Marketing WooCommerce as a Community: Our Real Strengths

Katie Keith:
Welcome to do the Woo, the podcast where we talk about all things WooCommerce. I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2.

James Kemp:
And I’m James Kemp. I’m the core product manager for WooCommerce. And today we’re going to be talking about how we can all market woocommerce as a community, focusing on what our real strengths are. And also a bit of an insider insight into how the Woo marketing team works.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, well, I believe that as a community, we’re not marketing WooCommerce as well as we could be. And I’m not talking Woo. I’m talking about all of us, everybody watching this who works with WooCommerce in any way. So this episode is about how we can all work together to do that better. Tim, thank you so much for coming on. Could you give us a bit of an overview of your work and what you do at Woo?

Tamara Niesen:
Absolutely. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. This is definitely a conversation I’m excited to have, so thanks for the invite. I lead marketing and go to market for Woo. And that means that my team works across brand, product marketing, developer advocacy, demand gen, partnerships, events, sales enablement. Very big, broad scope, as we like to say in marketing. It’s very much a symphony with folks playing different instruments to bring beautiful music together in order to help merchants help our builders, our agencies, our community, the developers and our partners understand not only why Woo is the right choice, but but when it’s the right choice and how to be successful with it. But if I can deviate from an intro for a second, I also would love to express some gratitude here. I believe strongly since joining here that I’ve learned Woo very much exists because of the community. Agencies, plugin developers, educators, contributors, our hosts, our payment and our tech partners and our merchants have all helped Woo become what it is today. I’ll say this right now, like official Woo marketing, which I’ll dub myself as. I don’t see that as replacing a community voice. I see it as investing back into the flywheel. So I wanted to say that I thought it was an important note to make, so thank you.

Katie Keith:
Absolutely.

James Kemp:
That’s great. Yeah, definitely a good point to make. So, while we’re going through our conversation with Tamara, feel free to ask your questions. We will try and answer any questions that get asked. And. And I think you should be able to ask wherever you are watching this.

Katie Keith:
Yep. And before we get into the topic, since we’re still a relatively new podcast, I think we’ve been going five months now please subscribe if you don’t already. Again, you can do that wherever you’re watching this. On YouTube, we do the Woo podcast, do the Woo on X. And the website is dothew.com where it’s got all the different places that you scroll down and subscribe. So please do that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, so let’s, let’s dive in. I think Tamara, first of all, it would be interesting to know sort of how the Woo team operates as a marketing function and what role you think the wider community should play in the marketing of WooCommerce.

Tamara Niesen:
Great question. And the reason I was excited to have this conversation was to talk exactly about this, because I think I like to think about it as less of a hard line and more of a shared system. Official Woo, as I said, I will refer to myself as, for the purposes of this conversation, has a responsibility to create clarity. I believe that we need to be crisp about who Woo is for, where we win, what we’re investing in, and what proof exists behind those claims that we make. We need to make the message easier for our partners, our agencies and developers so that they can reuse that or amplify it without having to reinvent it from scratch. But the reality is the community has a very different type of credibility. When an agency or a developer says we choose Woo for this merchant because they needed B2B pricing or editorial content, or three different payment providers, whatever it might be. When they say that or when you say that, it lands very differently than when Woo says it or when I say it as the company ambassador. Um, and then when a plugin company shows how their product extends a strong platform, I believe that helps the whole ecosystem. And when the community helps merchants understand, for example, total cost of ownership in language and, you know, proof points, they can understand that also counts as marketing. So I think that if I were to, you know, really sum this up, I, I believe that we should provide the backbone, the positioning, the proof, the merchant stories, partner programs, opportunities for co marketing, participating in events and enablement. And the community can bring those lived examples, the builds, the migrations and the hard won lessons, the nuance that we can’t. And we can also call out even agencies explicitly here. Because the reality is, what I’ve learned over my course or career in commerce, if you will, is that merchants don’t choose platforms in isolation. Always. You know, they’re maybe getting word of mouth recommendations from their peers, but perhaps they’re also working with an agency or a freelancer, a tech partner, and they help shape that decision. And so our entire ecosystem of marketing across automatic, not just Woo, but automatic for agencies, our partner events, our co marketing, all of this really matter so much. I would also say that like, one thing that’s really important that I want to get across is that the Woo ecosystem has always worked in my opinion because people participate in it. And that’s a really important difference for Open Source and WooCommerce because you can build extensions, you can build the stores and teach and consult and contribute. And that’s why I believe that the community has been vibrant for so long and our marketing work should help that economy grow, not try and centralize all of the story inside of Woo.

James Kemp:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think it’s quite a challenge, a challenging thing to market.

Sponsor Announcer:
Right.

James Kemp:
Because even like down to what are you marketing. So with the example of like closed platforms, it’s quite straightforward. You, you market to the website, people sign up, create an account and they’re in. And I think with WooCommerce we have a much more challenging approach to marketing because we, we can talk about the platform and everything that it can do for you as, as an agency, as a builder, as a merchant. But it’s hard in my opinion, and maybe you have some thoughts on this, to market it directly to merchants because there’s no clear entry point for them. Like they have to understand WordPress, they have to understand hosting and there’s like, there’s steps that they have to go through which are essentially barriers to get set up with WooCommerce, which, which if they’re not aware of the flexibility and the benefits of, you know, running their store on WooCommerce, might put them off. So I’m interested on your thoughts on that specifically. I guess I feel like the, the developer and builders understand WooCommerce and the WordPress ecosystem, but maybe, you know, new merchants don’t understand that and, and maybe don’t want to.

Tamara Niesen:
Yeah, and it is a very difficult task at hand. And I think in the last two years we’ve done a better job of getting out into the market and explaining what WooCommerce is. But that hasn’t been the easiest. We have perception challenges in the market. Many folks think that they do know us, that we’re for, you know, starting and you know, entrepreneurs. But reality is we have a lot of very high volume merchants on the platform as well. But the tricky part is how do you get started? And so I think you mentioned this, James. There is friction in that journey and so we need to reduce and remove those barriers as Much as we can. And so when you, you know, you learn about Woo, we want to bring you to a centralized place where we can, you know, educate you on where you can go next. If you want to get started on Woo, here’s the best place to go. Here are some hosting options, here are some merchants that look like you. Here, you know, here’s our marketplace where you can access all of those extensions and ways to build your store that works for you. And if that’s not the path that you want to take, we call that, you know, a little bit of a self serve or do it yourself path. Perhaps you want to work with a developer and agency and it’s our job to serve that up as well and make sure that if that’s the option you’re looking for, here’s the path to do that, or if you’re looking to, you know, build this custom platform and stitch together, integrate with your tech stack, then we do have a path where you can, you know, speak with our happiness engineers or our sales folks to help them guide or help guide you through this process. Because I won’t say it’s necessarily complex, but there’s optionality and I think that’s part of the beauty of it. And teaching folks the best path for them is part of our job.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. What do we know about who is the target market in terms of roughly what proportion? You may have no idea. I don’t know. Is end users choosing their own store merchants and people that are building it on behalf of clients? Because that’s a very different message, isn’t it? The people that are going to recommend it many times as part of their work and have an instrumental influence on whether the clients they work with are going to use Woo or whatever else they recommend versus people choosing their own website who may not know what things like hosting are.

Tamara Niesen:
I don’t know the exact splits, but I can share that. When you look at the different segmentation within the merchant base, we do have confidence that, you know, more complex builds or those who are generating more gross merchandise volume or GMV or revenue typically are leaning more towards working with developer agencies, creative agencies to build their stores, especially as they become more custom, bespoke or maybe they have in house developers as well, but that’s typically where that build starts. And then for the self serve, do it yourself, that’s more on the long tail and the higher volume of merchants we have on the platform. I realize I’m using the word volume interchangeably here, but I would say that they are more on their own learning how to build this themselves. But then if you also come through the woo front door, we can direct you to more of a managed hosting product that is easier to get at, get set up. So there is really something for everyone. But we do have to be crystal clear on what that is and help them make that decision, you know, without getting too overwhelmed.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think I have two follow ups on that. One is regarding the data we have. So during the onboarding there’s a question that kind of hints at are you a merchant or are you a developer? It’s phrased along the lines of like I’m, I think the question, I don’t know if it’s a question, but it’s like I’m setting this store up for myself or like I’m already running a store or I’m setting this store up for someone else. So it’s not directly asking what type of user you are, but it kind of hints at it. And, and I think, I think we could be more direct to be honest, because I’m aware that probably most agencies and builders configuring websites for people aren’t going through the onboarding anyway.

Katie Keith:
True.

James Kemp:
So we lose that, you know, as a, as a point. The second point was regarding hosting choice. I know one of the things that we have to cater to is that WooCommerce is available to any host. We have hosts that we partner with, but any host can essentially, you know, sell a WooCommerce offering as a plan. One of the things we do on the WooCommerce marketing website is to recommend some hosts when they get to the point of okay, I’m a merchant, I want to set up WooCommerce. And I think what we don’t necessarily do is explain why they should choose any one of those hosts. And the to them that’s like, okay, you know, I don’t really know what a host is and now I have to choose from one of these four things just based on essentially brand. So I think we could do better there to kind of guide the merchant to a specific host without looking, you know, preferential to any one host. It’s also a reason why we can’t offer it, you know, as a, as only our offering.

Tamara Niesen:
I agree with you and I think we can do a better job working with our hosting partners to get that differentiated messaging in our hosting pages, have that more fluid handoff process. There’s absolutely room for making it smoother, optimizing, et cetera. There. Good feedback there too.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, it’s a tricky one. Because the very fact that you have to choose hosting is a barrier for people that don’t already know about it. In a way it’s a great thing because of that flexibility, the whole self hosted thing. But for people that are just comparing it against other e commerce platforms, they don’t understand why do I have to do this? Because they haven’t come to it from that angle. So it’s a really difficult one. And I know lots of people are saying bring back WooCommerce Express or whatever, which may or may not solve the problem.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think one, one thing we could do is to sort of have a pre onboarding step there where we’re asking the merchant about their store, you know, how many products they have, and then even map it to the most appropriate host or just present them with one randomized host every time. So every host is getting equal amount of exposure.

Tamara Niesen:
Yeah, I would challenge you on that, James. I’d like to make sure that merchants have the host that is best for their business goals, their needs at the time. Can I start with this host today and then scale with it later on? Will it meet my product SKU or variant count requirements? I think there’s more qualification that we could do there to help both the merchant and the host, you know, make mutually beneficial decisions there. But agree with the sentiment on making that easier, making it easier to understand what it means to have, you know, the option to choose a house versus it just being baked in. It’s something that I struggled to wrap my head around when I first joined WooCommerce coming from a SaaS organization. And so we need to better explain the value of that and making sure that people don’t outgrow the host that they choose in the first place.

James Kemp:
Yeah, 100%. I think one concern would be that possibly, you know, every host would say, you know, we’re the best one. Like you will definitely be able to manage like 100,000 orders a day or something. So yeah, it’s a case of validating that. But yeah, I think the sentiment is to just remove choice overload and just really like streamline that process into actually getting running.

Tamara Niesen:
Yes, I like to talk about the paradox of choice often and there’s folks that want that endless opportunity to choose what they want and then there’s folks that come in and want some recommendations, some opinion opinions coming from commerce experts like the community, like WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I often say WordPress and its flexibility is kind of the Woo’s biggest advantage and also its biggest disadvantage. Because of that, it’s Good if you want the choice, but it’s actually quite confusing if you don’t. And that’s not WooCommerce’s fault, it just is part of WordPress. But that reminds me, a minute ago you said that part of the role of the Woo marketing team is to help guide the positioning of the community and how we all present it. So I’d like to talk about some work that I’ve been doing, which was largely in leading up to my checkout summit talk a couple of months ago, where I did a lot of work. The background to this is also that we’ve been expanding into building Shopify apps for the last year and a half or so and that’s taught me a lot about kind of when WooCommerce is the best and when it’s not. And yeah, there’s actually plenty of times when it is the best. And so that’s crystallize my thinking that we all need to understand better when it’s the best and when it’s not. So that we. And also why it’s the best. So I think it’s quite important that we get our heads around this. I published a blog post. I’ll just put it on the screen briefly. I’m not going to go through the whole thing and basically I went through all the reasons that I think we should use WooCommerce over Shopify specifically, but also things that I think we say, and I hear this from the top at automatic reasons to use it that I don’t think are valid. And I hear this a lot. You can’t do anything with Shopify that’s more the community saying it. This is a Matt Mullenweg one, I’m afraid, because he is so passionate about open source that he believes that everybody else is. And so he thinks that things like open source and data ownership are absolute good. When I think that from the merchant’s perspective, actually they might be a means to an end, but you have to focus on what is the benefit to the merchant. And so I don’t think that pointing out it’s open source is actually particularly helpful. So anyway, I went through various reasons and at the end, just scrolling through, I came up with a checklist of when I think we should. I’ve lost it. Promote WooCommerce. Here we go. Five real reasons to use it. So in my opinion the reasons are when you want to build big websites that are not just E commerce, like when you want major content management, for example. Shopify is rubbish at that. I tried to create a page in Shopify this week and got totally stuck. That’s pretty basic how hidden away and unimportant it was. You’re not dependent on one company because not saying automatic is going to go anywhere, but even if it did, your store wouldn’t. Your store would still exist. Whereas Shopify disappears, your store’s dead immediately. Then you’ve got all the control side of things that we talked about and it can be cheaper. So for me, those are the Keith reasons that we need to be focusing on to use WooCommerce and not things like open source. So I’m keen to get your feedback on that and what maybe we can do about it.

Tamara Niesen:
I’ve read your blog post quite a few times actually, and I absolutely agree with the spirit of this fairly strongly. I think you saying it out loud is a useful challenge, something that we should talk about, something that we should focus on. Because if our pitch to go back to the Shopify pieces, you know, Shopify is locked down and Woo’s open source and we have community, like that’s not enough. Some of those statements are actually incomplete and some of them are not how merchants make decisions. You know this, Katie. You know they’re asking more practical questions like, can this platform support my business model? What will it cost as I grow? Will it cost from the minute I start? Can I integrate with the rest of my tech stack or can I use the payment providers I already have? Can I change hosts? If they know about hosting, that is. And more importantly, can I grow without assuming that there’s a replatforming in my future? And I think that this is where open source becomes powerful, but we do have to translate it. Open source is really the foundation, the backbone and the merchant outcome needs to be control, choice, portability or adaptability and ownership. And, and so I don’t think that we should stop talking about open source, but I would stop treating it like the final answer. It is the reason behind the answer, if you will. And I think that’s important. And you know, if we want to get into where Woo really wins, they are more practical use cases and you’ve, you’ve alluded to them and I, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I’m kind of taking some of them because they’re very valid. You know, the first one is content and commerce together. You’ve said this. Woo is built on WordPress and there’s so much value in that. And in any case, there’s trade offs in any solution that one has. But with WordPress being, you know, the CMS that’s powering majority of the Internet, that matters more now than less. I think you call this out in your blog post too. If a store is a media engine or a membership site, an event hub or a course platform, B2B resource hub, whatever it might be. Woo has this structural advantage because commerce isn’t bolted onto content, it lives with it. And that’s a really powerful piece. And then there’s, you know, you call this out too, independence from a single vendor, that’s choice and that’s, you know, creating independence for merchants so they can choose their host and their payment providers, their extensions, what they need, what they don’t need. I mean, they have the opportunity to say here’s what I need today and then I can change that as I scale over time or perhaps I want to enter a new market or I want to try a new business model or product. And that is no longer a philosophy and a nice to have. It becomes like important for business continuity. It also becomes negotiation leverage as you scale and reduces risks in many cases. You know, we talk a lot about payment flexibility and checkout flexibility. That’s critical. Payments is one of the biggest parts of commerce economics. And not pushing one merchant into a provider or penalize them for choosing a payment provider that works for their geography, their region or their operating model and then the checkout piece. And I know you call this out, Katie, but. And maybe it’s not as flexible as and customizable in areas that you’d like to see, but it is still very flexible and approachable. You know, you don’t have to pay this fee to get this checkout flexibility and customization and this becomes really important. And as merchants grow, obviously so do costs because serious commerce does have costs. But the product is free to start and it gives more control. Costs can scale with you. And it’s our developer and our agency ecosystem that also help us do this. You can understand the platform, you can understand how to shape it in a way that the merchant has needs for, whether it’s cost constraints or you know, customizability or maybe they want to build weird cool things. That’s where our community also shines. And then I’ll say one more point because I know I’m going on and on here, but I did have a chance to think about this coming into this meeting, but, or sorry to this podcast, there’s no ceiling. There are high volume businesses running on woo today. We’re proving woo at a higher complexity and that really helps everyone it creates better evidence for the ecosystem. It shows merchants they can grow without assuming a future migration, and it funds more investment back into the platform.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, you saying that, and I heard. I kept hearing a message that people kept saying at PressConf, which is that once someone gets to between 1 and 5 million in revenue a year, they leave WooCommerce and move to Shopify. And I thought, what the hell? Why would that. I don’t know where this myth has come from. There’s no reason that Woo can’t scale. People say all the time that Woo can scale to massive revenue and millions of products. And yet I discovered that there’s this myth floating around. Leaders in the WordPress community who are going to PressConf. And I didn’t understand why they were saying that. So it’s quite scary.

Tamara Niesen:
I guess I need to go to PressConf. Yeah, you got to go there. We should show up.

Katie Keith:
Absolutely.

Tamara Niesen:
Let’s tell this story together.

Katie Keith:
It came up a lot, and then people talking about Woo and its challenges and then this myth from different people. So it would be worth having representation at these places. But then I’m obviously challenging as well and saying, why would you need to move just because you’ve got high revenue?

James Kemp:
I guess it goes back to the, like, hosting question right at the beginning, because potentially WooCommerce could not scale if you choose a very, very basic host with no, like, scalability path right at the beginning. And I think that’s probably where that myth comes from. So maybe people reach the limits of whatever hosting they chose initially. Whereas I think there’s a point in time, and maybe you can do this from the beginning where you need to consider choosing a host that’s very performant, like, at scale and making that a priority. Whereas I think in these closed platforms, they do that part of it for you. So there’s. There’s some thought that needs to happen, which I guess if you’re. If you’re a Merchant who’s chosen WooCommerce with no sort of technical understanding, you won’t necessarily be aware of this. And maybe, maybe that’s on us to identify, like, what minimum performance requirements look like for a given volume of store, something that we can point at and say, you know, that this is the type of hosting offering that you need for your volume and for your number of products in your catalog, that kind of thing. And maybe this kind of leans back onto that initial getting the merchant on board to a given hosting plan, that they should choose one that aligns with whatever their future position looks like and making it easy to migrate if they need to or upgrade or switch anything like that.

Katie Keith:
They don’t necessarily know their future path through from the outset. So we’re talking about once they reach that revenue level. It appears that instead of simply changing hosts, they are rebuilding their entire website in Shopify when they could move hosts. We’ve got a comment from Elliot Richmond who says, referring to Shopify, it’s a much more holistic, seamless approach for entrepreneurs, which does make sense because it’s all tailored around e Commerce, whereas WooCommerce is on a WordPress site. So it’s going to have all this other stuff as well, which might be a good thing, but it does make the e commerce side less focused, doesn’t it? Yeah, that from the beginning. So why are they moving when they scale?

Tamara Niesen:
And I think we have a, you know, the onus is on us and you know, to help the community also share this message that we do have high volume merchants on the platform that are seeing success and we need to tell their stories, you know, more loudly, show up at industry events, put them at the front and center of our marketing efforts because that’s the proof. I mean we were at Shoptalk Europe, what was it, a week and a half ago in Barcelona and we spoke and met with many merchants and the fir one of the first questions they ask are, you know, what, what merchants do you have on the platform that resemble the challenges I’m trying to solve? You know, do they have the same scale as I do and, and we’ve got a library that we are showing but we have to do more there, we have to invest more in those merchant stories, lean on the community. The reality is, you know, the developers, the plugin builders, our agencies often know about these stories well before we do because we don’t always have a relationship with WooCommerce merchants. This is open source and so we’re often relying on the community to bring those forward. But we love that bring those merchant stories forward so we can tell them. It’s great co marketing, it helps the, you know, the community as well. It, you know, all boats rise when we can tell those stories.

James Kemp:
I think we have a question from Simon which relates to this. He asked it on X earlier. Yeah, this is one he says, I would love to see WooCommerce create a video podcast showcasing success stories and the software itself. I also Jamie, who is the head of WordPress YouTube at Automatic, reached out the other day suggesting that we could do something like this on the WooCommerce YouTube channel, which doesn’t get masses of attention right now and is probably a good place to talk about some of this stuff.

Tamara Niesen:
Yes, and I love that suggestion. I would also love to be able to do that. I also wonder if maybe I’ll put the, you know, this group on the spot. You know, could we bring some of those stories to Do the Woo as well? Could we make that, you know, promoting merchants and the developers and the agencies that even help them? I think that’s one avenue. But yes, I would love to do something like that. And you know, we are in places where perhaps you’re not receiving necessarily the marketing in some cases, but we are showing up more in to your comment around, you know, seeing Woo in more places, paid search and paid social campaigns. We’re running more full funnel all the way from awareness down to the bottom of the funnel, showing up at more events. We’re really trying to put Woo in places where, you know, we see market growth opportunities, where we see merchants having success on the platform to try and engage with them and create that relationship as well. But yes, I would love to have a dedicated podcast to Woo merchants and that’s our shared customer. You know, all of the community that we’re talking about, the one thing that’s at the cent center of, of our relationship is that shared merchant. So promoting them is a win win. And you know, after being at Shoptalk Europe, I keep saying last week, a week and a half ago, it was, it was such an awesome feeling like to meet with customers to hear about what they’re doing, how they’re innovating, how they’re overcoming some challenges. It really filled my cup and getting Back to the merchants is really what will fuel our mission. So I love that suggestion. Thank you.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I agree that that does also fall under the remit of Do the Woo. I would love to see Woo steal Jamie for maybe half the time or something because the Woo channel is important too, and I think Jamie in particular could do a great job at building that up as he has the WordPress one.

Tamara Niesen:
All right, Jamie, consider that your seed planted.

Katie Keith:
And should we move on to Simon’s other question as well, which is will we ever see WooCommerce running ads on the radio, TV, streaming apps, billboards, social media, etc.

Tamara Niesen:
Well, there’s a bit of a running joke internally on the Woo marketing team that one of these days I will have a billboard. I would love to see WooCommerce on billboards out of home advertising, as we like to refer to it. But we are finding ourselves in some places, like podcast advertising. So if you’re familiar with retail brew or morning brew, we’ve been featured on there that there’s more content syndication happening. So trying to find ourselves in mediums where merchants are, where they’re digesting information and then showing up at those industry events. As I mentioned, we had some more physical presence at Shop Talk Europe. We had a presence at Shop Talk USA. We’re going to E Commerce Expo in London in a few months. And so we’re really trying to get our name out there from an awareness standpoint. But we do want to be where merchants are as opposed to more broad awareness, just because we do have limited resources and we’ve got to really try and get the most squeeze out of the juice or whatever the saying might be.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I had a call with Woo’s marketing team maybe a year ago and then you published something following up from that. You made your presentation public, I think, and I asked this question and you were very clear that the target is merchants with more than a million a year revenue and that that meant that the paid advertising, given the budget, was going to be very targeted and not broad brush like billboards. Is that still the strategy?

Tamara Niesen:
I think it’s an evolving one, you know, just to fall back on that. And I’m glad you brought it up because I think it’s important to say that it’s not our only focus. You know, like you said, you take a limited amount of resources and you do have to know, choose where you’re going to get the most bang for the buck. And you can’t peanut butter that. Otherwise you don’t, you know, get the impact and the reason why, you know, targeting, not necessarily alienating the smaller merchants, but targeting the larger one is, is really a way to get economies of scale, if you will. We don’t believe that Woo will be only a platform for large merchants. It’s always been a place where someone can start small, test an idea and build from there. The platform is free and it’s open source for a reason. And that starting point matters deeply. I never want to get away from that. That’s so important to what WooCommerce is, what WordPress is our ethos, it’s for builders, it’s for those who want to scale and grow. But what we are trying to do by targeting that type of merchant is to make sure that the growth story, or should I say showcasing that type of merchant as well, is to make sure that that growth story is just as credible as the starting story. Because one of the myths that hurts Woo, and I don’t know that you called it out in your article, Katie, but it’s really that it’s the idea we’re only for small stores or hobbyists or businesses that will eventually graduate to something else, like they’re saying at PressConf. And we don’t think that’s true. And so we have to focus or no, we don’t have to. So when we focus on more complex or higher volume merchants, we also build proof that Woo can grow with businesses. And that proof helps everyone, helps agencies, it helps the plugin builders, it helps new merchants have confidence that they won’t choose the wrong platform when, you know, they grow and scale. And transparently, if we can attract some of those complex higher volume merchants and we have relationships with them from a revenue standpoint, that allows us to invest back more into the product, into the ecosystem, and allows the community more to even build their businesses around us. So I think I want to put a really sharp pin on this. We’re not abandoning starters. We are proving that starters can grow here while also efficiently trying to get the most out of our marketing dollars.

James Kemp:
I guess the approach then is mainly around brand awareness and just recognizing that WooCommerce is a viable option rather than directly pull people in to get them to set up a store. Which I think is the typical kind of marketing you see from like closed platforms where, you know, you have a landing page, they sign up, it’s easier

Tamara Niesen:
to measure that, that’s for sure. This is a, this is a difficult, complex role and I think we have to be able to do it all. We have to, you know, you can’t abandon one start or one portion of the customer journey, or the marketing funnel, if you will, you have to create the awareness. You do have to try and, you know, bring them and create, generate traffic and then direct that traffic and, and convert it in the, you know, where it makes sense for the merchant by putting the merchant first. You called this out earlier. That’s really difficult when, you know, there’s three or four starting journeys for any, any one merchant. But again, those are the trade offs and there’s a lot of positive opportunity because of that, in my opinion.

James Kemp:
Agreed.

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
I think in, in light of that, it’d be interesting to talk about how we as a community can begin to sort of align ourselves with how WooCommerce is approaching marketing and, you know, market and recommend WooCommerce in the same way based on what our role is. So we have, you know, plugin companies that build on top of WooCommerce. I know I used to do this where the way that we would sell our product is to say, you know, woocommerce can’t do this. So we built a plugin for it rather than kind of framing it as this enhances WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
You know, it’s so easy to fall into that path. I know we have blog posts that start like that and it’s meant to be. This makes it even better. Not we can’t do this.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And I think that was traditionally like a good way to, you know, deal with your SEO. Like people were looking to solve a specific problem. Your post or product page or whatever solves that problem. So you’re framing your, your product as a, as a solution to the problem, which is technically true, but I think they could be framed more as enhancements. And I also think the, the landscape of SEO has shifted quite dramatically since I was doing anything like that with Iconic, where you know, people aren’t coming in the traditional way. They’re more than likely, especially builders and agencies asking, you know, the AI agent of choice how to solve any particular issue and then it will recommend ways to do it. So I think there’s probably a shift that, that we could take there for plugin companies. And then I think there’s also builders and agencies that are recommending WooCommerce to their merchants that they work with. And then we also have this kind of angle of, you know, content creators, educators that, that can recommend WooCommerce. So I’m interested in your take tomorrow on what Woo’s perspective is on, you know, each of those different or as a whole like how we recommend WooCommerce so that we align with the message that, that WooCommerce is putting out and maybe how, how we can help with that.

Tamara Niesen:
Well, I mean, I think you somewhat covered the entry point to this and I, I would love to also frame or in some cases reframe that how building for Woo is a platform advantage. So like you said, for plugin companies it could mean rather than saying hey, Woo can’t do this, so buy our plugin to reframe of Woo gives you a flexible foundation and our plugin helps you take that foundation into a specific use case. I think that positions the product as an additive and you know, really makes the platform stronger at the same time. So I agree with your framing there. And then for the agencies, you know, having an honest recommendation framework is really important. You know, Woo is a great fit when merchant needs content plus commerce as we talked about, or control over the payments or the infrastructure or deeper customization, B2B et cetera or you know, needs a tech stack that can adapt over time. So I think agencies in particular should be able to explain that in a way that the merchant understands, you know, not just technical language if it’s a, more, if it’s a developer type agency, but really leaning into the pain points and meeting the merchant where they’re at their customer. And Woo has a role in doing that too. Like when we talk about this awareness and you know, the solutions that Woo has to offer that ultimately, you know, if I can speak marketing or sales jargon for a minute here, it helps accelerate those sales cycles if it means that, you know, the, the shared customer actually understands what the platform has to offer when they actually go to meet with either an agency or a developer. So that’s part of our job is to reduce that, you know, unknown if you will. And then for the educators that are creators, I think the opportunity is translation. You know, we talked about hosting help merchants understand, you know, the trade offs or the benefits of choosing particular hosts, help them understand the tco, the total cost of ownership and the math there and why in particular cases data ownership might matter more to them in practical terms versus other business models or maybe the region that they’re operating in. And ultimately this helps us translate how open source, you know, isn’t just ideology, it’s optionality. And then I mentioned this earlier, but I will never stop saying this, tell more merchant success stories. We don’t have that direct relationship with every merchant. And as I said earlier, like agencies and developers and plugin builders know some of these interesting stories, often before we do or if we even do at all, we want to show the merchants the business outcomes, tie it to metrics where we can, how we build to solve real world problems so that other people can say, hey, I, I also had that problem. Okay, Woo can help me. Oh, and that agency can help me. And that plugin might be the real fix to the issue that I’m having right now. And help them work through that complexity. Because what I’m hearing more and more, you know, as commerce is more accessible online to more and more merchants around the world, is that they do have unique needs. Not one size fits all in many cases. But they don’t always know the path to being able to solve for that. And so often they’re making concessions they don’t want to. But what I do know to be true is they want to see the proof. They want to see people that look like them, operate like them and have problems just like theirs. Succeeding on Woo and with our partners for official Woo, that’s me. We need to do more partner assets, clear proof points that are evolving with, you know, the way that the world of commerce is also evolving. Stronger case studies. I would love to provide more co marketing opportunities, have those community voices at our events like we did just at Shop Talk Europe. Like having the community speak on our behalf is far more powerful than us saying it directly.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it’d be interesting. We obviously have a marketplace full of product builders that, you know, build on top of WooCommerce. I used to sell on there as a, as a vendor and I seem to recall we would share, we would allow those vendors to kind of share stories on the WooCommerce blog. I don’t know if we still do, but I think something like that is valuable for both merchants looking at the product, trying to find a solution to their issue, but also an incentive to sell on the marketplace, which we have an episode coming up about the marketplace. Kind of like you say, the co beneficial marketing.

Tamara Niesen:
Yeah. And Katie, if I may, I would love to ask you for a second, what can we provide to the community? You are close to merchants, builders. You’re thinking a lot about the value that Woo has to bring to the table. But how could we help you become a better advocate more than you already are today?

Katie Keith:
I think for kind of product people it’s largely leading from the front with a consistent message about what are the reasons. But in a way, I think the Keith group here is the builders, which I am not in the sense of building sites for clients, I think they are the people. So I’m indirectly recommending WooCommerce through my blog posts for example. But I think the most Keith group are the ones that are directly building the sites for the client. So I wonder whether Woo has like almost a pack or a presentation deck or something. Because these people, they’re having clients contact them saying I want an E commerce site. What is Woo providing to them to help them sell Woo?

Tamara Niesen:
Yeah, that’s. We actually have. I mean this is a bit of a plug, so forgive me, but we have our Automattic for Agencies program where as being part of that program we do offer enablement. You know, shared pitch decks if you will, co selling motions and the co marketing component where we do show up at events together or we sponsor some of our agencies to attend certain industry type events or join us in some cases. So that program is really the avenue to be able to do that. But at the same time also more than happy to have conversations with folks that aren’t in that program. I’m always looking to learn more and share more about Woo. So we do have those tools available and just get in touch.

James Kemp:
I guess that program is going back to the onboarding of new merchants. That program is a good starting point for us to be able to recommend, you know, agencies or builders to work with I guess because they’re already, you know, validated as these are high quality places to get a WooCommerce website built.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, and Sharni, who I believe is one of your developer advocates, says we have even more enablement coming. Katie.

James Kemp:
Interesting.

Tamara Niesen:
Awesome.

Katie Keith:
If you want to get any details, put them in the comments and we’ll read it out. But maybe it’s not announced yet.

James Kemp:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Cool. Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground, Katie. I don’t know if you had any further points to raise.

Katie Keith:
Let’s move on to some comments because we’ve got a few comments that have come in largely about why Woo is the best. So let’s read those out first. We love weird cool things. Actually that’s probably there’s more meaning to that than like because Woo, it’s the alternative option, isn’t it? It does attract a certain more independent person. So there is that as part of the angle. Whereas maybe the hosted platforms the more for the sheep that they don’t need that flexibility and independence. Elliot Richmond says most merchants just want to sell. But WooCommerce gives you an all in one advantage by pairing with WordPress. It combines your entire business management and E commerce into a single solution. And yeah, that’s the thing. Like in my blog post where we talk about the WordPress content management. If you want a membership size learning management system, a really sophisticated blog, custom post types, all the stuff that WordPress is great at, then it’s an advantage.

Tamara Niesen:
Absolutely. And Elliot, if you want to join the marketing team and consult us on some, that’s pretty good messaging. I love it.

Katie Keith:
Well, he goes further. He also says he’s applying for a job here.

Tamara Niesen:
He keeps going.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. The beauty of the WordPress WooCommerce combo is that it’s extensive extensibility makes it limitless. It’s the only all in one platform that truly scales to whatever an entrepreneur can dream up. He’s got the job.

Sponsor Announcer:
Right.

Tamara Niesen:
Let’s, let’s, let’s get Elliot on some of these events. He can have my Keithnote spot.

Katie Keith:
Right. So yeah, that’s been great. So I think we’ve covered the issue in detail and about talked a lot about reasons why Woo is the best. We haven’t really talked about when it’s not, which I think we kind of do need to acknowledge sometimes. For me, I would say it’s not the best. If you do have really simple needs, you don’t maybe want to pay a developer or you got, you just want something a bit more turnKeith. For me, I’d say maybe you don’t need all that flexibility. In that case, what would you say tomorrow?

Tamara Niesen:
I would have to agree that, you know, it’s not necessarily the platform for everyone and the same goes for our competitors too. Their platform may not be the best thing for certain merchants and I think that we have to be really honest about that. You know, if we onboard a merchant where our solution isn’t the best thing for them, they will leave. So let’s, you know, provide the best recommendation we can right from the get go. And I think you’ve nailed it. That the, you know, if you’re looking for a very standard store, minimal customization, one single provider, you know, managing the operating model on your behalf so that you don’t have to worry about controlling infrastructure or even think about payments, you know, some of the competitors out there might be a very good answer. And I don’t think that saying that weakens Woo. I think it actually makes our recommendation even more credible. Again, if you are joining a platform that isn’t the best thing for you, there’s some downstream consequences that only causes more pain and distrust with the merchant and the community. I mean those things get spoken about so, you know, we talked about where Woo is a fit, and I agree with you that it’s. There’s some very strong use cases for when it’s not. But I also think there’s plenty of room in the market. You know, I look at this as the more that are participating, whether they’re on our platform or not, the more people selling online is better for everyone. Everyone on this call, everyone in our respective organizations, everyone in the market. When more people have access to the tools that they need, they can succeed in commerce and everyone can win. And so, you know, there’s very real value in having an open source alternative in E commerce, you know, especially when they may have hit limits in closed platforms, whether that’s cost or customization or product model payments, all the things that we’ve talked about. So I would rather us be precise than defensive. If we’re honest, where Woo is a fit and where we’re not, merchants will trust us when we say, hey, in your case, maybe it’s not the right call and maybe when it is, they’ll come back to us. I believe that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think those are very good points. We have covered a lot of things and I think there’s sort of a few takeaways about how we can all talk about WooCommerce honestly and positively, you know, as a community and also as a, as a company to really frame and highlight the reasons why you should choose WooCommerce. And I do think there are situations where it being open source is something that, you know, merchants would be interested in to, to hear about and really understand, you know, why that’s a benefit. And I think we as a company can do a good job of actually highlighting these things through, you know, attending these events, talking to people, but also posting on our own website and, you know, focusing on our video content. And this podcast is a good example of a place where we could, you know, talk about that. And I, I think we are doing that and, and people really like to hear that, you know, sort of discussion coming from people who actively work with WooCommerce with automatic, you know, outside of WooCommerce. So I think we’ve, we’re really sort of paving the way for, for this to happen. So.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
Thank you, Tamara, for joining us. It’s been super useful to hear sort of your input on how we do marketing, what you expect from the community and things like that. And I hope we can have you on again, you know, later this year or early next year to talk a bit further on anything that’s changed and how things are looking.

Tamara Niesen:
I would love that. And I appreciate the conversation today. And also feedback. I mean, feedback is a gift. I say this in every opportunity I get to engage with the community. Please keep it coming. Whether it’s the positive reinforcements that we heard on the, you know, in the chat today or, you know, the constructive feedback around onboarding and opportunities for improvements, we’re always here to listen. And sometimes we don’t see it or catch it all. So please keep it coming.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you online?

Tamara Niesen:
I think LinkedIn is probably the easiest. That’s what I would suggest.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

Tamara Niesen:
Join me there, please.

James Kemp:
And it’s Tamara Neeson.

Tamara Niesen:
Yes.

James Kemp:
Next episode we are joined by Brian Cordz, who is a developer advocate at WooCommerce. And we’re going to talk all about development tools and work workflows for building WooCommerce stores. So this is going to be a great one for developers who build stores for merchants. This one’s going to be pre recorded because some of us are having super long holidays. That’s me. So watch out for it on the week of the 13th of July.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. And if you don’t already follow us or subscribe then go to DoTheWoo.com and subscribe wherever you watch podcasts. Thanks for watching. Bye.

James Kemp:
Thank you.