WooCommerce Managed Hosting, CBD Products and SCA

Brad:
Welcome back to another episode of Do the Woo podcast, episode 21. We’re legal, we’re drinking, well, not really during the day, but just assume we are. I’m excited to be back. Bob, how’s it going over there? Hey, just peachy. How about yourself? I’m doing good. It Summertime. The weather’s beautiful. I’ve been on the beach, I’ve been in the water, so I always forget how much I love summer until it hits and I actually, I like summer.

BobWP:
Yeah, I

Brad:
Think I would like summer better if I had a summer vacation when I was a kid. But

BobWP:
Yeah,

Brad:
Still good. Those were the days. Those were the days, and they are long gone. But here we are. Here, we’re back. So we’ve got a really great episode, a really awesome guest we’re excited about. I’ll let her do an introduction. We have Christie Chirinos of Liquid Web joining us today. Hey Christie.

Christie:
Hey, how are you?

Brad:
Doing well, how are you doing?

Christie:
Good, good. I’m also happy Summer is here. I grew up in Florida and then moved north and my first winter was like, this is horrible. Why did I ever leave the place of eternal summer? So I’m definitely enjoying water.

Brad:
Yeah, something about that sun, I don’t know. It just puts everybody in good spirits. So it’s nice to get some more sun in our lives and enjoy the great outdoors. So we’re definitely excited to have you on and talk about some of the things you have going on over at Liquid Web. So don’t you quickly, for anyone that doesn’t know who you are, why don’t you give everyone who you are and your bio and what you’re doing over at LiquidWeb?

Christie:
Yeah. Hi everybody. My name is Christie Torino. I am the product manager for Managed WooCommerce at LiquidWeb. So we have the one managed WooCommerce platform that is completely unique. There’s very people doing exactly what we’re doing, bringing in multiple WordPress products and WooCommerce and WordPress expertise to create a fully managed but completely extendable and flexible WooCommerce platform. So my job there is I am the product manager for the, so when it comes to customer success and feedback, that’s 100% of my job and making sure that people are happy, making sure that ideas are heard, making sure that things are moving forward is what I’m doing now. I’ve been there about three months. I’m brand new. I’m just figuring out where things belong on the shelf. And before that, I worked with Josh Pollock on Caldera Forms, which is a form builder plugin that we grew from nothing to 200,000 active installs and several million downloads. So that was fun and moving on to this new thing and bigger project is exciting. But that’s sort of my background and how I ended up here in relationship to WordPress and I’m really excited to talk about what’s going on.

Brad:
Cool. Yeah, I appreciate that. It’s, Calera is really cool. In fact, we just had our WordPress Philly meetup last night and we’re talking about form builders and kind of pulling the room on what form builders people used and calera was up there. That’s awesome.
Yeah, it’s always cool to see something like that, a product that really takes off and just kind of hear the story behind it. So appreciate you sharing. Going back to Liquid Web, the platform you have over there really fascinates me because I mean, I think obviously anybody listening to the show I’m assuming is in the WordPress and hopefully into WooCommerce what we talk about, but think’s interesting. The idea of managed WordPress hosting has been around for a while, including Liquid Web. You have your managed WordPress offering at WP Engine and Paisley and some of the others. But the idea of managed WooCommerce hosting is a very newer concept. And I think you alluded to it that are you the only ones in the space currently doing something specific for WooCommerce in the managed hosting space?

Christie:
Yes.

Brad:
That’s awesome.

Christie:
There are alternatives if you’re looking to achieve the same goal, but when it comes to this exact thing that we’re doing in terms of our platforms, the product we get with it, the expertise behind it, it’s just us.

Brad:
And I mean, I’m a big proponent of the managed WordPress hosting space just because I love letting people who excel in certain areas focus on that and do that, right? So it’s something I highly recommend to all of our clients, unless you have a team of CIS admins or looking to outsource that, which is generally a really large cost to do it correctly and successfully. A managed WordPress specific hosting is way to go because not only are the experts in hosting, but specifically around WordPress. So I think the idea of having a hosting platform that knows WordPress inside and out, but also knows WooCommerce inside and out and can help tailor that server stack and the infrastructure specifically through WooCommerce, which anybody who’s ever worked with e-commerce in general knows there’s a lot of very specific complexities to an e-commerce store, especially if it takes off live transactions, things like that, passing well money and just making sure the store is stable and things like that. So I love the idea, and I’m curious if you can maybe fill us in a little backstory of how that came to be within Liquid Web and where the decision was made to kind of go down that road. Obviously in an area that is it’s uncharted territory, like you said, you’re the first and only one currently doing it, so I think there’s a lot of people watching to see if it works. And I’m curious how that came to be in terms of Liquid Web going that direction.

Christie:
Totally. And I’ll take you all the way back because it’s an interesting story. Liquid Web is a old school web hosting company. They’ve been around a long time, but they were later entrant into managed WordPress. And the idea behind entering that is LiquidWeb has all the infrastructure they have all the stuff we’ve been around for over a decade. And LiquidWeb for that reason, was perfectly positioned to sort of come in with a lot of innovation and cost savings. And when we have this idea of a late entrant market, we have this idea that the person who is a late entrant can look at what everybody else has done and say, Hey, that worked really well. This didn’t work that well. We can fix that problem and address it in that way. And so when look at what decided to go after managed WordPress and then manage WooCommerce, the idea was that LiquidWeb wanted to go after the dynamic site market. So if you look at managed WordPress and manage WooCommerce and LiquidWeb, it’s not the cheapest option you can get because it’s not for cheap sites, it’s for larger membership sites, it’s for people running stores, there’s people really making money using WordPress and then using WooCommerce because it is particularly done in a way where our hosting doesn’t rely on caching to be fast. Caching is an option, but it’s not the thing that we do and we sacrifice whatever other functionality to make it fast.
Our team focuses on having all of that liquid web 24 7 support, all the other things that are already there to give that managed experience. Liquid Web managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce rely on automatic updates for security and plugins and visual regression testing to make sure that things don’t break. So we have the capability to do that. So we kind of came in and we said, here are the things that make manage WordPress and manage hosting great and the things that we could probably improve on. And on top of that came managed through commerce. So the idea there was, so the people that are really making money on WordPress are using WooCommerce, they’re launching e-commerce stores. So this product came out a little bit after managed WordPress about not even two years ago. So it’s brand new. And the idea was, well, what if we could do managed WordPress that has this automatic updates, it has automatic security that has an expert team behind it.
And we also added that WooCommerce layer to it for the people that are really making money and gave them all the support that you need to realize all the of an e-commerce platform without any of the limitations. So you’re still getting WordPress, you’re still getting WooCommerce when people end up switching off of whatever else they might be using. Let’s pretend Shopify is an example, right? They’re usually doing it because they find that they can’t put on a certain feature, they can’t do a certain thing, they’re sort of growing out of their situation. And then the trade-off that they make is okay, but now it’s going to be all this extra work. So we were like, okay, so if we could take away the extra work and just make it really easy to have a fully extendable platform, but that also is managed, has 24 7 support, has automatic updates as a team of experts behind it, and is 100% managed, then how would this work?
And that’s the premise behind managed WooCommerce. For me personally, even when it came to sort of Caldera form days, I came into WordPress as a user and as a product strategist. So I’ve made websites for clients before, but a WordPress developer I am not. And so as a user, I was always like, this is frustrating. I get frustrated when people say, oh, WordPress is so easy. It’s not easy. It’s easy to you because we’ve been using it for the past 10 years. It’s not easy. And so what is easy is these integrated solutions that give you all the things that you need to do, and then you just click and boop. And so when you choose that though, you’re giving up control, flexibility and extendability for that ease of use. And this project aims to find the sweet spot in the middle where it’s really performant, it scales up. We can talk a little bit more about concurrent transactions and requests and the custom order table, all the different ways in which managed WooCommerce on a technical level strives to be a great WooCommerce experience. But the basic premise and the idea and the story behind it is that it could just be better. We could be living in a better world. So we are.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think one of the interesting things, and it’s kind of a segue into some of the stuff you have going on, is things you spoke about already, but then the tools you actually put in there. I mean, we can go to any blog and look at a blog that says there’s 10 plugins you need when you start your WooCommerce site. And there’s so many variables, but I know from watching what has been added in there as far as plugins really taking the time to look at, we just don’t throw this in because maybe 20% needed or 25% needed. So you’re taking it slowly and adding those in as needed. And you’ve already put in quite a few of them. And I know that you put in a couple others recently, which we want to talk about. But since you were part of that after coming in, how did that process kind of work as far as, okay, we’ve got billions of plugins out there and which ones do we add? Is there some method to the madness that you’re doing behind that or listening to your customer saying these, or even watching the sites, what are they installing a lot? Just kind of curious about that. And then we’ll go into talking about what you’ve recently done, which is exactly what we’re talking about here.

Christie:
So I will start here. The products that we include with managed WooCommerce are not solely my decision. So you’re not talking to the decision maker when it comes to that, but I can tell you what the priorities are. The priority number one is speed and performance. When it comes to an online store, your online store has to be fast above all, or no one’s going to buy anything. People are going to get bored of waiting for it to load. The statistics are insane. It’s like if a page doesn’t unload under three seconds, people just bounce off and go buy something else. There’s so many options. Your store has zero chance at all whatsoever of showing up in an organic search or sold if it doesn’t load fast. So the first thing about those product choices is will this product slow down this site? And if the answer is yes, even maybe then it doesn’t make the cut after that.
I’ve seen that A lot of it is based on customer feedback. So for example, one of the newest product partnerships that we just rolled out that works with managed WooCommerce and also managed WordPress is WP Merge. And this is advanced and intelligent staging sync plugin, right? So when you have your staging site on Liquid Web and then your production site kind of figuring out how to get that database merged to be not painful, especially matters for WooCommerce because we don’t want to lose live orders. And that came from a lot of customer feedback, a lot of people saying, I really want a better staging to production workflow. And so listening to that and identifying, yeah, that’s important, and then finding the right partner is definitely a driving force behind product partnerships. And then when it comes to managed WooCommerce side, some of that choice has to do with just what we know works.
It’s one of those, if you’re a store owner and you’re doing managed WooCommerce and you’re offloading, like you said, all that CIS admin stuff to somebody like Local web has 24 7 support and you don’t want to be worrying about this kind of stuff, I’m going to assume that you have very little time. So you’re probably also trying to figure out how to grow the store. And there are tried and true things that are practically non-negotiables in the hyper-competitive e-commerce space. So abandoned cart recovery, really important. That’s why we partner with Jill because everybody should have this affiliate. WP was the other new partnership that we just announced, and it’s the same thing. Everybody should have an affiliate program if you’re trying to make a dent in the e-commerce space. And so these, it goes beyond the technology and into the strategy of what a WooCommerce store should have to grow and stand out among the rest and be able to successfully publicize and market was sort of the additional layer of where that’s coming from. And with that said though, right, it’s like we are not going to force that upon you. You don’t want to use it, that’s totally fine. Just take it off the side. It’s a WordPress site. If you’re not interested, it’s totally okay. And if you are interested, then we have this partnership developed. Then if you change your mind, you open a support ticket 24 7 support, and we put it back on your site. So that’s sort of the series of decisions that I’ve seen so far in my exciting last three months.

Brad:
And that kind of goes back to the idea of just bringing in the professionals to do what they do best. And I love the idea of not just the technical side, but also kind of the strategic side. You guys understand what works well in e-commerce, like you said, abandoned carts. If you’re just starting a store, you may not understand important or how much you can convert someone, how easily you can convert someone that’s put something in the shopping cart and left with a simple email or a simple notification saying, Hey, did you forget something? Hey, here’s 10% off, come on back. That works really well. I know because done it for our clients and I’ve seen the conversion rate on that stuff. It’s insane. But being new into the e-commerce space, you probably wouldn’t know that unless you’re reading Bob’s posts, which always tell you that the best of the best stuff.

BobWP:
Go read Bob’s posts.

Brad:
Bob’s talking about these top plugin articles. I’m thinking, didn’t you write those Bob, your posts you’re talking about? But it just goes to show and the values there. I always am baffled by people who spend a lot of money, even if it’s just a website, even if it’s not e-commerce, but absolutely if it’s e-commerce and then they cheap out on the hosting, it’s like, nah, I really want $10 a month. And it’s like, really? You can’t afford a hundred dollars a month on a store that has endless possibilities to make you money. So it’s just the value is so easy to justify with the things that you were doing, especially with the packages and the knowledge that you and your team have. So it’s really cool to see. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of the initiatives you’ve been working on. You said you’ve been there three months, a little bit newer at Liquid Web. So what are some of the initiatives that you’re working on? Anything behind the scenes you can talk about or anything you’ve released recently that you want to touch on?

Christie:
Yeah, so I mentioned that a little bit earlier, but my first project as a new part of the team was to roll out WP Merge and affiliate WP coordinate with the owners of those products and make sure that we got all the promotion out there. So that was a ton of fun, sort of interesting new project to get to know the partnerships and the products that come along with managed WooCommerce and all the things associated with that underneath the scenes. I dunno how much of this is going to be interesting to you. We could do a tangent into what is it like to be a product manager or at a technology company. I’m sure that’s important to somebody. We

Brad:
Just want to know what’s like to work with Chris Lema. Just tell us that. Yeah, let’s just get right to it. Yeah,

Christie:
See, you just asked the question that everybody wants to ask. They’re too afraid to ask, right? They’re like, so what is it like to work with Chris Lema? Honestly, it’s really cool. He’s a really cool boss. Something that I really admire about working with him is that you can really tell how his leadership style is very deliberate. He’s very thoughtful and gives good feedback and has a laser focus on goals and the things that he wants to accomplish. And it really feels like we are all sort of driving the boat in the same direction. So yeah, it’s really cool to work with him and the rest of the team too is really cool to work with. We talked about that a little bit in terms of the expertise really goes beyond hosting. We’re not just a hosting company that’s like we’re doing managed WooCommerce. You sign up for this account and you get WooCommerce installed, and then if you have a question, we answer it. We actually have that entire stack going on. We have the hosting expertise, we have the WordPress expertise, and then we have the sort of e-commerce and strategy expertise and all of that is coming at you. So working with a team that that diverse and dynamic is really interesting. The rest of my team is sort of also other awesome rock stars, and it’s one of those, how did they let me into this party? I’m just like some schmuck and everybody else here is amazing. That’s a really great way to feel when you’re on a team.
Yeah, and I mean a lot of my day-to-day is a lot of communication with customers. Like I said, not even two years into a product of this scale is not a long time. And so we’re still talking to a lot of customers, collecting a lot of feedback, including growing those product partnerships, growing the way that onboarding is done better and more interesting. One of the other things that I’ve been working on have been making the migration process as smooth as possible. Luc Web has a migrations team and we do white glove migrations for WooCommerce stores that sign up for the standard planner hire. And so making sure that that is the most hands-off beautiful experience you could possibly have is sort of an under the scenes thing that I’m working on that you won’t see a press release about, but you’ll feel it when you sign up and things like that.

BobWP:
Yeah. Cool. Well, I love it, Brad. That was a perfect question. Now I’m loaded for a tweet. Christie tells all, what’s it like to work with Chris Lima? Oh my God. At least we can, that’s how get the listeners, Bob, we could get lema to listen in. We should have taken towards

Brad:
Or something because you would’ve just love it. Love it. Yeah, it’s super cool to hear just some of the things you’re doing behind the scenes. And I mean, I find it interesting, I’m sure many of our listeners will as well, just because it’s like you said, not everything is a press release. Not everything is a public announcement of, Hey, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. But knowing that it’s constantly improving and building services behind the scenes and bringing in new partnerships and more value to the plans and packages that you have and ultimately to your client’s stores, which in turn should put more money in their pocket, is great to see that you’re still pushing forward behind the scenes to make the platform as best as you possibly can. So that’s awesome. I’m sure there’s a lot of really fun challenges with the migration having done a number of migrations over the years. I’ll just leave it at that. I’m sure there’s a lot of fun challenges.

BobWP:
The Do The Woo podcast is brought to you by Liquid Web, looking for top-notch hosting for your WooCommerce site. They have a ton to offer you. Plus you’ll get 33% off your first six months of any popular WooCommerce plan using the code. Bob wp, this is a limited time offer, so head on over to liquid web.com and a special thanks for Liquid Web for helping us do the Woo. Now back to the show.

Christie:
Well, and that comes back into how incredible this team is, that there is a dedicated migrations team and they’re really good at what they do. So my job is just to take this team that already knows what they’re doing and make sure that the customer experience is completely seamless. So a lot of my approach and my job with Liquid Web and managed WooCommerce has to do with digging into what the customers that we currently have are saying and creating a snowball out of the things that they’re loving and responding quickly to the things that they’re not. And if we had to talk about larger level, what is my day-to-day, that’s basically my day-to-day. It’s a lot of customer interaction, a lot of collecting information and making sure that we’re taking the right actions in the right order of priority. And Chris is great. Lots of stories

Brad:
Should just end it with Chris is great. That’s right. No, it’s cool to see it. And like I mentioned at the beginning about just kind of finding a niche, and this is something I’ve kind of talked about over the years, just in the WordPress space. A lot of people ask me if I’m starting to build websites and WordPress, how do I get my name out there if I’m starting to release products or themes or whatever it is? And the best answer now is to find the niche that excites you so you can really laser focus what you’re doing, your message and what you’re building, all that stuff, whether it’s a product or a service, it doesn’t matter. And I think this is a perfect example of there’s a lot of managed WordPress hosts and you guys do a great job as well. But I think having this niche of, we are also, we are the managed WooCommerce host, that’s us, and we’re the first and we’re going to be the best. It helps with market, it helps with messaging, it helps with the challenges that you’re trying to work through. So like I said, I think there’s a lot of eyes on it because it’s so interesting and it’s new. So it’s been fun to see how it’s grown the last few years, and I’m excited to see where you guys go from here.

Christie:
Yeah, I’m really excited too. I think this product is such a cool concept. Like I said, from the perspective of someone who’s kind of mad, every time someone says WordPress is easy, I’m like, but in this instance, it’s right. I’ve signed up for these plans to sort of examine that experience flow and I’ve had a working Blue Commerce store in an hour and that’s ridiculous. And so that’s great. We’re actually achieving that goal and I’m really excited about it.

BobWP:
Very

Brad:
Cool.

BobWP:
Alright, well, I imagine we could talk forever with about this. And I’m thinking that other podcast, I know Brad doesn’t want me to talk about that, but I do have another podcast I’ll be having you on where we’ll even go in deeper, well maybe not deeper, but we’ll find some interesting other stuff to talk about. Sounds, Brad. So no, really

Brad:
You do you, Bob, whatever you want to do, you go ahead.

BobWP:
Well, there is a couple things we kind of added for little talking points here. This first one, and I know it’s more around the eu, the whole, I guess maybe this, I don’t know if we want to even say this is one of those things that’ll saddle back on, probably not as bad as that, but as it’s totally different over on WooCommerce they did introducing strong customer authentication SCA. So what does that mean? That means that new regulation over in the EU that they have to deal with again. And I don’t know, just looking at that from either one of your perspectives as a developer or as the person that basically is going to be running billions of WooCommerce sites at some point. Yes, that’s the goal. What, is this something that, have you even noticed it, Brad, or does that even fall into your radar there?

Brad:
I mean it does. It’s one of those good to know in case it comes up. I mean, I think if you dig into it, and it can get a little technical exactly how it all works under the hood, but I mean the long and short of it is it’s just additional security precautions when someone’s buying something online, if they’re in the EU and their payment card or whatever is issued. Well in the European economic area, which is the EU, as well as a few additional companies. So essentially Europe I guess. But I think this kind of goes back to, well, I guess the thing to remember is even if you have a store in the us, if you’re selling product or services to people that are in the, then this does affect you. So more than likely this will affect everybody. Everybody that has an online store at some point, this will be affected by very much a lot of the data privacy stuff we’ve seen coming out of the EU recently.
So you just got to protect yourself. So I think my kind of TLDR on this is work with a good merchant that knows what they’re doing, Stripe or somebody, and they’re going to handle this type of stuff for you. It’s very similar, two-factor authentication almost for purchasing. It’s more than just entering your credit card information. There’s an additional step that needs to happen. It’s very similar two-factor, whether it’s a text on your cell phone or something to authenticate that transaction or there’s some different ways. But I mean, that’s my take on it. Yes, people need to start looking into this. It’s going to roll out in the fall and September, and if you don’t know, WooCommerce has a good post on it. And of course all the major merchants like Stripe and others are gearing up for supporting this as well. So

BobWP:
Cool. Now, the second thing, I’m going to let you go into the thing that basically stroked out a few people that were running certain kinds of sites when they first saw the first article, they came on it. And then of course since then there’s been some follow up on a little bit more clarification. What am I talking about here? Brad? C, B, D? Yeah,

Brad:
So yeah, I’ll dive into this one. I have thoughts. I’ll try not to go too ranty. But yeah, basically WooCommerce had some guidelines around what you’re allowed to sell using their services. And apparently they were a little loose and a little bit confusing, but it really kind of blew up when a gentleman who runs a store that sells CBD products was contacted essentially saying, you can’t sell CBD products using WooCommerce. And he said, what do you mean this is open source? So looking at the WooCommerce terms of use, it was very confusing. It was like, well, if you download it WooCommerce from wordpress.org, you can do whatever you want, but if you download it from WooCommerce or sorry wordpress.org, you can do whatever you want, but if you download from WooCommerce, you can’t, even though it’s the same thing, it didn’t make any sense. So they went back and kind of clarified it and they said, look, you can use WooCommerce.
You sell whatever you want. It’s open source, so you can download it, you can install it on a server, you could sell whatever you want, open source. I mean obviously if it’s illegal, it’s illegal, but who could stop you other than if you were to get caught, I guess. But the clarifying point that they made is if you tap into automatic services using things like jet pack for example, and certain features of Jet Jetpack that use automatic servers or even some of the WooCommerce extensions like the shipping extension or the tax calculator extension, those use automatic services, meaning they’re going to an automatic server doing whatever calculations and sending that information back to your store. If you do that, then you cannot sell CBD products among other things. And it’s really kind of a blanket statement that they made that regardless of what the law is in your state, because these laws vary by state, some states are completely okay with C, B, D, other states are not very much like marijuana and THC, some states are okay with it, other states are not. Basically they just made a blanket statement saying you can’t sell it if you use our services. So I think the one was getting that all clarified in their terms of use, which they’ve now done. And I think it opens up a bigger question, which I kind of posed as well, if you tap into automatic services, is it actually open source anymore? Because now there are limitations in what you can do.
I understand why automatic is doing what they’re doing. They’re a company, they have to protect themselves legally. I completely get it. Obviously they don’t want people selling illegal things using software in their services because it puts them in potential legal jeopardy. I get that. But I think some of these things are so, I guess so tightly promoted with WordPress basically saying, if you want the optimal WordPress experience, you have to use Jetpack or you have to use these extensions through commerce. So when that’s the messaging behind it, and then people use that, it just leads to even more confusion with WordPress and WooCommerce and open source. And so it’s a pretty big topic I think beyond just CBD, that brings up a lot of questions, more than it does answers. It’s just my biggest thing is just around confusion. There’s enough confusion around wordpress.com and.org. And now I feel like we’re putting even more confusion in there. If you’re using Jetpack, can you blog about legal things, illegal things? Yes. It’s just content. You’re not selling something. But what if you’re writing about doing something illegal and it taps into Jetpack service? Are you allowed to do that? You know what I mean? I just feel like it’s starting to blur the line of where open source ends and proprietary begins.

BobWP:
Yeah. So Christie, anything from your side of of it as far as when you first heard it or anything that, was there rumblings or tremors at LiquidWeb thinking about their clients? Or was it like, okay, we’ll just got to ride this wave and it’ll all work out?

Christie:
So both of these came across my desk. They’re very important considerations for the work that we’re doing. And on a personal level, when it comes to stuff like SEA, when it comes to stuff like GDPR, I personally think the EU is living in the future. This is the direction in which we’re going towards this regulation is going to come harder and harder on because we have billions of people online and growing every single day. And a lot of the times when I talk about this, I compare it to other economic revolutions that we’ve had. First happened all this growth, and then we were like, oh my God, if we don’t get this under control, people are going to die or people are going to get scammed or people are going to lose money in ways that could have been easily preventable. And that is the pattern that we see throughout history.
So this is just going to happen more and more. And I think that there is this tendency to resist this, right? Be like, oh, but what do I have to do to comply with it? And I’ll leave you with this. My business school law professor was the guy that wrote this theory called the Five Legal Pathways. And it was basically this idea about how do we as business people intelligently react to legislation and regulation? And at the very, very bottom of the list is avoidance. Like, no, this is bad. I don’t like, this is undue burden on my business. And somewhere in the middle is compliance. So staying abreast of the changes and making sure that your business is doing things right. So like you said, I don’t think it’s that scary. I think if you’re working with a reputable payment processor, then it’s their job to make sure that you’re not doing things wrong.
And that’s why you pay transaction fees for every single dollar you make and then you should be fine. But at the very top of this sort of idea is thinking about it in innovative and transformation based way. So when everybody was scared about GDPR, I thought that the smartest people were the people who were like, this is an amazing business opportunity for us. How do we make sure that people know that we are, my world was form plugin, so how do I make sure that people know that we are the form plugin that lets you do the single checkbox deliver it? How do I push out content about this? How do I make sure that people feel without crossing any regulatory lines, you don’t want to be the person who’s like, we’re GDPR compliant. What does that even mean? But making sure that people know that you’re actually staying on top of this development and that your product can meet these specific questions.
Like the single check box was one of those, right? When we talk about strong customer authentication, same thing. And so the CBD merchants, these two are really related. The CBD merchants have a very similar problem of it’s part of their business model to stay on top of regulation. And we have a good number of CBD merchants on our platform because they use WooCommerce and there’s a lot of limitations on them. Like Shopify won’t take them, for example. They have to use specific payment processors, they have to use specific marketing strategies. I’m not an expert. We have somebody at Liquid Web Hobby who he actually goes around to CBD expos and knows a lot of this stuff like the back of his hand. And again, that’s what I’m talking about. We have the e-commerce, the WordPress, and then the hosting expertise all but so this came across our desk and ultimately the approach that we have to take is that transformation approach. So how can we make sure that we are your partner in this thing that isn’t going away anytime soon for CBD merchants, which is the regulatory risk when you’re running different types of business, some businesses are much more established and risk free than others. If you’re knitting baskets, there’s a low chance you’re going to hurt anyone. And if you’re selling CBD, in my opinion, there’s a low chance you’re going to hurt anyone, but who knows, right?
And so it’s a higher risk environment that you’re dealing in and you just have to line yourself up with both a strategy and vendors who get that and are going to figure out how to navigate it. When I looked at the WooCommerce and CBD and the automatic stuff, I had the same reaction you did, Brad. I was like, well, this makes sense from a legals perspective. You don’t want to be the company that is caught enabling federally illegal activity. You don’t want to be that company. So how do you find the right spot in this range of reactions in which you’re not sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming and you are complying with the law, which is a very important thing for anybody in business to do, and protecting consumers, protecting your vendors, and also thinking about it like an intelligent business person who’s not only staying on top of trend but actually riding the waves and not getting swept under them.

BobWP:
Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, and I want you both to visualize this. Speaking of that and all this regulation, so when I’m driving home, you can turn either to go to where I live, right on the coast, kind of a dead end, or you basically go up the Peninsula way I in Washington and on the Washington coast, and there’s this billboard I always see that says the weed shack, your last chance you, it’s kind of throw that in.

Brad:
You’re living in the future, Bob.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’m the weed shock it takes me. Anyway. Love it. Well, I think that was kind of the side notes we’ll go into deeper with Brad here on another show into all the fun stuff. He likes to talk around these particular issues, I’m sure. So anything else, Brad?

Brad:
I think that about wraps it up. So real quick, why wrap the show Chrisy? Why don’t you tell everyone where they can find you online?

Christie:
Yeah, I’m all over the internet. If you signed up for Managed WooCommerce, you’re definitely going to find me online and you have free Reign to request to speak to me at any moment. I’m also on Twitter, you can find me at XT Chonos. It’s X-T-I-E-C-H-I-R-I-N-O-S. And I have a website ti chonos.com. You can find me there too. So

Brad:
You have any events you’re going to be at coming up?

Christie:
Yeah, I dunno if this will come out in time, but this weekend I’m going to WordCamp Jacksonville, I will be your keynote speaker. We will be talking about ethics, so strangely relevant to the conversation that we just had about regulation, legal strategy and doing the right thing. And after that I’ll be at Work Camp Denver. And other than that, I don’t know, find me in my apartment with my cat in Washington DC

Brad:
Very cool. Keynoting, congrats on that. That’s exciting.

Christie:
Thanks. Thanks. I’m excited.

Brad:
Yeah, so if you’re in Jacksonville, make sure you track Chrissy down, say hi. The show will be out a couple days before, so we’ll get some, we get a little traction there. So Bob, what about you? Anything coming up? Anything on the horizon?

BobWP:
Nothing on the horizon for me. Everything happens this fall. Well, I shouldn’t say everything as far as any word camps, I’m going to, I’m waiting till the fall for a couple, three of them. But yeah, just some mellowing air on the Washington coast is what I’m doing

Brad:
At the Weed Shack or nearby.
Nearby. That’s right. You can find me. I’m Williams ba on Twitter. I don’t have any close events. I’ll be at omics in the fall and certainly at WordCamp us later in the year too. But in the summer I’ll probably just be hanging out near water, so I dunno, in the woods doing something. But finally, we want to make sure we mention our promo here, which is 33% off your first six months of any Woo managed hosting at Liquid Web use code Bob dash wp. When you check out, that’s 33% off your first six months. And I’m really glad that’s for Woo. Managed hosting at Liquid Web or else that would be a really awkward promo to be talking about right now. But there you go. If you want to talk to Christie, use the promo, go sign up, check out the platform. It’s very awesome. They have an amazing team over there. If you’re running on Woo, that’s a platform you should be sitting on, so go check ’em out. Bob and I both highly support them over there at Liquid Web. So appreciate you coming on, Christie, this has been awesome.

Christie:
This was super fun. Thank you.

Brad:
And for Bob, I’m Brad, and we’ll catch you on the next one. See you.