WooCommerce Blocks 8.1, Joost on Shopify’s Decline, Insights from Beka Rice and Birgit Pauli-Haack
New enhancements to WooCommerce Blocks 8.1. • Joost’s report on CMS Market Share shows Woo growing — but Shopify has hit a wall. • Two “Voices of Experience,” Beka Rice and Birgit Pauli-Haack share long-term takes on WooCommerce, WordPress, and Gutenberg.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Woo Snippet for the Week of July 11
If you haven’t seen the release notes for WooCommerce Blocks 8.1, a few items under “Enhancements” deserve special notice:
- There’s an accessibility update to the block template descriptions, thanks to Vivien Ilett.
- Filter URL support was added to the filter blocks when filtering for the All Products block.
- It’s now possible to make single and multiple selections in the Attribute filter block. (Allows multi-select for dropdown.)
- There’s a new cart endpoint for the Store API to feature cross-sell items based on cart contents.
Joost’s Market Share Analysis
Joost de Valk shared his annual CMS market share analysis, which I always look forward to. (You can read more about the big takeaways here.) It was especially enlightening to hear and see this about Shopify, which has really been taking a beating lately:
“For quite a while, Shopify and WooCommerce had very similar growth trajectories. I think we can now no longer say that that’s the case, as WooCommerce continues to grow and Shopify doesn’t.”
Beka Rice on her work at GoDaddy, challenges and strengths in the Woo space
Over on Do the Woo, we had a couple of great shows this past week. It’s always a pleasure to chat with Beka Rice, who is now at GoDaddy after the team she built at SkyVerge was acquired a while back. Beka’s experience always gives us great insights into the Woo ecosystem, plus we got a teaser about the new Woo SaaS product they are releasing soon related to multi-service and multi-channel selling.
On the WordPress/Woo space, Beka spoke about its strength in flexibility:
One of the things I think is not just true for WooCommerce, but WordPress overall, is that unifying theme of flexibility. And that anything I can dream up doing, I can do it. Even if I need to write custom code to make it happen. But the amount of times there’s a plugin that does exactly what you need and it might have 10 other users, but you’re one of those people. I think Woo has done a good job of respecting that core value of flexibility. Being one of the main reasons that people come to this platform, and this ecosystem.
Taking a long view on Gutenberg with Birgit Pauli-Haack
Our chat with Beka was followed up with a different take on Gutenberg from Birgit Pauli-Haack. We hear a lot about what is happening now, but how about the long-term vision? Birgit shared her insights with us based on following Gutenberg closely from its inception.
