In this podcast episode, host Michelle Frechette and guests Tamara Niesen and Beau Lebens. They discuss WooCommerce’s recent rebranding, emphasizing the distinction between “Woo” and “WooCommerce.” Tamara highlights the importance of community and customer focus in their marketing strategy. Beau outlines the roadmap for WooCommerce, including improvements in core features, payment solutions, and shipping integrations. The episode underscores WooCommerce’s commitment to evolving its platform to meet diverse business needs while maintaining strong community engagement and support.
Top Takeaways:
- Marketing Focus on Community-Driven Development: WooCommerce’s marketing approach emphasizes listening to merchants and the community. By integrating feedback into product development, they ensure their solutions address real user needs. This transparency strengthens trust and engagement with the ecosystem.
- Collaboration and Ecosystem Strength Matter: WooCommerce sees the entire ecosystem as interconnected—whether it’s developers, merchants, or marketers. By improving core functionality and providing better tools, they aim to ensure that all WooCommerce-based businesses thrive, as their success reflects on the entire platform.
- Community Feedback is Essential: WooCommerce’s marketing and product teams are committed to keeping the feedback loop open. They encourage users and developers to share their thoughts on new features, usability, and how the company can better support merchants and builders in the ecosystem.
Mentioned In The Show:
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- Tamara Niesen (CMO, WooCommerce)
- Beau Lebens (Artistic Director, WooCommerce)
- Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
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Transcript
Michelle Frechette 00:00:02 Welcome to the next episode. I think it’s the third one now. We’re relatively brand new podcast of the Cache Up Podcast with Post Status, and I am really excited here today to be with Tamara Niesen, who is the CMO for Woo. Welcome, Tamara. It’s good to see you.
Tamara Niesen 00:00:18 Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Third episode I feel VIP being on here.
Michelle Frechette 00:00:23 I’m really excited I haven’t I don’t get to talk to people from Automattic that often and I’m hoping to change that. I’ve actually been working pretty closely with Megan Fox on the Automatic team. She sends me all the things like, hey, can you cover this? And so building those relationships to make sure that we help get the word out about products and movements within WordPress and be able to share what’s happening. And I’m really excited. There’s been a lot of stuff coming out of Woo lately. I think it was yesterday, your new branding launch, and I want to talk about that with you for sure. And then what you know about the roadmap, what’s happening with Woo and WooCommerce and kind of get into all the things.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:00 But first tell me about you a little bit. I, I, I asked you before, but people don’t know where you’re located, what you do as CMO? Some people might not even know what CMO means. So give us a little bit of insight into Tamara.
Tamara Niesen 00:01:13 Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. so I am based in Waterloo, Ontario, which is, about an hour away from Toronto. There’s plenty of snow here. I like the weather to where you are in Rochester or Buffalo or Detroit. We’re not too far from there. And, CMO so Chief Marketing Officer which is, you know, a title for leading marketing. So, marketing, I like to reference as a symphony. There’s many instrument players in the symphony, different roles, different functions that come together to produce beautiful music. Is that my favorite analogy? But what’s unique about, I think marketing in general, especially at Woo, is that we all play different roles, but the important part is that we come together, put our merchants first and execute on key strategies like our brand launch yesterday.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:03 I love that, and one of the questions I asked you beforehand and I think and you’re like, that’s a really good question for getting that a lot. So I want to kind of dig in a little bit. And I said we would do this live or we’re recording. But you know what I mean on the show is to ask you, what’s the difference between Woo and WooCommerce? You know, I think it was a year and a half ago that it was like, hey, we’re changing WooCommerce to Woo, and then it’s like, oh, we’re changing it back. And so I think people there might be a little bit of brand confusion, especially when you do launch a new branding. So can you kind of give us an idea of what that’s all about?
Tamara Niesen 00:02:34 Absolutely. And I think I know what you’re referencing to. So I’ll go back to that moment in time where we went from Woo to WooCommerce and, back to Woo and back to WooCommerce, but essentially from the standpoint of the Woo name, that’s like our organization, that’s our company name.
Tamara Niesen 00:02:48 And so we’ll wrap our, you know, our corporate branding around that. And our WooCommerce branding will be associated with our platform, our products, our suite of products. And so what I think folks are referring to. Last year, we did change our website at some point to Woo.com and then quickly pivoted back to WooCommerce because we had had so much equity built into that property. And so we’ll stick with that. And honestly, I mean, our WooCommerce website is really the front door to our platform, and we want to showcase our platform and our merchants through that. So that’s why we went a little bit back and forth on that.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:21 That makes perfect sense. And sometimes you try things and you’re like, well, we should pivot back.
Tamara Niesen 00:03:25 Yeah, yeah.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:26 Sometimes it works. Sometimes. I mean, I think back to New Coke and think, oh, that didn’t work. People knew it was Coke, but let’s go back to regular Coke. And like, the whole idea is we try things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. As marketers, we are sometimes mavericks. And we recognize when something doesn’t hit and we correct course. Well, you know, that’s a good thing.
Tamara Niesen 00:03:48 Right. Thrive on change. Thrive on change. Experiment. Ruthlessly experiment and thrive on change.
Michelle Frechette 00:03:53 Exactly. I mean, luckily, lives aren’t lost and, you know, lived and lost because of branding, which is a good thing. But yeah, it was a fun experiment, and it was kind of fun to watch as another marketer, you know, to see how that worked out for you, as a brand. But I’m excited about the new branding. It’s it’s really pretty, quite honestly. Like, I love the aesthetic of it. So can you talk a little bit about what went into that?
Tamara Niesen 00:04:16 Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m wearing it. As you can see, I’m wearing my hat and my sweater today I have my window open because this room is actually quite, quite warm even though it’s freezing outside. So I’m trying to balance so I can still wrap the brand. but this was a labor of love for really the last nine months. We decided that, you know, we had more focus in terms of how we wanted to go to market, the customer we wanted to serve, which is all of our customers, but we needed to have more focus in terms of marketing, in terms of our product and our roadmap. And so we felt like it was time, due time to bring a new look and feel into into the market and thought that it would be really beneficial, not just for us as as Woo, but also for our community. One thing that I learned, when I first got here, which was about nine months ago, is that we’re one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world, and I don’t think most people know that. And so there’s this, you know, opportunity to create more recognition and demand in the market. And, you know, give Woo a place in that conversation, which in turn, in my very strong opinion, helps all boats rise.
Tamara Niesen 00:05:24 It helps our community. It helps our developers, our partners, our agencies, which is really like, tied to our values and our business model and what helps us thrive and what helps, you know, our community thrive. So the whole brand was wrapped around that in in bringing that together. And so we started to, you know, really think about our customers. Let’s like refocus on them. Why do they come to Woo what matters to them? Why do developers and agencies build and sell Woo on our behalf? You know. What is it? What is so powerful about the WordPress community? How do we tie that all together and bring forward this brand that represents all of that? And so that’s the work that we were heads down on for the first few months of doing this, and then bringing in our in-house design team to say, like, how does that show up now with look and feel? You know, we’re it’s a vibrant color. It’s like a beautiful like it catches your attention. But it’s still professional.
Tamara Niesen 00:06:18 It’s still modern, it’s slick. It has like different applications that we can bring to products, to communities, to merchants and, you know, apply it everywhere. And so I am also a huge fan of it. I love the logo, I love the colors. And the fact that it was done in-house is quite remarkable in my career. I don’t think that we’ve really done something so big and grand in-house with arguably a relatively small team. We’re not a huge organization and so really proud of how that came together.
Michelle Frechette 00:06:48 Well, shout out to the whole team. I mean, that’s a lot of work to and a relatively short amount of time. I don’t think people outside of marketing don’t realize that nine months is actually pretty quick to turn something like that around. Especially when you say you have a small team. So that’s that’s pretty awesome. You can’t really tell right now because of the lighting in here. But I also have purple hair, so I feel like maybe I have an affinity towards the new branding.
Tamara Niesen 00:07:11 Oh, I thought you just did that for us today. Well thank you, thank you. It’s a commitment.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:17 Yes, it is for sure. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more like, like, kind of, like, in-depth. So what took you in the direction? Like, I love the W on wheels kind of idea like that. It moves quickly and that kind of thing. And it’s a freemius brand, right. So like, a lot of plug ins are freemius. Right. So you are freemium I mean, so you start with premium as a brand itself.
Tamara Niesen 00:07:44 Maybe I wasn’t familiar with and you were just I was just going with it. I understood what you meant.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:51 I’ve read something from them in an email this morning, so like it was in my head. But. But WooCommerce is free. Anybody can download it. Anybody can use it. There are add ons that are of course part of the marketplace that are in-house for you. And then there’s a whole ecosystem built up around it as well.
Michelle Frechette 00:08:09 I work, my other job is at StellarWP and we have Iconic and Orderable, which are WooCommerce add ons. and I will tell you a funny story about this. So when I was freelancing, this was probably about ten years ago now I was at WordCamp Toronto, and I heard somebody talk about WooCommerce and how it’s free and you can do so much with it. And I didn’t say anything like publicly, because I didn’t want the to put the speaker kind of on the defense. But afterwards I walked up to him and I said, WooCommerce is free, but it’s kind of like that free puppy, right? Like you, you get a free puppy and then like, all of a sudden you’ve got to buy this and you got to buy that and you got to buy that. But the truth is, you can use WooCommerce pretty robustly if you’re not trying to do very specific things. And Beau is just about to join us. So I’m going to bring him in with us. Beau Lebens, who’s on your team as well. Hopefully he knows that we’re already recording.
Michelle Frechette 00:09:02 Hey, Beau.
Beau Lebens 00:09:04 Hey Michelle.
Michelle Frechette 00:09:05 Hey. How are you doing? I was just in the process. Sure.
Beau Lebens 00:09:09 There we go.
Michelle Frechette 00:09:11 I was just asking Tamara about how I once described WooCommerce as a free puppy. Like the puppy is free, but then the vet bills and the food and the leashes and the dog bed and all those kinds of things are are separate. And so the the the idea of something being free and the freemium market, is great because you can use it free. But sometimes if you want to do very specific things, you have to pay for the add ons. And at the time I was just like, this was ten years ago, so I didn’t even work in. I was a freelancer back then. I wasn’t working in, in product yet. Now I know that, like, all those people actually have to be paid for the work that they’re doing, and that the the premium add ons actually go towards supporting the growth and the roadmap of what’s happening. So I think I started in a different part of a question, but I’m going to keep going where I am going and ask about like road mapping.
Michelle Frechette 00:10:04 And I mean, when WooCommerce was first introduced, it didn’t have nearly the add ons and the marketplace that’s grown up around it, because as we grow as an internet and we want to do more things, we have a requirement for adding more things. So can you tell me a little bit about what that’s been like over the last year, and then growing into what you might see that you can talk about, coming down the down the road way?
Beau Lebens 00:10:27 Yeah, absolutely.
Tamara Niesen 00:10:29 Can I say one thing about.
Michelle Frechette 00:10:31 Absolutely.
Tamara Niesen 00:10:32 Like carrying it over from the, you know, the rebrand and what I thought were really key differentiators to, to Woo because we were going into that. and I know everyone’s probably more excited to hear from Beau on this. But this is actually what makes Woo unique. We have this ecosystem of extensions. We have this free, you know, extension for Woo that you can start with. And one of the key differentiators, in my opinion, is that you can scale sustainably as your business grows.
Tamara Niesen 00:11:02 You can add on those pieces as you need to so you’re not paying for, you know, things right out of the gate, right out of the box that you don’t need. You are adding on as time goes on with, you know, integrations that are seamless and plug in, etc.. But I think that’s a really critical piece to, you know, our platform in general. But there are places where we need to make that easier. And so I’ll let I’ll let Beau speak to that.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:23 But but before I let me speak to that, I’m, I’m gonna have to circle back on that question. Sorry Beau and say, oh good. If somebody is thinking what what plugins do I need? Is there a support forum? Are there people they can talk to to find out more about what they need?
Tamara Niesen 00:11:37 They’re there. So we have our our hHappiness Engineers. We have, you know, educational tools that we’re starting to build out with that group as well. And, and make this easier for our merchants that are starting out on their own and for our our partners and developer ecosystem as well.
Tamara Niesen 00:11:51 But we also have an opportunity to get more opinionated there. And so I would like our team as the next phase of, you know, this platform evolution, this brand evolution, and the work that we’re doing is to provide more opinion or recommendations there because it can be overwhelming. I think there’s this paradox of choice, and there’s so much happening in the markets, like where do I start? And so we owe it to our merchants to guide them better on that. And we can look at it from, you know, certain levels of complexity. Are you just starting your business? Are you scaling your business? Are you migrating your business or what industry or vertical might you be in? Because that’s another really unique thing about Woo is we serve really complex business models in unique verticals. and so tailoring those recommendations and personalizing it is a huge opportunity for us that we need to lean into.
Michelle Frechette 00:12:38 So ecommerce is huge, right? I promise I’m gonna get back to the original question. eCommerce is huge. And I think that, so let’s go back to Michelle as the newbie freelancer. And I thought I could build a website pretty quickly because I was building these brochure sites and I was like, somebody’s like, well, how much would you charge me to build a website that was similar to this other one? And I said, $500. Okay. Like, let’s just oh, poor little newbie Michelle. Well, I really need an e-commerce system to go with it. How much would it cost if I add that on there? Oh, another 150. Okay. Yes, I was crazy and I counted that I paid for that education. So all of that to say that there is a lot that you can do with ecommerce, which brings us to all of the add ons and the ecosystem that’s come up to this point. And back to the roadmap. I told you I was going to get back to them Beau.
Beau Lebens 00:13:27 Nice. Nice loop back there. Yeah. No, I think this is actually, something that a lot of people, I think, underestimate the complexity and the scope of e-commerce. Especially today, global commerce. It’s online. It’s offline. It’s integrating with different marketplaces. You know, Tamara mentioned different verticals have different needs. In our case, we serve a global market. Every geography has different needs. So there’s just a million things going on there. And then every business is unique. Like everyone wants to run things slightly differently than want to present their products. However, it is that’s important to them. Maybe they want to take pre-orders or they want to sell on a subscription or whatever it is. So there’s really no just universal. Here’s everything that you need to run every business. Right. There’s definitely a sort of baseline, a set of expected things that most merchants are going to need to run most types of businesses. And that’s, I think, the really interesting thing that we’ve seen shift over the last few years, in particular, is that that baseline of expectations has increased. And so where previously, as Tamara mentioned, you know, what has made us unique is we had this core, and then you had this whole world of extensions and plugins and things that you could add on top of it, and the expectation of what’s in that core.
Beau Lebens 00:14:50 What are those platform features? That expectation has really changed. And so it’s actually it’s not in everyone’s best interest for you, have you to have to go make a decision on every single thing that goes in there. Right. And so what we’re a big part of our roadmap in the coming year is, is kind of bringing more of that baseline to the platform. So what you’ll see is a lot more, what we’ve we’ve started referring to it. And then the name sort of stuck is just calling it more ‘in core’. the intent is not just throw everything ‘in core’, but it is to, to look really judiciously at what are the extensions that people are using, a lot of which we sell frankly, and saying it’s in everyone’s best interest if we don’t sell this separately and we just put it ‘in core’ and we give it away. And, you know, to your point of, oh, but people need to, you know, get paid and pay for their meals and pay for their rent and whatever.
Beau Lebens 00:15:50 That’s where from from a sort of platform perspective, we can partner, we can make sure that we’ve got like really robust payment solutions. We’ve got really robust shipping solutions. Some of these like fundamental things that everybody needs. And we can monetize those. And that’s how we can help keep the platform free. So from a, from a sort of more concrete perspective, you’ll see us, like, really lean into payments. We’ve actually really been leaning in there already. We’re improving the way that you can enable and disable different payment methods, that you can customize and present those in your checkout throughout the rest of your site through, express payment methods, things like that. So that’s a big area. I mentioned shipping. So we’re really bulking up our Woo shipping solution. We’ve got, Well, we had USPS labels supported in there previously and DHL. We’re rolling. We just rolled out UPs. We’re working on some other big carriers. So making sure that that’s like a really deeply integrated and robust set of features.
Beau Lebens 00:16:59 And then outside of the just the actual sort of shipping and live rates and label printing stuff, there’s some pretty cool improvements coming to the way that order management works. That’ll apply to whether you’re using Woo Shipping or not. So, just to I guess I don’t know how much time we’ve got, but to get like into the detail because I think it’s a really interesting one. Historically, when you’re managing orders in WooCommerce, they just have a single order status. So there’s just this, like, kind of flat list of an order is in some status in this list. We’re moving towards breaking that out and having a fulfillment status and a payment status separately. So you’ll be able to have, you know, a global idea of this order is in processing, and maybe it’s partially paid and partially fulfilled. And so that gives a lot more flexibility to the platform. And that’s I come at our platform from a capabilities perspective. So like what can we make possible even if it’s not useful to everyone necessarily? The platform itself should make it possible to do everything that people want to do.
Beau Lebens 00:18:07 And then we can look at how we expose that. So, this order status, fulfillment status, there’ll be like a separate flow for handling fulfillment so people can keep track of their packages, split their fulfillment, split their shipments and things like that. So lots of improvements happening in that, in that area. And then there are so in this more ‘in core’ concept as well, I mentioned that some of the extensions that we actually own and sell at the moment. So we just recently merged brands. So the ability just to have a like structured list of what brand is this product that I’m selling, and have that be able to flow through to other integrations, whether it’s like schema.org markup or integration with another marketplace or whatever. So that merged recently. We’re looking at back in stock notifications right now. So I think that’s going to be an interesting one where, you know, just the ability to, have a customer sign up and say, tell me when this is back in stock. And I have that just managed natively.
Beau Lebens 00:19:12 And then we’ve got a few others. I won’t commit to any of them just yet because, our, James Kemp is our core product manager. People are probably familiar with him. He’s, he’s been around in the WooCommerce community for years. He’s great. And he’s working through the roadmap of, like, which order do we put some of these things in there and which, parts of this functionality are most useful for most merchants? So it’s not just a like throw this entire extension ‘in core’ type thing. And it’s, you know, which bits are people going to use and how do we put it in in a way that’s still extensible, that’s still flexible, that increases the capabilities of the platform.
Michelle Frechette 00:19:55 With my Stellar WP.
Beau Lebens 00:19:57 Yeah, sorry I rambled.
Michelle Frechette 00:19:57 No that’s good. That’s good. With my Stellar WP hat on, I will say that we have Iconic and Orderable because we got those from James and he worked with me.
Beau Lebens 00:20:05 Right, right right right. Of course.
Michelle Frechette 00:20:06 Prior to working with you, he’s a he’s a wonderful person and he’s incredibly talented. So you are very lucky that you have him on your team.
Speaker 3 00:20:14 We are indeed. Shout out to James.
Michelle Frechette 00:20:16 Absolutely.
Tamara Niesen 00:20:17 We can delete that part right? I was kidding.
Michelle Frechette 00:20:22 We’re not deleting it no. When I was freelancing and building sites for other people, I. The e-commerce part, the shipping part was the most difficult to try to to manage. I even attended classes on it and at that point said, I’m only building e-commerce sites for downloadables because I just got my head around it. I’m not a developer, like making those things work for me.
Beau Lebens00:20:47 It’s notoriously complex.
Michelle Frechette 00:20:49 Yeah. Especially if you go into international shipping and you have to deal with sizes and weights and things like that, for sure. so.
Beau Lebens 00:20:55 Don’t even get me started on if you’re shipping hazardous materials.
Michelle Frechette 00:20:58 Oh, let’s not even.
Beau Lebens: That’s even harder.
Michelle Frechette: I can’t even go into that. Right. Is there a battery in there? Is there a lithium battery? We can’t. It’s a different thing, for sure. But it’s really good to hear that. Some of those things.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:09 I mean, I’m it’s I’m talking. It was ten years ago when I was dealing with those things. So a lot of that has been worked through and a lot of that is much easier now, Which I’m very happy to hear. For those people who are still building sites for other people or for themselves, which is wonderful. What do you think about the ecosystem that has built up around Woo after offering these add ons and things like that? And when you are thinking about building it out on yourself or incorporating something into core, do you take into mind that somebody else has already done that and the competition that you could create there? And I know that’s kind of a tenuous subject sometimes, but I’d like to hear how you consider those things.
Beau Lebens 00:21:47 Definitely. Yeah, it is a tricky one. It is a sensitive topic, obviously. So we do consider what have people built, what are like, what is the sort of competition or lack of competition or a sort of prevention of competition, if you like, that’s happening here.
Beau Lebens 00:22:06 and as I mentioned, where we’re starting is actually mostly extensions that we own. So the biggest thing that we’re actually looking at sort of, I don’t know, preventing competition around if you like, is something where we are probably already the dominant solution in that space. So that, frankly, makes it just a little easier. It’s like, as long as we’re okay with it, then we can we can go with it. You know, and to be completely transparent, that is we’re giving up direct revenue there. We are selling these extensions and we’re saying we’re not going to sell it anymore because we think that putting it ‘in core’ and making more merchants more successful as a baseline is better for everyone, including us. So there’s that element of it that in some of those cases, it’s a little easier because we can just say we sort of do our own math and say, yep, we’re comfortable with it, let’s do it. But definitely we’re looking around and seeing, you know, oh, this actually sort of is, crosses over with a feature that someone else may have a product which isn’t directly solving that problem, but it sort of tangentially solves it.
Beau Lebens 00:23:12 And so we’re like, oh, we’re a little bit more competitive with them. We’re trying to have conversations with some of those developers. I just had one, at the end of last week. And so we’re trying to sort of be open with what’s happening and where we’re going and why it’s happening the way that it is. And so far, everyone that we’ve talked to, has actually been supportive of it, even even when it’s, you know, sort of personally challenging for them. They understand why we’re doing it. They understand that there’s always been this sort of platform risk of, hey, if you’re building a solution that the platform probably should have at some point, the platform might have that thing. And I think part of it has been, communicating that we’re not trying to put everything in there. We know we can’t do that. We just know that the I’ve internally often referred to it as a little bit of a like a slider. And on the far left, you’ve got like just a really basic set of code.
Beau Lebens00:24:10 And like every single feature is a separate plugin. And on the far right, every single feature is one plugin. It’s like maybe baked all the way into WordPress itself, right? We’re never going to be on that far, right. But at the moment we’re way over here on the far left, and we just need to slide it a little bit.
Michelle Frechette 00:24:28 Move that needle a little bit. If you had everything built in. All you would hear is this slows my site down so much. Right? So you have to be careful of that also for sure. Yeah. And not definitely.
Beau Lebens 00:24:38 Not trying to get there.
Michelle Frechette 00:24:39 Yeah. Not committing you to anything when I ask this. But I mean Automattic typically has been open to the idea of mergers and acquisitions as well. So I imagine that there and I’m not again, asking for things that you can’t talk about. I imagine there are possibilities that you see something that’s so well built. You say, hey, can we make you an offer to just bring that in-house and then either bring you with it or not. So I mean, that’s always a possibility as well.
Beau Lebens 00:25:02 So yeah. And I won’t commit to anything there. But I will say like if you look around, you know, the things that we’re putting in there at the moment, like back in stock notifications is a good example. Came from our acquisition of Somewhere Warm. Yeah. So that’s exactly how that happened. And one of the ones that we’ve been getting a lot of questions about and, to be completely open here, like, we don’t actually know what this will look like yet, but is subscriptions the really popular, really interesting, differentiated feature for WooCommerce, where I think WooCommerce has like by far the most powerful and robust subscriptions capability in the market. That’s a separate product at the moment.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:43 Especially for memberships. That works really well for memberships.
Beau Lebens 00:25:47 Right, right. And so, you know, having that sort of capability, a lot of people are saying like, put that in core. We want that in core so that it’s available everywhere. but figuring out exactly how that looks is it’s a little more complicated because it is a sort of separate type of use case, and it’s just a huge code base of its own.
Beau Lebens 00:26:05 So so back to your like, you know, this slows my site down. We’re doing all of this with performance as a sort of first class requirement. So in parallel to putting things in core and making sure we do it in a performant way, we actually have like a whole separate work stream going on of performance optimizations and improvements just at the platform level.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:27 And of course, every step of the way. Just like every plugin developer, you have to be paying attention to what’s happening in WordPress core to make sure there’s no problems there. But also, when you’ve got as many add ons as you do, you also have to make sure that those add ons are not competing with one another and with your core. And then you have to look at what some of the bigger players are in the market and make sure you’re not competing or not that those plugins aren’t causing problems with like say, Elementor or Kadence or some of those things as well. So I don’t really I don’t know if everybody realizes how much research goes into that kind of development also.
Beau Lebens 00:27:01 I definitely do not based on the feedback that we get. Anytime there’s any kind of misstep or any kind of small problem. It is remarkable like that the people expect everything to work with everything flawlessly. As they should. That’s actually what we aim for. But yeah, to your point, it’s it is complex. There’s a lot of moving pieces in this ecosystem. We’ve built some really interesting tools internally within the WooCommerce.com marketplace. We have some infrastructure called the Quality Insights Toolkit, which is actually baked into the marketplace. And so it allows you to do a lot of compatibility testing and interoperability testing between various plugins. And so that’s actually it’s got a whole suite of different tests. But I think the personally, I think the most interesting thing in it is that you could, for example, run a suite of tests across, let’s say, five different extensions for different plugins, WooCommerce itself and WordPress across different PHP and MySQL versions. And you can just run automated tests across all of that. Every time you make a change.
Michelle Frechette 00:28:09 And then you cross your fingers hoping for no fails.
Beau Lebens 00:28:12 Right. Yeah. But that’s so we actually run that on our infrastructure now. We use it ourselves across a lot of our extensions. And we’re really starting to encourage anyone who’s got solutions in the marketplace to use it across. You know, like to use our example. If you know that subscriptions and memberships are used heavily together, then like anytime subscriptions or memberships make a change, they should probably be testing against each other. Right. And and this enables that. So we’re looking at how we can roll that out and make it more widely available. Because ultimately that the experience that people have with any part of the WooCommerce ecosystem is what they think of the entire ecosystem. So it’s in all of our favor for it to be as good as possible.
Michelle Frechette 00:28:58 Absolutely. One of my favorite questions when I was head of Customer Success for GiveWP was, well, can’t you just add something? And I was like, if you remove the word just, we can actually look into it, but it’s not going to just happen. Like, oh, we’ll have that for you by tomorrow. Yeah.
Beau Lebens 00:29:16 It’s always and it’s always like, yeah, we can just add that. And then here’s this just like tidal wave of other considerations that come with it.
Michelle Frechette 00:29:24 You can just add it maybe in 10 to 12 months. Yeah. Not by tomorrow. Tamara, as you hear some of these things talking about the. And I remind you on your you’re on mute before you begin to talk. As you hear about some of these things in the roadway, how excited are you about being able to market some of these things, especially under the new branding?
Tamara Niesen 00:29:44 Oh, thrilled. I mean, especially because I think the community, our merchants, they’ve all been asking for these things and nothing is more satisfying as a marketer is to say, hey, we’ve listened and now we’re bringing it to you. Also, we’re making it easier. And I think that the, the thing that’s really unique about WooCommerce and WordPress is this open source driven by community and ecosystem approach.
Tamara Niesen 00:30:09 And so being able to bring that to them, you know, seeing all of these folks benefit from that and making their lives easier is like, it’s pure joy. As lame as that might sound, it’s true. And it also makes my life a lot easier. Or my job, I should say not my life.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:23 Well, I mean, if your job is, your life’s easier to for. So I think that follows. That follows. as a marketer myself, I just, I you can’t help it. It’s like you start to foam with the mouth about some of the things that that you can start to think about your personas and ooh, what color should that be? And I’m already like playing around with likelogo designs and things like that in my head. So I totally understand where that’s coming from.
Tamara Niesen 00:30:44 The ability to tell that like to speak the truth. Like, I know this is true because our, we’ve listened, we’ve heard you. and so it’s not, you know, just a bunch of marketing jargon and fluff. It’s it’s real stuff.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:55 It really is. Yeah. And I don’t like I keep saying I don’t think a lot of people realize what goes into the marketing, what goes into the development. It’s like, oh, there’s a product. I just want it to work. And if you both have done your job right, that’s exactly what happens. So I love that for sure. So things are great. Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap it up for the day? I’ll go to Beau first.
Beau Lebens 00:31:18 Yeah. I want to just add a shout out and a mention to something that’s coming soon that we haven’t talked about a ton publicly, but a little bit. And I don’t think people realize, but it’s going to be a good one, which is a new starter theme for WooCommerce. So people are probably if you’ve been in the space for a while, you’re probably aware of, Storefront has been around for many years. And it’s kind of a good starting place for an e-commerce website.
Beau Lebens00:31:43 but it has not moved with the times of, you know, the blog based editor and everything being block based, adopting global styles, all of the cool new stuff that WordPress supports. And so we’re working on very actively working on a new starter theme for Woo. That’s going to be kind of a out of the box default best experience with all of the latest blocks, all of the latest patterns, deep integration with everything that WordPress offers from a side from a side building perspective. I’m really looking forward to that because I think it’s going to, again, this kind of baseline and increasing the out of the box experience. I think it’s really going to shift that for, for a lot of people. And they’re going to see things like our new checkout or newer checkout, which is fully block based, is so much better than the short code version, which a lot of people are still using. This will give you that out of the box. I think people will will really see what’s possible with the Woo store without a ton of customization.
Beau Lebens 00:32:45 You won’t actually need to do too much to have a really beautiful store straight out of the box. So I’m super excited for that. And that’s coming probably in the next two releases, I would guess.
Michelle Frechette 00:32:57 Oh, nice. What I also like about block based is that you can customize it as much as you want, so that people don’t see your site and go, oh, that’s a WooCommerce store, you know? So like you have that. So it’s branded as your store, less so than being recognized as the the theme behind it, for example. And I think that’s great.
Beau Lebens00:33:14 Yeah. Storefront, I think, I mean, I’m going to show my age here, but Storefront to me felt a little bit like the Kubrick of WordPress. Like, going way, way back to the end. Like every single WordPress site that you saw, you were like, that’s WordPress, because it’s using the theme that wasn’t super customized. Storefront felt a little bit like that, even though it was really flexible.
Beau Lebens 00:33:36 A lot of people would just put, you know, a couple CSS tweaks on it, change the logo, and there’s your store. This new starter theme, the fact that it’s block based, the fact, the fact that it’s powered by patterns across the board, is incredibly flexible. And our designers have put together, like, dozens of incredibly beautiful and wildly different looking layouts and styles, style systems and everything, all using the same theme. So I’m really excited to see what people do with that.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:07 So when that’s released, you’ll have to come back and do a little demo for us so we can show the world through that.
Beau Lebens 00:34:11 That’d be awesome. I would love to bring back our designers and have them do it because they’ve like, they’ve spent. They’ve done some amazing work here.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:18 Sounds good to me.
Beau Lebens 00:34:18 And actually its the community’s familiar with Ellen Bower. She’s leading that work. So we’re also really lucky to have her join us. Again, someone with, like, deep community experience. Tons of background in theming and design. And she’s been driving that, and it’s been awesome.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:37 We’ll definitely have her back then or have her on the show. I would love that. Tamara, what about you? Any last words before we wrap up today?
Tamara Niesen 00:34:44 Tough act to follow with some product insights.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:47 I know.
Tamara Niesen 00:34:47 Right.
Michelle Frechette 00:34:49 So you’re ad in is and will be marketing all of those for you.
Tamara Niesen 00:34:54 Maybe we’ll ask the community for feedback. I think that the power of the way that we operate is very much driven by the community. And, I would love to be more ingrained in that, in touch. And so if there’s feedback, constructive or otherwise, or, you know, how we can partner better together, how we how we can provide more resources as it relates to making it easier for our community to market what they do or to build with us that that door is open and I want to hear from the community. So the feedback loop, keep it open. Any ideas that come to mind. We want to put the community and our merchants at the front and center of everything we do. And so if there’s, you know, collaborations out there that might exist, like we’re all here for it. So I’d love to hear from you.
Michelle Frechette 00:35:38 Excellent. And, after we’re done recording before you leave, I’ll get some of those, links and ways that people can do that, and we’ll include them in the show notes. So I want to thank you both so much for being here, for joining me today. I’m excited to get some of this information or all this information out to the Post Status community through our podcasting and our YouTube channel. So thank you very much. And if other people have things that they think would be worthy of sharing with the community, hit me up either on Slack through our contact form and we’d be happy to have you on the show. Thank you both. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Beau Lebens 00:36:08 Thanks so much, Michele. Glad I can make it.
Michelle Frechette: Thanks.
