Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress today this is the podcast not just about the people inside the WordPress community, but today this is also the people about inside the WooCommerce community. With us today is James Kemp. And for those who have no idea who James Kemp is, but do know what WooCommerce is, please, James, can I ask you to introduce yourself?
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Yeah, like you say, I'm James Kemp. I am the core product manager for WooCommerce as of a month or so ago.
Yeah. So prior to that I was a product manager and now core product manager. And we can dive in a bit more about what that means.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Yeah, because right before we hit record, I asked you, how long are you working at woonow? And we settled on as close to a year as possible.
What were you doing before that? Because I think that gives you, certainly the people listening gives a better idea of what your expertise is and what it is you're doing will follow from there.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Yeah, like you say, this month, December 4th, was my one year anniversary at WooCommerce. Prior to that I was working for Stellar WP Liquid Web. And that came about after an acquisition. So if we go back even further.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Than that, how long were you working at Stellar?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: For Stellar, I was working just over two years. Okay, so 2021, they acquired my WooCommerce plugin company, Iconic WP.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: And then I continue to run that company for two more years after that. Within Stellar. Yeah, they, they had an acquisition spree in sort of 2020, 2021 where they acquired quite a few product companies like Cadence, gif, wp, some other ones that I am forgetting.
And yeah, that was a great experience. So yeah, like I say, prior to that I founded Iconic WP, which was a WooCommerce plugin company. We had 14 or 15 premium WooCommerce extensions that we, we sold primarily through our own website using Freemius.
We also added I think two of those extensions to the WooCommerce marketplace.
And sort of within that process of adding those extensions to the marketplace, I began getting a bit more connected to the people working behind the scenes at WooCommerce.
So I had this few years old relationship with Paul, the CEO of WooCommerce and some other people behind the scenes who work primarily in the marketplace sector of WooCommerce.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: Here's a question.
If you're building products for WooCommerce specifically, at what point does it make sense? I mean, as Iconic wp, you had the choice for every single product.
Do I put this in the WooCommerce store.
The question probably should start with, is that even a thing you can decide? And at what point do you decide that that's the smarter choice?
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Yeah. So when I started making WooCommerce plugins, this was 2011, I think was my first plugin.
Back then it was kind of a different environment. You.
You were limited in where you could sell. I actually started selling on CodeCanyon and one of the reasons I chose them was because they handle all the tax for me.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: And that's not something that I wanted to be dealing with. You know, at the time, this was just like a little side project and that seemed like the easiest route to go. And also it's a marketplace environment. So they. They did a lot of marketing.
They had an audience already, which I did not have, so it made sense for me to do that.
I don't know when the WooCommerce Marketplace became available, but I.
Oh, yeah, to be fair, I think it did exist then possibly a bit after that, but it was. It wasn't an open marketplace, as I am aware. I think it was by invite.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Or perhaps if you asked, you know, that you could build a relationship there and, and get into the marketplace or potentially, and this is just from memory, it may have been open then they closed it and it ran as like an invite only thing. And then they reopened it. I feel like there was a thing about it reopening.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: I think I remember that as well. I was trying to pinpoint if I remember when the marketplace was opened as a.
Know something they made noise about. And I don't think I can recall that. So.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: No, I can't.
And WooCommerce was created like 2009, right?
[00:05:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: So I would expect in 2011 they didn't have a marketplace.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: No, no, I don't think that.
So you have been certainly working around WooCommerce for well over a decade then.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. 12 or 13 years prior to that. I was.
I kind of transitioned from Magento.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Oh my.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: And then we. Yeah, my first plugins actually were to integrate Magento into WordPress.
But it was messy. It was a. It was a messy scenario because they both run on different environments, different stacks.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Were there multiple plugins doing that? Because I remember a plugin, but I'm not aware that that was your plugin.
And that's funny because that's not.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: There was two different ways that it was done. There was a company called.
I think they were called fishpig and they had Magento extensions. The name alone, that may be wrong, but I'M pretty sure it's quite a memorable name. They had Magento extensions that brought WordPress stuff into Magento, but there wasn't anything that brought Magento stuff into WordPress, like the cart, like Cart sessions and the navigation that you can create in Magento.
So, yeah, I made that plugin in 2009 or 10 and it was aptly called Magento WordPress integration.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: I guess it did exactly what was on the tin.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: That was my typical naming scheme. Just say what it does.
And I moved over to Gigo Shop and then over to WooCommerce.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Yeah. For those who don't know what Jiggo Shop is or was is it even a thing currently? Probably not.
It's the precursor to WooCommerce. WooCommerce was forked off of Jigoshop and essentially turned into a fully standalone version.
It was a bit of a thing at the time. It wasn't it? I think it was the first publicly we're going to fork this because we can't figure a different way how to start without entirely reinventing the wheel. What did you have at the time? You had Shop with two P's, you had Jiggoshop with probably edd.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Yeah. I think there was wp. E Commerce was the thing.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Oh yeah. WP Ecommerce was also a thing. Yeah.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: And Magento with my plugin.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Well, but Magento was a beast.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: I was going to say I was going to interrupt you and ask you, like, how did you get to do Magento? Like, and I'm asking because I built sites on Magento and probably in total about a dozen, and I've not enjoyed a single one of them. So I was like, you really have to enjoy Magento side of things to actually start developing in and around it.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: But enjoy or be made to use it.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: I was working at a web design agency from 2009 and we used Magento exclusively before I even knew that WordPress existed.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: Ah, okay. Yeah. It's always interesting to learn how people, how they enter the WordPress community, the project and the products. Like you're saying I learned it because it was at some point adjacent to Magento. And then from there I went deeper into the world of WordPress. But the steps are always interesting. Like, how did you do it? Out of your curiosity, Were you forced? Were you. You know, and there's forced by. My boss tells me and the clients keep asking for features that I don't know how that. And oh, wait, it's over here. It's built in.
Do you Remember from that period, like, how do these things go?
[00:10:17] Speaker B: I do.
So we.
I don't recall what they used. Okay, yeah, I do recall actually.
So if we were building a kind of. We called them a brochure site. So like a local business website with just pages, contact form, that kind of stuff. We were using HTML and PHP and you know, this site was built, it was styled and it was just uploaded as is static.
Then we started getting requests for like e commerce websites and that's where Magento came in. And we started using Magento quite exclusively for E commerce.
And then we discovered that Magento had some level of CMS built into it, but it wasn't great. It works, but it wasn't.
It's not user friendly for people who aren't technical.
And we discovered WordPress.
Not sure how.
I was kind of told, like, this is the tool we're going to use.
And then we started using that. And at the time, the E commerce stuff on WordPress wasn't, you know, as evolved as Magento.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Magento was complex, was difficult to work with because you had to do stuff on so many different locations and layers and whatnot. But it was solid, like it was stable. It was solid except when you had to upgrade.
I'll add that in the not so great corner.
But yeah, at the time was quite, quite evolving still.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And then they changed to Magento 2, I think they called it.
And that's when I kind of stepped out because they changed how everything works.
I think I already had some WooCommerce plugins at that point. Maybe just one.
No, I think I had more. And then I thought, you know, I'm just going to focus solely on WooCommerce plugins because it's an easier branding exercise, essentially.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So in other words, you've been around the block for a while.
Your, your work at WooCommerce. How much of.
Can you remind me your full title again? Because it's a. It's a bit of a mouthful.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: My full title now is Core Product Manager.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: Core Product Manager. So there are some assumptions in what that title is. Right. So there's Product Manager kind of assumes that there's not much code going on.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: And Core assumes that you're mostly focusing whatever's happening in the core of WooCommerce and less so on the integration side, extending side, all that sort of stuff.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Exactly right. So Core has two branches to it. There's Core Platform and there's Core Experience.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: What's the difference?
[00:13:40] Speaker B: My primary area is Core Experience.
So the Difference is core platform is more about the behind the scenes stuff like performance, like developing tests and things like that.
And core experience is more like what you experience as a user of WooCommerce. So you know the UI UX of actually using WooCommerce. So you're not too fussed about, obviously you're bothered by performance, but you're not too fussed about how it all works or that kind of thing.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: If it's easy to find, you're kind of okay with it.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
So core experience is all about the experience of using WooCommerce. Like how does that look out of the box?
You know, not just you've installed WordPress, you've installed WooCommerce. What can you do? What's that, what's that flow like for a merchant, for a builder, for a customer? There's, there's kind of those three different categories of people using WooCommerce. Yeah, there's also developers, third party developers, but that's, that's kind of less core experience than the other, the other three.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: So if I may ask, just to clarify a little bit in your day to day, what are the type of topics you come across? Like, so what are. I don't know. I'm assuming there's a list of things you work on Specifically what kind of things are we looking at?
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean this has changed over the course of the year. So prior to being core product manager, which was a change that happened probably around this time last month, so it's pretty fresh.
Prior to that we didn't have a core product manager. We had maybe eight, eight product managers that worked on core related things, me being one of them.
And we all had essentially a focus area. So my focus area was order management.
And that would be looking at things like how the orders are listed in the backends, the like order creation, order editing experience. For admin, one of the projects that I initiated and we are still working on was essentially evolving the way order statuses work and separating out payment versus fulfillment statuses from the main order status. Okay.
And that in itself entailed creating a mechanism to create fulfillments within WooCommerce. So you can create. So if you have an order that has maybe three items in it, you could go in as a merchant, ship two of those items, assign it a tracking number, come back later when the third item's in stock, and ship that one separately and still trade it with one order and still treat it as one order. Yeah, yep. Yeah. So that, that's something that we, we spoke to quite a few like high volume merchants and when they had a scenario like that, they were kind of working around it. So they had to like duplicate an order, remove one item from one order, two items from the other and, and, and do it that way, which is not only like cumbersome for the matching, but also confusing for the actual customer.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: Yeah, not only that, as a, as a, you know, all the notifications and stuff you find as a client inside a dashboard just gets real, really confusing really fast. Like I ordered six things, but I see three related things here. Which one is the one I'm looking at and do I have a question about it or not?
[00:17:51] Speaker B: And yeah, and even you place an order, you get your order email.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Oh yeah, and all those notifications, then.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: You go back to look at it later, it's only got two items and there's a new order which you didn't place. So it's, yeah, it's not, it's not an ideal scenario right now, but it is typically like high volume merchants that would experience that, that flow.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's a typical topic you touched mostly prior to, you know, a month ago. What, what is the change now? So if you're more focused on the core stuff, so what are the things you solely look at or what are things you absolutely do not look at?
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Yeah, so what I was looking at there was still core, but like I say, there's eight or so product managers that are all working in, in areas like that within core. So you've got the product editor experience, you've got the onboarding experience, you've got the checkout experience and all of those different components that make up core, but there was no one person who was kind of connecting the dots between all of those different pieces.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: So I'm not necessarily overlooking all these other product managers now, but I'm kind of facilitating communication between all of these different focus areas. And also one of the reasons that they chose me for the role is because I have this kind of relationship with many community members and kind of can gather this feedback from what people actually want and can ensure that we're implementing that in all these different areas that I wasn't able to touch on previous before.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: So you're kind of like the glue between not only the, the product managers and the developers working on the specific products on the inside, but also to the outside, bridging whatever you can learn from either merchants or shop builders or whatever to sort of make sure that whatever's being concocted on the inside and I don't mean in a negative way concocted, just mean like thought of to then make sure that everything and everyone is still seeing the thing intended as in in the best way. Is that a. Is that an apt summarizing of that's a fair assessment.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Obviously not everything is going to please every person.
It is impossible.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: And we have some people don't exactly.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And we part of like that role is to take the feedback from all these different data points and people and community and then decide what the best path forward is for the majority.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: So one of the items that I mentioned in my Within WordPress newsletter two editions ago was a list circulating on Core features.
Well potential features to be added to Core.
I learned in the week after that the list wasn't as is as it was presented.
So I made a slight correction on that in my last newsletter, number 141.
But I then again learned that even that correction wasn't quite enough of a correction in terms of how WooCommerce is looking at first of all, how it is looking at the things it's considering to add to Core as well as a definitive list of things that has been decided on. And I learned essentially there's quite a bit of different story on I guess both those components like what is on the list currently and how is determined which external functions are for instance merged into Core.
I know there's a lot of questions about that certainly in the, you know, this is the fourth quarter of 2024. There's been let's call it a lot of noise and I got more questions than I thought I was answering with my second newsletter about this port part.
What can you share about that? Essentially there's two questions, right? So there's how does WooCommerce as a team decide which features it needs to have and if that is an existing feature currently, presentation partially or fully in an existing plugin.
How do you approach that?
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah, this is quite a deep topic, something that's been been going on for a while and I can see like how how confusion has come about regarding like the strategy here.
So I'm going to start a little bit at the beginning of what of this project, not time.
So I don't know if you're aware of Manos, he was I believe the founder of Somewhere Warm Summer Warm was a WooCommerce plugin company that was acquired by Automatic Woocommerce many moons ago. I think it was one of their biggest acquisitions maybe in terms of the WooCommerce space.
They they brought to WooCommerce the, I believe, subscriptions plugin and some other plugins like that.
So that's some context about where some of our premium plugins have come from.
And this is WooCommerce's premium plugins. So the ones that are currently developed and maintained by WooCommerce and still the Somewhere Warm team, that's still what the team is called.
So back in August, Manos posted a proposal that some of these plugins shouldn't be premium add ons, but they should be potentially included in Core.
And this is where the terminology of more in Core stemmed from. So the premise of this proposal was something we hear quite a lot and not just in the WooCommerce space, but the WordPress space is how much people hate having loads of plugins that they have to update and, you know, keep an eye on.
And this is people being, you know, people who run, run a store or maintain, maintain a WordPress store or a WooCommerce store.
And many of the features that we're adding currently with these premium add ons could be considered pretty basic features. So one example is shipment tracking.
And as I mentioned, however long ago on this particular podcast, shipment tracking is coming within that fulfillment work as part of Core.
Some of the other features were things like min max quantities, it's quite, quite a basic plugin. Or it could be reduced down to a pretty basic, like what is the minimum quantity of this product and what is the maximum?
Back in stock notifications is another one which is just very basic. If something comes back in stock, then as a customer or a potential customer, you, you want to be notified. Right?
But then we have the other side of these plugins as well, where we've got WooCommerce subscriptions, which is a massive product and it offers a lot of functionality as well as WooCommerce bookings. WooCommerce product add ons, like all of those things do stuff that a lot of people use, but they're also quite large plugins. They do a lot of things that, you know, the whole of them may not be worth adding to Core, but maybe some element of them might be right.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: Components that can easily be used by other plugins as well, if it is in Core.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. And that's kind of the goal really is to have this baseline of we've got all of these tools that just work out of the box.
If you need something more advanced, then there's plugins that expand on those functionalities.
And I mean, that's the premise of WooCommerce and WordPress in general. Right. That's why it's so successful.
So yeah, like I say, back in August, Manos proposed.
He basically went through the list of somewhere worn plugins and proposed which ones of those plugins he suggests we should roll into Core.
And he did this in a manner of like this is this plugin now and this is what we should do now, this is what we should do next and this is what we should do in the future.
And he very in depthly analyzed every one of these plugins and this is things like subscriptions, automate, Woo brands, product add ons, product bundles, like the majority of our premium extensions basically. Yeah.
And he analyzed each one of them, went through the numbers like of usage of revenue for WooCommerce and all that kind of stuff. And he made proposals based on that of what we should do with the plugin. Should we roll it into core, should we improve the plugin as it is and maintain it?
[00:28:46] Speaker A: And this is looking at the plugins that are in the Woo Marketplace, in.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: The Woo Marketplace specifically run by WooCommerce. So we're not looking at other people's plugins and saying good distinction.
Yeah. So specifically WooCommerce's plugins.
And yeah, I would say that is where the premise of this list came from that you spoke about in your newsletter.
That exists as a proposal, like as a list of products. This is what Manos proposes.
Manos left WooCommerce recently. Obviously this was done in August, so sometime after that.
And at that point this concept of a project was on our minds, like having these basic features and building out the core of WooCommerce and just offering what you'd expect to see in a modern E commerce platform out of the box and just providing this like more, more useful core product that doesn't require the merchant or the builder to go out and buy simple things like shipment tracking as extensions that then need to be maintained on a yearly basis and you know, have to be managed in terms of updates and all that kind of stuff.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: Yeah, this was my curiosity when I saw the initial list or the examples of plugins.
There's obviously a big competitor to WooCommerce in the name of Shopify.
I think it's fair to say that it's the biggest competitor.
If you look at what they're offering versus what Woo Commerce is offering. There's a delta of stuff that we're missing. Right. Some of this is maybe ever so plugin territory, but it sounds like WooCommerce has made a decision that on the base install, on the core functionality, it needs to be as much on par with Shopify as it possibly can. Is that a fair assumption?
[00:31:05] Speaker B: I would say that's probably part of it.
That's one data point that we need to catch up with with not just Shopify, but what other e commerce platforms are offering.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: There are more, but I think certainly in terms of wanting to avoid people moving to Shopify and attract people who are equally interested in either, it makes sense that your base offering is as close as together as one offering, you know, from a woocommerce side versus whatever, whatever the other option out there is.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: It's tricky because I personally don't see WooCommerce and Shopify as apples to apples.
I would say when we did Woo Express as an offering that was more like Shopify versus Wooshore Slide, they were comparable.
WooCommerce in itself is very like builder heavy and I think Shopify is getting more into that direction. But kind of even prior to this year it's been very heavily focused on non technical like you need to set up a store, then click a few buttons and you're done. Whereas WooCommerce has always been its kind of key driver is how extensible and how flexible it is. And that's not necessarily what the same audience that Shopify were going for.
But you do see them treading more into this developer focused audience for sure.
Particularly this year, I think.
And I think they made some announcement recently that they're not focusing so much now on like the TikTok shops, but they're going for like the bigger, you know, merchants.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: But yeah, that didn't answer your question about what some of the other points are that kind of drive this concept of improving Core.
The core of WooCommerce and they would be essentially user feedback is obviously a massive one. Like a lot of the feedback we hear is why is this a paid extension?
You know, this should be in core. Like we hear that quite a lot and just kind of setting up merchants for success. I think the, the more merchants that we can get to use WooCommerce then the more successful WooCommerce will become, regardless of if we're charging for those products or not.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: There is a challenge of course, in, in this particular example, if you are solely relying on feedback from clients where they say, look, we like what this particular plugin does, but if we're really honest, we think they should be in core and you are deciding then, yeah, okay, a few hundred people have said the same thing. So let's consider adding this to Core. It's been added to Core, then you no longer have a product they're paying for.
So every single decision you make here. And again, this is still just looking at the stuff that is in the.
You know, it's the plugins that are still managed by WooCommerce, but you would lose revenue. And the same goes for plugins that are created by others entirely. Now you have the version where they're in your store still, and you obviously have the version where they're entirely out of your ecosystem, but still very much a WooCommerce shop.
I can see this then quickly becoming an issue of how do we decide without negatively impacting all the other layers that come with it?
How much of a hassle is working through all those parameters of, you know, impacts? Like, if we decide this, then we have that to take care of and that to mitigate and that to solve. And I mean, all I'm saying is, from my perspective, it's less about the code, even less about the philosophy of what is Core and what is, you know, what is an extension. But it's also more like, how do we do this in a way that all the parties benefit?
Surely that must be the biggest, biggest challenge.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: That is definitely one of the biggest challenges.
And for a little bit more context, obviously, I mentioned Manos left, and then I mentioned that I am now the core product manager.
So part of that role change is to inherit this Moran core project and kind of drive it forwards.
So when the list you discussed was published as, like, these are the things coming to Core, it was based on this recommendation from Manos of what he believes should be in Core.
I followed up to that to say, we haven't officially confirmed what is going to be in Core yet out of those products.
And the reason being is because I've only just started working on this stuff and also wrapping up the stuff that I was doing prior to that. So a lot of what I'm going to be doing more than likely in the new year at this point is reviewing those recommendations that Manos has made, reviewing the data behind them, and essentially figuring out a framework of how we can assess which of these products should go into Core. And Manos did do some of this work as well. There is like a ranking, like a rating system based on different parameters.
[00:37:45] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: That, that is a good starting point, though I don't. There's some of these items, and I think I mentioned before that I don't necessarily think are Core products.
So in my mind, like if we were to roll, if we look at product add ons, for example, or maybe product bundles is a, is a better one to look at.
Bundling in itself is something that I think could be possible in Core and we kind of have that anyway with grouped products. Right.
But it's not a great.
I don't know how many people use grouped products, but it's not.
Yeah.
Whereas product bundles is used a lot and it adds a higher level of functionality than grouped products.
And I think the way we should look at this is not that we're going to take product bundles and just put that in Core and that's it.
But we need to take the essence of product bundles where it's useful for the majority in however you implement it, but still leaves room to be extended on top of to add these more niche functionalities.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say it sounds like you were working towards the goal where let's say that if the product bundling, let's say there are from five different interpretations of a plugin that kind of does what bundling is.
What I hear you say is that we want to find the way that is the, the base functionality and that is part of Core and then sure, that might mean that one of the five is going to disappear, but it also gives the opportunity for four of the five to then come up with their flavor, which helps them build on a more solid base, on a unified base, as well as highly extending it into the flavor that they see would be the best market fit for maybe a particular niche.
Is that a quick translation?
[00:40:04] Speaker B: That is a good summary.
I mean, obviously there's going to be things that go into Core and not even just necessarily from this project, this initiative.
There's going to be things that happen in Core that people have plugins for and that's going to maybe wind down those particular plugins. Even when I was running Iconic, we experienced that with our most popular plugin was like a Gallery plugin.
And we were adding this really nice looking gallery to WooCommerce.
And a few years into that product's lifespan, WooCommerce updated their gallery and it had many of the same features that we offered, but we also offered a lot more than what they were doing there. And actually our sales weren't impacted.
[00:40:59] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: There's no saying how it could have grown, but like we didn't see a massive drop off in sales for that product.
And I, yeah, I do. I think if something is super basic, then it benefits the merchants. Ultimately the people using WooCommerce to have that functionality.
And I think it's a benefit as well to create these features, these mechanisms for plugins to build on top of in a consistent way. Because if we look at product bundles again, there probably is four or five plugins out there that do product bundles and I imagine they all do it in a different way.
In fact, I think Iconic has a product bundles plugin and yeah, they all work slightly differently. So having this kind of nice common base that they can then extend on top of makes sense.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: A question that probably a lot of folks who are building on top of WooCommerce may have, having listened to the answer so far, should they be worried about that their particular solution is going to be found inside Core? Like is that, is that a thought.
[00:42:33] Speaker B: Their exact solution or their method?
[00:42:37] Speaker A: Yeah, because the example you give is a very generic example and this is an example that makes total sense. But there's obviously also going to be plugins. And now let me rephrase, there's going to be extensions of functionality found in plugins that are entirely outside of WooCommerce's control.
You might end up with the conclusion, actually if we're, you know, wanting to solve the problem we have identified, we need to include this functionality. How would you, how would you go about making sure that the it's not seen as a hostile takeover type of thing or killing someone's revenue?
What kind of things are you preparing there?
[00:43:25] Speaker B: I mean, that's the challenge that we need to figure out, I think.
And this was always a concern when I ran Iconic as well, like my whole business is based on this other product.
And I think in the back of my mind the whole time was they could roll this stuff into Core and that product would be wiped out.
So this has always been a risk in my opinion. Even building on top of WordPress, building on top of anyone's platform, whether it's Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce is always going to have that risk.
And I think so Iconic made like utility kind of small level plugins that did specific things.
But we diversified so we had 15 or so plugins that all did different things.
If we had just one plugin and that was rolled into Core, then yeah, that would have been been an issue for us.
But it is tricky. Yeah, I don't have an exact answer for what the solution is there, but as you've seen, part of my approach to this isn't going to be me saying this is the product in its entirety that we're rolling into Core, but it would be more like These are the products that we are proposing to roll into Core and then looking for feedback on that from the community.
Yeah, there's a risk that any of these could step on the toes of other products doing similar things.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: For sure, sure.
That risk is always there. I think that's a very fair thing to comment on.
It's not as bad as that. You don't have any control over the platform you're building on top of.
I think I'd like to think we have some control over WordPress and its direction.
Maybe not all the control we want, but some control in a way. The Same goes for WooCommerce and then I'll add to that as a complement to WooCommerce. I think the last, this past year started the year before. But certainly this past year the communication of what's going on inside of the mind of WooCommerce has been way more public than ever before. There's a lot more information shared on posts on social media posts on questions on all these types of things. And I think that helps in terms of getting the right amount of call it credit, call it accessible conversations back and forth between builders and woocommerce, between merchants and woocommerce and between even clients. Because as a client I have opinions about certain interactions I have with WooCommerce as well. Right. So all of this I'd like to say that there's a huge change, very, very noticeable and visible. But if a plugin builder listening to this goes, oh crap, now I gotta worry about which of my plugins is going to be added to Core without me having any say so in this, how, first of all, can they contact you or whom should they contact to at least start the conversation? Is that something you're actively looking for or is it entirely an internal decision of what are we doing, how are we doing it?
[00:47:21] Speaker B: It's.
There's a few kind of layers to it. I think initially I need to take this list of suggestions that Manos has proposed.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: Revise it, adapt it, make my own suggestions and also put those suggestions into some sort of like timeline, some sort of roadmap.
And then at that point I think the plan would be to publish that to The Developer, the WooCommerce Developer Blog, and say like, you know, this is the proposal for more in Core. These are the exact aspects of these add ons that we want to roll into Core and gather feedback at that stage before we do anything.
And at that point, obviously anyone can comment on the developer blog and I'll be there reading and listening and replying.
Yeah. Like you say they can contact me on Twitter on X, which is where I am most of the time, where I'm kind of most accessible.
Um, yeah, I mean, I'm definitely open to hearing this feedback.
[00:48:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say you as WooCommerce and you as James Kemp, you are quite open to listen to somebody's arguments on whether.
Yeah, you know, maybe it's one or two plugins that are being affected and it's basically the 80% of their revenue. I can see that being an issue.
Certainly, if that.
If that's the reduction is going to hit you, as soon as it hits Core, there's going to be a lot of people having a lot of questions about where do you draw the line? Like how many points of influence do you take in before you actually make that decision? But I think you kind of answered that already with Dylan G. Looking through the list.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's hard to put a number on it, but it's more of like a. An instinct.
You can get the vibe of whether something's a good idea or not based on the feedback that you're getting. If the majority of the feedback, no matter what number that is, is negative, then you can expect that, okay, this specific thing is a bad idea in the context of that data point, I guess.
But I think the key distinction to make, and we did touch on it already, and at least for like my view on this whole thing, is that we're not looking to roll like advanced niche functionality into Core.
So my, my hope would be that if someone has a product bundles plugin, we roll the basic ability to create bundles into WooCommerce and then they can adapt their plugin to build on top of that.
And I envision that that would be the way that things would go. And the other thing that we're talking about, you may have seen that we've been talking about adding cost of goods to Core as a feature and that does have plugins that exist that do that in some form.
So something we've been talking about is the ability to turn our version of that off via just like a code filter.
So before it's even released, these plugins could add a code snippet to their plugins. That means that when the person updates, they would just continue as normal, which.
Which works in two ways, I think. So that that prevents issues of merchants upgrading. And then they've got these two different cogs fields because they've already used that plugin. So it prevents that.
It also Means that if the merchant is looking for something specific that our COGS feature doesn't have, but this other plugin does, then they can install that without an issue. I think the ideal scenario would be that they either do that or they adapt theirs to work on top of our implementation.
Because I think there's something to be said about consistent data formats and that's something that we're focusing on a lot with this fulfillment project that I mentioned.
The downside is, and I think this is something that Katie from Barn T mentioned before, if someone's just looking for the basic COGS functionality, then they're probably not going to go looking for another plugin. That's the point at which they may lose either a customer or a user. I think if the basic functionality that we add covers their use case, then that's the point which will have an impact.
[00:52:50] Speaker A: And that's a very difficult one to gauge up front.
[00:52:54] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:52:56] Speaker A: So I think allowing.
So having your added extra functionality to be turned off simply by having a filter available by which the added functionality is just turned off by a plugin that kind of does that functionality already.
I think that's a smart way.
I certainly like the idea of the whole architectural idea behind it. Like we're building something that's meant to be a base, like pure base functionality minimum as possible, but it needs to do exactly what it needs to do and everything else that should still be extendable.
[00:53:41] Speaker B: Exactly. Right.
[00:53:42] Speaker A: There's still some in my head and I think that's only natural.
Worry is not the right word, but there's a slight concern more is going to be impacted than what is intended.
But having said that, I think the premise from which you're starting this project is a good one and I think it makes sense to have the goal of Wu being more.
Yeah, just that little bit more complete once you install it for the first time having. Because I know how this works, right? So you have there's another product and there's WooCommerce. Now you look at the feature set and you go, what am I missing? What do I have in just having that comparison be more complete on the woo side of things? And you don't have to say yes, you know, it may look incomplete, but add this and this and this and this and this, this plugin and then we also have what you actually want as a core. I think it sends a strong message in. In terms of looking more feature complete, looking more close to being like a fully finished, fully thought out e commerce solution.
I think that base is a Very promising one, which in my mind, you know, and I don't have any skin in this game. Right. So I'm. I build W side, I don't build on top of W. So again, I have no skin in this game. But I would still think that approaching everything the way you just mentioned and keeping that in mind, I think the, the net positive would be that it's far more easy to pick Woo because it's more complete and then focus on making it even more suiting for all these different scenarios that we have. And my word, there are so many scenarios and where a WooCommerce store can, you know, have all these niches within of how you actually run your type of store with the types of solutions that are in Core, but you have a different version of that. I think there's way more opportunity to start looking at it in a more creative, innovative way of. Okay, how can we, how can we distinct ourselves from what Core is offering? I like that as a principle.
[00:56:24] Speaker B: Again.
[00:56:24] Speaker A: Not discarding stuff that I said on the negative side or on the cautious side, but I like the principle of having a more complete Core solution.
[00:56:34] Speaker B: And I think we have to do that to, to remain relevant. Like we can't just never add new features to Core.
[00:56:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree.
[00:56:44] Speaker B: Because there may be a plugin for it.
If your plugin is just adding basic functionality and we're talking like you touched on real kind of minimum viable functionality for cost of goods, for example, then yeah, you would need to start thinking about how we can expand on that. How can we make this the obvious choice on top of whatever Core is adding.
And to touch on something that I haven't kind of mentioned in why I believe WooCommerce is as successful as it is is because of how extensible it has been, you know, over, over its lifespan.
That, that's why I'm where I am today.
And it's not something that I would ever encourage reducing. You know, I, I want it to be more extensible. I don't want it to be less extensible.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: I agree. I think that is the power of both WordPress and WooCommerce to have fully embraced that whole philosophy of extendability.
For sure, that has been the one that, the one thing that kept me connected to the project as long as it did, you know, been using it for 20 plus years now.
There's a lot of stuff, like, there's a lot of stuff built out there where you can go.
Not sure if I should add this, but the fact that you can, the simple fact that you can is still more inviting to me than saying, well, you know, architecturally not the best choice to have this or that functionality inside WordPress. Maybe, maybe you want to have that in front, maybe you want to move that into a different layer, but the fact that you can just speaks volume on the extendability of the core product and I guess anyway, that goes for WooCommerce as well.
[00:58:59] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:59:01] Speaker A: Interesting to learn all of this. James, I have one last question for you. Since we are mid December, what is your biggest thing you get excited about for 2025?
[00:59:16] Speaker B: Wow.
I mean this Mooring core initiative is something I'm really looking forward to diving into, but also like a focus of WooCommerce in 2025. And Beau put a post out about this on the developer blog the other day, is heavily focused on making WooCommerce as good as possible.
Whereas, you know, a lot of the time companies are driven by how can we make revenue like that kind of thing and the product might get left behind. But this, this year, this upcoming year, we're focusing specifically on how can we improve the product and assuming that a better product is going to equal better revenue.
Because Obviously, you know, WooCommerce is a business, it's an open source product, but the majority of the work that goes into it is from the WooCommerce team and we have to fund that somehow, which is through, and I mentioned this on Twitter the other day as well, primarily through, yes, extensions, partnerships with hosts and payment providers, all that kind of stuff.
And the third thing that I, I can't recall off the top of my head, but we have all these different avenues of generating revenue so that we can make a better product. And I'm excited that in 2025 we get to focus a lot of time on actually putting these improvements into practice. And that's coming from both sides of this core umbrella that I mentioned earlier, where the core platform is having tons of focus around performance and just improving queries like the order list query can take a huge amount of time without hpos just to load the page.
And we have some strong goals to reduce that quite dramatically by just optimizing queries that we use and all that kind of stuff on the platform side, on the experience side, with, with me being, you know, core product leads, we're going to have a lot more insight into the whole, the product as a whole and just making sure that we're improving everything collectively and not, you know, siloed.
So yeah, I think there's some very exciting things coming for, for WooCommerce in 2025 and particularly I'm looking forward to diving into this more in Core and just, you know, creating my proposal of what we should be looking at, putting into Core, getting feedback and just talking to more people about that and hopefully, yeah, coming to a good decision and just improving WooCommerce, which is going to improve the ecosystem for, for everyone. For people selling products. If, you know WooCommerce is the obvious choice, then there's more visibility into, into their products as well.
[01:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I like what I just heard because you mentioned performance. Performance is a lot of. There's a lot of room for performance on any version of the. The bulk data that's inside of Woo, whether that's orders or products or.
Yeah, that gets me excited about WooCommerce. So thank you so much.
Thank you also for answering difficult questions because I don't think they were necessarily easy questions to ask given the fact that you're still working yourself into the taking over the project more in Core. But again, thank you so much.
[01:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, like I say, I'd like to be as open as possible, so if anyone has any questions they want to ask, feel free, reach out to me on Twitter or even just on the developer blog.
You know, some of our developer advocates are over there as well, so I'll.
[01:03:39] Speaker A: Link your details in the show notes.
[01:03:40] Speaker B: So thank you. Thanks for having me.
[01:03:45] Speaker A: Thank you for being on. Thank you so much, James. Cheers.
