The State of WooCommerce: Summary of WooConf 2017 Keynote
The notes below are compiled from Todd Wilken’s Keynote and Bob Dunn’s interview with Todd. Todd is the Head of eCommerce at Automattic (WooCommerce’s parent company) and Bob is an influencer in the WooCommerce and WordPress community who runs the popular blog WPBob.
• There a now over 3 million WooCommerce stores and WooCommerce powers 28% of all online commerce.
• WooCommerce started in South Africa in 2007. By the way there is a saying that “If something works in Africa it will work anywhere!
• The original team had 3 developers based in South Africa, London and Australia. As a result, the team has always adopted a remote ‘work from anywhere culture’.
• Most WooCommerce stores are small and medium businesses although there are a several $100 million plus businesses
• Many WooCommerce users started out in SquareSpace. SquareSpace is great for getting started but its ease of use and ‘cookie cutter’ design also makes it inflexible for all but the smallest and simplest of businesses. Todd contends that “there are no cookie cutter businesses”
• HEB is an example of a large business that runs on WooCommerce. They do $23 billion a year in revenue
• There are three primary roles in the WooCommerce ecosystem: Store Owner, Store Builder and Extension Developer
• They think through how each of these personas will be served by new features they are building into WooCommerce. While they strive to make WooCommerce easy to use and administer for Store Owners (abstracting away the gory details) this necessarily makes life more difficult for Store Builders and Extension Developers who want more control. It is a tricky balance to maintain.
• One of the key challenges they grapple with is what to offer as a cloud service versus what could reside within WordPress as an extension.
• Some exciting upcoming features include:
o Powerful abstractions for developers, to make it easier to write extensions without having to muck around with the inner workings of the code!
o Easier and More Reliable upgrade path: The Upgrade to WooCommerce 3.0 was painful and error prone and they realize that if that is the case few people will upgrade and the software will not improve. As a result, they made the upgrade to WooCommerce 3.1 and 3.2 easier and they envision the WooCommerce 4.0 being a breeze!
o Optimized checkout pages: The Automattic team acknowledged that the current default checkout page for WooCommerce isn’t well optimized and they are working to improve it. One of the challenges they face is access to data on what elements of a check out page lead to higher conversion rates. Although there are 3 million plus WooCommerce stores, most of these stores operate autonomously and Automattic has no access to the data (This is in contrast to Shopify where all the stores are hosted by Shopify). They would like to have a default page that converts well along with customization options.
o Re-working JetPack so it Plays Better with WooCommerce: JetPack has served millions of WordPress users well over the years but hasn’t always worked well with
WooCommerce. The team will take a closer look to see how Woo users needs can be better served.
o The WooCommerce extension market will be opened to everyone. The proposed revenue split will be 60% (developers) to 40% (WooCommerce). While this is positive, it would be nice to see developers get an even larger share, given Woo's open-source and community ethos! In comparison, Apple takes a 30% cut of AppStore sales.
• WooCommerce isn’t just about selling stuff but indirectly they’ve also had social impact. For example, during the Hurricane Harvey in Texas Todd and his friends were among the first to drive their trucks to the ‘ground zero’ to rescue people.
On their way noticed several HEB Semis rushing to deliver supplies to victims. The HEB trucks were two hours ahead of the FEMA ones!
Bob Dunn: How can developers make it clear that they are delivering value to customers? Many customers (store owners) don’t really understand the concept of extension and feel like they are being nickel and dimed
Todd: Try to gain trust so that they don’t question your advice. Also try to be a full-service shop, help them with everything and price the engagement accordingly, rather than just selling an extension i.e. deliver a whole experience and, say, help them get their site launched and include things like SEO and social media.
Most small and medium store owners want one vendor to handle everything and you may want to partner with other agencies for specific skills. If you just sell them an extension, they will be frustrated with this thing you gave them that they can’t make sense of and are more likely to feel “nickel and dimed”!
When you think about it, it really comes down to educating your customers.
Bob Dunn: Speaking of education, how much should WooCommerce developers educate customers?
Todd: Developers should think about the store management experience and separating that from the nuts and bolts. The needs of the owners and builders are different. One thing we continue to work on is the onboarding experience for store owners. We want it to be a simple, encapsulated experience without exposing them to the innards of the software.
It is like building a car with the chassis and engine exposed. Instead, we want to cover up all the stuff with a beautiful body. At some point we will add Javascript to create that rich user experience for the non-technical folks.
We realize that no matter how great our software is, it won’t even get a chance if it doesn’t look accessible and stable. To use my car analogy again, I have a friend who owns a souped up BMW that can beat most cars but it looks ugly!
Image courtesy of Just a Car guy
Store owners should only know the things they need to know. We want to cordon off the nuts and bolts and not force feed them education they neither need nor want!
For the more technical folks—the store builders and extension developers--we are thinking of having config files with all the different options so that they can have full control while simultaneously having a low barrier to entry for the owners.
Bob: What pisses of Todd when he shops online?
Todd. Slow sites and poor performance especially because it is usually just a case of someone being lazy! I am also concerned about the homogenization of commerce. I feel like we are losing the connection to the people who make the products. I want to buy stuff that feels like it was made by a person or a small group of people.
Bob: What would Todd never buy online?
Todd: A used wife!
• There a now over 3 million WooCommerce stores and WooCommerce powers 28% of all online commerce.
• WooCommerce started in South Africa in 2007. By the way there is a saying that “If something works in Africa it will work anywhere!
• The original team had 3 developers based in South Africa, London and Australia. As a result, the team has always adopted a remote ‘work from anywhere culture’.
• Most WooCommerce stores are small and medium businesses although there are a several $100 million plus businesses
• Many WooCommerce users started out in SquareSpace. SquareSpace is great for getting started but its ease of use and ‘cookie cutter’ design also makes it inflexible for all but the smallest and simplest of businesses. Todd contends that “there are no cookie cutter businesses”
• HEB is an example of a large business that runs on WooCommerce. They do $23 billion a year in revenue
• There are three primary roles in the WooCommerce ecosystem: Store Owner, Store Builder and Extension Developer
• They think through how each of these personas will be served by new features they are building into WooCommerce. While they strive to make WooCommerce easy to use and administer for Store Owners (abstracting away the gory details) this necessarily makes life more difficult for Store Builders and Extension Developers who want more control. It is a tricky balance to maintain.
• One of the key challenges they grapple with is what to offer as a cloud service versus what could reside within WordPress as an extension.
• Some exciting upcoming features include:
o Powerful abstractions for developers, to make it easier to write extensions without having to muck around with the inner workings of the code!
o Easier and More Reliable upgrade path: The Upgrade to WooCommerce 3.0 was painful and error prone and they realize that if that is the case few people will upgrade and the software will not improve. As a result, they made the upgrade to WooCommerce 3.1 and 3.2 easier and they envision the WooCommerce 4.0 being a breeze!
o Optimized checkout pages: The Automattic team acknowledged that the current default checkout page for WooCommerce isn’t well optimized and they are working to improve it. One of the challenges they face is access to data on what elements of a check out page lead to higher conversion rates. Although there are 3 million plus WooCommerce stores, most of these stores operate autonomously and Automattic has no access to the data (This is in contrast to Shopify where all the stores are hosted by Shopify). They would like to have a default page that converts well along with customization options.
o Re-working JetPack so it Plays Better with WooCommerce: JetPack has served millions of WordPress users well over the years but hasn’t always worked well with
WooCommerce. The team will take a closer look to see how Woo users needs can be better served.
o The WooCommerce extension market will be opened to everyone. The proposed revenue split will be 60% (developers) to 40% (WooCommerce). While this is positive, it would be nice to see developers get an even larger share, given Woo's open-source and community ethos! In comparison, Apple takes a 30% cut of AppStore sales.
• WooCommerce isn’t just about selling stuff but indirectly they’ve also had social impact. For example, during the Hurricane Harvey in Texas Todd and his friends were among the first to drive their trucks to the ‘ground zero’ to rescue people.
On their way noticed several HEB Semis rushing to deliver supplies to victims. The HEB trucks were two hours ahead of the FEMA ones!
Bob Dunn: How can developers make it clear that they are delivering value to customers? Many customers (store owners) don’t really understand the concept of extension and feel like they are being nickel and dimed
Todd: Try to gain trust so that they don’t question your advice. Also try to be a full-service shop, help them with everything and price the engagement accordingly, rather than just selling an extension i.e. deliver a whole experience and, say, help them get their site launched and include things like SEO and social media.
Most small and medium store owners want one vendor to handle everything and you may want to partner with other agencies for specific skills. If you just sell them an extension, they will be frustrated with this thing you gave them that they can’t make sense of and are more likely to feel “nickel and dimed”!
When you think about it, it really comes down to educating your customers.
Bob Dunn: Speaking of education, how much should WooCommerce developers educate customers?
Todd: Developers should think about the store management experience and separating that from the nuts and bolts. The needs of the owners and builders are different. One thing we continue to work on is the onboarding experience for store owners. We want it to be a simple, encapsulated experience without exposing them to the innards of the software.
It is like building a car with the chassis and engine exposed. Instead, we want to cover up all the stuff with a beautiful body. At some point we will add Javascript to create that rich user experience for the non-technical folks.
We realize that no matter how great our software is, it won’t even get a chance if it doesn’t look accessible and stable. To use my car analogy again, I have a friend who owns a souped up BMW that can beat most cars but it looks ugly!
Image courtesy of Just a Car guy
Store owners should only know the things they need to know. We want to cordon off the nuts and bolts and not force feed them education they neither need nor want!
For the more technical folks—the store builders and extension developers--we are thinking of having config files with all the different options so that they can have full control while simultaneously having a low barrier to entry for the owners.
Bob: What pisses of Todd when he shops online?
Todd. Slow sites and poor performance especially because it is usually just a case of someone being lazy! I am also concerned about the homogenization of commerce. I feel like we are losing the connection to the people who make the products. I want to buy stuff that feels like it was made by a person or a small group of people.
Bob: What would Todd never buy online?
Todd: A used wife!
