From Open Source Debates to Hosted Solutions and UI Challenges with WooCommerce Evolutions

James Kemp:
Hello, welcome to the second episode of do the Woo, the podcast where we talk about all things WooCommerce. I’m James Kemp, I’m the core product manager at WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
And I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2. Two weeks ago we interviewed Matt Mullenweg about the future of WooCommerce and a lot of the questions that people pre submitted for that interview were more focused on specific plans at Woo. So what we dec decided was that instead of doing those questions, then we would do an extra episode where we put those questions to the people who are responsible for the day to day decision making at Woo. Now we already have James, core product manager, as he just said, as co host. So he’s already perfectly placed to answer those questions. And in addition to join him, we’ve invited Beau Levins, artistic director and lead at Woo. Hey Beau.

Beau Lebens:
Hey everybody. Good to be here. How you doing?

James Kemp:
Have you. Do you want to talk a little about a little bit about what your role is at WooCommerce so that people get an understanding of what you’re dealing with on a daily basis?

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, sure. So obviously my title is maybe a non standard one in this space. So my title is artistic director, which is sort of a nod to the craft of creating good products basically. So my responsibility spans the product, the business, partnerships, sort of all of the commercial side of things. My background is in engineering and so I sort of came up through an engineering line of work into product and then now I’m responsible for the entire Woo business which spans the sort of commercial side of it, the community side of it, and all of the software that makes that work.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, and that is exactly why we thought that you were the person for the questions that we’ve got today.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, looking forward to it.

Katie Keith:
Thank you so much to all of those of you who have already pre submitted questions on social media. For those of you watching live, you can ask Beau and James your questions about anything to do with WooCommerce in the comments, wherever you’re watching this and we’ll try to get to them during the live show.

James Kemp:
Yeah, and before we dive in to the Q and A, we’d love if you could subscribe to do the Woo. So we are part of the Open Channels network and you will need to subscribe individually@dothewoo.com on YouTube, YouTube.com the Woo podcast or follow us on X o the Woo.

Katie Keith:
Now let’s get into the questions. First, I’d like to do a group of questions which Simon Harper basically published. He did a commentary following the Matt Mullenweg interview where he raised some lots of points, very interesting and well thought through points. I’m just going to put on the screen people watching where there’s video, a link to his newsletter. It’s the latest issue of LoopWP Newsletter Issue 191. So if you’re not already subscribed then you can do that and look at past episodes and other people. Also featured the Matt Mullenweg interview which was great, such as the WP repository and on X. So we’re going to go through Simon’s comments which I’ve for some reason lost in my notes. Here’s one of them. So one question that Simon had was about from a Sorry, I’ve lost my place here. From a store owner’s perspective. Oh yes, this was a bit about what are WooCommerce’s competitive advantages and how do they set woo up for success in the next five years? And Matt Mullenweg answered this question and he talks largely about freedom being WooCommerce’s biggest competitive advantage. And he also referred to open source. And Simon’s response was that he understands from a development agency or a builder perspective. But what about from a store owner’s perspective? Most don’t care about ownership or open source. They want something easy to use with as little friction as possible.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. So I think I’ll start by agreeing with at least the second half of what Simon’s saying there and having a great product that doesn’t introduce friction, that doesn’t cost too much, that does all the things that you need it to do. That’s kind of a baseline that applies to everybody. Right on the point about merchants not really caring about ownership or open source, I think that’s a little bit of a failing of us, frankly, us as a community, helping people understand the importance of ownership. Because merchants very much care about ownership the second they realize they don’t have it. And so you see this all over X in particular, people who have been deplatformed or they can’t do a thing that they want to do because their platform doesn’t allow them to do that. And that’s when they suddenly realize like, oh, ownership is actually really important. And the best way that I get that is open source. So I think that’s like an education thing. But that’s obviously not going to be the singular thing that makes the difference. I think what comes along with the open source nature of Woo and that level of ownership and that freedom is the flexibility and the customization. So it’s actually sort of more of a control thing. I often think of the ownership side of things from a lens of control. Control for the user, that is, for the merchant. And so they have the ability to do things on their own store that they just can’t do on a shared platform where somebody else controls their code base. Somebody else is doing all of their scaling and maintenance and security and building the product for them. If they don’t have any ability to customize that, then that’s a real blocker for a lot of merchants. They want to do something different or specific or they’re in a highly regulated market and being hosted on somebody else’s platform is just not a legal option for them, or it’s not a preference or whatever. And in all of those types of use cases, Woo really shines because people can take it and do whatever they need to do with it. So I think that freedom piece is really important. And from a merchant’s perspective, I think the way we talk about that is actually more about control than freedom. Control in their hands, that is.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I totally agree. If we just say open source, what does that mean? We need to talk about the benefit to the merchant, which might be freedom, flexibility. And we need to be as specific as possible so that they know why it’s a benefit. And I love your point about the they only miss things like the lack of data ownership when they’ve had a problem as a result. So that’s not a good selling point in the first place. You need to pick out what those selling points are.

Beau Lebens:
It’s kind of the same as selling security, security software or I guess insurance of any kind. It’s like nobody really wants it and it’s very difficult to explain why you need it until you’ve had some experience where it would have been good to have it.

Katie Keith:
Now let’s move on to events. So we were talking with Matt Mullenweg about whether there was going to be more WooCommerce coverage at flagship . He spoke very positively about how he would like to see WooCommerce featured more at WordCamps. He encouraged the community to submit talks. I’ve already heard of some people who are planning to submit talks as a result of this. And he also said, I think this would be a cool year to see another WooConf, the last one having been in 2017 and Simon’s follow up in LoopWP was. I don’t think this be the community’s sole responsibility with Checkout Summit, which is an independent event that’s coming up about WooCommerce. There is a clear community app. Oh, it’s gone. There is a clear community appetite for a dedicated WooCommerce event. Automatic should be intentional about this. So the pressure is on.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, I guess I’ll agree with both Matt and Simon. I would love to see a WooConf this year. Candidly, it is something that we’re looking at internally to see can we do it at the level that we want to do it at? I’ll say shout out to Rodolfo Checkout. I love that he’s putting on Checkout Summit. And I know we’re a headline sponsor for that event because we’re really happy to see events in the community. We’ve sponsored Word Set Woo Sesh in the past. Obviously, we sponsor do the Woo. So, like, we. We love to see events and activity in the community, but putting on WooConf is, you know, it’s kind of a big deal. And so when we anything like that, it’s the same as anything else we might do. We have to look at how much are we going to spend on it, how much time are we going to put into it, you know, how much of a benefit is it actually going to be and for whom? And so we’re very much looking at that. I never got to go to a WooConf previously, and so selfishly, I just want to put one on because I want to go because I think it would be really fun to go spend time with folks who are deep in the Woo community, people who are building in the community. We have a lot of partners who really want an event. They want to get in touch, they want to spend time with people who are building with Woo or using Woo. So I’m a big fan of the idea and would love to do it, but no promises just yet, unfortunately. But we’ll see.

Katie Keith:
Intriguing. It does feel like something that would help to not put, but keep Woo on the map and keep. Because it is such a widely used plugin, it definitely justifies something like its own official event. Although I do understand there’s an opportunity cost and it’s a huge amount of work to put on something like this.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah. And I think we’ve also gotten used to. I see mention of, like, wordcamps. You know, wordcamps are incredible events that are really only possible because there’s so many volunteers involved in running it and then running, like, the coordinating all of the contributions of the volunteers who are part of it is a huge job in and of itself. And so, yeah, we just have to make sure that if we, however it is, that we go about doing it, if we want to do a pretty large scale event, it would most likely be that we’re able to actually do it at a level that, you know, shows up in the way that we want to show up and is at the level of experience and quality. And we have great speakers and good food and a good venue. All of those things sort of take time and money. So we want to make sure we do it right if we’re going to bring it back. And then we do it hopefully in a way that’s sustainable, you know, that it’s not just we do it once and then we say, well, that didn’t work out, we don’t do it again. But that, you know, if we. I would love for it to come back and be a thing that we do every year.

James Kemp:
Dave in the comments has said, what about like a WooCommerce Day sort of bolted onto wordcamps? That could be quite a nice approach.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, it’s an interesting one. WooCommerce is obviously technically quite separate from WordPress as like an official project and a foundation and everything. So I think Matt was talking last time about how the scale of WooCommerce maybe sort of tips that balance a little bit. So that could be an option that would be interesting. We’re definitely interested in something that cannot stand alone, but we know that there are a lot of people who are very interested in Woo who aren’t maybe as deep in the WordPress ecosystem. And so there is a bit of a. Do you bring them into the WordPress ecosystem first or very directly alongside Woo, or do you just embrace, hey, this is merchants and commerce and it’s actually like kind of a different audience in some cases.

Katie Keith:
Well, that kind of achieves both. If you have it as an additional day adjacent to a WordCamp, you’ve got the venue and everything. So you’ve got a lot of economies of scale to make it easier and cheaper. And some people would go to the word camp as well. The group you’re talking about does their E commerce first. May or may not. That’s okay. Maybe tickets would be separate or something like that, but then that might bring a lot more people. If you think about WordCamp, us, if it was an additional day, then a lot of people that wouldn’t otherwise go to WooConf or whatever we’re calling it, they might go, and it would get more people into WooCommerce. So I do like that. That idea.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a good one. Thanks, Dave.

James Kemp:
I’m not sure that WordCamp would allow it because they don’t want to see. They. They don’t want to be seen, like, pushing one specific product. But potentially as, like, I often see, like, side events that happen, you know, nearby. They’re not officially associated, but they’re, like, in the same place. You’ve got the same people that are already there and access to, I guess, like, some of the same speakers that. That might be able to do. But then you don’t want to take away from WordCamp and, like, when do you do it? So I. Yeah, I. I think it’s complicated. I don’t think WordCamp would allow it.

Katie Keith:
But that’s just my side event. Fair point. Because you can organize what you want, but it is all automatic, ultimately. I know wordcamps are independent, but you know what I mean.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, yeah. And I think that is an important point, though, is that especially wordcamps, like, they are organized by a group primarily of volunteers. They’re not a strictly automatic event. And so James’s point of not wanting to muddy that is.

James Kemp:
Excuse me.

Beau Lebens:
Very valid.

Katie Keith:
So moving on, Simon has just turned up. Oh, sorry, I just clicked on the wrong comment. There we go. So, Simon, we are featuring the point that you raised, so you’re going to want to go back and watch the recording later, and we’re going to move on to your next point. Next, which is that in the Matt Mullenweg interview, He was asked, WooCommerce serves merchants, product builders, and agencies. Are their goals aligned to those segments and how are they prioritized? And Matt explained that there are goals tied to each one, but he wasn’t specific about how they are prioritized. So Simon wrote in his newsletter, I would love to hear more on this. As a freelancer, I’ve been rejected from the agency program in the past, and that hurt a little bit. But I would love to know, what are the goals for each segment and how are those goals being achieved?

Beau Lebens:
Good question. I guess I won’t speak to specific numeric goals as far as how they’re prioritized. We actually have different or sort of sub organizations within Automattic who tend to focus on different parts of that equation. So for, for example, we have the A4A program, automatic. I always mix it up. Not agencies for automatic. It’s automatic for agencies, and they focus exclusively on agency programs. So they’re not necessarily building product. They’re more looking at, you know, incentive structures. And I guess they are actually building products to allow agencies to manage websites and that sort of thing. But their focus is exclusively on the agency side of things. Within our core WooCommerce product group, that’s where things are a little muddier. And we really are always prioritizing kind of some combination of merchants, builders and builders sort of in general, like people who put together WooCommerce sites and agencies. And, and there’s also one that we often, we like the collective community often forgets to talk about. Really important stakeholder is shoppers, who we refer to as shoppers like the customer of the merchant. So looking at what is that experience and what are we doing to enable a really good experience, there is the other important group that’s like one of the top levels of everything that we care about. Again, I’d say from a priority perspective it really is a mix. We know that for example, merchants won’t use WooCommerce if they’re not able to make a good shopper experience. And developers or agencies won’t use WooCommerce if they can’t customize it and build with it in a way that creates what their merchants are looking for, which ultimately is what their shoppers are looking for. So we go back and forth over time and at different times we sort of see that there’s need for more focus on different parts of the experience. But there’s pretty much always something going on for all of those different groups. So I know that’s not like maybe a specific answer that Simon’s looking for, but I don’t know that there really is a super specific one.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think one of the, one of the things that we do is we work pretty closely with a number of different sized merchants as well and we’ll iterate on things with, with, with them. And the goal is to always try and improve the core product, you know, so it’s. So it’s always improving based on what these merchants actually need. And I think working with like the different types of merchants and the different sizes of merchants really helps to get like a full view of what these different people need. And yeah, we also work quite closely with some agencies and developers, you know, specifically Kestrel WP We’ve worked pretty closely with, on the fulfillment stuff that we’ve done. I’m always like out in the wild listening to agencies and developers about, you know, what all their needs are. And we try and bring that back to the product as much as possible. So really it’s just a case of like a lot of listening and iterating and improving based on what we hear. But yeah, as Beau says, we kind of focus on all of these different segments. Like even within just the merchant segment, there’s so many different types of merchants, different sizes of merchants. Like, you know, a small merchant who’s just selling a couple of products doesn’t need the same features that a massive merchant selling thousands of products needs. So there’s definitely like a challenge there to, to figure out what the core product should offer that kind of caters to both of these things. But yeah, it’s something that we always consider in a lot of the things we do. It’s something we consider with the Morin core work that we were doing and that we still are doing. And yeah, it’s an ongoing process and.

Katie Keith:
There has been a noticeable improvement in that in the last two or so years where we were much more active in going out and getting that feedback and so on. Let’s move on to another part of the Mullenweg interview, which Simon followed up on, which is the UCP side of things and how will commerce move forward with this? Now, Matt explained that everything will be supported AI wise and that Shopify are very good at getting exclusive day of launch announcements, but WooCommerce won’t be left behind. Matt also mentioned that surprisingly few people actually use features like this and that in almost a year there have been almost no transactions. And Simon’s follow up on that was, I would love to know where Matt gets this transaction data from, but it’s encouraging to hear that WooCommerce will support UCP. Yeah, I don’t know. Was Matt quoting specific transaction data or talking more generally about the fact that people don’t use this stuff much?

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, I can speak to that one a little bit. So there’s a mix of both there. So for example, if people are using Woo payments, we have pretty good visibility of understanding what sort of transactions are happening there and where are they coming from. But I think he was speaking a little more generally from the perspective of a lot of these things have been announced, but if you dig into them, they’re not actually live, or they’re live only for very select groups or very specific partners with very specific merchants. So you can think of them basically as beta in a lot of cases, like a closed beta type release. So they’re really not like a broadly adopted technology yet. That being said, things are moving very quickly and we are working with all of These folks, the Googles and the OpenAI’s and the Stripes, et cetera, of the world, to make sure that we support them all and make sure that we do it as much as possible in a way that actually works with our platform, which is pretty unique. It’s open, there are many different payment types, there are all sorts of different checkout flows and whatever different concepts that need to be supported that aren’t necessarily supported in more closed and narrowly targeted platforms. So for example, I think Etsy was one of the launch partners for ACP from memory. They have a very specific controlled environment. They sell certain things in a certain way. Frankly, it’s a lot easier to build a new protocol or a new, especially in the payment space, which is very complex, they control everything about that. So it’s much easier for them to collaborate and design a new protocol and then ship it. To do it on an open flexible platform like ours is way more complicated. Which is not to say that it’s not happening, but it just takes actually a bit more work to get it done. So it’s coming. I will say on the data side, other than Woo payments, we also have folks who opt in to sharing data with WooCommerce or through WooCommerce with Automattic technically. And so actually through that we see a decent number of sort of referred sales. I think Matt talked about this as well. So not necessarily like a fully agentic purchase where an automated AI is just off making purchases on its own, but something where a user is engaging with an AI, probably conversational interface, it’s recommending a product and then they go, the person, the human goes and makes that purchase on the website themselves. So you can think of that as like a referral, as if it was an ad or something else. We’re seeing a lot of that. So we do see data that supports that, that is happening a lot. But technically that is actually just a matter of the LLM. Ingesting the catalog doesn’t actually require what people refer to as agentic commerce, any sort of actual like automated transaction process. So a little bit different. We are definitely seeing a lot of that and it’s continuing to grow. So we’re working again working with these partners on how can we help merchants get their catalogs as fresh as possible into these LLMs. Because that’s a really important part of that equation. You know, getting the latest product information, the latest pricing, if there’s any deals going on. So figuring out how to basically bring that data over live and real time is also something that’s not actually defined yet. There’s not a standard mechanism for doing that and is a little more complex in our environment because we have unstructured data, every type of product. You could imagine people who configure their site in all sorts of different ways. So again, working, working with those partners to figure out how we can do that. Best to give them the data that they need and give merchants the sales that they’re looking for.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, yeah. That kind of fits with how I’m observing it as well. People are being recommended products. There’s not much shopping going on yet. It is interesting to see where it’ll go sometimes. The media suggests it’s all happening now when really, as you say, it’s really in beta. While we are on AI, we’ve got a question also from Simon, submitted via X, which is does Woo have any plans for how to capture the 4% merchant fee for agentic commerce?

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, James, I think you were following up with our team internally and you had a good answer for this one, right?

James Kemp:
Yeah. So we’ve got basically a team of people that are digging pretty deep into both ACP and ucp. So ACP is the protocol that Stripe announced and UCP is the protocol that Google announced. Pretty similar, I guess, in the way that, you know, that they work. So we’re digging into both of them. The 4% fee is, my understanding is it is something that we would probably integrate with our own payment plugins to begin with, where the kind of underlying structure of what that looks like is extendable. So other payment plugins would be the ones that would also need to integrate that into their products using what they call shared payment tokens. So, yeah, it’s all very technical, but what I would say is that like with a lot of the things we’re doing, we plan to build sort of the foundation that can be extended and utilized by these other systems. So we don’t know exactly what that looks like right now, but it is what the team is working pretty, you know, heavily on at the moment. And there’s so much stuff that they can do with all of this and that they’re looking at. And it’s quite exciting actually. I’m looking forward to seeing what this agentic commerce world looks like.

Katie Keith:
Definitely. The final point that Simon raised is about Woo Express. Matt Mullenweg was asked any plans to bring back Woo Express? And Matt explained that a separate service like Woo Express is no longer needed due to improvements@WordPress.com which mean that every paid plan now supports themes and plugins and have full scalability and performance. However, Matt accepted that onboarding could still be improved for new merchants. Simon’s response was I disagree with Matt here. To remain competitive, I think Woo should reconsider a hosted decoupled version of WooCommerce after the failed Woo Express attempt.

Beau Lebens:
I know Simon’s here. I’d love to hear what he means by decoupled in that response. If he’s able to drop it in the chat. I guess I’ll speak to the other pieces. I think what Matt was getting at with the onboarding is if I combine that with the idea of hosted, I think there’s this world where WooCommerce is too complicated. If you are starting from absolute zero and have no knowledge of WordPress or hosting or managing plug like all of these things right? And so I think the point of there being when I hear hosted I hear of like a hosted environment so you’re not really thinking about hosting. So more of a WordPress.com style thing where you just go and you sign up and there’s a WordPress there for you. But there should be a WooCommerce installed with it as well. And then if you streamline that whole onboarding process so that you’re really not having to think too much about domains and a hosting account versus a WordPress account versus a different any of the any other accounts. If you can combine all of that and the onboarding actually helps you with the sort of selection and configuration of whatever plugins and things you need to actually make a full WooCommerce site. I agree. I think that’s actually something that’s missing for sort of DIY merchants in particular. Excuse me one sec.

Katie Keith:
In terms of the admin, these are questions which people pre submitted to the Matt Mullenweg interview but we decided were better placed for the two of you to answer instead. The first one is from Dave Lutz who is watching live, which is that WooCommerce is used by serious businesses but the backend experience feels messy because of notices, banners, upsells and scattered sett. What would it take for Woo to feel enterprise level professional in the WordPress admin, which includes the design system, the guidelines, enforcement or something else?

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, it’s a great question, Dave. We think about this one a lot. We definitely see, as James was mentioning, working with specific merchants, many of which are quite large. We see this as well. We see the sort of experience that some folks end up with in WP admin. And I’ll say ultimately that is sort of the blessing and the curse of how open and flexible things are. Right. And so every single different vendor, we refer to them usually as vendors like person who makes a plugin is partially responsible for this. And so everyone who sticks another admin notice or another banner or whatever on the screen is contributing to this problem. But ultimately I think it’s actually kind of a platform or a framework level issue. And so it’s either a WordPress or a WooCommerce problem to solve to some extent at least, which would mean to actually provide better ways of doing these things right. Like the admin notice hook is used by everyone because it’s easy. That’s what all the examples show. You can put one together in. I can go ask an LLM to put one together for me now and it’ll be done in two seconds. So people use that. Right. I think if either at the WordPress layer or the WooCommerce layer, if there was a better easy to use API for how to handle the concept of like a global notice or whatever, that they would do that. I know there was a notifications project in the WordPress core project. I don’t know what happened to that. I don’t think it is proceeding or.

Katie Keith:
It seems to the draft look good. It was about having one banner which would kind of. I don’t know if it’s a slider or something, but it would have everything in one banner. Imagine that.

Beau Lebens:
I know it would be lovely. So I mean, I’ll be honest, like since that hasn’t moved forward very well at the WordPress layer, we’re looking at can we do something at the WooCommerce layer? What’s challenging though is whatever we do at the WooCommerce layer, typically most WooCommerce sites are running a lot of WordPress plugins as well. They’re not just strictly WooCommerce things. And so even if we solve that problem for WooCommerce, it doesn’t necessarily solve it for the entire experience that a merchant is having. So that is a tricky one. That’s where I say, I think working with the WordPress community on how to address that is pretty important. And part of that is you mentioned actually the design system. So the work that’s going on sort of coming out of the Gutenberg Project and driving the WordPress design system is really doing some great work. So I see, like, a lot of the early work on, I guess it’s called the admin redesign for WordPress, really start setting some, some much better, just visual guidance components that are reusable. I don’t think they’ve solved the notifications or banners question just yet, but there’s some really good work that’s happening there that points to a very bright future. But frankly, it requires every plugin developer to play a part in that, because with the flexibility that everyone has in WP admin to add admin notices or hook into every page or whatever, when people abuse that, it’s our shared users who end up suffering.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I will add to that as well that we are aware that there’s a lot of UI that could be improved, you know, throughout the product of WooCommerce. But one of the things that is very challenging for us, which we kind of experienced with the product editor previously, is when we roll this stuff out, we also have to consider, like, backwards compatibility and how plugins can integrate with these new UIs. And, you know, rolling out a full redesign of, like, everything is not necessarily viable in some ways in terms of, like, how the community can extend it and, and integrate with it based on what they already have. So there’s a lot of consideration that we need to take around that and, and what that looks like. And also something I would like to hear from the community is, like, from the, from the plugin developer community specifically, is what approach could we take that would best suit them? Like, you know, how could we roll out UI updates in the best way for them that they can, you know, integrate with them without being, like, overwhelmed by, okay, you know, I have to completely rewrite my whole product now because everything’s changed. I think that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges for any sort of UI improvements we make. And maybe, you know, as we come, as WordPress rolls out its new admin experience, when that happens that that kind of process of updating to the new way of doing things will happen naturally anyway. But yeah, I would love to hear from the community on my. On that front, ideas around what that sort of rollout process might look like.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, what people need is a clear design library. And as you say, this is WordPress, as much as WooCommerce, which needs to include all the possible UI elements, including maybe things that aren’t even in Core, like, I don’t know, maybe Core doesn’t have radio buttons or something, those sorts of things, so that people can do it in a consistent way. And also timescales are really important because there’s been a bit of boy who cried wolf in which things maybe have been consulted on and then not happened, and we might have done some development work to integrate with something that then never gets implemented. So we don’t want to know too early in the sense of it’s time for you to start building for it. We want to know it’s definite.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, I think that’s all spot on, especially the design system. As I said, there’s a lot of work happening in that space for WordPress, and we’re working really closely to make sure that the WordPress design system includes, at least, as you’re saying, Katie, all of the sort of visual elements and different components that are needed for WooCommerce, where WooCommerce is already sort of a. You can think of it as like a superset of what’s required for WordPress. WordPress has a certain set of form elements and cards and accordions and whatever that it needs. And then WooCommerce, because it tends to deal with more complex data, a lot of structured stuff, financial information comes with extra needs, so we need currency fields and more complicated date pickers and other things like that. So we’re making sure that all of that is handled and available. And then, yeah, I think to some extent we’ll keep learning, right? We’ll keep finding new components that aren’t there yet and they’ll need to be added. But I think that work is really positive and I think is frankly, like, way overdue in the WordPress ecosystem. I started developing in the WordPress space in 2004, I think, and was a little surprised back then that there wasn’t a consistent way of creating a form element, like an input text box or something. And they’re still not. There’s sort of de facto standards, but there’s not like a required official way of doing it. So WooCommerce is actually a little bit further ahead in some of that, interestingly. So things like our Settings API already have a structured approach to doing most things which most developers use, but it’s obviously not constrained, you don’t have to use it. So that flexibility again introduces a little bit of extra complexity when you try and sort of upgrade all of these things.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think we’re all looking forward to all these things coming to fruition. While we are on the admin, let’s move on to the suggestion that a lot of people have made about WooCommerce becoming a bit more arrogant in the admin, like maybe an E commerce mode or something. For example, Jake Hawkes had a question. What will it take to employ a highly performant main menu that is laser focused for active merchants and move the prompts, promos and general distractions to appropriate locations? And that’s just one variant of lots of things that I’ve seen people saying that they want you to log into the admin and it’s all about your online shop.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, yeah, great question, Hot Topic. James and I talk about this a lot. I like to think of it less as arrogance and more as maybe like a gangly teenager coming of age. And it feels like that’s like we’re kind of overdue for that, in my opinion. So I think, you know, we James mentioned we work closely with a lot of merchants, we work closely with a lot of agencies and we are hearing more now than ever that WooCommerce users, the actual merchants, they identify as WooCommerce users, not as WordPress users or their mental model. The thing that they are laser focused on is WooCommerce and that’s a sort of shorthand way of saying they care about their business. They’re not necessarily there to think about. Like what is WordPress’s posts and pages structure and you know, how do I navigate between what are these top level settings and why are none of them related to commerce? They care about their orders, they care about their products, they care about the data that helps them run their business. So if you follow GitHub, you know, James actually has an open PR to move the orders menu item to the top level. He had a X post out recently asking for feedback about potential changes to the settings menu. We’re very much looking at how we can do this and if it makes sense to do sort of a full switch to a coming of age mode or arrogant mode, whatever you call it, commerce mode. We actually do think about that as the default WordPress experience is very content centric and then WooCommerce kind of adds this commerce experience to it. And so the sort of simple reverse way of looking at that is, well, what would a commerce centric experience look like with content sort of added onto that? WordPress technically gives us the flexibility to do that with the admin menu structure. Like we could filter and change the menu structure to match a commerce centric experience. But again, it does get complicated with all the other plugins in the ecosystem because they expect to hook in at a certain place or they expect a certain menu item to exist. And if it doesn’t, then we don’t want to break things. Right. So probably, if I was to guess, given what we’re looking at, I would guess that we end up with some sort of option. As much as I would love to be able to just make this a thing one way or the other, I think the reality is that we have a split between people who really are commerce centric and people who are, I don’t know, sort of a blended commerce and content experience. And so they actually, they enjoy or they like this sort of fully. I don’t know, not aligned. I don’t know what the word I’m looking for there is, but having everything as is versus just focusing on commerce. So maybe it’s like a full commerce mode or something like that. And for brand new stores that are going through the onboarding experience and everything, we’d probably default to it even and say, hey, if you’re setting up a store, this is probably what you want. If for some reason you don’t, or it doesn’t work with some plugin you’re using, or maybe you’re a developer and you’re very, very familiar with the existing structure and you don’t want to change yet, then toggle this thing and it’ll flip back to the old menu style. So I think we can figure that one out. I’d love to hear feedback from folks on where or how they would think that might cause problems. We hear a lot of support for it in the abstract. As with a lot of things, frankly, we hear a lot of ideas. We hear a lot of folks say we should do X. And the main reason that we don’t is that it’s always harder than it sounds. There’s always some reason that it’s difficult in the sort of flexible ecosystem, whatever. And so figuring if we can figure those things out, we’ll do them. If they’re the best thing for the merchants and best thing for the users. Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

James Kemp:
I think something we could consider as well is to, is to tie that commerce mode to like a user role. So maybe, you know, you can enable it for store managers. So when store managers log in, they see this commerce mode because there’s already some level of customization that they get anyway. But yeah, just to touch on the moving the orders top level, like you say, it’s always a lot harder than it sounds. There’s the way that WordPress works is that wherever you put a menu item, the page that renders once you click that has like a unique id. And that ID is what plugins use to extend or like add to those pages. So moving orders just one level up completely changes that id. So we had to do a lot of work to kind of maintain the original id. And I think shifting the menu items anywhere else is going to have the same issue. And maybe it’s something, maybe it’s like a JavaScript level thing that they’re actually just, it’s like a faux menu and it just redirects to the original page. But there’s considerations like that that make it a lot more challenging than you might imagine. Like there’s plugins you can get that customize the menu and I believe they all work in like a JavaScript way. So they just, they just insert the menu with JavaScript and it just redirects to the page, which actually works really well. But it does require that your, you know, successfully running JavaScript and there’s no like conflicts there and it feels a little bit hacky. But yeah, it’s, it’s a way to do it. But yeah, I really like the idea of a commerce mode. What that looks like, I don’t know. So I’m more than happy to hear feedback on that and what people think that experience should be like. Katie, I will say that Simon has followed up with his response about decoupled WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
Oh yeah, let’s move to that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, so I’ll just read it out word for word. I haven’t read it yet, so bear with me. He has said so when he says decoupled he means a version of WooCommerce that is maintained separately. So the core remains the same for everyone. But perhaps Automattic develops its own modules and add ons that are exclusive to the version. Or it’s a forked modified version of Core that is obviously maintained by Automattic and is optimized for a self hosted and truly managed platform similar to how Shopify works. So he’s essentially saying like we’re running one version of WooCommerce that everyone uses in summary. So he’s saying Shopify is customizable, but there are certain things you cannot do in it because it is a controlled environment. Something is needed from Woo that can compete apples for apples with Shopify. I think you can do that. It’s just whether matte or automatic or bottom, I don’t know whether this decision falls on you want to do it. I don’t know what that means. At the end, I think he was dictating whether we want to do it.

Beau Lebens:
I think he’s dictating into AI or something. So I think if I’m getting this right, I think the sort of core of the suggestion is the decoupled bit is basically like we should maintain our own fork of WooCommerce which is decoupled from the core version, and that we can make specific changes in a more controlled environment, in a more hosted sort of environment. Got it. So I guess my immediate response is anything along the lines of fully forking and maintaining a separate version is a bit of a nightmare from a purely technical perspective. It’s just like so much overhead and so much extra work and frankly, we are not a big enough organization to do that and for that to make a ton of sense. So I personally wouldn’t advocate for like a full forked separate, totally separate thing. But I think in the spirit of what he’s saying, the idea of offering something that’s not your normal Woo, so take normal Woo and maybe apply some extra restrictions to it or build some custom stuff on top of it. Maybe it’s packaging specific extensions or whatever. I think that’s totally valid and that’s very much what I was saying earlier. So if you start looking at the full user journey and where does the complexity come in? It starts right at the beginning. It’s hosting and domains and getting WordPress set up and getting WooCommerce set up. So that’s sort of just your get out of the gate type complexity. I think that’s actually pretty solvable. And a lot of hosts are already solving that in various ways. Right. Like they have pretty good, pretty smooth onboarding processes. They simplify the idea of registering or transferring a domain. They’ll auto install WordPress for you. To Matt’s point, WordPress.com does a really good job of all of this. And then the next layer I think is more like what Simon’s talking about, which is more of the, like, how much flexibility do you actually have in that WooCommerce environment and what other extra things added in other. But we’ll just keep calling them extensions since that’s the model. Are there extra extensions installed? Are they configured in a certain way? Can you install other things? Can you break your site in any way? Or is it actually sort of controlled in a way that you can’t break it? And that’s really interesting figuring out how to do all of that. It’s relatively complicated to do, especially in the commerce space because every merchant, every business is different, so everyone has different needs. So figuring out what’s that set of functionality that everybody needs that allows them to run a fully capable business is relatively complicated to offer a broadly appealing service in that way. But I think. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that’s actually like something that is most likely in our future.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it touches on. It’s like the opposite of the opening question about open source and like having that freedom and flexibility to completely do what, what you want with it. And there are a subset of merchants that don’t want that. You know, they just want to ins. They just want to launch a site, a store that they can sell their product on and they don’t, it’s. They don’t care as much as having the flexibility to customize that. And you know, with functionality, maybe, maybe they want to insert their brand into it and just have a nice looking professional website. So yeah, I do think there’s space to like target that kind of user. Like you say, it’s a very complicated challenge and one that requires a lot of capacity.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. And interesting is Shopify isn’t as good at that as people think it is. Patrick Rowland published a really interesting article about how it’s a lot harder to, particularly with the apps marketplace. He found a lot of them didn’t work. It wasn’t really just a plug and play thing like people think. So that might be an opportunity for WooCommerce.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, definitely.

Katie Keith:
Let’s move to a question from Ian Meisner from Kestrel, who wants to know where’s the line between helpful defaults and overly opinionated and how do we know when we’re touching that line?

Beau Lebens:
Good question, Ian. Also shout out to Ian, I believe he’s got. I forget if it’s a GitHub discussion or maybe it was just a GitHub issue. Open about the whole. Is an issue. Okay. About the whole conversation we were just talking about earlier with like a sort of commerce opinionated mode of moving menu items and whatnot. I don’t remember the issue number off the top of my head, but there’s some good discussion on there as well. So the question of smart defaults versus overly opinionated, frankly, I think they’re kind of. I think what he’s getting at is like, opinions or defaults or opinions that are unchangeable or we’ve made a choice for you. Let’s use. What’s a good example? I don’t know. Let’s say I’m based in the US So let’s say we decide that you can only ship your packages with usps. You could argue that that’s a smart default in the US and being opinionated and saying everyone’s going to do that. But if you just literally cannot change that, that feels like we’ve crossed a line and it’s not very useful. For example, Katie, trying to ship something via USPS for you, I imagine, is not very possible. So I think, to me it’s more a question of like, defaults are great. And actually, to James’s point earlier, we have a lot of merchants who really want us to be more opinionated with defaults. They want us to tell them this is the best way to run your store, given what we know about it.

James Kemp:
So.

Beau Lebens:
But to still have the option to change those defaults. So I think when the word is default, to me that implies there’s still another choice. And I actually think that we can go very, very far down that line before it’s a problem again, as long as you can still change it. So you’ll see us a lot more of that, frankly, because we’re very aware that is a problem right now for merchants who are trying to set up their own store, is that we don’t really do a lot of defaulting. And we should.

James Kemp:
I wonder as well if Ian is touching on not just setting the default settings, but also default functionality. So things like cost of goods, like being available and just there for everyone versus something that you can turn on or off.

Beau Lebens:
Gotcha. Yeah, that’s a good question too. And I think, like, that is something that we also haven’t done enough of in the past. And what I mean by that is, if you look back, say, call it five years in the WooCommerce space, we really just put out WooCommerce Core and then there’s thousands of extensions and it’s kind of just, you know, Core does the very narrowest things it could possibly do and then go and install a bunch of extensions. So really not very opinionated, not really defaulting to providing a lot of functionality and kind of the Same thing goes for what I was talking about with settings. The sort of market expectation has shifted on that and we get constant feedback that people don’t expect to have to go get separate extensions to do a lot of this stuff. They just expect it to be in the platform. And so yes, it’s always going to be a balancing act and like a line that we have to walk of putting too much in there and it just being wasted code that isn’t necessary. So what I look at is I try and think about what are the capabilities that Core needs to have. So a good example of this is the shipment tracking changes that we’ve been making. We had dozens of extensions in the ecosystem that offered some form of shipment tracking and they all did it differently. And so none of them were interoperable. You couldn’t rely on any of the, on a piece of data being stored in a specific space, a specific part of the database. And so making that a core capability means that there’s a consistent place that that data is stored, a consistent way of accessing it, and then the actual functionality that exposes it. That’s a different question. Like, should the core WooCommerce experience visually expose how to do shipment tracking? And we decided yes, I think it absolutely should. But then there’s another layer to that, like should it do live updated API based? Exactly where is my shipment on its way to someone’s house kind of thing? That’s not core functionality as far as we’re concerned. But we’ve provided this solid capability and a core UI that gives you what you need to then sort of build on that functionality through some other service. So it’s always a balancing act. I think it’s a lot, it’s a lot more nuanced than just do we do it or not. So like I said, I think about these core capabilities, then core functionality, then there’s layers of how much of that actual feature you expose to customers versus leaving it open for extensions to build it out where it makes sense.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that makes sense. We have two more questions. One is from Rodolfo from Business Bloomer and Checkout Summit, who wants to know what’s the update regarding the official Woo full site editing theme.

Beau Lebens:
James, I think you got a good update on this one, right?

James Kemp:
I did, yeah. So the plan is to release it. It’s actually almost complete. A lot of work has gone into it and also that work is reflected back into Core as well in terms of like the blocks that we offer and how they can be used within this theme. I will say that it. We’re. We’re releasing it in. We want to get it out there so people can use it. So it may not be a fully polished experience, but we want people to use the theme, experiment with it, you know, customize it, find what’s good, what’s bad, what’s missing, and we’ll just iterate on it from there. But it’s in a pretty good state and I would say at least within like the next month or two, we should see that coming to the WordPress repository as a theme that you can download and use. And yeah, I think it’s about time we kind of replace Storefront.

Beau Lebens:
Yes.

James Kemp:
So I’m looking forward to it. But yeah, it’s on its way. We’re just doing a little bit of polish and then we’re going to get it out there so that people can use it and feedback on it. And I expect there’s going to be blocks and changes that come from people using that, that trickle back into Core and generally like improve those blocks for any full site editing theme. I think the ecosystem of like full site editing themes is interesting because you’re not necessarily building a theme. It’s like sort of a placeholder for blocks and I guess it’s an opinionated way to display those blocks. So, yeah, on its way.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah.

Katie Keith:
Interesting. I didn’t know that. Have any designs for it been released yet?

James Kemp:
I am not sure. I know we have a demo site which is like the fully specked out version of it. I’m not sure if that is public yet, but maybe I’ll ask and maybe it’s something I can share.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, we’re just redesigning all our demos because we use Storefront, which is a bit old. So I’m just thinking, oh, maybe we should stop this project.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, maybe. I’ll say, yeah. One of the things I’m really excited about with this theme is having a modern foundation for things like demos and for, you know, obviously WooCommerce. Core comes with a lot of templates and blocks and to really understand it, you’ve got to build pages, you’ve got to build a cart and a checkout and a shop page, all of those things. And so being able to demo all of that in a consistent environment and being able to sort of use that from our perspective as a bit of a design target. And so like, does all of this stuff work together? Does it look great? Is there a standard set of CSS that we should tell theme developers that as long as you do this stuff, it’ll look good across everything. Can we optimize the performance of everything in a specific environment? Can we make sure that it’s all mobile friendly? There’s a lot of things that are actually really, really hard to do when you’re just trying to target every possible theme in the world that become a lot more tractable when you just say, well, we’re going to, you know, the goal is that it’s compatible with every theme in the world, but we’re going to really optimize it in this environment, which we know top to bottom. And it’s very consistent. We can run performance tests on it, like version after version. So I’m really looking forward to that for us internally from a development perspective. And then also, Katie, perfect example from the community, like, rather than every developer out there having to come up with their own demo, I’d love to see it if it was just this standard theme that everyone just sort of defaulted to for their demos, because that sort of coalescence of everybody’s effort is when you really get leverage on that being a fantastic first experience, no matter which of these solutions you’re using. So I think it helps with some of the fragmentation that we see otherwise.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that sounds good. And we have a live question from Anne Bovelett which is very closely related, which is my enterprise customers are all switching to full site editing hardcore. What’s the status on all those blocks that seem to be just blockified widgets without settings? She also says that having to write custom CSS is expensive.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, so the idea of just blockifying widgets, that’s kind of obviously just a first step for us. It’s like, how do we make these things available in a full site editing context? But if there’s specific feedback on which ones do people need settings for first, let us know. Reach out on X, reach out on GitHub. That would be really useful to understand which ones are people trying to use. And so we can prioritize actually doing the sort of full blockification if you like. But yeah, as I said, that was just a first step and we’re sort of continuing down the path. But understanding the. And the priority of them is really useful.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think one of the blocks to look at, which is really cool actually, is the add to cart with options block. So if you are using a block theme and you go in and edit your single product template, you can swap out the add to cart section or the block with the add to cart with options beta block. And the way that that works is really cool. So if you can enable, I think we call them pills. So sort of buttons rather than drop downs. You can preview what it looks like for simple products, variable products. I think that’s a really nice example of where we want to get to with like all of our blocks. Just like that level of detail and flexibility is. Is the goal. I would say so check that one out.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah. And I’ll add if you’re giving feedback on which blocks, blocks widgets you would like to see sort of more detailed control over. It’s also really useful to understand exact use cases. Like exactly what are you trying to customize? What settings would you expect to see? But more useful is actually like what is the sort of end result that you’re going for? And then we can figure out the sort of reverse engineer. Exactly what settings would you need to be able to do that? Do we need to contribute additional controls into Gutenberg or something or. Probably not at this point. There’s color pickers and sliders and padding selections and most of the things are there already. It’s just a matter of enabling them for specific blocks.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah. And it all just makes it so much more flexible for people. So that all sounds perfect. Well, that is all the questions. So thank you so much, Beau, for coming on and being so transparent in how decisions are made and what’s coming up.

Beau Lebens:
Yeah, happy to be here and. But this was fun. I’m sure we’ll do it again sometime.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. The next episode we have is with James LePage, who is on the AI team at Automattic, and it is titled AI Meets Woo and how AI is already reshaping E Commerce. So pop that in your calendar. It’s on Tuesday the 10th of February at 11:00am ET and 5:00pm CET.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. And after that, James and I will be back every month to discuss a different area of WooCommerce. So to make sure you don’t miss upcoming episodes, you can find all the options for subscribing on dothewoo.com you can go to the YouTube channel, you can subscribe on X and all the different podcast networks as well. Thank you so much for watching. Bye.

Beau Lebens:
Thanks everyone. Bye.