WooCommerce and the Enterprise Space

Hey everybody, BobWP here, and we are on the debut episode of the Do the Woo podcast. Yes, I’m bringing it back in all its glory. It’s a little bit different format this time around, more conversational. What I’m going to be doing is bringing on a co-host each week. So instead of just a Q&A, even though I may not have a lot to say about the subject, we want to make it a bit more bantering back and forth, as well as take the opportunity to bring on a few people more than once. I think, probably to start this off, it’s going to be somebody that will be returning here and there. Many of you know Brad Williams from WebDevStudios. Hey, Brad.

Hey, Bob. Thanks for having me on. It’s no pressure being on the debut relaunch of the show.

No pressure at all. Yeah, that’s what I figured. Everybody was saying, “Oh, I’m so glad this is starting up again.” And I thought, “Okay, well who can I sucker… I mean, who can I ask to be on the first one?” This is perfect, BobWP and BradWP. Yeah, let’s just do this.

Yeah, well, what the show’s going to be from here on in, just so people know, is that I’m just going to come up with subject areas. It may go off in other areas. It’s always going to be WooCommerce related, but it’s not really going to always be just about Woo. So we will branch out into the eCommerce space, just talk about whatever, and want to make it very organic and natural. This time, I thought Brad, who has a lot of experience with enterprise, working with enterprise, and even in the eCommerce space, would be perfect for this discussion.

They do a lot of WooCommerce stuff, and I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to talk a little bit about that because I just want to clarify stuff with enterprise. Brad, what I’m going to do is, I actually looked up “enterprise.” I’m always like, “Okay, I’m just going to Google what is an enterprise business,” and I came up with this: “The action of enterprise is when somebody shows initiative by taking a risk, by setting up, investing in, and running a business.” Okay, that’s pretty straightforward. Then I thought, what is it? Because everybody has this perception, or I shouldn’t say perception, but an automatic perception because of the way it’s talked about that enterprise is huge. So now let me read something from—this is kind of funny—the site just came up at the top called Less Annoying CRM. Have you ever heard of that one?

No, that’s an actual CRM? Less Annoying CRM?

Yeah, that’s a URL.

That’s a bold strategy. Never heard of it.

So it says, “CRM Definition: What does enterprise mean?” And they’re talking a little bit more about software, saying enterprise software, enterprise-grade security, enterprise-level features. We’ve got enterprise hosting, all this stuff. A lot of it is in the CRM area, and they kind of say, they call it almost a hidden meaning of what software companies use the word “enterprise” for. So, talking software companies now, going back to what we’re talking about, they say, “The real meaning of enterprise is a really, really big business or company. Enterprise is the alternative to small business. Enterprise means that you have hundreds of thousands of employees, or at least you’re behaving as if you do. Lots of small companies like to act much bigger than they are.”

Okay, so are they kind of spot on with what defines enterprise? I mean, people have asked me this, “How do I define enterprise?” in the past, and I’ve always just… I think the idea of saying it’s a large company, a big company that needs big solutions, is really how I break it down. And if you’re comparing it to, in the web development space or WordPress world, enterprise versus small business versus whatever, enterprise companies have very specific needs. You are not going to work on a website in an enterprise space and FTP code directly to a production server. It just doesn’t happen. There are going to be certain workflows for code. There could even be workflows for content within the CMS. There are usually a number of stakeholders from various departments involved in these projects. So I really just define it as a big company that needs big solutions, and that’s how I’ve always looked at the enterprise.

And that’s where we come from when we talk about WordPress moving into the enterprise space. WooCommerce is growing in it. And so I guess I am thinking, what… and again, I want to make this more conversational, but I have so many questions for you. What inspired, or at what point do you think, let’s take WooCommerce, not WordPress itself, but WooCommerce—what was the point where we all sat back and said, “Okay, this is ready for the big guys, and we know this can be done?” Or did it just… was it a natural migration into it, or?

Well, I think we’re still on the cusp of that, to be honest, because is WooCommerce enterprise-ready? Can it handle large, extremely large eCommerce websites? I believe it can. I mean, there are certainly some challenges with anything at that scale, not just WooCommerce, but WordPress, with any platform. I truly believe it can. And I think the fact that we’re seeing some real-world examples of large-scale WooCommerce applications is helping validate that. I feel like WooCommerce is… right now, WooCommerce is where WordPress was maybe six years ago or so when we were talking about, “Is WordPress ready for the enterprise? Is WordPress ready for large scale?” And everyone’s like, “I don’t know.” And now we’re all like, “Of course it is.” There’s a million different examples of it at scale out there in the enterprise space doing all sorts of crazy stuff for WordPress, right? Totally validated. No one thinks twice about it, or at least most people. But I think WooCommerce is kind of at that stage now where we’re talking about, “Is it or is it not? Is it ready? Maybe, maybe not?” But we’re starting to see some really good examples out there, which is helping confirm what I think we all know is, “Yeah, it absolutely can be an enterprise player.”

Now, I don’t… I wouldn’t put it at the level of something like Magento right now or some of these really, really large-scale eCommerce applications, but there’s no reason it can’t get there, right? Absolutely no reason it can’t get there over the course of a few years. So yeah, it’s an interesting time for WooCommerce because we are right on that cusp of pushing it into the enterprise.

And does that cusp mean that there’s more consideration and more strategy behind looking at existing sites? Maybe not somebody that’s saying, “I’m starting an enterprise business, a large eCommerce venture,” but I guess what I’m wondering is, are you seeing more people that are at that point where they’re wanting to start something, and that’s easiest to move them into the WooCommerce arena? Or are there existing sites out there that are saying, “Hey, I want to go into a CRM. I have an online store, we have this humongous large enterprise, and we are looking at options to move into that, and we’re wondering about WooCommerce?” Which one right now is more prominent, do you think?

It’s a good question. I mean, I think from what I’m seeing over at WebDev, it feels like more people are coming with the knowledge of WooCommerce, right? They’re saying, “Hey, WooCommerce is part of the conversation,” when they’re looking at eCommerce platforms. Whereas a year or two ago, I’m sure it wasn’t. And I don’t think it’s a part of every… everybody is mentioning WooCommerce when they talk. I still think there’s a long way to go there, but I do believe a lot of companies when they say, “Alright, we’re rolling out an eCommerce shop or store,” or, “We’re looking to upgrade our existing store to something more modern,” I think it’s starting to become an option that they’re discussing and weighing pros and cons and asking, “Is this what we want to do or not?” or “Should we use something else?” Now, on the flip side—we’re talking enterprise—but on the flip side, if you think small business, I think WooCommerce has a long way to go in terms of ease of use for small business, and that might be an even harder nut to crack, to be honest.

Interesting. Like when people come to me and say, “Hey,” I’m sure you get this a lot from friends and family, “Hey, I want to launch a website. I want to sell some stuff online. What should I do?” I’m like, “Go to Shopify.” I don’t want to walk you through the process of getting WooCommerce running when you just want to test something out and maybe sell a couple of shirts you make in your garage. Go pay Shopify 50 bucks a month, test it out. If it works, then we can talk about moving over to WooCommerce or something. And I think that is on the flip side, on both ends of the spectrum—from small business all the way up to enterprise—there’s a long way to go in terms of ease of use, in terms of really getting people to buy into it. I mean, it really feels to me like where WordPress was six, maybe seven years ago where we were trying to get people to buy into WordPress more so than just being a blogging platform, right?

Yeah.

We’re kind of doing the same thing with WooCommerce now and saying,

“No, it can go small, it can go huge, it can do it all.”

Yeah, that’s interesting. So essentially you’re kind of saying that, hey, these big enterprises, they’ll come to you and say, “Hey, Brad, get your team on it. Build us a site.” And they sit back… I shouldn’t say they sit back, but they guide you or however, work with you. You create it, where really that’s, I want to say, easier for them because they have you handling it. And it’s those small businesses that are saying, “Hey, I want to do this all myself,” and they’re having to actually dive into WooCommerce, and you’re not doing it all for them now.

And they don’t have the budget. They’re not going to spend 50 grand or a hundred grand or whatever to launch a store. A lot of times it’s almost like a proof of concept. They’re like, “Hey, we don’t know if this is going to work. We just want to try it.” Okay, well, don’t invest 10, 20, 30 grand to build a custom or even an out-of-the-box WooCommerce site. Use something like Shopify. We talked about this a little bit at WordCamp US, you and I, when we did the interview there. I really think that hosted WooCommerce piece, what Liquid Web’s rolling out, and I’m sure some others are—if they’re not already doing it, they’re thinking about it—I think that’s going to be a big market. Because again, when friends and family come to you and say, “Bob, what should I use?” you can be like, “Hey, Liquid Web. Go over here, pay them whatever, 50 bucks a month, and click, click, click—you’ve got a store.” And it sets it all up for you.

You don’t have to install WooCommerce and configure it all. You don’t have to go through the 150 different options. It sets up the basic store for you and gets you rolling really, really quickly.

Yeah, I think there’s a big market there. And I think we get so—or some people get so wrapped up in the WordPress space that they’re so into that whole, “Okay, I like building, and I like testing, and I like adding plugins to see what works, what doesn’t work,” and they don’t realize that a normal person despises that kind of pursuit. It’s like, “I’m going to spend all my time…” And that’s why it’s interesting because when I focused my blog on WooCommerce, or actually, I found it was more beneficial to just talk about extending your site. If you already have a site, here’s a way you can extend it through these plugins or offering people coming in talking like you, or they’re talking about marketing, or social, or taxes, or shipping. It wasn’t as much about building your site from the ground up. It’s more extending it and growing it. And those are the people that have a little bit more invested in it and are a little bit more serious about it than those people that are exactly like you’re saying, “Should I try WooCommerce?” “No, that didn’t work, maybe I should go to Shopify,” “Maybe I should try this instead.”

Yeah, dip your toe in to make sure you’ve got a viable store or idea. MVP—minimum viable product. Get something out the door, see if it works. If it works, great, then you can invest more time and money into it and continue to grow it. But ideally, you want to get—it sounds bad to say—but you want to spend the least amount of time and money to get a workable product out the door to test it to see if it works. This is something we talk with our clients about all the time. They come to us with these amazing ideas, but they’re amazingly large ideas. And it’s like, great, we could absolutely do that. It’s going to take us a year and a lot of money. Let’s phase this out. Let’s get a plan where we can get you something out in two, three months, and then continue to iterate it through different phases. And you could even iterate based on feedback from your visitors, your clients, your customers, because things might change based on what you thought was going to work. It may not.

Yeah, it’s an interesting area for eCommerce and WooCommerce specifically. I think we’re in the middle of a space race, I think, between things like Shopify and soon-to-be-hosted WooCommerce and some of the other platforms. I think it doesn’t mean there’s going to be one clear winner and they all die off, but they’re going to be battling from a marketing standpoint.

Oh yeah, exactly. So it’s like WordPress and Wix and Square—all that crazy stuff. And I mean, going back to the ease of use, and this is even somewhat on the enterprise too, but again, everybody wants it as easy as possible—the WordPress way, which is great. And I think that’s another reason why a lot of these page builders are so popular now.

More and more people are getting away from the idea of learning how to code and build themes rather than dive in and figure out how to code a theme. “Hey, here’s a page builder, I can drag and drop, and I can get a lot further with that because I don’t know how to code or whatever.” So, same thing with WooCommerce. Are we going to start seeing more of that spread in the WooCommerce world where it turns into more drag-and-drop versus coding?

Now, I want to slip back to the enterprise and the agencies that are out there and the smaller agencies that are looking. I am kind of guessing for a lot of people, “enterprise,” they hear the word “enterprise,” it means bigger projects, that means bigger money. What are your recommendations to these smaller agencies or these medium-sized agencies that have been primarily working with small to medium-sized businesses, and they’re thinking, “Wow, maybe I need to start dipping my toes in the enterprise world.” They haven’t really had clients that have been that large, and they want a piece of the pie. What are your words of wisdom for them as they consider that move? Or are there really some danger zones or alert? Danger, danger?

Yeah, I mean, I think in the enterprise world, there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through, a lot of steps you have to go through that don’t exist in the small to medium business world. And a lot of that is kind of upfront. This is pre-project kickoff type stuff. Just getting vetted and approved through systems, going through security and background checks. I mean, companies will review your security and password management policies.

There’s a lot of things that you don’t realize that are requirements for these companies to work with you that you’ll have to go through. Some of the stuff I didn’t realize either until we were like, “Hey, we need this.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay, let me figure that out.” But the security policies, for good reason. Some of the challenges we’ve had are these companies—their security requirements are very much structured towards brick-and-mortar agencies, right? Companies that have an office. They want to know what our policy is for locking the doors, right? Well, we’re 100% remote, so I hope all of our employees and team members lock their houses, but we don’t have a formal policy about locking your house if you leave or whatever. So sometimes, being a remote company—and this is unique to remote companies obviously—but there are going to be more considerations where you have to work with these agencies or these enterprise companies and be like, “Look, we’re one of those new-age companies,” whatever you want to call it, “we’re remote.”

So it’s just a lot. There’s a lot of upfront, there’s a lot more overhead across the whole project, and they take a little bit longer to get going. But ultimately, once you do get going, enterprise work is great. Usually much larger contracts, longer contracts, more stable work. I think a good opportunity for small to medium-sized companies that are looking to get into the enterprise world is to try to partner up with a company that is looking to hire you as an extension of their team. So rather than a company just hiring you to build Project X, how can your team be an extension of their team? You know what I mean? So basically, your developers are their developers. A lot of companies like to do that because it’s ultimately easier for them to get budget and funding to essentially set up a retainer with a company to extend their team versus hiring full-time employees. Because hiring full-time employees, there’s a lot of overhead with that for companies.

So many times they can get the budget that’s more than what it would cost them to hire an employee just to outsource it and to extend their team through you. So that’s always a really good opportunity to get your foot in the door with enterprise work.

Right. And it’s interesting you said how corporate enterprise is so much different. I know before my pre-WordPress life, we had a marketing business, and we had small and large businesses, and we worked with larger corporate and even larger nonprofits. I mean, we worked with some major hospitals and stuff, and there’s a lot of stuff there. And you find out there’s a lot more people in the mix there to make decisions. And if you’re used to working with a one- or two-person small business, and they’re getting back to you, wait until you have to wait for it to go down the pipeline in a corporation or something.

Yeah, I mean, a project that maybe normally would take… maybe the design phase would take two to four weeks in the enterprise just because of how many

stakeholders have to approve something. That two to four weeks’ worth of work that you would normally do could take two to four months, easily. Not to say you’re taking more time, but it’s more time of that going up and down the chain of command to get approvals. We’ve had that happen time and time again, and we’ve learned, and we’ve grown. And so now we have those discussions upfront, so we’re a little bit clearer, “Okay, what is the approval process? Is it one person? Is it ten people?” Because that helps us set a more realistic timeline. And you need to factor that in because again, there’s going to be a lot more overhead, there’s going to be more meetings, there’s going to be more time where you’re not just writing code, and you need to account for that time somehow, or else you’re going to have 10 billable hours and 80 non-billable because you didn’t account for all the actual management time that’s expected as a part of those projects.

So yeah, it’s different. It’s a different world. You just have to have that mindset and be ready for it. Things are going to be different.

Right. So I kind of wanted to throw in something a little bit in the news right now, and speaking of enterprise, Walmart is closing down, what, 60-some Sam’s Clubs. I didn’t read the article, and I know I’m going off on a little tangent here, but there are actual reasons behind it. I can imagine there are probably several reasons, and we could probably guess them, but have you ever seen anybody on Twitter say, “Hey, I’m at Sam’s Club,” how people talk about shopping at Costco all the time? “I’m at Costco in the lines.” I never heard anybody talk on social about being at Sam’s Club.

I don’t know if I have seen that. I mean, I shop at Sam’s Club. Does that count?

Yeah. I mean, I like Sam’s Club and Costco, and I purely go to whichever one’s closer. So Sam’s happens to be closer to me now, so that’s where I’m a member at. I hadn’t heard that news, but that’s surprising because I gotta be honest, one of the best things to buy at those stores is TVs. I’ve price-shopped TVs, and they always seem to have the best deals on flat screens.

Costco and the chocolate cake. I don’t know if you’ve had that chocolate cake from Costco.

No, I haven’t.

The thing weighs like 20 pounds, and it is heaven. It is heaven. It’s like 10 layers of just chocolate on chocolate. It’s the Costco chocolate cake. There are a couple of people listening right now, shaking their heads like, “Yep, I know what you’re talking about.”

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder… and I wonder, I’m thinking of… and I know somebody actually talked about the closing of them, and they said, “Oh, California people.” I don’t know if there’s a lot of them in California. And I wonder if every time something like that closes, I always wonder about the effect of online shopping. And they obviously had competition with Costco and—

And Amazon.

Yeah, Amazon’s affecting a lot of these companies more and more. And it’s interesting to see what’s more, the retail, the brick and mortar, and obviously it makes you wonder, when they’re closing that many physical stores, if they’re seeing… and again, I should have read the article beforehand, but if they’re seeing more online sales, basically.

Maybe. I mean, the thing I would immediately think about in terms of online sales for something like Costco or Sam’s is the size of buying. It’s bulk. So when you walk out of those stores, you have two shopping carts full.

So big.

And they don’t offer free shipping, I’m sure. I would think not, just because of… I mean, if you’re buying a hundred rolls of toilet paper, I doubt you’re getting free shipping on that.

Not heavy, but a super big box.

Yeah, and it seems like both of those… it’d have to be local delivery there really, specifically—fill up their truck and go around.

Speaking of that, not to get sidetracked, but I read a really interesting article the other day about Amazon. Amazon is… the software behind Amazon and how it does packaging is unreal. Packaging and delivery. But what I thought stood out—and maybe someone listening will think this is interesting and want to look into it more—but they said basically, a lot of people complain like, “Oh, I got this massive box for this little thing.” And sometimes it’s a mistake. Sometimes they put a pair of scissors in this big box, but other times it’s actually intentional. And what they do is they’ll analyze every square inch of the truck that’s going in, and they’ll put small things in bigger boxes so that it actually stacks evenly throughout the truck.

I’ve wondered that.

I was like, “That’s amazing.” That actually makes a ton of sense. And I had never thought about that.

I don’t think it’s something you would ever think about, but I’m like, “These people complain about it.” So yeah, sometimes it’s a mistake, but not always. Sometimes it’s actually done absolutely intentionally to fill every square inch of that truck and not have things falling over on top of each other. So, yeah, crazy.

You’d think that’d be a nightmare. It could be a big puzzle, or I don’t know what you call it—Tetris.

Yeah. You’re Tetris-ing the truck, right?

Right. “Okay, we gotta pull this one out. Anybody got one of the—”

If you don’t pack a truck correctly, you might have to run two trucks, and now you’ve just doubled the amount of gas and the drivers, and so you’ve doubled your cost immediately. So it makes so much sense when you hear about it, but I had never ever thought about that. I thought it was really interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, I know probably a lot of people would be nodding right now because everybody’s experienced that.

It’s like, I’m just waiting for drones—the day I can buy something and a drone will bring it to me. I’ll buy the dumbest thing, a pair of socks, and I’ll just sit outside with a smile waiting for that drone to show up.

Yeah, you’re waiting for cheesesteaks to be delivered by drone, I bet.

Oh man. The health will be going down dramatically.

Alright, well, we did digress a little bit, but that’s kind of what I want this show to be about—bringing up different stuff. And that’s kind of cool about Amazon. Well, excellent. I think this has been a great first show, and see, it’s going to be a hit, and everybody will say, “Yeah, when’s Brad coming on next time?”

Hey, I’m ready. Let me know. I’ll be back. This is a lot of fun.

Thanks, sir.

Thanks for having me on, Bob.

You bet. And thank you, everyone, for tuning in for the very first episode. We’ll continue on to Do the Woo. Take care.