Ecommerce in the WooSesh Community

Kathy: I am so happy to be able to talk to you both Allie and Daniel. Their sessions today were so interesting. And I’d love to hear some more about. I’ve never met either one of you. But I’d love to hear more about what it is that you guys do with WordPress. We’ll start with you, Allie. You’re over in the UK, yes?

Allie: Yep, I’m in Wales, which not a lot of people know about Wales, but yeah, based in Wales.

Kathy: And you work with eCommerce.

Allie: Yeah, I’m head of eCommerce with a web agency. So for the last four years, I’ve mainly been working with large scale, really complicated WooCommerce platforms that have melted my brain with really complex integration. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years.

Kathy: And your session today was all about headless WordPress with WooCommerce, which kind of blew my mind. We won’t — I don’t want to hear any technical details, I just want to hear just kind of high-level, how is that going? I’ve been watching headless for a while. And I know there’s a lot that goes into that. How has that been for you?

Allie: It’s been really challenging, to be honest. I mean, we — when we started the project, we were kind of like, we hadn’t done headless WooCommerce at all. And we thought, OK, this is a good way for us to learn about it. But learning about it, again, with it on an enterprise scale where we’ve got 20,000 products and not only that, multitude of plugins that we hadn’t really factored in the complexity around actually building the entire frontend. It’s been really, it’s been interesting, but super challenging. We’re about two weeks from delivery on this project now.

Zach: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s — not a lot of people who are outside of the eCommerce space understand really how many pieces have to come together for any eCommerce site to work right.

Allie: Yeah, and I think one of the things I’d always — the kind of the safety net I’ve always had with WordPress and WooCommerce is so we work in sprints, and sprint 1, you can have a whole eCommerce journey. It might not look nice, it might be clunky, but you can spin up your environment and from the very first sprint, you’ve got the end-to-end process. And then you kind of layer up the features. But with headless, it’s kind of like sprint one, I’ve got nothing. Sprint two, I still don’t have anything. Sprint three, I might have a little bit. And it was a completely different development process that I found really interesting. Frustrating at times, but also, we can see it now towards the end and you go, yeah, I get it. But it was — it’s been a challenge.

Kathy: Wow, sounds like you’re a trail blazer and we’re excited to watch how it all unfolds for you so we can all learn from you. Thanks for taking that on for all of us. That’s really cool. And Daniel, your session was interesting, I was thrown into back in the day eCommerce in the past. Your solution sounds really interesting with Monitorific. Could you give a high-level overview of the service? Do you mean I don’t have to monitor things by setting up things like PHP calls that send me emails and things? I can have a service do it for me?

Daniel: Absolutely. Someone said there was a party, so I don’t know what happened. But just, you know, couple of things instantly appeared. So —

Kathy: Love it.

Daniel: So we, yeah, I’m definitely the wearer of many hats and of bright sunglasses. So my main gig is core development where I have a bunch of clients who focus on WooCommerce subscriptions. So they have large, multimillion dollar subscription catalogs that renew every month, and so there’s a lot of care and feeding that goes into that. So when you have a development team that’s pushing out code often, you need to make sure that stuff works, not only in your monitoring of your local, you know, unit testing or maybe some integration testing, but you need to know that, hey, is checkout going to work or not? And so the example I gave in my presentation was, it was fictitious, there is no Mary’s robots, the MAR-E has not yet been developed as a product even though there’s maybe some example products out there.

I would have loved a robot to read to my kids because reading elephant books are awesome, but the thousandth time after you’ve read pig and elephant book, you don’t want to read it, again. So, no — the concept for Monitorific is checking live cards. This existed prior as a product off of another company. Mr. Brian Richards reminded me of that last year, and sort of a lightbulb went off. Not a neon lightbulb. But yeah, this needed to exist, again, even if it was just for my clients or my plugin shop.

That’s the second hat I wear, I sell plugins for WooCommerce, and the just — I have done that self-inflicted wound. I have pushed on a Friday afternoon, gone along with my weekend, and then come back on Monday to check on sales, which usually do happen on the weekends. And just, you know, quizzical look of why I have no sales come in. Well, dummy, you shot yourself in the foot. You broke checkout on a Friday afternoon. And so, it fills the Monitorific, fills in that gap of is checkout working? Can I sleep at night knowing that checkout’s working?

You know, it could be a push of code, it could be an automatic update. All of these different scenarios of where your main money-making piece — part of your site is going to go down. And yeah, just trying to help people sleep better. I’m a sleep therapist, I want you to get the full, combined REM sleep to make you more productive. I’m here for you, for the people.

Kathy: That’s awesome.

Zach: Well, I really appreciate you guarding my sleep. It’s important.

Daniel: Absolutely, using these glasses to make it very not creepy.

Kathy: Zach, have you ever broke a checkout on Friday?

Zach: Not on Friday, but I’ve done it on Thursday and it’s almost just as bad. There’s so much that can go wrong when you’re updating a website in general. But especially an eCommerce site. And when something goes wrong on an eCommerce site, that’s revenue lost no matter what. And I really, first, I loved the allegory you used throughout the entire presentation giving us a person and a product that we were we grew to care about throughout the presentation.

And the fact that you covered all of these various ways that we can monitor not just your own product but other products, as well. I really liked the multi-layered approach and using things like uptime robot and I’ve used hotjar for watching users click through the site, too, it’s a remarkable thing to be able to do. And you figure out things you never figure out any other way. Right? People are trying to click on a picture. Oh, that’s just a picture. We don’t have a link there. Maybe we should make that a link. So all of these various types of monitoring really for store owners improve the overall experience for their customers.

Bob: And Allie, I was going to ask, you probably discovered all of the new things that could go wrong when you’re doing it with headless, right?

Allie: Yeah, I think — as well as, you know, the extended kind of development time, one of the things that we found with headless is all the edge cases that you don’t think are going to come up. Error handling. So when someone doesn’t put in their card information correctly and it’s kind of like, that’s coming from Stripe and how do you handle all of those error messages? And it’s like, all of those things that — I think I said it in my talk, a lot of things you do through development, they’ll be assumed. We know there are going to be error messages coming back, but with headless, it’s like everything, every single thing was an unknown and everything was oh, we have to factor that in. Oh, we have to factor that in. And it’s been fantastic as a learning experience, but super challenging.

Kathy: Yeah, it’s so funny when you think about headless or basically any kind of innovation, it sounds so great in theory and then, yeah, you get into it. And it’s just like, what is this growing over here? It’s just hard to be able to predict any of those things because in theory, it should work, but then in practice, there is all sorts of things that can trip you up and cause things to go haywire. It’s great to have a monitoring tool that’s not just looking at checkout and is checkout working, but is tax being collected? And did that get turned off?

And you brought up so many great points, Daniel, in your talk, about the different things that can go wrong with an eCommerce store front. It’s not just about, you know, did the sale close? There’s so many different moving parts. I love that somebody else is thinking about all of those things because when it comes to monitoring those, having to recreate the wheel is daunting.

Zach: And the other important thing there, Kathy, it’s not just about, does WordPress and WooCommerce work? There are external services we integrate with, as well, that we have to monitor. What if ship station’s API goes down. We need to know that’s happened. And so, yeah, it’s a complex beast. It’s not just the website itself, it’s all of the other services and tools asked to integrate.

So you mentioned that you also, Daniel, have shop plugins, which is great specialty plugin company for WooCommerce. And I’ve used a number of your plugins through clients in the past. I really enjoy the subscriptions plugin you have, actually. I tend to tell all of my subscriptions customers to buy that.

Daniel: Awesome, thank you. That started out as a — that’s the tool box for subscriptions plugin that started out as a client project for coffee. So very much, very much similar to Dhruvin’s session today. And then, it — and then it kind of — the development of that kind of got to a point and then kind of stopped. So it is due a refresh. Because supporting a bunch of subscriptions commerce sites you see, again, with the user monitoring users and getting all of the customer requests, you see commonalities. And the checkout, the cancellation one is a huge one. Cancellation. Making that available. And then, also, I’ve gotten so many requests for one-time addition products. And that is — that’s top of the development queue. People want to be able to add items to their cart, have it renew and then have it drop off.

So that’s been — something that definitely has highlighted the support requests, the preorder requests, and people just say, hey, is this possible? We actually built that out for one client and just sort of had them migrate the code over into the plugin. Yeah, there’s still a lot of additional functionality that could be built for that. And there are other plugins that do that. All subscriptions in the WooCommerce shop. I’m tool box compatible with it. When you change something in your subscription, it checks to see if there’s an all subscriptions discount, you know, combine an item for $20, but if you subscribe, you get it for 15. That type of percentage discount. That gets applied when you change stuff in toolbox.

So that’s something one of the other presentations today, the, you know, how you’re choosing your plugins from Marcus. The inner compatibility between vendors’ plugins is really challenging because it’s development time on from my end. But it makes happy customers.

Zach: Absolutely. Between what used to be called subscribe all things, right? And your plugin, it has handled most of the use cases that I’ve had for subscriptions where store owners want to give people more control. The other big request I get is customer retention, right? So that retention workflow, when somebody does choose to cancel, giving them options rather than just automatically saying, OK, well, we’re going to cancel you. Giving them the option to skip a month or skip two months. And I believe your plugin can do some of that on the customer side, as well, right?

Daniel: I built it out, yeah, it’s been — it’s skip a month or change the date in the future to a different date. But the cancellation sequence is something that’s been asked for a lot. That’s probably number two. You know, if — why are you canceling? Let’s let a built-in sequence, not a person handle that and handle the feeling out where the customer’s temperature is. Are they fixated on canceling immediately? And they never want to see you again? Or are they on the fence? If it was a little bit cheaper, a little bit less often, if it was a little bit less product. And if you keep a customer you worked really hard to win in the first place.

Zach: Yeah, the first place I saw a custom cancellation workflow work well was for deodorant company. And they were able to they were able to retain people because sometimes they were canceling because they wanted to switch scents or maybe they had enough deodorant they felt they didn’t need that month’s shipment. So they were churning completely rather than just changing what they didn’t like about the subscription. So yeah, I think that’s a powerful thing, and I look forward to seeing that in there, as well . That would be awesome.

Daniel: Yeah, because there’s a certain level of trust you’ve already won for having them as a subscriber, you want to leverage that trust and keep them around.

Zach: What’s the statistic? It’s 7 times harder to get a new customer than to just sell something to an existing one?

Daniel: Absolutely, yeah.

Thanks to our Pod Friends NitroPack and Weglot

Bob: I’m going to interject a question on headless. It’s really two-part. And it’s — do any of your clients actually ever come to you and say, hey, I want headless eCommerce? And if they don’t and you decide because that seems to be the right fit, what is your education process to tell these people? Or do you feel the need to tell them that it’s quote, unquote headless?

Allie: On the client we’re working for, they asked for a specifically headless build. For our point of view, it was going to be a great experience for us. I think it’s really important when a client comes to you when, you know, whether they want headless, or not. Is it something on their radar? Is it something on our radar? Understanding not just what the initial build of this site? What is the purpose of this site? Where do they want their products to go?

One of the advantages of headless helps with omnichannel. If you just — if you want a site and you want your products on your site and it’s just serving content, I think headless is probably not the right approach right now. If you want products going into marketplaces and, you know, you’re going full the omnichannel, yes, it might be the right approach. But I think if you’ve got clients, as well, who are early adopters. Headless has been around for a while, but it feels like new tech. It still feels a little bit kind of in the air that we don’t really know how maintainable it is, what — from a development perspective, and from a cost perspective.

There’s still, I think, a lot of questions around whether or not headless is the right approach. So it really does depend on what the client’s — the purpose of their product offering is. And I can’t say that headless site if it’s headless. But what is the purpose of their product offering? Where are their products going out to? I think that’s kind of the questions we should be asking all our clients.

Bob: That makes sense, yeah. Anybody else have anything you caught or heard or saw something in Slack that you want to share that you probably shouldn’t but you could anyway? That you want to bring up?

Allie: Well, I think, for me, same thing full site editing, I think — not going to say game changer, but I think one thing especially for our clients that’s prohibitive is not being able to make quick changes to product pages. More of the fixed assets. Within WooCommerce. I think being able to move the power to them rather than to an agency to have to make those changes I think is kind of quite powerful thing. For me, I really enjoyed listening to.

Daniel: I have a question related to that. As I mentioned in Slack, I forced Gutenberg on to the shop product post types so I could get it working for a client, proof of concept. And it’s great and you build out an entire page, entire page in Gutenberg and someone who doesn’t necessarily 100% know how to use the editor, this is probably the same thing as element or Beaver Build or whatever, someone moves a block and the whole page changed. Anyone have any strategies for when everything in that editor, this is not something that can be versioned like a page template? How are you keeping the content of these pages that are meticulously built out to look a certain way? That same? How do you preserve them and maybe burden them in multiple?

Kathy: I’m a big fan of keeping content and design in separate places for those types of reasons. And that was one of the reasons I got involved in WordPress to begin with. It was like I was blogging and I wanted my design over here and my content here because I was changing the design all the time, right? And so now we’re moving WordPress towards full site editing and things like that, but I think with those kinds of situations, things where you can have people build templates out with blocks but the data is stored and edited by someone who may not understand how the it works.

And it allows you to build out those templates for your product pages and you can assign it to one product to a number of products to a category of products products offered by one individual where you can template out things that way but then you have the content, the product information all of those types of numbers and data information is dealt with separately. I think there’s a ton of implementations where you’ve got people you don’t want anything to do with product layouts but you still want them to have access to the data and to be able to edit it. So, I’m still kind of like living in the camp of data one place and design in another place.

Bob: I’m going to add in, Darren is actually listening to us and he was in the Slack and Darren spoke earlier about the home page and the customization easy in merchant flexibility as well as content locking in patterns.

Zach: That’s going to be a huge thing.

Daniel: The curve ball from that client the proof of concept, they’re coming from a developer who had implemented a ridiculously complex multi-site, multi-plugin implementation and multi-theme based on URL, like the URL change the theme. It was horrific. So they were on the pendulum of we’ve gone so custom, we want everything default. We want no custom, no default, they didn’t want advanced custom fields, anything. So I’m trying — that’s what I was trying to prove that with just WooCommerce and WordPress, you can have block type functionality to have a marketer change a landing page of a product URL. It was a challenge. It stopped there. That project ended because, yeah, I couldn’t bring in cadence, I couldn’t bring in other type of block library or any other plugin. It was a bit of a challenge. But it was a fun — it was a fun exercise to see what’s out there, what’s available.

Zach: What I’ve done in the past for that exact scenario is I’ve used the description field. And then put that into its own view on the page. So moved it out of where it would normally be. And made it a longer form product page. And by doing that, we still have WooCommerce controlling the top of the page where the product was displayed. But the long form content about the product below it was controlled by the visual editor.

Daniel: Nice approach. I don’t think it’s the only thing that’s there yet for someone without your level of experience, but looking forward to a time where it’s easier and more products that would allow something like that. It’s interesting. I like, I like the focus of having their product page being more of a landing page that is — that is — someone as small SMB can say I want two different versions of this. I don’t want to hire out to an agency that’s going to do JavaScript wizardry, I want to see if I can get data on this myself. But yeah. Maybe I’ll get there.

Zach: That’s huge. And you know, the other thing is, in the eCommerce space on larger product focus sites, we have this dichotomy between the marketing site and the eCommerce site that happens frequently. And it’s large sites like Apple. There’s a marketing page and there’s a buy now button, takes you to the eCommerce store. They’re not the same thing.

And I think that’s just friction. It’s friction that can be removed, right? So if we can combine those experiences into a singling page, the marketing and the commerce functionality, we’re going to see increased conversions, we’re going to see happier customers, they’re not going to be going somewhere else to find that information. And it’s not this broken experience of I’m driving a car that looks one way and then I have to, you know, turn the turn signal on to go to buy the product and now my entire dashboard’s changed and I’m driving a different car.