WooCommerce Blocks and Page Builders

BobWP:
Hey, everybody, welcome back to Do the Woo podcast, and I have my esteemed colleague, the charming Brad Williams, joining me. How are you doing, Brad?

Brad:
Hello. Hey, Bob. I’m doing good.

BobWP:
How—

Brad:
Are you doing?

BobWP:
I am doing just great. I guess we’re into summer now, officially—or not officially. I guess it doesn’t start, but we’re getting closer.

Brad:
I don’t know if anyone’s ever described me as charming, but I’ll take it.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’ve got to throw out a different adjective, something to describe each week, something a little bit different. So anyway, we have an overdue guest here, somebody who’s been in the WooCommerce space for many, many years. I like how I added “many, many,” just “many years.” But Jamie Marsland, welcome to the show, Jamie.

Jamie:
Hey, Bob.

BobWP:
Now, everybody probably knows Jamie, or some people might not know Jamie, but I think—why don’t we kick it off by having you tell us a little bit about your background and your life in Woo?

Jamie:
Yeah, so I run a company called PootlePress, and we’ve been going about nine years now, so a long time. We started off as just a training business, and we still are a training business. Now we’ve built our own plugins as well as training, and we run courses around the UK. We also focus on plugins, and historically we built plugins for WooThemes Canvas. So this is a long time ago when WooThemes was WooThemes, and that’s where we started our plugin journey. Now, we have a range of plugins, but I guess it’d be fair to say our focus is more and more on WooCommerce. That’s where we’re seeing the growth in terms of our plugin strategy.

BobWP:
Cool. Yeah, so I am more than familiar with your plugins, and I think we’re going to just dive a bit into the world of Gutenberg—that’s never been talked about before, anywhere—and I thought it’d be a great thing to bring up, mainly because of one of your newest plugins. Tell us a little bit about that, and then we’ll just talk Gutenberg for a while.

Jamie:
Sure. So we’ve just released a plugin called WooBuilder, which gives users the ability to use Gutenberg to change and edit the single product layout in WooCommerce. We built a whole bunch of blocks that kind of atomize the WooCommerce product page. We have an “Add to Cart” block, a “Product Image” block, a “Short Description” block, and some other blocks. It just gives people much more control, so they can edit what is generally a standard page on their WooCommerce store. When you think about it, it’s probably the most important page of anyone’s shop. In many ways, it’s the page that sells their product, and actually, at the moment, everyone’s product pages look pretty much the same. There are changes in themes, but giving people more control over that product page seems like a really neat idea. And the other thing we can do, once you start working in blocks, is add extra blocks into that experience. We’ve started by having a “Sales Countdown” block, but you can start to imagine other blocks that would be useful to people within that product layout. So they can customize individual products, but they can also create templates and then apply those to multiple products using categories and tags. Some of the product pages we’re seeing are really, obviously, very different from the traditional WooCommerce layout product page.

Brad:
I’m curious how you come up with your product ideas. Putting together an idea for a product and actually going from that point to releasing it can be a lengthy and complicated process. So, obviously, you want to make sure whatever ideas you have and whatever products you decide to invest your time and resources into are the ones that are going to be successful. So I’m curious—is this feedback from your users, or are you just looking at the landscape? Where do those ideas come from?

Jamie:
Yeah, it’s a good question, and we have a pretty good hit rate. We’ve obviously released a few products that haven’t sold great, but most of them do. I think because the feedback comes from, because we’re a training business as well, and I personally have trained about 3,000 people face-to-face on WordPress. So I’m sitting there teaching them—these are beginners, and these people are DIYing it, and that’s a weekly experience. I see that every single week, and quite a few of these people are running their shops. So that just gives you incredible insight—into how people are using WordPress, the confusions around WordPress, and we’ll come onto that, probably, in terms of Gutenberg and WordPress.com and WordPress.org. But you see their problems up close and personal, so it’s an amazing feedback loop. Obviously, we have history in this space and get feedback directly from customers about what they’re looking for. So we tend to release and iterate, try and iterate quite quickly on the products. And the other thing we try and do is, rather than going horizontal in products, we try and go quite narrow and deep. So we have a product called Storefront Pro, which is purely focused on customizing the Storefront theme from WooCommerce. They’re quite niche, but quite deep plugins, if that makes sense.

Brad:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I look at this, the Builder, and you mentioned the product page being probably one of the most important pages, which I would agree, right? That’s where people are really making the decision if they want to buy this product or not. I love the idea of giving users a lot of control, but there’s also the other side of the coin: giving users a lot of control, which can be both good and bad. So I wonder, do you help guide your users and say, look, this gives you a lot of flexibility in how you can lay out these pages? However, there’s a certain kind of expectation that customers have online of things they expect to see in certain places. Are you helping—maybe within your training you do this too—kind of helping guide on best practices or things that might help a store if they’re not as familiar with making these decisions?

Jamie:
We’re starting to. We just released an update last week, actually, which gives them some starting templates. Technically, this is quite tough because Gutenberg is changing and it’s quite new, but we’ve released two, which are kind of the standard layout for WooCommerce products at the moment. The only difference is the product image and where that’s placed, but that gets them to a starting point of a traditional layout, which they can then change. But in my head, where we’re at with WooBuilder is we’re at the “plumbing” stage; we’re piecing together the plumbing. Almost the more interesting stuff is what you just asked me about. There are ways you can do that through training and information. One of the long-term visions—and I don’t know if we’ll ever get here—is you could potentially introduce split testing into this thing, and then you could get feedback from the community on what works and what doesn’t, which would just be amazing. That’s probably a long way off, but as a vision, as an end user, you just want to set up these products and almost automatically switch depending on what’s selling best. If you could somehow harness what other people are experiencing—which, technically, you can do now with Gutenberg—that’s kind of where I’d want to head with it. But we’re right at the early stages, really. We’re just at the plumbing stage.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, it is exciting, right? Because you’re right—that is the more, I guess, interesting stuff. Not to say the base of the plugin isn’t interesting; it’s amazing-looking. But the idea of how changing a piece of text or the button placement could increase conversions by 2%—that’s very real, some of that stuff.

Jamie:
And you can see other services doing this. A lot of people will be familiar with things like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, and these guys are already doing that kind of stuff, in terms of, you can split test subject headings. So that’s where I’d like to get to.

Brad:
It’s something we get a lot of clients for, and we talk about different things, and you always get the client that wants to do something completely out-of-the-box and something that’s never been done before around their e-commerce store. I usually have to talk them off a ledge and say, look, unless you’re a really established brand, doing anything too far outside of the norm is not going to help your sales. They expect a certain flow. It’s why Amazon does things a very certain way. They’re spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars to confirm and figure this stuff out—what users expect when they go to an e-commerce store. It’s just fascinating.

Speaker 4:
It’s—

Brad:
Really fascinating to me what works and what doesn’t, and how these little adjustments and tweaks can have major impacts.

Jamie:
And you could take a simple idea like the traditional WooCommerce page layout—the product pitch is pretty small, which is fine if

you’re selling a pair of glasses. But if you’re like a holiday website and you want to really expose something beautiful on that page and build the experience for that end user, then that’s one occasion where you probably want to do something slightly different. That’s one of the things we’re seeing with WooBuilder that people are able to do now.

BobWP:
Now I’m curious—with all your plugins, are you finding that most of your clients, especially with the builder and stuff before the block plugins, and what’s going on with those, are a lot of your customers still on the Classic Editor when it comes to commerce?

Jamie:
It gets very complex. There’s more to it than that as well, right? Because they might not be on the Classic Editor, but there are a lot of themes and plugins out there that are disabling Gutenberg, which I’m discovering, which I didn’t know about. I thought you could look at… So when we support customers, we would start by saying, “Are they using the Classic Editor?” They might say, “It’s not working. WooBuilder isn’t working for whatever reason.” So you check, and the first thing is, are they using the Classic Editor? It’s “no.” So what else? Then there’s something else that’s disabled it. It might be Divi—there’s an option now in Divi where you can disable Gutenberg, which I only found out a few weeks ago. So there’s lots of firms finding ways to disable it, so it’s a bit of a hunt.

BobWP:
Yeah. So what I see now with support, it’s not like everybody would always ask, “What’s your WordPress version?”

Jamie:
Yeah.

BobWP:
It’s just as important to ask, “Are you using Gutenberg or not?”

Jamie:
Yeah. And what’s incredible is that people don’t know. People don’t know if they are.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Jamie:
I was Skyping a client today, and they had no idea they had Gutenberg. Their experience of WordPress was Visual Composer. And we were talking about some things, and I sort of mentioned—I was giving them a demo of Gutenberg via Skype, saying, “Look, you can do this cool stuff now.” And they asked, “How do I get that?” Well, they already had it, but they had no idea.

Brad:
I think just by us, you’ve been… I think Bob said your company’s been around for about nine years, which is a long time in the WordPress world. Bob, you’ve been around for a while. Let’s just leave it at that for a little while. And I talk about this a lot, but we take a lot of this stuff for granted. Things we just assume people know in WordPress—even using the term “Gutenberg” might be confusing because that’s no longer what it is. That was kind of the development term, and now it’s… What do we call—I don’t even know what we’re calling it now, that visual editor. What are we calling it?

Jamie:
I call it the block editor.

Brad:
The block editor, the new editor, whatever. We’ve been doing this forever. I think, obviously, that’ll work itself out over time, but yeah, you can never take these things for granted. I always tell the story—when I first got into WordPress, I couldn’t figure out how to log into WordPress. And when you search “WordPress login URL,” it’s a very hard thing to search. And, of course, now we know WP-admin or just go to admin or dashboard or whatever, but I take that for granted now. I think—so I always try to, and I’m sure you know this, you do training, so I’m sure you get all sorts of fun questions during training.

Speaker 4:
That’s…

Brad:
It’s a big one. It’s important for everybody to remember that these common terms or things we just assume are common knowledge are not.

Jamie:
That’s a huge question at the start of my course. People are saying, “I’m logging into WordPress, but I’m not seeing my website.” And they’re running self-hosted websites, but they’re logging into WordPress.com. Add on to that the fact that now you can use WordPress.com to log into your self-hosted website. That just plays with people’s heads.

Brad:
Yeah, yeah. That’s not confusing at all for our new users.

Jamie:
What’s incredible is that some people are maybe using the latest version, everything built-in, but they’re also still using the Gutenberg plugin. Does that—does that play a lot differently than if you have it in core, or—I’m not familiar with it.

Jamie:
It can do. I think it’s slightly ahead. So now we’re supporting Classic Editor, WordPress 5.2.1, plus Gutenberg 5.8 or whatever it’s at. So it’s a very mixed economy in terms of trying to support plugins. If you’re building block-based plugins, your support overhead has a certain complexity to it. And a lot of people have got Gutenberg active and don’t realize they’ve got it active again because they still think it’s not part of core.

BobWP:
So what actually happens if you’re running a Gutenberg plugin and you have the latest WordPress? How does that…

Jamie:
It’s fine. I mean, it works. There might be—from our point of view, from developing plugins, we’re now supporting almost two versions of Gutenberg or trying to. It’s just more complexity, Bob. I’m not being too negative about it, but it was one of the concerns that was voiced when Gutenberg was being rolled out in the way it was. I think this might happen. Well, not so much different versions of Gutenberg, but more the fact that if you had Classic Editor and Gutenberg and you gave people that, it was almost like you’re forking WordPress to a certain extent, which is kind of—when you support many people’s websites or see many people’s websites—that’s kind of what you see. I don’t know if that’s your experience, Brad.

Brad:
Honestly, the majority of our clients are not using it yet because they’re trying to figure out how and if it makes sense to use it. And honestly, I think there are just a lot of sites that don’t need it. There’s a lot of great use cases for Gutenberg, and I think it’s really cool, but I don’t think it’s—I always say, use the right tool for the right job. I don’t think it’s always the right tool. So most of our clients are taking a wait-and-see approach. Now that the dust is settled a little bit from the release, or another release past it, 5.2, I expect those conversations to probably heat up toward the later part of the year once it’s considered really, really stable, stable, stable.

Jamie:
Stable, stable.

BobWP:
And I think it kind of plays into how much time you spend in the editor. A lot of people running stores aren’t doing tons of content. They’re working more on their products, keeping those updated. Of course, that depends if they use the blocks or not. But for myself, I’ve discovered Gutenberg helps my workflow because I spend so much time creating content. So I first, of course, had to figure out the damn thing, and then once I did, it was like, okay, this is cool. This is a lot quicker than it used to be for me. So like you said, Brad, I think it is use cases. I mean, I can go out there and say, hey, Gutenberg’s great because it saves me time, but that’s not the case for everybody. And I usually make that point, too—that yeah, this is coming from me; it’s not for everyone.

Jamie:
It’s interesting because if you look at the reviews on WordPress.org, they’re still largely negative. I mean, very negative with not the most helpful feedback. But I now teach Gutenberg in my courses, and it’s almost universally liked by people coming to it fresh. The stuff we can now teach that they can produce in a day’s course for beginners is 100% better than what they were producing six months ago. So there’s a real split.

Brad:
Yeah, I haven’t actually looked at the reviews in a while, and they’re still pretty…

Jamie:
They’re either five stars or one star; there’s nothing in between.

Brad:
And it’s still a baby, six, seven months old. There’s a ways to go, which is why a lot of larger clients are cautious and taking their time. I think it’s a great tool for certain use cases. But I’d love to hear, Jamie, what you think about the future of page builders in light of Gutenberg’s development.

Jamie:
How long have we got?

Brad:
As long as you need.

Jamie:
Well, I think page builders have advantages, but Gutenberg will eventually help unify the WordPress experience. As it evolves, it should lessen the training curve for WordPress users, especially those taking over sites or using multiple plugins. If Gutenberg can really leverage the entire WordPress ecosystem and allow people to incorporate blocks from different third parties, that’s a game-changer. Right now, advanced page builders like Elementor are still ahead, but for a lot of

users, Gutenberg might be enough with a few plugins. Time will tell.

BobWP:
Definitely. Well, let’s check back in a year and see where things stand with Gutenberg and page builders. That should be fun.

Brad:
Yeah, it’ll be interesting.

BobWP:
Okay, well, let’s see. I did see an article about PayPal rolling out its e-commerce solution. I thought it was interesting. I think I shared the link. Did either of you have a chance to look at it? It seems like a pretty big step for e-commerce and PayPal. Any thoughts on that?

Brad:
PayPal is like… I think everybody takes a big sigh before they start talking about PayPal. It’s a necessary evil; maybe evil is too strong a word, but it’s a necessary payment method. Most people have used it, and it’s just kind of there. Even though a lot of us techies may not prefer it, PayPal is well known, so it’s often a go-to for small businesses. It’s also familiar to customers, so it makes sense.

Jamie:
I agree. If I ask my attendees who’s heard of Stripe, maybe 2% have. But everyone knows PayPal. It’s ubiquitous.

BobWP:
Yep, PayPal is a necessary… fill in the blank, as Brad said.

Brad:
I recently had my high school reunion, and the organizers only accepted check or Google Pay. You’d think they asked people to mail cash. People were shocked—“What? I can’t use PayPal?” It’s just everywhere and so familiar to people.

Jamie:
I demo WooCommerce as part of my training, and people are amazed at what they can do in a day—adding products, setting up PayPal, and knowing PayPal handles the security. It’s a revelation for them.

Brad:
Anytime there’s no price listed and just a “Contact Us” button, I wonder if it’s really meant for small businesses. I don’t know if PayPal is trying to compete with Shopify or not. It’s a little unclear, but we’ll see.

BobWP:
Yeah, definitely. Anything exciting on the horizon for you, Brad?

Brad:
Not really; it’s summer.

Jamie:
Two things, Bob: WordCamp Berlin next week, and it’s been raining for 24 hours here, so I hope you’re having better weather.

BobWP:
Wow, that’s a lot of rain. As for me, I recently moved one of my podcasts to its own website and will be launching another podcast soon, this time focused on digital content marketing—interviewing people about video, podcasting, YouTubers, and all that good stuff within the WordPress space.

Brad:
Whoa, I didn’t approve that.

BobWP:
Oh, didn’t you get that memo?

Brad:
Things I learn on the show!

BobWP:
Jamie, where can people connect with you?

Jamie:
Just go to pootlepress.com or find us on Twitter at @pootlepress.

Brad:
And make sure to watch that video on the site. I watched the whole thing. The “baking a pie” theme was intriguing.

Jamie:
That was a genuine attempt, Brad. That’s what happened.

BobWP:
Thank you, Jamie, for joining us, and as always, Brad, a pleasure. Thanks, everyone, and until next time—Do the Woo.