Actionable Thoughts from WooSesh Chat

Brad: Hey, how are we doing, WooSesh. We should’ve done some drinks, maybe we should’ve done that. We are excited to talk about the first day of WooSesh, the great presentations that hopefully many of you caught, if you didn’t, I know they’re recorded. I know there’s a couple I wanted to see I wasn’t able to catch live. We’re going to dive in and talk about some of the highlights and some of the things that stood out to us and talk with some of the speakers that were bringing you great information. I’m also joined by Jonathan Wold. What is up, Jonathan?

Jonathan: Hey, Brad, great to see you, always a good day when we’re talking about WooCommerce.

Brad: It’s a big day for WooCommerce, WooSesh, other big news out there. But it’s an absolute WooCommerce type of day, which is exciting.

Jonathan: And kudos to Brian behind the scenes. It’s good to all be here.

Brad: It is a lot. I don’t know how he juggles it all between the live stuff and people behind the scenes in the green room, but somehow he’s figured this out and does a great job of it. So it’s really great content for everyone, with that, let’s jump right into it. We’ve got a couple different guests, but first, let’s bring Paul on. Paul, really kicked it off this morning.

Paul: Hello.

Brad: Had a great presentation, talking all about WooCommerce. And great things coming and pretty big announcement in there that I’m sure a lot of people have questions on or are very interested in. But you made the announcement that there is a turnkey WooCommerce coming in collaboration with hosting partners.

Paul: That’s right.

Brad: I’d love to hear more.

Paul: Sure.

Brad: Tell us about that. One of the barriers of entry to WooCommerce has been kind of setup, configuration and many of us take it for granted because we live in this world and this is what we do. But if you said, hey, set up a store with WooCommerce, it might be a little bit of a struggle through the different plugins and extensions and a plethora of decisions, essentially, that need to be made to get your store online. So I would assume this turnkey solution is somewhat of an answer to that to help, especially small business owners, store owners to get up and running on WooCommerce quickly and efficiently as possible. Is that how you’re looking at it?

Paul: That’s exactly right, Brad. We’re hearing from merchants, you know, not so much builders, of course, who are having success with WooCommerce and find it, you know, a tool in their kit to help bring new stores online, but for merchants, you know, very much what we’re hearing is they want to be able to put in an email address, load product information, business information and start selling in an hour or less.

Today, WooCommerce in large part due to the very deconstructive nature of the platform leaves a lot of building to the merchant. If you want to start selling appointments and physical goods, those are all decisions that you have to make you can do a much better job further up, and asking really, just some very simple questions about what the merchant is trying to accomplish, a little bit of information about the business and then, really configure their site to be — to meet the needs of their specific store right out of the box. Such that, again, they can — once they land in WP Admin, there’s not a lot of building to be done. They could load their information and go.

Jonathan: Paul, I’m curious, this to me, the way you’ve described is quite ideal, right? This idea of we have a big decentralized ecosystem, there’s hosting companies all over the place, to be able to partner with them, to me, is like strategically it’s right on. There’s challenges in pulling something like this. I’m curious, how do you — hosting companies can be very different from one to the next. Right?

Paul: Sure.

Jonathan: Maybe they skew small businesses. How you dealing with that part? If I’m a hosting company out there listening, oh, that’s great, we see WooCommerce going up, we’re interested. They can reach out to hosts at WooCommerce.com. How are you navigating how different the different hosting companies are and the different needs when designing the partnership program like this?

Paul: Yeah, in large part, that’s why we made the announcement today, we wanted to have a conversation with all sorts of different hosts, large, medium, small what we are very much hearing today is there’s — there’s not all web hosts are created equal. Some folks have the capabilities and resources to solve some of these problems on their own and we’re seeing that in the market. Not just for Woo, WordPress more generally, and a lot of web hosts, maybe not a lot, but some have invested in onboarding to really simplify that experience and onramp into WordPress and Woo. But not every web host has those capabilities to do that themselves.

It’s not just about onboarding, but it’s offering a really complete solution once you land in WP Admin or WooCommerce Dashboard, as well. Things like gift cards or, you know, the ability to bundle products together those are separate solutions today that in a hosted model, we can deliver something much more turnkey and meets customer needs on day one where they don’t have to find the solutions themselves and make separate purchases and, it just adds a lot of friction to the process.
Instead, we’re seeing merchants as a community gravitate much more towards proprietary SaaS website builders that are doing a good job of catering to the needs of the DIY merchant.

And anyway, as a community, we need to respond to that. This is something we are building on our own. Keeping within the walls of Automattic, we want to work with web host, we know if we’re not enlisting our ecosystem and working together to solve these problems for customers, it’s like we’re dividing pieces amongst ourselves and the proprietary, you know, website builders, which really represent an erosion of our mission to democratize commerce, you know, they win and our mission loses.
We’re not — we need to work together as an ecosystem and community to solve these problems.

Jonathan: I remember talking to a large host provider in Southeast Asia where they were seeing WooCommerce get traction and Shopify wasn’t having the same amount of success and so for me, you taking this position as a big win? Because there are companies that don’t have the resources that bigger providers have that have the answer but need this more productized approach. Where it’s like, OK, how do you help us put the things we need to?

I love you have that focus on reducing churn, the co-marketing side of it. It’s a tough set of problems to solve. It’s great to see you guys are working on that. When we look at it from the ecosystem, GoDaddy has their offerings and few more starting to do it. At the end of the day, we want to see from an open source, open web perspective, people being able to build successfully on WordPress.
But this to me is the ideal, the WooCommerce the business can be in that position. How can we work together? It’s easier said than done. But from my point of view, it’s great to see it, and looking forward to seeing how that develops.

Paul: Yeah, it’s one of the most exciting things we’re working on. It’s a bet. We need to have conversations with web hosts and better understand. We’ve had some, but we want to scale that up a bit.

And really account for what the web host needs as a primary customer of ours. But we really believe that’s the strategy that will work best for WooCommerce is to work together with everybody. And, you know, part of the process is, you know, in working with folks, it’s, you know, we’re not looking to just kind of keep all of these innovations for lack of a better word to ourselves. But developed this fly wheel, so to speak where we don’t host many Woo stores today at Automattic, but in working with Webhost we can learn about their challenges and getting some of that actionable data and insights that we could bring back to make WooCommerce better for literally everybody on the web.
It’s an ecosystem first, but also kind of a core first approach we’re taking.

Brad: I’ve got to be honest, when friends and family come to me and say, hey, I want to launch a store, I’ve got this idea, can you help me set something up, I hate to admit it but I usually send them somewhere else. Over here, it’s turnkey, you hit a couple of buttons, do a proof of concept. If things start to work, we’ll talk about getting you on WooCommerce and expanding that out. Same thing with WordPress.com. People thinking about starting a site or blog. Start our WordPress.com, kick the tires, see if it’s going to work, if you’re going to enjoy doing it. And if you do and it starts to work, we can get you on your host and blowing it up.

I’m excited about having more options when it comes to kind of pointing, especially new users and new store owners to WooCommerce without kind of that overhead that some of us are familiar with. And even the presentation today from Cesar with the in-person payments and I had the opportunity to test this out at WordCamp San Diego. That’s awesome. We’ve all been to a local small business and you always see a stripe or square, right? They all have this kiosk, everybody’s using it. I can’t wait for the day I walk into the store and they’re using the WooCommerce. I’ll take a selfie with it. The field is probably going to be leveled out more because of this. Is that ultimately the goal? To get more exposure? Get more people on it and more people to WooCommerce?

Paul: Yeah, exactly. You’ll see from the branded card readers and Woo Pay, talked about the accelerated online payment method we’re building out a wallet, right? Is a prominent presence of the WooCommerce brand for shoppers, as well, and the kind of thesis being that if we could deliver a really delightful shopping experience to shoppers, you know, as their merchants become merchants, right, and pursue their own entrepreneurial dreams, we’re driving some awareness for the WooCommerce community more generally in the process.

And yeah, I was so excited to go, the first time I saw the card readers was just at WordCamp US last month. It’s important to use those for anybody coming by the booth.
We were selling our swag, we had to run the credit card through and get — anyway, some of our swag from Swell. And it took us 40 minutes to build that site up, which our store ending functionality.

Jonathan: Paul, last question from me. WooCommerce is the best within the ecosystem of WordPress, you have the parts and pieces and the partnership pieces, the Woo Experts program. As you look at the next couple of years, there’s a lot that’s going really well for WooCommerce in terms of momentum and growth. What do you see as the biggest challenge or threats to WooCommerce as an ecosystem?

Paul: I think it very much is the competitive market we’re operating in at the moment. Not within Woo, but more broadly. And not just the historical, traditional, more direct competitors to WooCommerce, Shopify or towards the smaller end of merchants. You know, almost every platform is trying to capture, Amazon, Twitter’s doing something in commerce. Pinterest, TikTok, all of these, Google, Facebook. All of these folks are partners of ours, as well, they represent, in many cases, they represent sales channels, Beka spoke to that so well earlier today. You know, really embracing an omnichannel strategy.

But they’re also very much looking to own commerce and that’s a risk, again, to our mission and we really think there’s still a really important place for the independent store front or sales channel to exist.

Jonathan: That’s awesome, thank you, Paul. Appreciate it.

Bob: I don’t do these things. Thanks, Paul, yeah. Let’s bring in Courtney and Kim.

Paul: I can’t wait to hear what they have to say.

Brad: Appreciate it, Paul. Yeah, Kim, I enjoyed your appreciation, Kim Coleman, I think one of the overarching themes I really took away today from the talks is a lot of these kind of bigger topics that I think newer store owners aren’t really thinking about. You’re thinking, just get the store online, that’s kind of — obviously, that’s kind of the easy part to get the store online, then, you’ve got to make sales and that’s where it gets difficult. So I think a lot of the topics today, and Kim, with flash sales and talking about doing sales like that and not just around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but all throughout the year the a different points and really trying to figure out what works is a really interesting topic that many people don’t think about.

We know, everybody knows Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a whole weekend for sales. That’s kind of a no-brainer. You should probably do something. But I don’t think and myself included, most of us think about it outside that time period. It’s neat to see a topic like that and dig in. Maybe you could touch on, especially if someone missed your presentation. One of the big tips, big takeaways you tell store owners with flash sales and why it’s important.

Kim: Yeah, for me, it’s — if you only do Black Friday, it’s kind of your only test of how you run sales and strategies around them and the discounts you can push and the prices you can charge. So, if your first sale is Black Friday, that’s probably a big no-no. I would recommend testing something earlier in the year. And how do you pick that timeframe? You have to look at what you sell, which was part of my talk. Looking at the customers you serve, when does your product naturally get purchased by them? And use that time.

Because when you run a sale, you get a lot of information about your buyer. Also look at your yearlong revenue. I’m a subscription product — I thought all of today’s talks did well talking about more than just physical products because we’re seeing so many digital things sold with WooCommerce. Looking at your sales for the year, looking at the revenue and finding the low periods where you can kind of even things out.
It’s really hard to budget as an entrepreneur when you’re starting out. One month you make $50,000 and next month $10,000, you’re playing with your runway there. Evening out revenue makes it feel more like a real job, I guess you could say.

Brad: And if you don’t already, follow Kim and her husband Jason online. You share a lot of information online. Like, the information you share makes me nervous because I’m not that transparent and makes me nervous if I see people putting out, here’s what we sell stuff for and here’s what we made. But you put a pricing chart out the other day. I think you got a lot of traction with it. A lot of people were talking about it.

It showed, I don’t know in the chart 20 or 25 different prices that you had tried over the years. And you’re kind of, I think your point was don’t be scared to try things. And I think that kind of really started thinking about that. You have a couple of products at Webdev, I’ve never changed the pricing. I’m terrified it’s all going to blow up and nothing’s going to work. And now maybe I need to rethink that and look at, you know, adjusting pricing.
But I love the transparency, the information you put out and the fact you’re like, you’ve got to try things and learn from that data and learn from what happens, you know, I think that’s a lot of store owners could really learn from that.

Kim: For us, because we build a product, they can use our product, we can tell them how to use our product, set it up. But if their business fails, we fail. They don’t renew if their store closes down. None of you developing sites for people, none of the people who started a WooCommerce site themselves. We don’t know where their expectations are. We don’t know their expertise as an entrepreneur.

The more you can inject business into product, you’re becoming a resource for the people and you’re kind of future proofing, you know, churn for your business next year.

Brad: And these are the people you want to support, they want you to succeed. It’s not the one-off paycheck. You want store owners to succeed. If they succeed, you succeed. I like the stuff you’re putting out there.

Jonathan: Kim, something I’m curious about. Black Friday is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a highlight, it’s like, OK, a lot of activity, a lot of interest. You also have these curious patterns where people follow into renewing on Black Friday. So and what I’m hearing there’s this broader, how do we think of sales more broadly outside of Black Friday, right?

What I’m curious about, first, is there a type of business or who are sales not for? Is there someone who — because it seems like there’s benefits and tradeoffs to each thing. You can prime people to expect it, which means you can hurt your revenue long-term, the percentages that you do matter — with the experience you’ve had in this, who is someone who this wouldn’t be a good fit for?

Kim: I mean, I definitely feel like service-based. It’s hard to do a sale because you’re kind of establishing what your price point is. And it’s probably sickening for you to do work the a lower rate. You can find things to find something — I wouldn’t do it in a services based business. I think those sales in those types of businesses are something wrong on flailing, I need influx. I heard from someone in the chat today if you’re not in the WooSesh Slack, they sell a product that’s apples to apples. They’re navigating a space where people are saying, I can buy this pair of jeans from this merchant and buy the exact same pair from a different company. Who costs less? Whose shipping is less? I think it’s hard to do sales with coupon code sales in that space. And my recommendation for them was to consider a paid membership, you think of Costco, right? They don’t really run sales, kind of some products are on sale.

Everything’s one price, we pay to get in the door. To think creatively if your business doesn’t have the margin or you’re kind of cutting into your own pocket through all of the sales, you have to think creatively and find a different approach.

Jonathan: And the importance of the long-term planning. Some people are like, oh, Black Friday’s coming up, I guess we’ve got to do something, my guess based on what you’ve seen and sharing, there’s a lot of missed opportunity. And if I’m guessing right, if you were thinking strategically about it throughout the year and doing different things, you’ll be in a much better place when Black Friday, for instance, comes around to know what your numbers are. The difference between 30% and 40% discount is huge and so on and so forth. Seems like one of the key messages is for people to use this opportunity whatever you do here is one thing, now go ahead and look at the entire year and what are the key moments? There’s a lot of opportunity for creativity, sounds like.

Kim: Yeah, and people expect your best deal on Black Friday. Ours is going to be 40% off. That’s what WooCommerce just ran. If your Black Friday deal isn’t better than any other deal throughout the store, there’s no urgency. It won’t be as big of an event for you. But you can do smaller discounts at other times of the year. And do better number of sales and your average order values way higher. I think you can do better on nonBlack Friday sales if you pick time periods that fit your audience well.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Yoast SEO and FooSales

Brad: Yeah, let’s get Courtney Robertson on here, too. We’ll have a little party. Courtney, if you missed any of WooSesh today, check her Twitter, I think she live fed the whole thing all day. A lot of good information on there. What stood out, Courtney? Presentation, topics, anything of interest that really stood out to you today?

Courtney: Well, seeing WooCommerce ship a release on the same day we’re having WooSesh. I think we can attribute this release to Brian. Thanks for picking the date, Brian, for that one. I absolutely loved hearing from — I’m drawing a blank awkwardly on his name from TikTok. About the connection from your website to your social selling outlets. And I thought how that related to Beka’s talk about having different channels and different platforms that you might be selling on and the need to sometimes be on these spaces and identify where your audience is, but also, connecting that into your website really stood out.

Brad: That was Lorry Destainville, global partnerships, head of TikTok.

Courtney: I thought that was really eye opening for a lot of folks.

Brad: It is for me. TikTok, I’ve held out. I don’t know how, but somehow I’ve held up.

Jonathan: Brad.

Brad: I’m really trying to hold out. But I know it’s big. And I know it’s obviously — if you’re selling, you can’t — you’ve got to be everywhere. You’ve got to be where the people are, the customers are at. And TikTok is huge. So if that is, you know, your market, then you need to be there, clearly.

Courtney: Yeah.

Brad: Talking about flash sales, talking about TikTok and social media, connecting to commerce and multi-channel selling. These topics today were great. These were things all store owners, even if they don’t know about the stuff, it may not all be right for them. But they at least need to be thinking about the options that are out there, what may or may not work for the business. Try some stuff. Especially if you’re new and running online store. Try things. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? As long as you’re making a profit, right?

Courtney: I think a lot about one of my local coffee shops, Brussels Cafe and watch how they handle their different platforms. I could place an order, go to the store, pick it up already made. I could do that online, but I also follow them on Facebook and Instagram and a few places and they have some coffee available that I could purchase. They have a few different things kind of all going on at the same time.

And then, they’re using one payment system, one way, and the idea that Beka has highlighted, honestly, I heard her first speak on some of this just a couple weeks ago at WordCamp US, and I work with her. Not closely, but I work with her. And so, thinking about the logistics that the average small business owner faces when you’ve got inventory in multiple buckets and needing to piece that together, right? That is such a challenge, so it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about as we’ve been working on launching manageable commerce stores over at GoDaddy and seeing where that takes us. I think for the average small business owner, you’re going to see website performance, tooling and the way in which you can integrate these things together because over the last ten, 15 years in social media, everything’s been separate social buckets. And then, if you’re also trying to do Amazon fulfillments and some of these other channels, it just becomes different marketplaces, too, it becomes — like exponentially bigger, right? Harder to manage?

Jonathan: This is part of where WooCommerce is in a good position. I remember going into Walmart the other day with my daughter and I was going to show her how to use Apple pay on her phone. And realize at the counter, it’s Walmart pay. We’re not going to sell Walmart pay here the a Walmart. It’s fine.

You have all of these different companies doing these different things, WooCommerce and the WordPress ecosystem and WordPress broadly, but WordPress specifically in this case is in a great position to be able to serve as a point of integration that can effective neutrality, and say, oh, yeah, you can work with any number. And the different platforms have an incentive to like naturally, a lot of them saying we want it all here.
You can want it all here as much as you want. But to me, the stronger that WooCommerce can become and these open source solutions can become, which is why the hosting partnerships are so key in this, then in theory, open source is in a better place to build these because we don’t have the conflicts of interest. Amazon is going to do what Amazon’s going to do. And they have this interest to have it as tightly interwoven to their ecosystem as possible as does Walmart and so on and so forth.
So I’m — I think it’s great, and it’s interesting, Brad, you’re going to have to check out TikTok.

Brad: Still thinking about that?

Jonathan: Yes. Really, no? I’ve completed my first eCommerce transaction on it the other day. I forget what the store was but OK, it’s a video of a product I was interested in. I think it’s a game and I bought a board game afterwards. And I wouldn’t have seen it except for TikTok. And the idea of going to where your customers are, that’s the big point of it. Whether we care about it, or not. I don’t care much for Facebook, but I have an account and some of the businesses that I’ve worked with, that’s where they are. That’s where we go.

Courtney: Brad’s going to be buying Philly merch in no time at all.

Brad: If I saw the product on TikTok, I would definitely be there. Some day I’ll end up on it. What else? What other big items stood out to anyone? We’re kind of an open forum here.

Bob: I think we need to revisit something Brian asked. And that is, what we want to do is we want to elaborate. So I want to just a simple question. I want to know why. Brian asked earlier what your favorite sandwich is. So we’re going to — we’re going to step away from WooCommerce for just a couple three minutes and have each one of you tell us what your favorite sandwich is, but you can’t just tell me what it is. I want to know why you like that sandwich so much.

Brad: That’s a big question.

Bob: Kim’s going to start.

Kim: Yeah, it’s a running joke in our family that I purchase a tuna wrap before a flight. I like it because it makes everyone else disgusted because it smells. I get onions. No, I’m just kidding.

Brad: You eat it on the flight?

Kim: I eat it on the flight. Jason’s like, that stinks, I don’t care. I like tuna wraps, I don’t eat other animals, but I do eat fish, so for me it’s a weekly treat to get — I think my body craves it, probably. But I’ve always been a tuna fan. People who have worked at subway say don’t eat Subway tuna, and I don’t listen to those people.

Bob: This is great, I think Kim’s on this flight. I smell something.

Kim: You have to eat it early. So this is not like a four-hour flight, three hours in, it’s first section of flight, start your tuna.

Bob: Courtney?

Courtney: The one I don’t make for myself. That would be the important factor here in a good sandwich is if I don’t make it myself. It would be a tie between there’s a local grocery store that’s really known for their subs or three of us are in Pennsylvania kind of near each other today, a Sheets sub that’s a turkey and all of the vegetables piled up. But one thing I don’t make….

Brad: We already know what side of the state you’re own talking about Sheets.

Courtney: I’m in the middle, we don’t have a lot of Wawa options. I’m right in the middle of the state.

Bob: It’s not going to be surprising Brad’s answer, I know that.

Brad: I’ve got to go with a cheesesteak, right? Easy, steak, cheese, onions, delicious. I don’t have them often because they’re terrible for you. When I do, I go big, I eat the whole thing.

Courtney: And always good is units of measurement.

Brad: I’m going to have to get one, my son turns 7, and I’ve been measuring him with cheesesteaks his whole life. I’ve got 7-year cheesesteak for scale coming up.

Bob: Jonathan, you’re on the spot.

Jonathan: So in general, if I’m out and about, I’m a fairly big fan of Subway, I like the veggie delight. But if I’m making something myself, these days I’ve been doing more of the Ezekiel bread. But in nowadays a Costco bagel with avocado and Himalayan sea salts. That’s my go-to favorite sandwich.

Bob: All right. There you have it, Brian, you can add those to your list.

Courtney: What about your sandwich, Bob?

Bob: It’s a real basic sandwich, but I was in San Francisco recently and restaurant called Sears… something, I can’t remember the name of it and they had a San Franciscan. A grilled mozzarella, avocado and tomato. And that is one good combination and Jonathan’s making a face, that doesn’t really matter to me. But anyway, that is —

Jonathan: It’s not a negative, just processing.

Bob: Back to WooSesh. What else piqued everybody’s interest?

Jonathan: Courtney, GoDaddy had an announcement, as well?

Courtney: Yeah, the link was available and my co-worker dropped it into the WooSesh Slack for the managed WooCommerce stores, we can get that link out on Twitter, again, as well. But it is now available for those in the US, it is restricted to the US because of where we are open for business for payment processing.

GoDaddy has available WooCommerce managed stores as one of our options. Under the hood, you’ve got the performance that the team knows how to bring, the Sky Verge plugins in there, Sellbright point when it comes to the payment processing and where you can sell technology as available. And you’ve got a couple peeks at it, actually, during Beka’s talk. If you flip through her slides, there’s a few screen shots she pulled from right inside of that.

It is now available, ready to go, for people to come and test it out. We’ll be continuing to expand some of the options that are available inside of it. You’ll see when you go to the page. That the preview is listed there at the top and during the preview of the fine print, there’ll be more features available soon.

Jonathan: GoDaddy’s WordPress story is one of my favorites. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know more and more cool people at GoDaddy over the years. It’s interesting for a really big company to be an important part of this large, open source ecosystem. One thing I’ve learned, it doesn’t matter, for some of the big companies, I worked for Google back in the day, you’re always held up to a different level of scrutiny and expectations. People are going to think what they’re going to think.

For me, it’s been great watching GoDaddy over the years, making investments in the ecosystem. And the big thing is the success for the end users. That’s what matters at the end of the day.

Courtney: It is.

Jonathan: It’s been great to watch, I’m curious to see how this opens up. And I think at the end of the day, all of these moves all of these moves are good for open source. What I hope to see more of wholistically, how do we have more collaboration and cooperation throughout the ecosystem? And it’s things like this that help make it happen. Really appreciate all you guys have been done doing.

Courtney: Thank you, Jonathan, it’s been a lot of fun for me in year and a half I’ve been there. A lot of people know me from the contributor team and do some of the covering the news that’s happening across the official WordPress teams.

But it has been a fantastic time in my time at GoDaddy and getting to know Adam Warner is my manager, but I’ve got great teammates and coworkers there and continue to see more and more of best WordPress talent I know showing up there. Surprised recently by some of our new hires and very delighted by that. So I feel like things are moving in a really good direction.

Jonathan: Thank you for sponsoring WooSesh. That’s a big thing in making all of this possible.

Brad: Does feel like we’re in the golden era or entering maybe the golden era of WooCommerce. With so many hosts going all in with WooCommerce, managed platforms, turnkey options, making it easier to onboard SMB and smaller stores.

It kind of feels like the big press with WordPress ten years ago with managed hosts, the hosting companies opened their eyes and said this isn’t a blogging platform anymore, we need to take this seriously. And all of a sudden they all have their managed option, whole teams and staff dedicated to WordPress. A lot of open source contributors, you know, within those companies that fully dedicate their time to contributing to the project.
I feel like we’re in that now or certainly on the cusp of that with WooCommerce and all of the action we’re seeing getting so many people exposed to WooCommerce that probably never would’ve been. It’s exciting times for WooCommerce, you know. Definitely — I feel more bullish than I have in probably forever because of how much action is going on with it. There’s so many things happening. It’s amazing.

Courtney: I think we’re on to something in WooCommerce where we’re seeing folks interested in the technology that brings as opposed to going to piecemealing all of the separate little extras together to try to get one culminating thing. I think more of the various plugin technologies, themes, et cetera, build for Woo, the more that folks are collaborating together. We won’t see as many folks that are turning to third party eCommerce platforms. They’ll stick within that WooCommerce field because of the flexibility and what it can do for them.

Bob: Well, I think we should wrap this — go ahead, I was going to say, you go ahead and then I have one more profound question for everyone.

Kim: OK. So two talks after mine was Nirav from StoreApps, and I really enjoyed watching that because I think it’s like a — I deal so much more often where sites that can sell one thing to one person, pick A, B or C, but that opened my eyes more to the upsells and the pieces of things we encounter. Bringing the features to WooCommerce we see in all of our favorite online merchants that have hundreds of developers on their teams. I love when you can see a feature on a site like a Target.com and say, oh, wow, this exists for me as an open source product or as open source but $49 annually, I can get that feature for my own smaller merchant site and it’s validated, it’s being used on Target.com, it must be successful for them to have that type of upsell feature. I think a lot of entrepreneurs use kind of that market research for them isn’t in their own market, other eCommerce sites. So I think it’s super cool.

Bob: Brian’s going to be sorry he ever had me come on with the rest of you. But I’m going to ask one more thing since we’re all talking about online shopping and eCommerce and we’re so excited about it. I want to know starting with Brad what you wouldn’t buy online.

Brad: What I would not buy online. I buy everything online. Like almost everything, food, clothes, everything. I just don’t like shopping. What I wouldn’t buy online, probably illegal stuff. Keep that in person with cash, you know. I don’t know. That’s terrible advice. Of course, you could use crypto — I’ll stop. I don’t know if there’s anything I wouldn’t buy online. If it’s available online and the shipping’s not crazy. Usually the big limitation is how heavy it is and how much it’s going to cost to ship. But even that these days is not that big of a factor. I just ordered a massive new desk I’m very excited about for my office and it’s coming in 6 boxes and it’s free shipping, you know. It’s crazy.

Bob: Well, I started with Brad because I knew he’d screw it up for the rest of you. Anyway, why don’t we — yeah. Why don’t we move on over to Courtney?

Courtney: So I live west of Gettysburg a little bit. Some of the things I purchase from the Amish are like baked goods and they don’t sell them online. So I would go with that or my kids go through clothes and toys really quickly and I like to go to the consignment store because we’re just churning through it. Quickly, around here. And our consignment store doesn’t have stuff online. If they did, I probably would browse ahead of time.

Bob: Jonathan.

Jonathan: Kind of a good question. I was thinking through, I would buy a house online, I would buy vehicles, I’d buy a business if there’s all these things. So in general, I actually don’t like buying food online. There’s something about grocery shopping. Even though I know that I can go to Costco online, I still like going to Costco in person and doing all that.

So there’s something — I know that I can, there’s certain things — it’s increasingly the things I could buy online that I don’t want to. Something about the in-person experience also not a big fan of buying clothes online unless I know what exactly what I want. If aisle going to get a repeat. I’ll go local first, which is super annoying, stop in, they don’t have the thing. OK, guys, well, I guess I’m going to order online now.
But yeah, not a lot. Most things, happy to get online.

Bob: Kim?

Kim: I’m going to go with things you have to test. So a mattress, a pillow, perfume, and probably also like pets. I know you can order a dog online, but I’m a big like, you should meet your dog before you acquire your dog online. I think, yeah, things you want to test the relationship with. I know people do buy beds online and they have 30-day ship it back, but I don’t know, I don’t think I ever could do that. I slept on this, I used it. You know —

Jonathan: Adoption. Wouldn’t do adoption online.

Bob: There’s a lot of things. I wouldn’t buy any videos that include myself, that’s mostly what I don’t buy online. Anyway —

Kim: Are there a lot of those?

Brad: Where are these videos, Bob?

Bob: They’re in that spot you won’t buy. We won’t go there. Any last words, any last words on WooSesh or anything you want to say and then we’ll hand it back over to Brian.

Brad: This is just day one, two more days of awesome, jam packed topics, amazing speakers, you know, check out the schedule and the beautiful thing is, it’s all recorded, which I love. Because, you know, some of us have to work and there’s some meetings we just can’t get out of. You can always go back and watch things you missed. I always appreciate it.

Kim: I’ll say that today definitely had information for people of all sizes of stores and people who are running the stores themselves or operating them for others. So, I liked that it wasn’t all about huge eCommerce and then it also had lots of options for small eCommerce. Days two and three will continue to bridge all types of eCommerce sites.

Courtney: I personally don’t have my own store, I’ve done some eCommerce stores for clients, but it’s been a number of years, in fact, it was before Automattic had WooCommerce since I last touched one of those. But I might take the inspiration that my manager Adam has with his son and opened up a T-shirt shop with kids custom designs on it. I think I might be getting one of those soon and exploring some social outlets for my kids, I’ll maintain their accounts, they’re too young for that

Jonathan: I’ll offer my favorite piece of guidance anytime you’re in WooCommerce is a big ecosystem, there’s a lot going on. Encourage people to stay curious, cultivate that curiosity. Attending the sessions for perhaps topics you didn’t think you’d be interested in, didn’t look particularly interesting, but you go in there and you’re going to learn something you didn’t know. And yeah, especially because there’s so many different moving parts, so many people doing things in the space. You won’t be able to keep track of it all.

If you cultivate your own curiosity, that’s a fantastic starting point and at least in my experience, it’s never failed.