WooSesh, a WooCommerce Virtual Conference

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Brad:
Welcome back to another episode of Do the Woo podcast, episode number 25. We’re moving right along. Very excited this week. For this show, we have two guests, which is not our typical setup, right? Bob, you’ve got a double header here. I like it. Yeah, twice the pleasure. Twice the pleasure. Well, we’ll just get into it. So we have Patrick Rauland back on the show. Patrick, some of you may remember, was on the show back in March, which, as he so appropriately put it, felt like a lifetime ago. He is back to talk a little bit about WooSesh, a cool event coming up, as well as Brian Richards, his partner in crime over there at WooSesh. So welcome to the show, guys.

Brian:
Hey, thanks for having us.

Brad:
I got it first. I like it. You’re talking in unison. This is going to be a fun show. So why don’t you both just take a minute, for anyone that maybe didn’t catch the show you were on, Patrick and Brian, just to tell everybody quickly who you are and what you do, and then we’ll dive right into it.

Patrick:
So my name is Patrick Rauland. I do a lot of e-commerce content for LinkedIn Learning. So if you go on LinkedIn Learning, formerly known as Lynda.com, I have a ton of WooCommerce courses, a BigCommerce course, and a Shopify course. I basically talk about selling things online all day, every day. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Last year, or in the previous episode, we chatted about Fry Thief and launching a physical product. And then this fall, something that Brian and I started last year, we’re going to be doing version two of WooSesh. So that’s kind of what I’m working on.

Brad:
Yeah, very cool. How about you, Brian?

Brian:
So I run WPSessions.com, which organizes WordSesh. WordSesh EMEA is coming up on September 25th. That’s targeted for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. An extension from WordSesh is essentially how WooSesh was born because there were lots of requests for WooCommerce content, and I couldn’t fit enough of it into one 10-hour event while also having all of the other things going on. Patrick came along at the exact right moment and said, “Hey, let’s have a dedicated event just for WooCommerce.” And that has been my focus pretty much all year—these, well, three events, because WordSesh is happening twice this year.

Brad:
A couple of busy guys. Real quick, Patrick, with the LinkedIn Learning, I’ve got to say, and this isn’t a sponsor, but I love LinkedIn Learning. We’ve been using it internally at our company WebDev, and it’s amazing how many courses are out there. We’re using it for everything from development to leadership to anything, and they’re very well produced. It’s a nice online learning system. I was a little bit hesitant at first, but just putting that out there—if you haven’t checked it out, LinkedIn Learning is a very valuable tool, especially for remote companies, in my opinion. It’s a great learning tool. Well, cool. Thank you. Not sponsored, I just like the service. Let’s talk about WooSesh. Many of you are probably familiar with WordSesh; it’s been around for a number of years. I was involved in the early days when it was a little bit more Wild West—a 24-hour online event. Brian, since you’ve taken over and run a few since then, you’ve kind of reeled it back into a more sustainable effort, I guess you could say. Why don’t you touch on just the idea of WordSesh and WooSesh and just the overall goals of what you’re accomplishing or working to accomplish over there.

Brian:
Yeah, perfect. So the major thesis here is that physical conferences are expensive to run, expensive to attend, and hard to get to depending on where you live in the world. A virtual event costs considerably less to organize and is available to everybody around the globe simultaneously. As you said, WordSesh used to be 24 hours long so it could hit every time zone, but that’s a very complicated thing to coordinate and run. So I scaled it back to 12 hours, which is far simpler to run, but of course has the detriment of, well, now it’s only really convenient for half of the globe at any given moment, which is how I spawned the next one, WordSesh EMEA. It’s offset, and that one’s going to be scheduled better for people across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. There might even be a WordSesh APAC coming up for people in Asia and all the Pacific countries. We’ll see. It’s tricky. But the main driving goal here is to create an event—in the case of WordSesh—for WordPress developers, business owners, and professionals who use WordPress in their day-to-day lives, to create an event that they can attend no matter where they are in the world. And with it being recorded, also no matter what their schedule is currently like. It’s better for everybody if they can attend live, but even if you miss the live event, good news: it is inherently recorded, and you can catch it right afterwards. WooSesh is the exact same concept, but specifically for people who are building sites with WooCommerce. Whether you are a store owner building your own store, or a developer, or an agency who is building stores for others, WooSesh has something for you. Because WooCommerce encompasses such a huge demographic of store builders, we have one day that’s for everybody, whether you can write code or not. Then day two is just for people who work with code. That’s not to say that every talk on day two is about code, but it is for people who work with code or who run an agency or who are otherwise building e-commerce sites for other people.

BobWP:
Apparently, it’s a lot easier to split it up like that online versus doing it in person because you have that flexibility of really targeting this day, this second day, rather than somebody traveling all the way and going, “Here I am, stuck on this second day, and I’m just not quite sure.”

Brian:
Right.

Patrick:
Yeah. So a little bit more backstory: I helped run all three WooConfs, which WooCommerce did, and then Automattic did. So that was San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle. Those were great, those were in-person events. We had really high-quality speakers come in, but it’s so tricky to find the right balance of talks. If you have a talk for developers, then what do all the people who can’t write code do? You have to either have two tracks all day, every day, and then there are multiple talks going on at the same time that you can’t attend. It’s just very messy. It’s just very hard to run a physical conference. So when WooCommerce within Automattic decided they weren’t going to do this conference, I said, “Hey, Brian, we’ve got to do this.” And I think the two days just make it work really well so people can attend however many talks they want. The one thing I just want to say is we’re starting day one with a keynote. Automattic is sponsoring the event, and a couple of them are going to be speaking, and I think that brings everyone together. There’s this one sort of talk where everyone is there together, and then you just attend whatever talk is relevant for you. If there’s a talk that’s not relevant, check your email for an hour, you know what I mean? You’re not trapped in a foreign city.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean that’s a challenge I think with any event around WordPress, even local meetups, is WordPress has just such a wide user base and such wide interest within that user base that it’s a challenge. I mean, I’ve run the Philly WordPress Meetup group for about a decade, and I mean it’s awesome and it’s challenging at the same time, right? Because you have people there that maybe all they care about is actually writing content or running a website, or they’re diving into React-based headless setups. It’s just a massive spectrum. So it’s a really big challenge, but that’s the reason I’ve always loved the idea of WordSesh and these online conferences. I mean, I believe WordSesh was the first WordPress-focused online conference, at least the first one that had any kind of traction. You mentioned being a part of it in real-time; while if you haven’t done it, you might question whether it does feel that kind of connection with the other attendees, but you actually do. There’s a really active chat room, there are side chats, there are Slack conversations in WordPress and Post Status and other places, and it is fun participating live, I think more fun than I realized it would be. It’s one of the reasons we enjoyed doing it for a number of years, even though the 24-hour thing was tough.

BobWP:
And I was wondering how successful or how do you feel about that part of it, the chat part of it? Because I know that was one of the benefits you brought to the table—this isn’t just sit and look at the person talk, this is getting in and talking to other people. How has that gone so far, and is it definitely something you feel that a fair amount of the people that are attending are participating in?

Brian:

Yes, it is kind of a mess when it comes to a chat room that has multiple hundreds of people in it who are all trying to talk simultaneously. We had talked about having a separate standalone Slack team or Discord or any of the other standalone chat platforms so people could have their own one-on-one conversations, could spin up their own channels and talk. So sponsors, for example, could sync up with people who wanted more information about a thing, and we’re still exploring that idea. I think that is probably the best, with the one obvious downside being that you’re only really going to use this thing during the event, and now you’re in a team, some other chat thing that isn’t really super relevant for most of the year. Maybe it would be, that’s a surprise that I’d be happy to see. But the benefit here is it engages you, even if you’re not participating in the chat, you can see things that other people are saying. The chat helps influence what is happening on the stage with the speakers because either Patrick or I, as hosts, are seeing what’s being said and incorporating that in. Or the speakers themselves, sometimes not paying attention to their slides, look at the chat and go, “Oh yeah, that’s a good point. Here’s this concept that I wasn’t even going to get into, but I’m going to share with you all because I saw that.”

Brad:
Which sets it apart from just going to watch a YouTube video or a presentation on WordPress TV. There is that interactive element that still exists.

Brian:
Yeah, one of the biggest drawbacks to self-directed learning is that you can do it anytime. And what that means is usually it gets pushed off until later, and later is never. We all want to learn things aspirationally, which means we’ll sign up for a course or we’ll add a video to a playlist or add an article to a “read later” list and never come back around to it. But with a live event, you’re forced to actually pay attention while it’s happening, and it takes this aspirational action into, “Well, I’m actually going to do it now,” which helps a ton.

Patrick:
One of the things I like about the chat is I think if you’re just watching a webinar replay, it feels very hollow. It just feels empty, and you don’t even know if you agree with them or whatever. But if someone says a really good point, and then you see the chat go, “Oh my God, I totally agree,” or “Hey, this is really good,” and look at these other cool concepts, then it feels like even I am more convinced of the speaker when I see other people talking about it. “Oh yeah, here’s the code repository for that project you mentioned, and it looks great.” Stuff like that is really good. And I didn’t even think this happened at WooSesh, but if someone does say something, let’s say technically incorrect, they made a mistake or something, and someone goes, “Oh, he mentioned this thing; it was actually this thing,” you get instant feedback on whether someone has an opinion or they make a mistake or they share something awesome. You just get instant feedback from everyone, and you get to build on that and then, of course, add your own two cents. I really, really like that and appreciate that, and it keeps me engaged. Even if someone’s going through some long technical thing that’s hard to pay attention to, at least if other people are sharing examples or sharing where they struggled or how they did something awesome with that technology, then it engages me on a whole different level.

Brad:
And just, I think you mentioned earlier, the cost to entry. WordCamps, by and large, are very inexpensive events for the ticket, but that only really works well for you if you’re local in terms of the cost. So if you’re coming from out of town, traveling to an event, then there’s obviously travel time, travel costs, lodging, food, things like that. So a $20 ticket usually turns into hundreds of dollars, if not five, six hundred dollars, just for a one or two-night trip to another city to experience this event. With WooSesh and WordSesh, by and large, it’s either very, very cheap or free in some cases. For WooSesh that’s coming up, has that been announced? Is there a cost for the ticket? I didn’t see anything on the website, so I’m guessing it hasn’t been announced yet. Is that something you could share with us if there is a price and what it’s going to be?

Patrick:
So the price is a whopping $0, so it’s going to really stretch your wallet. Brian spent a lot of time this year working with sponsors to make sure that it is going to be free. Brian and I started working on this in February, March. We’ve been spending a lot of time working on this project, and basically, the sponsors are paying for the technology, and then our time, getting speakers together and prepping them and helping them get ready for this event. And the speakers’ time.

Brian:
And the speakers’ time, yep.

Brad:
That’s awesome. So there’s really no excuse not to attend, right? It’s free. There’s a wealth of knowledge, and you can pick and choose what interests you. If it doesn’t interest you, like you said, go off for an hour, do something, get back to work, whatever, then hop back on when the next show or the next presentation is on that catches your attention. And everything’s recorded, like you said. So once the event’s done, the recordings are available. Is that under WPSessions, or is that under some other spot?

Brian:
It is. So you’ll be able to watch them on WPSessions indefinitely. They’ll be there forever. But one thing that we’ve chatted about—only briefly—and we haven’t landed on it yet, but what I’d like to do is make the recordings free for a full 24 hours past when the session broadcasts, so that if you are on the opposite side of the world and it is just not a convenient time for you, you’re not stuck missing this free content or having to stay up until 4:00 AM so that you can watch it. So it’ll be free to show up and watch during the broadcast and for the next 24 hours. Then after that, anybody who wants to can go to WPSessions.com, become a member, and watch all of them, plus all of last year’s, plus everything else that’s on there.

Brad:
Love it, love it. I mean, it’s amazing to see this. Like I said, I think WordSesh was the original. There have been a few since then, but online content is amazing, especially a live conference like this. It’s a wealth of knowledge. So for the price tag of free, you kind of need to be there. You kind of need to check it out. And a little fun fact, we’re actually just going down your list of speakers from last year and inviting them all to our show here. So thanks for laying the groundwork for that. It makes our lives a lot easier.

Brian:
Happy to do it for you.

Brad:
You guys had really good speakers last year, and I’m excited to see what you have cooking this year. So anything else you want to touch on while we’re talking WooSesh? Anything else you want to get out there that we didn’t mention? So go sign up right—woosesh.com—punch in your email, and you’ll get all the relevant information to get your ticket for the event on October 9th and 10th. So crazy to say we’re like, what, a month and a half out. Not trying to make you nervous or anything, but it’ll be here before you know it.

Brian:
We’re getting ready to make our speaker announcement, and the schedule will come sometime after that when we can figure out what’s a good time for each speaker. But while I was working on collecting sponsors, Patrick was working on finding speakers, and we have a very impressive lineup again this year. I am personally excited to hear several of the talks that are going to be in the schedule.

Patrick:
So I will leave a teaser here. You know in life how sometimes if you just ask people for what you want, they give it to you? I reached out to a company that I’ve been following for years. They have amazing data on e-commerce and UX and stuff like this, and I reached out to them thinking, “They’re probably not even going to answer me. This is probably going into a black hole.” And within just one email, they were like, “Yep, we’re in.” I was like, “Oh, amazing. Great. I’m so glad I asked.” So I’m excited for some cool big names to show up.

Brad:
That’s awesome. We’re looking forward to it. We’ll definitely keep everyone updated as the speakers are announced and more information is revealed between now and the event. But definitely check it out—woosesh.com—get your email in there so you don’t forget, and they’ll get you the relevant info to get to the event on event days. I’m looking forward to that one. How about you, Bob?

BobWP:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I dabbled in it a little bit last time. It’s hard for me—my brain sitting that long. Well, I won’t even go there, but anyway, yeah, it’s great stuff, and I am looking forward to it for sure.

Brad:
Very cool. What do we got? Let’s move on to some topics of

the week. There’s this platform out there a few people have used over the years called Tumblr. Have you guys heard of it?

BobWP:
Nope.

Patrick:
Tumbling? It’s a social network for people who like to tumble.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s very niche. It’s very niche. Actually, I had to dust off my Tumblr. I knew I had one. I had no idea if I’d ever actually done anything with it, so I was very curious. After the news of Automattic acquiring Tumblr, I was very curious to see what I had posted. I was able to log in, surprisingly, and I hadn’t posted anything, so it was pretty anticlimactic. But I do have an account with nothing. So Automattic acquires Tumblr—I think that news has been out there; we’ve been talking about it. But what’s the angle we’re taking here, Bob? There’s an e-commerce angle, right?

BobWP:
Yeah, there is. And I actually also wondered if I had a Tumblr account, and I was looking through, and so I went to set one up. The username BobWP was taken, and I thought, “Well, maybe I do or maybe I don’t,” but I could never retrieve it, so I just went ahead and opened another one in case I wanted to use anything. But over on Post Status, I was reading through Brian Krogsgard’s article on it, which was really a good article. I’m just going to read this one quote in context because it’s what I want—anyone that has any of you three that have any idea of what Tumblr really does, which like I said, I’m pretty foreign to—but Matt said in the chat that he thinks e-commerce on Tumblr is a great idea. I can also see a world where Tumblr could be shaped into a primary mobile product, a more direct and more privacy-focused implementation of what Instagram is with a similar minimal interface. And I’m not much on Instagram either, so I would love to hear—just e-commerce on Tumblr is a great idea. For those of you that are on either Instagram or have some significant thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.

Patrick:
So I talked a lot about this in some of my LinkedIn Learning courses. Instagram is amazing. What Instagram does really well is they have in-context photos. So what that means is you are at the gym, you take a selfie of yourself, you’re wearing your brand’s workout clothing, and you can tag your T-shirt—here’s the red gym shirt, here are the red gym shorts, here are the Nike black sneakers. People can see that it’s like a shoppable image (I forgot whatever it’s called), and they can click on individual items in that photo and then buy them. So Instagram is the only platform that kind of does this really, really well. I think if Tumblr did something similar, they could rock that, where an in-context photo—it’s a photo of your kitchen, and here’s the table that costs $100, and the bowl on top costs $20, and you can click on individual items and add them to your cart and check out. The thing that’s challenging is all these platforms that have… So Pinterest had this for a while; they were called “buyable pins,” and they got rid of them. Now it’s just back to where you click, and it takes you to a link to the website to buy. But the thing you have to figure out is Instagram has an incredibly simple shopping interface where you click, “I want the red T-shirt,” and buy, and it adds the cost of shipping, and you buy it. And with red pants, it adds the cost of shipping again, and you have to buy it again. So you can’t even have a cart system. So you have to almost redesign, restructure your shipping costs and all this stuff. You have to do a bunch of logistics to make it work for your company. Some companies do really well on Instagram; a lot of them only do okay. I think if Automattic does that in-context thing and they have an integration with WooCommerce or something like WooCommerce, that’s perfect. It could be really cool. There’s just a lot of stuff that has to go into it.

Brian:
Brian, does that make any sense?

Patrick:
Yes, I concur.

Brad:
Lost the podcast.

Brian:
Perfect. Yeah, the hardest part, like you said, is finding the right mechanism to make it work. A platform that I think about often is Gumroad, which was created for creators to just very easily and quickly set up a page to sell a thing. “I’ve made this thing; now I want to sell it for a fixed price.” Here you go, Internet, come and buy it. And it has done exceptionally well over the years. I think an experience like that via Tumblr would be amazing, and it would empower tons more people to just use this quick posting thing to say, “Hey, by the way, I just made more of these things.” If you’re a crafter or someone who sells things on Etsy, for example, you can just sell those same things via your Tumblr. That’d be wild to see. I don’t anticipate it being a full-blown e-commerce store. That doesn’t feel like the right place to do something like that. But a way to either, as you said, Patrick, point people off-site, like, “Hey, here’s a photo; here are all the things in that photo. You can go and buy them at these places, and I get an affiliate kickback from that,” or a place where you can sell your own stuff and just make it really easy for someone to click, “Yeah, I want this,” and they click “buy,” the transaction happens, and you get your cut whenever the payouts happen. It would be amazing.

BobWP:
Really cool. That makes sense. You’re right, both of you, as far as, yeah, it wouldn’t become a full-fledged e-commerce site. I think that might upset a lot of Tumblr users right now or even in the future whenever it would happen. So it would be an added integration. It seems like… Anything, Brad?

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I concur. I think one of the challenges is Tumblr has had an interesting history over the last 10-plus, what, 11 years or it’s been around 12 years, something like that? But it seems like its demographic, by and large, is younger—under 25. And I think that presents a challenge. So the idea of selling something… There are a lot of different ways that could be implemented. I think the Instagram approach probably makes the most sense to keep that Tumblr experience. But I feel like the audience is younger, so is that even going to work? Is it going to make sense? The under-25 crowd doesn’t have a lot of disposable income, or at least I sure as hell didn’t when I was 25. So I think it’s as much about the approach as it is the strategy of if that even makes sense for that platform based on their current demographic. Now, I think we also have to keep in mind that Automattic just bought it, what, a few weeks ago? So what it is today probably won’t be exactly what it is a year or two from now. I’m sure Matt has a long roadmap and vision of where he wants to take it, and some things will probably change along the way. But yeah, I think the whole idea is you’ve got to keep the experience that’s familiar with the platform. If Tumblr is to break out into, “Here’s a shopping cart and add a bunch of stuff to it,” that would be weird. I don’t feel like that would fit. Who knows? I guess we’ll see. There’s a lot of money to be made here on a platform that’s been kind of on the downswing. So I’m very curious to see the moves they make and some of the bigger moves and how quickly they make them to address that.

BobWP:
Exactly. Let’s see. Next thing on the list is nothing earth-moving, but WooCommerce 3.7 recently came out. I don’t know, I can’t say anything revved my engine. I don’t know if any update really ever has revved my engine in any plugin, but a few new blocks, a few other little tweaks. I’m sure you were all sitting on the edge of your chairs waiting for this to happen, and you just can’t wait to talk for hours on it. But I don’t know if there’s anything that just you particularly liked in this particular update.

Patrick:
So I’m waiting for them to do something big. They were supposed to add the new WooCommerce Admin into the WooCommerce 3.7 release, and they punted it, which is frustrating because I recorded a LinkedIn Learning course with them saying, “Hey, this is going to be added in WooCommerce 3.7.” They said that for months. So right before WooCommerce 3.7 came out, I was recording a new course showing the new admin, which by the way, is really gorgeous. If you haven’t yet, check out the WooCommerce Admin feature plugin on WordPress.org. It does really make the admin experience nicer. There are really cool reports in it, but I’m slightly frustrated that I recorded the whole course and a week or so before 3.7 came out, they’re like, “You know what? We’re going to punt this.” So I’m very excited for WooCommerce 3.8 when that new admin experience comes out.

BobWP:
Just use the plugin.

Patrick:
Just use the plugin.

BobWP

:
We’ll remember that snippet there for when it comes out.

Brad:
Yeah, I might want to wait on that recording for 3.8 until it’s official. Reminds me of when Gutenberg came out, and nobody was ready. So everyone had to go back, and a lot of the learning courses and stuff, people had to re-record some things very, very quickly. I think the branded blocks are kind of cool. I could also see how that will be absolutely abused, but on the surface of what you hope people are going to do, I think that could help things be found a little bit easier visually in a list of blocks that we know is going to get so big over time, not just WooCommerce-related, but just WordPress in general. That’s going to be a very convoluted experience, I think, at some point because when you have a hundred blocks to sift through, how do you really get to what you’re looking for? This might be a little bit of a way to help with that or at least to start. So nothing groundbreaking like you said, Bob, but I think that’s kind of cool. Just a little UI visual enhancement there.

BobWP:
Cool. And last but not least, I always have to throw in some bigger picture stuff. A post came across, “How E-Commerce Boom Crushes Mall Retailers One by One.” We probably kind of already have seen this happening, but they had some interesting stats on this. It’s on, let’s see, what’s this site? Wolfstreet.com, and basically just going through talking about the big brick and mortar retailers that have already thrived online, but then also looking at some facts around Best Buy and what they’re doing with some of their stores and how many they’re closing down. Anything that you saw on this that makes you just think “Ah,” or any of these graphs on here that seem super impressive to you?

Patrick:
The story that I’ve been following for a little bit is about Walmart’s e-commerce platform. Walmart has been pumping so much money into their e-commerce division that they are slowly, slowly getting a teensy bit of their market share. And all online sales in the US are growing, but they have to spend so much money to do that. So I’m just curious if, long-term, Walmart will keep pursuing that strategy. They are growing their market share, but margins in e-commerce are not huge for big retailers like that. I just don’t know if they can keep doing it year after year. I think right now they’re at what, 2.9%? No, there’s a different number. I’ll have to find it in this article, but they’re a tiny fraction of all e-commerce sales. Amazon’s a huge amount, and I just don’t know if they can keep pumping money into it until they tie Amazon. So that’s the story I’m very eagerly following.

Brad:
I think the big differentiator there is Walmart has stores, and I think that the immediacy of ordering is the biggest reason why brick-and-mortar stores can one-up e-commerce, at least today. I know Amazon’s working to fix that or to go after that with one-day shipping, and eventually, there’ll be a lot of same-day stuff, which you can do now. But the idea that I can order something online and then just drive down to Walmart or Target and pick it up or anywhere, like Home Depot—all these places do that now. And that immediacy of things that you need is going to take some time before e-commerce can really touch that. So that’s the biggest thing they got going for them, and they got to go all in on those online ordering things, which a lot of them are, like you said, but they’re all playing catch-up.

Brian:
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, actually. I’m in the process of remodeling my basement, which I personally am doing, which means many transactions with Home Depot. They have, I think, one of the better e-commerce presences. Their e-commerce presence is better among all of the other physical stores. It’s very easy to search for the thing you want, filter, sort it, etc. It’s very clear if this is available at the one near me or one that’s still close by, if not that one, and it’s super convenient to be able to pick out what I want and have it ready for me when I get there so I don’t have to traverse the giant store. But also, if I want to go and pick the things myself, it tells me exactly, “Here’s where it is in the physical store if you want to just go and grab it,” which I thought was brilliant.

Brad:
They also tell you how many there are. So if there’s only one, you gotta move; if there are like 30, you’re good.

Brian:
On the opposite end is Best Buy. They’re on my mind often because they share a parking lot with the Home Depot near my house. So I always see Best Buy on my way to Home Depot, and it has caused me to wonder what their strategy is for the future. I was thinking about this particularly in light of same-day delivery with Amazon. It feels like to me, Best Buy is just one bad week away from completely having to close up shop because if Amazon has same-day delivery for all of the stuff that Best Buy carries, it’s a hard argument to say, “Well, why don’t you come to our store and pay the same price but also have to pick it out yourself?” In particular, I’ve been curious about Geek Squad, where they will send people to your house with the thing that you bought to install it for you. I wonder, I would assume they have, but I wonder if they’ve had many conversations around, “What if we repurposed Geek Squad or supplanted Geek Squad with the ability to provide same-day delivery to customers? They buy something online, if they buy it before noon, let’s say, it’ll get to them same day. If they buy it after noon, it’ll come to them tomorrow.” And I realize there are tons of logistics that come with delivering things, but that seems like a solvable problem—a much more solvable problem than, “How do we stop ourselves from going out of business?” when it is, “Oh no, we’re past the cliff and it’s too late.” Bringing it back to the article that you mentioned, Bob, the mall stores versus e-commerce sales, there’s a graph at the very end of the article that I thought was interesting. Mall stores continue to sell tons and tons of merchandise, and many of them continue to thrive even as e-commerce grows. But it’s just a specific segment of mall stores and physical retailers that are going under, and those are the ones who are selling entertainment things, music, video games, movies, etc., where it’s just way easier to buy digitally or buy from a store that will deliver it to you than go to the mall and get it. Best Buy falls squarely in the “oh no” region when it comes to the kinds of stores that e-commerce is swallowing whole.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, this list of top 10 e-commerce retailers, even though Best Buy is sitting at number six, I would agree. I would say they’re probably the most likely to not be here in five years for that very reason. Electronics… I got a hundred-dollar Best Buy gift card for my birthday, and I used to always love Best Buy, right? I get gift cards, go there, get a game or get something. I was like, “I don’t even know what I want.” There’s nothing I want there. I ended up buying a carpet cleaner. Can you believe that? That really shows my age—that I took my gift card for my birthday and bought a carpet cleaner from Best Buy. And I was very excited about it because I’m like, “I don’t need those electronics. I get all that on Amazon, and it comes very, very quickly.” But you’re right, that chart at the bottom is interesting. I don’t know about you guys, but malls around me, in the Philadelphia area, are still very busy. They still do very well. A lot of people still like to go and window shop, and clothing is another biggie because I’m not comfortable buying clothes online unless it’s just a simple T-shirt or something. I want to go to a store and try it on and see, and maybe I don’t even know what I want because I’m terrible about shopping for clothes. I don’t know what I want until I see it. So I think there will always be a place for malls. They’re just going to evolve a little bit. It probably depends on the area where you live and things like that.

Patrick:
Yes, so there’s this… Malls have a rating system. Here’s the long and short of it: If your mall has an Apple store, it’s probably an A-rated mall, and your mall’s going to do great for a long period of time. So in the mall near me, which is Cherry Creek here in Denver, there’s an Apple store, there’s a Tesla store, there’s a Peloton store, there are all these super nice luxury brands. They do very well in those malls where people talk about mall closures—they’re all in small rural areas. So as a good example, I used to live in Green Bay. There’s this mall on the east side of Green Bay, and that mall is not—at least the last time I was there, it was not doing well. There weren’t stores you recognized. That, I think, is where this retail… When people talk about the retail apocalypse, that’s where that’s coming from. It’s the malls in these really smaller rural areas that

don’t… People have jobs, but they don’t have high-paying jobs like in downtown Denver, where there are a lot of high-paying jobs that can support malls and retail stores.

Brad:
I hope they don’t go away. I’ll just leave it at this: My son’s three, almost four now, and I was actually talking to my wife about how when we were kids, Friday night was fun. We’d go to the video store, you walk around, you don’t really know what you want, your parents allow you to pick out a video game or something. It’s exciting. You don’t even know what the game’s going to be like because all you can look at is the box. I’m sure all of you had childhoods like that where it was fun to just go browse and not really know what you want and figure it out with your family and your friends. Obviously, on the video side, that ship has sailed long, long ago. But I hope we don’t lose that. I hope we don’t turn into a culture where everything is just online and there’s no actual place to go to look at stuff. I know that’s way out if that’s ever going to happen, but it’s obviously trending in that direction where everything’s online, we never have to leave our houses. I still think there’s something about being out there and seeing things and experiencing it. Especially with kids, it’s still fun. So hopefully we don’t lose that. We’ll see.

BobWP:
There’s still one Blockbuster left, so we could go there.

Brad:
Or Oregon. It’s out by you, Bob. It’s in Oregon, I think.

BobWP:
Oh really? Oh geez. Yeah, I’ll drive there for that. I went to, just real quickly, I went to Best Buy actually when we bought our new TV because it was as far as pricing, and it was the closest, since we’re way over on the coast. We had to drive 40 miles to get to it or so. But it was the only reason I went there was because I wanted to ask some questions about some specific TVs. When I walked in there, it was like, “Well, yeah, I remember what Best Buy looked like now that I’m in here.” But it was kind of weird. I think it was a Sunday, and there was absolutely hardly anybody in the store. They were more than happy… We had all sorts of people; they were calling people left and right who knew different things about stuff, and I thought, “Oh, I guess everybody in here doesn’t have anything to do right now because we’ve got five salespeople here that are helping us.” But that one instance—and that was based on where we lived. So it really is interesting to see where this is going. Yeah, I grew up in malls. I’m a little bit older than most of you and stuff. We used to spend—I swear it was days in malls.

Brad:
You were a mall rat, weren’t you, Bob?

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. I’d sit in the car, I’d go over to the… I loved putting the little plastic car models together. I don’t even know if they have them anymore, but you actually had to glue them together. Man, that was the greatest thing—just sitting and looking at the boxes of those and picking those out and stuff. I can imagine buying that online would really suck now.

Brad:
All right, cool. Well, let’s wrap it up. This was a great show, guys. Definitely appreciate you joining. Don’t you quickly just tell people anything you’ve got going on—obviously, WooSesh is coming up—but anything beyond that and where they can find you online? Patrick?

Patrick:
You’re muted.

Brad:
Sounds like you’re saying something really important.

Patrick:
Or I just said the ultimate question for life. So the answer is 42. I just shared the ultimate question, but I was muted. Sorry. Yeah, so WooSesh is coming up, and then you can follow me on Twitter. I’m @BFTrick. Is there anything else I want to share? No, that’s it. Just WooSesh and chat with me on Twitter.

Brad:
Awesome. Brian?

Brian:
I’m going to say the same, except I also have WordSesh coming up two weeks prior to WooSesh. So go to WordSesh.com if you want to go to a WordPress development conference, or go to WooSesh.com if you want to go to a WooCommerce-focused conference. On Twitter, I am @Rzen, but it’s spelled R-Z-E-N because I don’t know how to spell.

Brad:
Very cool. Very cool. Bob, what about you? What do you have coming up?

BobWP:
Nothing coming up. Just a couple of WordCamps in the fall, and that’s about it. But I might meander to that WooSesh too. So I’m looking forward to that.

Brad:
I’ll be there for WooSesh. WordCamp US is looking more likely by the day that I’ll end up there as well. And PressNomics is right around the corner next month, so you can definitely find me @WilliamsBA on Twitter. Anything else, Bob?

BobWP:
Nope, I think that’s it. I think we’re good to go. I appreciate having Brian and Patrick on and talking about all sorts of stuff—Woo and non-Woo. Yeah, good times.

Brad:
Yeah, great show. Thanks again, gentlemen. Best of luck with the event. We’ll be there judging and talking about you. So have fun.

Brian:
Perfect.

Brad:
Everybody, we will see you in a couple of weeks on the next episode of Do the Woo. No pressure, guys.

Brian:
No pressure. I love being talked about and judged.

Brad:
I like judging.