS. If your store is secondary to other content on your website, WooCommerce makes a lot of sense. Shopify underestimates the power of that because there are way more websites than there are pure e-commerce stores.

WooCommerce has really grown enormously with this middle ground of sites or for people who want maximum control. Shopify is popular with big, direct-to-consumer brands, and they’re adding features WooCommerce doesn’t currently offer, like warehouse fulfillment. With Shopify, you can manage your inventory like Amazon’s two-day shipping. Can you imagine Automattic running warehouses for WooCommerce? So it’s a different conversation. But that said, I think both are underestimated within their spaces: Shopify within the WordPress community, and WooCommerce within the e-commerce world. WooCommerce still has a long way to go in certain areas, like the marketplace, where Shopify has a well-established app ecosystem. WooCommerce tried to put the brakes on that when they should have been hitting the gas. I think as Automattic continues to grow, WooCommerce could become its biggest revenue generator because e-commerce stores typically generate more revenue per customer than simple content websites. If Automattic goes public, people may be surprised by how widely used WooCommerce is, which could play into their valuation.

BobWP:
On that growth point, I was going to ask you—correct me if I’m wrong—but in one of your Post Status podcasts, you mentioned making the WooCommerce marketplace more subscription-based, right? Where instead of paying separately for every plugin or extension, store owners could have a monthly plan. What are your thoughts on that? I wonder if that could be part of making WooCommerce more profitable for Automattic and maybe even help store owners.

Brian:
Oh, yeah. I talked to Matt about this to see if he was open to it. As it is now, I run a store, and I don’t even know how much I pay per year for the various plugins I use on Post Status because they come up in ones and twos based on when I bought them. It’s a yearly license fee. Right now, I have a plugin like “Box Office Tickets” or something. I don’t use it anymore, but it’s been pinging me, saying, “Hey, do you want to renew this?” I don’t use it, so I don’t renew it, but that’s $100. There’s no monthly option, so I have no consistent monthly cost for WooCommerce. If someone is just starting out and wants to know the cost, it’s impossible to answer. With Shopify, the monthly subscription is clear: you start at $29, and as you add functionality, the cost goes up. Chris Lema also told me at a recent event that the average Shopify customer spends about $89 a month, even though the base plan is $29. This subscription model clarifies what to expect and removes the unpredictability of annual renewals, where you might be hit with a larger upfront cost just to get your store’s basic functionality.

Brad:
Yeah, I was going to mention how easy Shopify is in comparison. I get people coming to me—friends, family—asking for website advice, and if they say they want to set up a store, I usually just say, “Go to Shopify.” In the back of my mind, I’m like, why am I saying that? But the alternative with WooCommerce is more complicated, with multiple extensions, each with their own costs and variations, like the PayPal extension options. For someone who isn’t technical, it can be overwhelming. You’ve got a point; WooCommerce and Automattic need to work on simplifying the process for smaller shops. Larger, more technical stores will have a team behind them, but smaller shops need an easy way to dip their toes in and see if their idea works before committing to a more complicated setup.

Brian:
And I think it’s confusing because the conversation shifts to hosting pretty quickly. Where does this website live? Who makes that first pitch? Are people going to GoDaddy, seeing WooCommerce as an option, and following an onboarding workflow there? Or are they going to WooCommerce.com? WooCommerce is different from WordPress. The automatic WooCommerce relationship is not like WordPress’s open-source model; WooCommerce is owned by Automattic. WooCommerce.com is their platform, and they could choose to direct people to their infrastructure. But they also rely on hosting companies to want to install WooCommerce for people, so there’s a delicate balance to manage there.

BobWP:
Exactly.

Brad:
Yeah. It’s interesting because, on the one hand, there’s the ease of Shopify for smaller businesses, but then there’s also the enterprise side, like with multi-warehouse setups. The challenge is in figuring out if WordPress is right for that. You could build anything with WordPress, but that doesn’t mean you should. With WooCommerce, especially with transactions every second, you need to know what you’re doing. It’s still a long way to go, but I’m happy with the improvements. However, large-scale e-commerce might not be their target.

Brian:
One of the interesting metrics would be seeing who’s switching from WooCommerce to Shopify and vice versa. If there’s a bottleneck or a feature gap in WooCommerce that causes a user to leave, that feedback would be valuable. And you’re right about not wanting to manage huge order workflows in the WordPress admin; you’d need an external service. With Shopify, they already have flows for managing all of that in-house, whereas in WooCommerce, it’s more challenging.

Brad:
It’s fascinating to see different approaches. We talked about BigCommerce recently, which has a cool platform and takes a more API-driven approach, letting you keep everything on your WordPress site or go fully into BigCommerce. Shopify, meanwhile, wants everything on their platform, so it’s a different philosophy. We’ll see if that helps BigCommerce catch up, but it’s good to have different options and see these platforms evolve.

BobWP:
It seems like a lot of our conversations come back to “Where do you start with WooCommerce?” Writing about WooCommerce often leads to specific use cases. People are more interested in extending WooCommerce for specific needs than the basics of starting up.

Brian:
And I think you’re onto something. WooCommerce shines when your store isn’t the typical T-shirt or dropshipping setup, but maybe includes courses, memberships, or subscriptions. I’ve subscribed to services on both Shopify and WooCommerce, and the WooCommerce experience was better. Shopify is really catered to physical goods, while WooCommerce is flexible enough for different types of businesses.

BobWP:
I came across a couple of articles relevant to what we’re discussing. One was about how “Shopify Will Soon Trail Only Amazon for U.S. E-Commerce.” Some people in the WordPress space were talking about it, and I thought, aren’t we comparing apples and oranges here? It’s good PR for Shopify, but comparing them to Amazon seemed odd.

Brian:
I don’t think it’s unfair because Shopify, like Amazon, captures a percentage of every transaction. Sure, Shopify isn’t a centralized platform like Amazon, where customers go to shop, but every dollar going through Shopify still earns them a percentage. Investors are interested in order flow, and Shopify’s is growing fast, so it’s a great headline for them.

Brad:
I think the confusing part is that when you buy on Amazon, you don’t always know if you’re buying from Amazon itself or a third party. As long as the shipping is fast, customers don’t mind. But Amazon’s model is different from a self-hosted brand experience like Shopify’s, so the comparison isn’t perfect.

Brian:
It’s a huge deal for sellers, though. Amazon provides automated traffic for third-party sellers, but Shopify store owners have to create that traffic themselves. They often do both: sell on Amazon for exposure and on their own Shopify site to maintain brand identity. There’s always a debate about whether to go all-in on Amazon or Shopify, or do a hybrid. It’s challenging, and I don’t think the WordPress space is fully tapping into this conversation yet.

BobWP:
Good point. On the WooCommerce side, there was an article on WooCommerce and Shiprocket partnering for cost-effective and automated logistics solutions in India. It’s an example of how WooCommerce often requires third-party integrations to handle specific needs like

shipping logistics.

Brian:
Shiprocket coordinates with FedEx and other services rather than being a shipping provider. It’s an extension that will be available through the WooCommerce marketplace, which is helpful for international sellers. This is an example of WooCommerce’s flexibility; you could have multiple similar options integrated in WooCommerce, unlike Shopify, where you might have to wait for their approval.

BobWP:
Cool. Any thoughts, Brad?

Brad:
I like having podcasters as guests.

BobWP:
Yeah, I know!

Brad:
Brian, you bring great insight. These are all important topics that shop owners and implementers need to be aware of. It’s fascinating. Great conversation, Brian.

Brian:
Thanks. I think at the end of the day, merchants want their platform to make their lives easier without getting in the way. They want to focus on product development, manufacturing, inventory, order fulfillment—all those pieces that are their business, and not get bogged down by software issues. WooCommerce, like any platform, has to make sure they fit seamlessly into business models without causing bottlenecks.

BobWP:
Exactly. Thanks for joining us, Brian. Excellent conversation. Let’s have you back soon.

Brian:
I appreciate y’all having me.