#159 – James Kemp on WooCommerce Innovations and Trends in Selling Online

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case WooCommerce innovations, and trends selling online.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured, on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have James Kemp. James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce. After working with WooCommerce, running a plugin shop for 10 years, he joined the team at the end of 2023 to help shape the future of e-commerce.

James talks about his journey with WordPress and WooCommerce, and explains his role at Automattic, where he’s tasked with connecting the community’s feedback to the developments in WooCommerce, ensuring that the Woo platform continually evolves and improves.

He discusses the innovations within WooCommerce, the challenges of balancing the needs of small and large scale stores, and how the team navigates an environment filled with both competitors and opportunities.

He gets into the positive impact of WooCommerce’s recent rebranding, and how the system positions itself amidst the ever-growing competition from SaaS platforms like Shopify.

James shares his insights into the trends shaping e-commerce, like the seamless integration of newer technologies and consumer buying habits.

If you’re keen to understand the breadth of WooCommerce’s impact on e-commerce, or are curious about the direction of online shopping, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you James Kemp.

I am joined on the podcast by James Kemp. Hello James.

[00:02:50] James Kemp: Hello, how are you?

[00:02:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to speak to you. James is on the podcast today to talk all things WooCommerce. And he really is a very, very credible person to talk about WooCommerce, because James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce over at Automattic.

However, when I say that title, James, I don’t really know what it means. Will you just enlighten us? And also, if you feel like throwing some other biographical information at us about your history with WordPress and things like that, feel free.

[00:03:17] James Kemp: Of course. Yeah, I mean, we’ve spoken a couple of times on a podcast like this. I don’t know if we’ve done the Tavern one before.

But yeah, as a quick introduction, I started using WordPress in 2009, and I started building with WooCommerce in 2011. And from that time I worked with customers and specifically like building websites for customers who needed websites.

And in that time I built up a collection of plugins, which I sold on a premium basis, which eventually turned into IconicWP, which was a WooCommerce plugin shop with 14 or 15 premium plugins. Sold that, well, that was acquired in 2021 by Liquid Web, Stellar. And I stayed there for a couple of years, carried on working. My whole team came over with the acquisition. We carried on just working as we were really, but under this kind of bigger brand of products and WordPress software, which was quite nice. It was nice to kind of get that experience from companies selling products like we were, but they were at a much bigger scale than we were at the time. That was a nice experience.

And then, yeah, towards the end of that, I reached out to Paul, who was the CEO, at the time, of WooCommerce, and just kind of said, I feel like I could have a good impact on WooCommerce itself, is there anything there for me? And I was kind of open to whatever that might look like. There was no job description that I applied for. I just kind of reached out and said, this is what I want to do, this is what, I like doing, this is what I’m good at. And then, yeah, here we are just over a year since I joined.

I joined as a product manager. And like you say, now I’m a Core Product Manager, which is a new role within WooCommerce. So a Product Manager would be, and for context, there’s eight or nine Product Managers within WooCommerce. When I joined, we each kind of had an area of focus. So my area was order management. So any project or improvement or just, my day to day would be looking at order management and, how can we make this better? It kind of shifted outside of that a bit as well into other areas. But each Product Manager has that kind of role where they’re focused on one kind of key area of WooCommerce.

But there was never really any product manager that had an overall vision of the whole product. And that’s what the Core Product Manager role is. So I’m less focused on one specific area, and more focused on just, how can we make the whole thing better? And part of that role is kind of connecting the dots a bit. One team’s working on this, another team’s working on that, how do they overlap? But also connecting the community dots to the stuff that we actually put out there. So, what are people asking for? What are the common kind of requests that people have, or the complaints that people have? Or even the positives that people have and, how can we make those things better?

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: So is there just one of you? So there’s one Core Product Lead. There’s not multiple of those.

[00:06:18] James Kemp: Correct.

[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that’s really interesting. So you’ve got like the 10,000 mile high view of the entire project. And so you are kind of open to suggestions, innovations, improvements, tweaks, that all comes under the purview of your job.

[00:06:32] James Kemp: Correct, yeah. There’s different areas. There’s what we call product, which is kind of the user facing experience. And by user I mean merchant, and probably customer as well, so the visual aspects of the product that people interact with. And then there’s the platform side of things, which are backend architecture and performance and all those kinds of things.

So I’m primarily focused on the front end aspect, not front end but, you know, the core experience we call it. I am actually focused a lot on the platform side of things at the moment as well, because the person who usually does that is on sabbatical, so I’m kind of helping out a bit there. And it’s quite nice to have, you know, that understanding as well, for approaching core experience type things. And it also encompasses the WooCommerce app and many of our premium extensions, many of our marketplace extensions, premium or free.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing that if you ask anybody the question, is their inbox pretty full? You know, the to-do list that you have is pretty full, everybody would probably say, yeah, I’ve got plenty on my plate. But it sounds as if you may well have a lot on your plate.

Now, I don’t know if there’s a lot that you’ve got to deal with in there, and you’ve got a lot of ideas, and innovations that you’d like to push forward. But is it fair to say that there’s a ton of innovation still to be done inside of WooCommerce?

[00:07:46] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. It’s something that I’m still trying to figure out. Like, how do you stay on top of all of these things and, where is my input within this most valuable? Because I’m still working alongside all the other product managers.

And actually that’s been really nice to kind of connect with a product manager that’s working on something specific, and work with them to make that the best it can be for WooCommerce.

But yeah, I’m still trying to figure out how to like organise all of these things so they’re not just in my head, but they’re out there in a manageable way.

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: How do you get intelligence about what needs to be done? I mean, obviously there’s the team within Automattic that you deal directly with, I would’ve thought of, but do you keep your door of your office kind of half open a little bit? Are you prepared to listen to community suggestions?

And again, I’m not trying to get you to give out your email address or anything, but is there that element still? Do you still listen to people out in the community, users, and what have you? Do they come directly to you, or is there some kind of filtration process which people have to go through in order to get ideas in your head?

[00:08:46] James Kemp: There’s many ways. Yeah, I think one of the things that I love most is talking to the people that actually use it. And I do that primarily on X or Twitter. I talk to a lot of people over there.

The downside to that is the majority of them are agencies and developers. It’s not a downside, the downside being that I don’t get that kind of open communication necessarily with merchants directly. So if I want to talk to a merchant that’s more of a filtered, as you say, it’s an intentional, you know, I have to reach out to a merchant and schedule a call and all that kind of stuff. There is the occasional merchant on X, but it’s not their stomping ground.

So yeah, I’m also in the Slack, the WooCommerce community Slack. Some of what I’ve implemented is these kind of external channels within our own Slack. So one example of that is a project we’re working on for fulfillment statuses, where I got Becca from Kestrel WP and Patrick Garman from Minesize into one of our internal Slack rooms to discuss and kind of help shape this project. So they’re directly involved in that way in stuff that we’re working on.

And I think something that we really want to do is be really transparent with like, this is what we’re working on. You may well have seen over the course of the last year or so that that has been the case, via GitHub discussions, via the Developer Blog, via Slack, the community Slack. But yeah, I love getting feedback from people on Twitter. I still don’t know what to call it, Twitter or X.

[00:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: I often wonder if the sort of inside baseball of WordPress is a little bit hard to penetrate, because I’m imagining there’s a lot of people who use WordPress that in a million years have never opened up the WordPress Slack, GitHub is not a thing for them. And I’ve always wondered how people such as yourself, you know, in senior positions get that information. How does it get to you? And X, Bluesky, whatever the alternative is, that’s a really interesting way of kind of completely circumventing that process. I will make sure that your profile, your X profile is linked in here and then people can reach out on that basis. Yeah, that’s great. Thank you.

Let’s just paint the picture of Woo, and how big it is because we keep hearing the statistic. The one that everybody talks about is this 43%, which is the WordPress statistic. And I never quite know how to manage that in my head, what that exactly means. But a fairly sizable number is also the e-commerce side, the WooCommerce side of WordPress.

Where are we at in terms of the web, and in terms of WordPress, how much of WordPress is WooCommerce, and how much of the internet is Woo? And every time I hear this number, it changes a little bit. But every time I hear it, it’s still breathtakingly large.

[00:11:24] James Kemp: Yeah, that’s an interesting one actually. In terms of how much of WordPress is Woo, I’m not sure on that. I think we could probably calculate that based on the figures I do have, which is how much of e-commerce is WooCommerce, and that is 37%.

[00:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: 37%. Okay, so whatever the percentage is, be it the top million websites or the top 10,000 websites, whatever that metric is, let’s assume that that’s solid and safe. 37% is done on a WooCommerce platform. That is breathtaking.

[00:11:56] James Kemp: Which is a huge amount, for the listeners, and for you if you want to check it out later. If you go to woocommerce.com/newsroom, we update these numbers every month. We have some numbers there, like there’s 3.6 million live installations. 37% of e-commerce sites are powered by WooCommerce. There’s 1,000 plus official marketplace extensions. That’s actually going to grow, I think substantially this year.

And then, yeah, some other stats that are listed there, which I think are useful to keep an eye on. And there’s, I believe the team that updates those numbers kind of, they take the data primarily from Store Leads, which is a data gathering outfit. And I think they kind of dial them back a bit, rather than, you know, inflating them, I think they actually go the other way.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the trend of that, so the 37%, I’m not looking at that chart at the moment, but is your impression that, has it stagnated, has it gone up broadly in the last, let’s say five years, something like that? Is WooCommerce basically growing, stagnating, declining?

[00:12:54] James Kemp: Over the five year, I would expect it’s gone up. There’s no graph to look at. There probably is somewhere, but I don’t have it in front of me now. But I do know that this was updated this week, I believe. And it was updated from 35% to 37. So there’s definite growth there. And I would expect, just the nature of e-commerce in general, that that number’s grown over the course.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: When you say that, what’s the thing in your head which is promoting you to say the nature of e-commerce? Because I really don’t follow e-commerce, but I have this impression that during the lockdown period, 2019 and on, it felt like everybody, for very credible reasons, had to move whatever they were selling to an online format. So I imagine there was a bump there.

But also it feels like the world is now inundated with pocket size technology, which means that I can buy anything 24/7, no matter where I am. And so it feels like high streets in the UK, the shutters are going up. Bricks and mortar shops seem to be closing. Certainly where I live, that is a broad trend. It’s not particularly rapid, but it’s definitely a trend.

And I’m imagining that the confluence of mobile technology, ubiquity of internet connection, computers available all over the place, certainly in the country where you and I both live. It feels like this inexorable rise, this trend towards purchasing things at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, sitting on a sofa, a bus, wherever you might be. It does feel like that’s the way the world is moving. Are those kind of the intuitions that you have when you say WooCommerce is rising for obvious reasons?

[00:14:23] James Kemp: Yeah, exactly. I think just the nature of the internet and the online world has kind of exponentially grown since its inception, right? And I would expect that e-commerce will grow with it.

I think one of the greatest things about the internet is that you can buy online. I should look into the history actually, but I can’t imagine what the thought process was back when the internet was invented. Did they imagine that e-commerce would be a thing? That people would buy stuff, even from the other side of the world, and have it shipped out to them in a matter of days or weeks.

And I just think as technology evolves, and we’ve seen the boom in AI, and just the boom in like generational development on computers, and coding and all of that is advancing, and I think e-commerce will follow suit as well.

[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like there’s no place but an upward trend for e-commerce. Now, whether or not WooCommerce fits into that landscape perfectly in the next decade, we’ll see. But it feels like I, and I can really only rely on myself, I feel like I’m going to buy more things online in the decade to come than I am this year. It feels like each and every year, my desire to get on my bike and go into the town centre dwindles, and I’m far more likely to buy things online.

And now the merchants have pivoted their offerings so that, you know, if you don’t like it, you can freely return it and things like that. So even the impediments that were there have suddenly changed, and it’s just remarkable.

And also the mere fact, just capture in your head for a moment, the fact that you can get all of this for no money down. The WooCommerce platform, and I know, in order to get the best out of it, you will definitely want marketplace things, third party, but other places as well. But the thing is free. It’s completely free. And I find that utterly remarkable. I just think that’s breathtaking in all honesty, that that’s available.

[00:16:15] James Kemp: Yeah, I think it’s one of the key selling points about WooCommerce is that you can get started for free, as close to free as possible, when you account for hosting and transactional fees that naturally come with any platform.

But on top of that, with WooCommerce specifically, and with the age of AI now, you could make WooCommerce do what you want it to do for free. And every site could be tailored to specific needs, and like a specific execution of functionality without too much technical knowledge, which I think is really interesting.

And you’ve seen people are building apps, and I’ve built a few as well, specifically for needs that they want to solve. I saw one yesterday, I think it was Maddie on, Twitter, I can link to it. She built an app to automatically put an emoji over faces in photos. I don’t know if you’ve seen, when parents share photos of other people’s children and that kind of thing, they typically put an emoji over the face. She said she was getting annoyed at having to do that with every photo. But we’re in that era now where you can kind of roll these things with no technical knowledge, whether the output is good, I think is questionable, but it’s pretty good.

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Does the advent of AI, and what you’re suggesting, you can add your third party stuff, if you like, for want of a better word, to WooCommerce with the assistance of AI. Does that undermine the longevity of the free, open source WooCommerce project? Because I imagine that there’s a lot of underpinnings there, you know, the marketplace that WooCommerce, as I imagine those plugins that are sold to add different functionality and what have you, that must in some way pay for the freeness of it all.

Does AI, does that concern you? You know, that if we erode the need to purchase third party software in order to get out what you desire, yeah, does that erode the possibility of WooCommerce being free in the future?

[00:18:05] James Kemp: I don’t think so. I think it assists. I think it depends what you’re making. Like, I wouldn’t want to build out a full subscriptions platform just using an AI prompt. And maybe that will become more advanced in the future. I think as someone running a business, you don’t want to be dealing with this code yourself, maintaining it, making sure it stays up to date. And I think that’s the case for, or that has been the case since e-commerce software existed. There used to be a trend of rolling your own e-commerce solutions, and I think that’s less likely to happen these days.

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a good point. If you think about just a regular WordPress website, if it’s just a brochure site with no e-commerce attached, go with the AI, you know, it seems like there’s loads of scope there. But obviously if you’ve got the compliance, and the financial obligation, and all of the law that underpins an e-commerce shop, I imagine there are impediments in people’s heads which will say, wait, did an AI make that? Are we really going to trust that? So maybe it inoculates itself given the nature of the websites which are in question.

Okay, just moving on, tell us a little bit about the kind of people that are using WooCommerce. Now, I know this is a very, very broad question, but in my head, for some reason I have it, that a significant amount of people that are using WooCommerce will be small stores. But I’m guessing also maybe WooCommerce really does dig deep into the enterprise as well. Does it run the gamut of everything? Or is there a kind of focus for you, and teams within Automattic because there’s a certain type of clientele which largely consume WooCommerce?

[00:19:37] James Kemp: Yeah, it does kind of span everything. So people just starting out either want low cost, in which case WooCommerce is an obvious choice. You can start setting things up, especially for brand new e-commerce, whereas they’re just selling single products. There’s nothing too technical there that would require an expense of some kind. So it’s super easy to spin up a WooCommerce site and test it out pretty much free.

So yeah, we have that audience. It’s not necessarily our focus, our focus is primarily the higher revenue, higher traffic e-commerce stores, because that’s the aspiration for anyone selling, right? They want to become successful, they want that to be their business, is e-commerce. And those are the users that we’re focused on. And then naturally anything we do for them is going to trickle down to benefit the people who are just starting out with the platform.

So it does span a wide range of users, but we do focus in on the higher revenue and high product volume, high traffic, those kind of things. Or at least that’s what we’re focusing on this year. That target evolves over time. But that’s been our focus for most of my time since I’ve been here. So it’s nice to have that vision of who’s using it and what we can do to make the platform as good as possible for them.

[00:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: We have this expression in the UK, Jack of all trades, master of none. I don’t know how that works outside of the boundaries of the UK, but it basically means if you try to be everything to everybody, you sort of succeed at nothing. It’s something akin to that basically.

And I’m wondering if there are bits of WooCommerce which you have to manage those sort of trade offs. Like, okay, if we build this thing, which feels like it’s a real enterprisey thing, how is that going to work with our more modest users, let’s say?

Or if we really focus on the more modest users, how are the enterprise going to feel like that? And it not being a niche, and it being the full spectrum of sites out there, yeah, at times that must be actually quite frustrating, I would’ve thought.

[00:21:29] James Kemp: It’s a challenge, yeah. It’s something that we’re working on at the moment, is making the base of WooCommerce have the majority of features for the majority of users, the features that you’d expect in an e-commerce platform, which I’ve touched on in other podcasts if you want to go and find them.

But it’s a process called More in Core, which is the kind of code name for it. Where we’re just trying to build out the base product to have the majority of things that merchants and builders need, without needing to go and find all these plugins and custom development and things like that.

But the challenge is which features. The features that people need are going to change depending on what type of store they’re running. So I’ve seen a lot of people want subscriptions in Core. And then I’ve also seen the complete opposite where people don’t want subscriptions in Core because they see it as bloat. There’s a challenge there for sure, to figure out what that kind of sweet spot is without being bloated, but also without nickel and dimming, and making the average number of plugins required too high or too low.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve often thought that if I worked at Microsoft on Windows, the software, the OS, it would be my constant annoyance that I had to think about every possible permutation of hardware that could ever be used. Whereas if I worked for Apple and was working on the Mac OS project, it’d be like, there’s just this one set of hardware, it’s just so much more straightforward, we build it.

And I imagine that commercial rivals, things like Shopify, and we can get into that in a moment, probably have it easier in that sense because there isn’t this, well, I know that they have an ecosystem of sort of third party apps, I believe they’re called. But there isn’t this whole backwards compatibility thing that 5,000 different plugins that bind into WooCommerce and what have you. And so I guess you’ve always got to be taking real careful steps when you develop a new feature or tweak anything, which maybe the other platforms don’t have to think about in quite the same way.

[00:23:16] James Kemp: Yeah, I actually posted about that exact thing on X or Twitter earlier. I’m just going to call it X. I want to call it Twitter, but I’m going to call it X. It’s a challenge because, and this touches on the 37% number, like any update we roll out is affecting over a third of all e-commerce stores online, which is a crazy number.

It has to be backwards compatible, it has to be rolled out in a way that isn’t going to break things. There’s a lot more consideration that needs to happen because of the multitude of environments that could exist. There could be bad hosting, there could be good hosting. There could be low performance, high performance, number of products, different plugins, different themes.

For a platform like ours, that is one of the greatest challenges, but also one of the greatest strengths as well, because of how flexible it is. In a platform like Shopify, like you say, they have an app marketplace, but it’s a lot more restricted. There’s only really a handful of ways to do something. Whereas with WooCommerce, you’ve kind of got full control because you are hosting it yourself. You can pretty much do anything. Which, like I say, is a challenge, but also a strength.

It requires navigation, and I touched on this in a, I do a monthly, Inside wooCommerce podcast. The last one that went out was with Julia, who is the lead for our release process. And it’s worth a listen, because it’s quite interesting to hear, now, how we roll out releases and how we’re able to test and watch for signals for issues that might arise. And be able to roll it back, fix that, and then roll out the updates. There’s quite a nice process there now, which we’ll obviously refine as time goes on, but yeah, it’s a challenge.

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: More recently, and we don’t need to get into the story behind it, but there is a story behind it. But the Automatticians, so the people that work for Automattic, have in some cases been repurposed. So their work that they’ve been doing for many years in one direction has now been pivoted. And I think it’s probably fair to say that focusing on things which generate revenue is a crucial part of the decision behind that.

I’m wondering if that’s had an impact. So this whole thing is not really that old, it’s maybe only five, six weeks old, something like that, so maybe it hasn’t yet. But I’m wondering if it’s had actually a positive impact on the teams that you work with, or maybe there’s steady away, no change.

[00:25:38] James Kemp: I would say there’s no change actually. I mean, WooCommerce has always been, we’re building a free product, but we are also a business, and we’ve always been a business. We wouldn’t be able to afford to put out a product and not have any money coming in to continue developing it. There’s always been a business aspect to WooCommerce.

But yeah, the teams that have kind of moved off of the open source contributions that they were making previously, I haven’t seen any of them come over to WooCommerce. And maybe they have, if they come in as engineers, then I probably wouldn’t see that anyway. But yeah, in my day to day, I haven’t seen an impact. But, you know, Automattic has multiple products and experiments and things that exist outside of WooCommerce, and I honestly don’t dig into them too much. I’m very focused on the WooCommerce side of things.

[00:26:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve recently, I say you, WooCommerce recently had an entire upending of the branding. If you don’t follow it very closely, it may be that you haven’t seen this story, but maybe it was not that long ago in the last week or so. It feels like the message dropped that a lot of the branding has been redone, and I often look at rebranding and I think why all that effort?

What was really the point of that? What was the need to upend everything, and make people have to see something new? And I’m just wondering if you know what the point of that was? I mean, it’s nice. It looks lovely. Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly love it. But I’m curious as to what the reasoning was. Did it feel stale previously? What was going on there? Do you know?

[00:27:06] James Kemp: All of the above, yeah. So I’ve known about the branding, in its current form of, what it’s gonna be like since maybe October last year. And it’s been really interesting to watch. If you compare what we had previously against this, it’s clear like why it had to happen. The branding that we had previously was the same branding that WooCommerce had when it was initially formed via WooThemes. If you compare it, it just looks out of date. The colors are flat and, not very inspiring. And the new branding now allows us to be a bit more modern, I think. It’s modernized the brand.

But it also opens us up to be able to go out and do more effective marketing and acquisition that we haven’t done prior. Branding isn’t just changing the logo and updating some colors. There’s a whole array of assets that come with it, and like a story behind the assets and what we’re trying to put out there into the world. Which we didn’t have before, we just had a logo and some colors.

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: There’s this sort of nod to a shopping cart in the W of Woo, which is actually quite clever, I think. And you’re right, it does just smack of more modern.

Being a complete non-designer, I can never summon up the vocabulary to express why I think something looks good. But saw the new branding, and I saw the video that was associated with that, and I did think, yeah, that’s great. That looks really great, but I can’t for the life of me tell you why it looks great.

But interestingly though, was there a market push, not just because it was stale, and let’s move this conversation into the rise of the SaaS. Because over the last period, the Wixs, the Squarespaces, the Shopify and all of these other things, I’m sure there’s many more. They’ve brought to the market a fairly affordable alternative. There’s nothing free, as far as I’m aware, but it’s a fairly low monthly cost. And I imagine over time these companies are eating up some of the new people, maybe even taking people from WooCommerce. I imagine it’s a bit of ebb and flow and what have you.

But was it that, were they becoming more professional, more visible in the world? Super Bowl ads and all that kind of thing. Was there some of that in the rebranding as well?

[00:29:14] James Kemp: Yeah, I imagine so. I think if you look at our branding previously, I don’t think it was necessarily thought out as a brand as such. I think it evolved over time. Whereas this was, the rebrand was much more focused, who are we trying to connect with here? What type of customer are we trying to pull in? And how can we reach them? What do they want to see? And I don’t think we had that before.

And yeah, definitely it helps us compete with these SaaS solutions that are quite easy to pitch. You know, influencer can pitch this stuff, because they have cool branding and, it’s hard to say really.

Like I think you could say about any product, like if Apple had a really badly designed, like 3D Apple from the nineties as their logo. In this modern era of what you expect from a brand, and a brand that’s powering 37% of all e-commerce or, I don’t what Apple’s market share on mobile devices is, but I imagine it’s pretty high.

It’s just something that needs to be considered, and there needs to be a thought process behind why we look like we do, and who we want to attract with that. And we didn’t have that before with the previous speech bubble thing.

[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: I remember listening to, I believe it was Bill Gates, this is many years ago, and Bill Gates was asked a question by an interviewer and it was, what keeps you awake at night, in terms of the longevity of Microsoft? And he said three things. Google, Google and Google. And basically he’s terrified of Google.

I’m gonna pitch the same sort of question to you. Of the SaaS things out there, are there any bits out there which make the Woo team think, oh gosh, that’s interesting. We need to copy that?

Does the sort of gouging out of the pricing, their very affordable pricing, those kind of things. How do you cope with that? How do you compete with that, with something which is basically free? I don’t know if that keeps you awake at night.

[00:31:06] James Kemp: Obviously like any business has its competitors. There’s nothing that’s come up that we’ve been like, oh, we’ve got to copy that and we’ve got to get that in. It’s more like comparatively are we offering an equal playing field to a potential customer?

And this ties back into the More in Core stuff that I was talking about. Is there stuff that not just Shopify, but other platforms have in their core offering, and this may be like low priced or free plans, or there’s other self-hosted versions as well that exist. They are comparatively free. Are we offering the same functionality? Do we have those essential features available? Yeah, we do, but do we charge for them? Probably, if there’s stuff that’s missing, there’s probably a premium extension for it. Or there’s a free extension for it, but it requires the merchant to go out and find it, rather than like us presenting it to them as a solution when they need it contextually.

Yeah, things like that are definitely considerations. We need to be innovating, and we need to be keeping up as well. That could be said about any platform versus another platform that there’s always, again, going back to Apple, Apple and Samsung have this kind of to and fro.

So yeah, it’s a consideration for sure. The target audience of someone going onto Shopify versus someone going onto WooCommerce is slightly different. The kind of core things that they are looking for are what we need to be offering.

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s interesting because if I was a WooCommerce user, which as I explained I’m not, that would be the sentence I needed to hear, I think. The people working in the offices and the places where you are working is, okay, we are keeping an eye on what the competition are doing. And if something is a moving, shaking feature, which is upsetting the industry and everybody wants it, then you’ve at least got your beedy on it.

[00:32:55] James Kemp: That’s one part of it as well. What are the competitors doing, but also what are our marketplace sales saying? What are the trends saying in e-commerce, even TikTok, Amazon, like all those kind of things that aren’t directly related to what we do, that’s accounted for as well.

And also what are the customers saying? And we touched on it earlier, but we have a whole, what we call the feedback river, which is just a big database of feedback from everywhere. From within the plugin itself. From support. From reviews and from wordpress.org, and like all of these places combined into one database. So yeah, I think you have to keep an eye on all of it. And the challenge is figuring out is this essential? What percentage of users actually want this specific thing?

And actually that’s always been a challenge, like even working on much smaller scale products at Iconic, it was always hard if a customer reaches out and says, oh, I wish it did this, it was hard to say no to that, because you are excited that someone’s using it, and they want to adapt it to their own use case. But you have to take into account, is the effort to implement this going to be valuable for everyone? Is this the priority for the majority, or is it just going satisfy this one person? You have to do that at scale now, or I have to do that at scale.

[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: I know that time is short, so I’m just going to pivot just for one final question before we leave and it’s, it really has nothing to do with WooCommerce specifically, although it may? And that is, I’m just curious if you know of any interesting things which are happening around the periphery of e-commerce that you personally are finding interesting and engaging. Something that maybe our general audience won’t have come across, because they’re not deep in the weeds of it.

That could be inside WordPress. I dunno, the Interactivity API, or it could be something the browsers are thinking about doing, or third party vendors who’ve got some curious technology that we might not have heard of.

So, really just any interesting thing that James has spotted lately that you think we might want to look at?

[00:34:54] James Kemp: Yeah, I dunno whether I have anything that nobody’s ever heard of.

[00:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fine.

[00:34:58] James Kemp: There’s a definite rise in platforms offering their own e-commerce. So, TikTok, commerce and all that kind of stuff is growing. And you touched on, something before we started the call actually, which kind of relates to that, the ability to see something on a device and just purchase it there and then. And within TikTok you get that experience. Within a typical e-commerce platform, you have a flow that you go through. You’ve got the cart, and then the checkout. You’ve got to populate details. So yeah, I think there’s gonna be a, an evolution into how quickly can I buy something. And that’s what the merchants want. Whether it’s good for the population and spending habits, I’m not entirely sure.

I personally love the experience on, like Amazon, for example, and I don’t know how long they’ve had it, it’s been there a while now. But on product pages, you don’t need to go through the cart process, you can just click buy now. Although that has tripped me up a couple of times.

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, me too.

[00:35:54] James Kemp: You press buy now, and it goes on some card that you never use.

So yeah, I think that is a definite kind of trend, that I’ve seen a lot of. And I think we touched on something earlier as well, which I haven’t seen much in the way of solutions to it. But one of the key things about people buying from a brick and mortar is that they can try on the product and they can physically see the color of a product, and touch the product. Which is possible. You can order now and it’s getting a lot easier to return stuff. But can you do that with a sofa, for example? So, I expect that we’ll see some innovations around that.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Sort of augmented solution, where you can drop room and, yeah, size it up, and things like that.

[00:36:38] James Kemp: Yeah. I don’t know what that looks like.

[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: No, and it will be sort of a strange simulation of reality, but probably enough to get a proportion of the people over the wire, I would’ve thought.

[00:36:48] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. There’s been AR stuff for a while now, right?

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and things like, you want to put a logo on a t-shirt, here’s what that look like on the t-shirt. Those kind of things.

I think for me, one of the most, most interesting things is what the mobile wallets have done to my capacity to spend. I just that is remarkable. Especially out in the real world where you take the Tube in London, the underground, and you just don’t do anything anymore. You just walk by a thing, and your phone’s in your pocket, and it registers it, and you walk out and at the end of the day you get a bill, and so these kind of seamless solutions.

[00:37:21] James Kemp: I don’t feel like you have that so much on a computer though.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: No, but I wonder if that’s coming with, I don’t know, biometrics. Like purchase this, put your finger print in, your done.

[00:37:33] James Kemp: I think that would be nice. I still populate, I use 1Password, so it does it for me, but I still populate the card.

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: An intermediary, a trusted intermediary getting in the way. Yeah, it’s interesting. Again, I wonder if those kind of things might be handled natively by browsers, and things like that.

Anyway, we’re sort of staring into the future, and we’ve no idea. But I know that you’ve got to go in about 30 seconds time, so I will just round it off by saying James Kemp, fascinating chat about all things WooCommerce. I appreciate it, and all the hard work you and your team are doing to democratize e-commerce. Is there anything you want to add just before we round it off? Maybe a Twitter handle or something like that?

[00:38:08] James Kemp: I’m jamesckemp on most things. C, the letter C. Yeah. The only thing I’ll add is just, if you have questions, ideas, theories, my dms are open there, so I’m happy to hear it.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much, James Kemp. Been a pleasure chatting to you today. Really appreciate it.

[00:38:25] James Kemp: Thank you very much.

On the podcast today we have James Kemp.

James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce. After working with WooCommerce running a plugin shop for 10 years, he joined the team at the end of 2023 to help shape the future of e-commerce.

James talks about his journey with WordPress and WooCommerce and explains his role at Automattic, where he’s tasked with connecting the community’s feedback to the developments in WooCommerce, ensuring that the Woo platform continually evolves and improves.

He discusses the innovations within WooCommerce, the challenges of balancing the needs of small and large-scale stores, and how the team navigates an environment filled with both competitors and opportunities.

He gets into the positive impact of WooCommerce’s recent rebranding, and how the system positions itself amidst the ever-growing competition from SaaS platforms like Shopify. James shares his insights into the trends shaping e-commerce, like the seamless integration of newer technologies and consumer buying habits.

If you are keen to understand the breadth of WooCommerce’s impact on e-commerce, or are curious about the direction of online shopping, this episode is for you.

Useful links

WooCommerce

IconicWP

Kestrel WP

Patrick Garmen from Mindsize

Woo Newsroom

Store Leads

Details about ‘More in Core’

Inside Woo podcast

James on X