A Journey and the Evolution of WooCommerce with Beka Rice

Zach:
Zach Stepek here again with Carl Alexander for another episode of the Do the Woo Dev Chats. Carl, how are you doing, man?

Carl:
I had a good WordCamp EU, but I got Covid, so I’m slightly recovering from that now. I’ll be muting my phone so I can cough silently in my apartment, but otherwise, I’m doing quite well. How about you?

Zach:
While you were in Europe getting Covid, I had bronchitis in the US. It’s just been a fun month for respiratory things, evidently.

Carl:
Yeah, apparently summer is now the time for respiratory issues. Usually, we’re from the north, so it’s a winter thing. Winter is when all the bugs come out.

Zach:
Yes, unless you’re talking about cicadas, which have been recent. Those are the bugs that came out this summer for a lot of the Upper Midwest and a bunch of other places too. So that’s been fun. And we as developers, of course, know how to deal with bugs evidently. It’s been a very interesting month, watching some of the changes around Do the Woo. If you’ve missed that and you just come to listen to the dulcet tones of myself and Carl talking with developers about nerdy things,

Carl:
It’s mostly your dulcet tones. I don’t think my tones are dulcet at all.

Zach:
Well, some people may be attracted to the accent, my friend. That being said, if you haven’t heard about the changes around Do the Woo, Bob did a great episode summarizing what shows there are now. We’re up to 12 shows, so I encourage you to check out some of those other shows if you haven’t yet. The most recent is our Enterprise WordPress and WooCommerce show, which is pretty cool, partnered with the Scale Consortium for that. So really cool stuff. But yeah, we’re growing and changing, and that’s always nice to see. This month we have decided to invite a friend I’ve known for a very long time now, Beka Rice, to join us here on the dev chat. Let’s start out, Beka, by introducing you a bit and seeing how you have been in the last month.

Beka:
Yes, I am one of the lucky folks who did not get Covid from WordCamp Europe, so very grateful for that. I had enough respiratory illnesses this winter that I am glad to be done with it, but it’s good to see you guys again. As Zach noted, I’m Beka Rice. I’ve worked with WooCommerce since 2013, maybe even before that. It’s been a long time—since I think version 1.4 if I go back in time a bit. I was one of the original folks at SkyVerge; Max, Justin, and I were partners there. We worked at SkyVerge for a long time and were acquired by GoDaddy in 2020. I still worked in the Woo ecosystem but had a number of other responsibilities and projects I was working on there as well. I left earlier this year after a few years of doing some really cool stuff but wanted to be back working with a small team. So now I have reentered the Woo atmosphere and am very excited to be back doing specific work with a small team again at Kestrel. It was nice to reconnect with a lot of people at WCEU, so if you were one of them, it was very good to see you again.

Zach:
Yeah, no, that’s quite a journey. I tell the story of how I got into WooCommerce—building a website for a record label I was part of, using the white light theme back in the day.

Beka:
It wasn’t Canvas?

Zach:
No, I used white light because it had the look that I was after. Those were very interesting days. One of my favorite parts of that time period was the fact that it was kind of the Wild West of WooCommerce. The fork had just happened recently, and we were all starting to adopt it and get into it. There was this Trello board with all these ideas for integrations and plugins, and people would go in there, claim the things they wanted to build, and then build them. Suddenly, we had this ecosystem of plugins and extensions for WooCommerce that started to grow. You and Max and Justin were very early in all of that. I know there were some cards that were claimed that you didn’t end up building. One in particular was taken over by someone else when the bandwidth just wasn’t there to do it. I think that was subscriptions, right?

Beka:
Well, I would have to ask them if that was a card they had talked about or not, but there were a number in the early days. I think “Wild West” is a great way to describe it because the community was so small at that point that you had a couple handfuls of developers who had gotten into WooCommerce, but there weren’t very many. There were more integrations and ideas and extensions than could simply be built by that small group of people. So certainly Max and Justin were earlier with that. I wasn’t developing anything at that time myself; I was more so doing documentation and support. But yeah, there were a lot of things that got built, some things that didn’t, some ideas that probably were big misses still. But with subscriptions in particular, that landing with Brent was probably a great thing all around. You can’t be mad about a really fantastic piece of software that someone else built.

Zach:
I don’t think so. Honestly, the ecosystem wouldn’t have Action Scheduler if that hadn’t happened. For those who don’t know, WooCommerce Subscriptions is what birthed Action Scheduler, which is the way WooCommerce handles asynchronous tasks in the background. Brent Shepherd and his team did all the work to make that happen. I still have my blue T-shirt, the collaborative T-shirt between SkyVerge and Prospress, the Subscriptions team. One of my profile photos that I frequently go back to is me wearing that shirt with a leather sport coat over it next to a performing arts venue that’s now five minutes from my house. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and it was taken by my former business partner, Scott.

Beka:
A lot of fond memories of those times for sure.

Zach:
We were still technically just exiting that Wild West era when the first WooConf happened, and we all got together in Austin. What year was that?

Beka:
The second WooConf in Austin? Yeah, I think it was 2015.

Zach:
You and I both spoke at 2017; we were secondary keynotes then, so that was Seattle.

Beka:
We’re testing our memories here, Zach. But yes, there was one in San Francisco early on that was much smaller, then Austin, and then Seattle. All were really wonderful conferences. I would love to see something like that again in the Woo ecosystem.

Carl:
I tell them all the time, every WooCommerce event. Zach can’t go, but I crash all the WooCommerce events and consistently remind them they should have a dedicated WooCommerce event.

Zach:
A few people are calling for that now, and it’s a common thing. We miss it because it was our chance as a community to not only gather and be a community of builders and developers in one location but also a way to show off the cool stuff that’s been happening.

Beka:
Yeah, it’s hard in Woo, right? With it being decentralized, you don’t always have a view of what other people are doing. There’s no one source, not even Automattic, that knows every WooCommerce site out there. I think it was super valuable to see that across the community.

Carl:
For me, it was more networking. I was trying to find agencies that specialize in that or people that worked with it more because it’s hard at WordCamps. It’s people doing a bit of everything, so it’s hard to find the people that specialize in that. I’m actually really thankful I broke in because Bob sent me an invite that he couldn’t go to the first WordCamp Asia in Bangkok, and that got the ball rolling for me. A lot of WooCommerce people hang on the sidelines a bit at these WordCamps, so it’s hard to know who specializes in it, what the big agencies are, the big plugin companies, the big extension companies, who’s doing cool stuff. It’s just really hard to find them.

Zach:
Yeah, it is, and I think Brian has done a great job with WooSesh, trying to keep some of that alive virtually, but virtual events don’t compare to being in person with a group of people. It’s still fun. I enjoy them. I love what WooSesh and WordSesh have done for the community, but it’s different than gathering in person.

Carl:
Some conferences, like WPCampus, do a hybrid. I got accepted to speak this year but couldn’t go physically, so I declined because I’m like you. I think the physical connection aspect, the physical networking in person, is way better than virtual. So if that’s your goal, it’s really important. Conferences, it’s hard when you do purely virtual. I think it’s good that some events are trying to do this hybrid format at least to accommodate the speakers because it’s also about the speakers. It costs a lot of money. I think WPCampus actually has a bit of a stipend, but WordCamps don’t. So there’s financial accessibility, a question of how comfortable you are traveling. So I think it’s great to have these hybrid events, but for the speakers and attendees, there’s a big difference.

Zach:
It is. Right now, the designer and developer community are coming together in a virtual and physical hybrid event for Figma, right? Figma has their Config event happening yesterday and today as we’re recording. They’ve taken a hybrid model as well. They have a limited number of in-person tickets that sold out, and everybody else can attend virtually, which is pretty cool. I hope to see

more events do that, take that hybrid approach, limit the number of attendees, but offer the people who couldn’t attend in person to attend virtually. It seems to be a really good model. The hardest part with that model is the participation of virtual people compared to those in person. I don’t think anybody’s really cracked the code on that yet. We’ll see, though. We’ll see if somebody figures that one out.

Carl:
I remember there were these little virtual pixel 16-bit hallways during Covid. Some people, you could walk around and I was just like, no, thank you. I’m a bonafide nerd. I’m 41, started coding at seven. My first computer was a Phillips, which I learned something insane, that Phillips spawned ASML and so did TMSC. I always associated Phillips with shaving razors, but apparently, they were really good at computers.

Zach:
They did a great job in the semiconductor industry and other parts of the computer industry. They’re also huge in medical. They’re kind of everywhere. I worked on a project back in my Adobe days. I was working on a Flex application built for a subsidiary of Siemens called Sorian, called Med Suite. It was an electronic medical record system built entirely in Adobe Flex.

Beka:
See, I find it interesting that you guys got into programming and the tech ecosystem prior to, let’s say, Woo or WordPress. Woo and WordPress is actually what got me into the ecosystem. My background was not in tech. I used WordPress early on to manage my website. The reason I learned HTML and then CSS was trying to insert tables on a website. How do I do this? There’s no WordPress to do a table. How do I do tables? Then, after you learn HTML and CSS, you keep going—PHP, you start to learn JavaScript. Even though I wouldn’t consider myself a very talented developer at this point, it’s never been my focus. I learned a lot about building and got into different ecosystems, different applications, worked extensively in Shopify, but have worked on e-commerce platform infrastructure as well. Since you’ve done other things outside the ecosystem prior to working with Woo and Prospress, and I have post working with it, how do you feel like the ecosystem these days compares? It’s definitely more mature than the early days. As a developer, if you were coming into this ecosystem today, are there things you would expect that you don’t see?

Zach:
I think if I were coming in new right now, the thing that would bother me the most is how to add a table that I can actually use in the block editor to call back your table story. The table block kind of sucks right now. Sorry to those responsible for that block, but at least I filed a bug report.

Beka:
Yeah, now you’re responsible for giving them the feedback.

Zach:
It’s inflexible. There’s barely anything you can do with it beyond displaying data. Not a lot of options to customize beyond that. The ecosystem is interesting. It is at this inflection point between what it used to be, primarily PHP, and what it’s becoming, this hybrid of PHP and React, JavaScript, and whatever new technology we want to insert next. The interaction API isn’t react. It’s something else. I can’t remember what the framework is. Is it Alpine JS?

Carl:
No, we were saying they should have. We had a conversation with Marcel and Mike when we did our joint. I have a lot of thoughts on the current state because I teach a lot of programming. I wrote an object-oriented programming book for WordPress developers that teaches computer science topics. It’s a huge loss to WordPress that you can’t do what you went through.

Beka:
Yeah, it’s really easy to get started with React, and then 27 steps later, now you can finally write some code.

Carl:
Yeah, exactly. It’s not easy. There’s a lot of… I think now more than ever, WordPress needs to think about developer experience more if they want to go that route. Before, PHP by itself offered a really good developer experience because you could just literally edit a file, FTP it up. Okay, you’re cowboy coding, but you could get something done. You could change something and see the effect.

Beka:
Well, you could see your white screen of death, but then you got to see your effects later.

Carl:
Then you fixed it, or you could display errors there. It felt more accessible for somebody with no programming background. Now it’s like, oh, I have to learn react templates. I have to learn this. I have to learn that. But forget about that because does my thing even build right now? I think it’s a huge loss to the ecosystem. I’m starting to get to the point where, I mean, things change. Nothing stays the same forever. But I think it’s more obvious than ever that WordPress, yes, it’s more mature, but the whole community nature of it is not really the same either. My favorite analogy is that it’s more like a corporate-backed open source project like MySQL. MySQL is super boring. Nobody knows who works on MySQL. It’s Oracle that must sponsor a lot of developers. WordPress is not quite the same, but it’s not the kumbaya of open source where people can make contributions. But there needs to be a focus on developer experience, especially in the PHP ecosystem. You’re competing with JavaScript, which is really popular. Then on the other side, you have something like Laravel that actually does care about developer experience. It’s completely different. If I told somebody to learn something in PHP, now I’d tell them to try Laravel. They’ll be closer to doing what you wanted to do, which is edit a template file. The syntax is different, but I see HTML tags. I can add some HTML tags. There’s some stuff there. I don’t have to compile it. There’s just so much tooling around it. How do you bring new people in? WordPress used to attract people that never did programming. That’s the best part. That’s what I find the most exciting. I think that’s what makes the community so diverse. People came from so many different backgrounds, just learned WordPress, and could contribute and build a company like yours. Well, you’re at your second company now, but SkyVerge was a big company, got bought by GoDaddy, and it started with somebody editing HTML files and adding tables. That’s amazing. To me, that’s crazy. So that’s why I think about that a lot.

Beka:
Yeah, the diversity one is interesting. I certainly don’t have a problem at all with a project evolving and becoming more mature. There were parts of WordPress that needed that. If we go back 10 years, the Wild West wasn’t the way.

Carl:
No, absolutely.

Beka:
We’ve all seen the good and bad side of that. I think the biggest thing that I see sometimes is if you don’t have that kind of diversity of thought, you develop pieces of the project in a certain way. I sometimes see that with blocks. Exactly, your point about the table block. One of the things I’ve seen in WordPress is it was so accessible to me because of how extensible it was. You learn about actions and filters and the hook system, and you’re empowered to change something without having to completely write your application. Literally with a code snippet, six lines of code, I can change a thing. It gets addictive in a way where now I’ve changed this thing.

Zach:
Absolutely.

Beka:
Then you learn more. Within a couple of years, I was like, I really want to write my own plugin and started writing my own plugins. You progressively learn. I’m not saying my path is the right one or even a good one, but that extensibility is what got you in. It empowers a lot of people to use the software and made it popular. Sometimes with the block ecosystem, and I’ve had conversations with the Woo folks about that, who have been very receptive, which is wonderful, without that extensibility or ability to modify things, it makes the project less accessible to those tinkerers. People just trying to build a website for some local business that contracted them and is like, can you do this? It sacrifices some of the interoperability that’s unique to commerce. If you’re a publishing site, a block may be the most atomic piece of your workflow. I put a form here, a button there. But from our perspective, working in WooCommerce, that’s not the smallest piece because another extension needs to modify that too or add something of its own into your form. That’s been challenging. The diversity of thought of people who have grown up in open source and with that extensibility and playing in the sandbox with everybody else versus in isolation is something I feel is missing in modern day. I don’t know if you feel the same way.

Zach:
I do to a point. I’ve provided feedback on some of the blocks WooCommerce has released, like the cart and checkout blocks. They are these monolithic pieces. They’re not separated well and weren’t extensible for a while. It wasn’t easy to extend them. They finally added the ability to add your own text blocks to the checkout, which was missing. I think the more we think about blocks, the more we have to think about blocks at the atomic level and how they compose into larger patterns. The patterns weren’t fleshed out when WooCommerce blocks started. I get why the checkout block and the cart block are more these monolithic block components, but now they would be better suited to being a pattern, a composition of numerous blocks that make up all those individual pieces. We would finally get back to some customizability and the ease of customizability on WooCommerce pages. We wouldn’t be back to the level of code we had the ability to tweak and customize before, but we’d have a clear delineation between front end and backend development. The visual display being separate from the backend processing makes sense long-term because it gives us

more flexibility. As it sits right now, we’re getting there, but we’re not there yet. I just taught a course for Solid Academy talking about WooCommerce fundamentals with people who haven’t dove into WooCommerce yet. My favorite thing when teaching WooCommerce is showing people the Business Bloomer visual hook guides for the first time. They have this light bulb moment of, oh, so that’s what hooks are, that’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s what actions and filters are. Actions interrupt the flow of code, do something, and return control, and filters take an input, modify it, and return it back. Those are the two things we have from a code perspective to change how things work by overriding how they do by default. Just this eye-opening moment for developers where they see those visual hook guides and it clicks. Oh, okay, these are all the things and this is where they live, and this is why overriding that hook or changing its priority does what it does. That’s the power of where we’ve been. We have to make sure we don’t lose that.

Beka:
Yeah, I would agree. With PHP, it’s a little easier versus something more event-based like JavaScript. It’s easier for a newcomer to grasp. I don’t lament that we’ve ruined WordPress. It’s a big step forward. People who have been in Woo as long as we have, we’ve seen some things. There’s the adolescent phases of version 1.6 to 2.0 or 2.3 to 3.0. Those were huge jumps for the project. There’s a lot of pain to grow up as an ecosystem. I feel like this phase is like that for me, but I’m also back in the ecosystem. It’s a good change and will make things better. The biggest thing is preserving that superpower of the ecosystem, that interoperability between different code projects merging into one execution stream at runtime. How do you preserve that and welcome different builders into that workstream? I think it’s a little scary. People are scared because that results in bad things sometimes. But the net positive of the kinds of sites people can create is really cool. Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.

Zach:
I’m reminded of the commercials for State Farm. “We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.” We’ve been through the trenches of building WooCommerce sites larger and more complex than imagined. It’s amazing that open source can do that. It can enable something that even the creators had no clue was a possibility when they were starting out. I don’t think Mike and James had any idea that something they were working on would power billions of dollars in commerce.

Beka:
Every year, right? Billions every year. They’ve published the global GMV of WooCommerce sometimes in WooSesh. It’s probably even an underestimate from what I’ve seen. Last time they estimated WooCommerce powers tens of billions.

Carl:
It’s hard to get an estimate.

Beka:
Yeah, because there’s no centralization. I’ve looked at different ways to estimate, but it’s hard to know how much revenue is online versus offline for some businesses that use it.

Carl:
Some people use it internally.

Beka:
At least tens of billions.

Carl:
I know from indirect clients that they use it just for internal warehousing and internal customers. If you’re a big company…

Beka:
Running your own swag store.

Carl:
Yeah, exactly. It could be a swag store or just managing inventory between divisions. In big companies, the financialization is interesting. It’s impossible to track all that usage.

Beka:
The cool thing is they do that because you can customize it. It has those crazy diverse use cases because of that customization. Your software can work together easily with other software.

Carl:
It’s the only option. That’s why I’m still really bullish. Even if Shopify is great, if you want a self-hosted thing, your other option is Magento, and that’s not really a road most people want to go on. That’s really exciting. Just from a developer aspect, it’s not necessarily lamenting, but it comes from being around programming for so long.

Beka:
Yeah, you care about it. You want it to be better.

Carl:
But also, I love programming. You described it the best way. You can make little changes and feel empowered. It’s the empowerment. You put a filter, six lines of code, and it did something. And you’re like, holy crap, I’ve done something. That’s addictive. How do you get people to that space as fast as possible with as little technical knowledge as possible is really important, even if you’re not the flavor of the month framework. That’s the essence. Things can mature and not stay accessible, and that’s okay. But if you want to think about the health of the ecosystem and bringing new people in, I was really heartened to meet a couple of 23-year-olds at WordCamp EU. I thought we were all late thirties, early forties people. There weren’t a ton of them, but a few. That’s really important. It doesn’t have to be cool, but you want to make it something they’re not like, okay, boomer. It’s always going to be like, oh, I want to try the newer thing. It’s good to keep that in mind. The harder it is, the more people don’t want to do it, and the harder it is to bring people in, which affects health of products, hiring, maintaining talent.

Beka:
You don’t want to become COBOL in a few years, right?

Carl:
Yeah, exactly. I’m trying not to say COBOL, but basically not become COBOL. There’s a big gap between that, but this idea that it’s good for the ecosystem too, for indirect reasons.

Beka:
The accessibility becomes a big thing. It reminds me of what General Assembly did for Rails and how easy it was for people to pick up and start learning. By the end of six weeks, they build a small web app. I hired a lot of Rails developers. Some of our software was Rails with a React front end. As a small company, we didn’t always hire people that junior, but it was amazing how people could have no code experience but have an interactive web app they built by the end because of how accessible the ecosystem was. Carl, to your point, that’s a good measure of how well you can thrive and get people in the door. Not people like us who do this all day, every day, and build software for the platform. It’s people building WordPress websites and need to customize something for a client. Can they do it? If there’s not a plugin that exists or it only gets them 90% of the way there, have we made it easier for them to get on board and try?

Carl:
I always try to think empathetically. PHP is my sixth or seventh programming language. I’m not a representative person, so I always try to think. I think programming is a life-changing career that anybody, regardless of educational background, could get into. Anything that empowers people to do that, to have that opportunity, is huge. WordPress attracted people that never did programming. That’s the great thing. A lot of people career changed into WordPress, built companies, sold companies, made money, learned even more complicated things. It was great. That’s always what’s in the back of my mind.

Zach:
A couple of things based on what was just discussed. We have a newer podcast here at Do the Woo, part of the All Things WordPress and WooCommerce podcast, called The Next Gen, with Allison Dye and Sophia DeRosia talking about WordPress and the next generation of WordPress. It’s interesting to see what that looks like from their perspective as younger people in this ecosystem. I’m excited about the next generation of WordPressers. There’s a lot of possibility and potential. I’m excited about newer community members driving us forward. Also, I got into computers by breaking something. There’s an inherent desire to tinker that comes with being a developer. I was tinkering before I knew what I was doing, and I ended up breaking my grandmother’s brand-new computer. I ended up on the phone with my friend’s dad, Tom, who worked at Baxter Labs in their IT department. He was the only person I knew who could help me fix what I had done. I spent hours on the phone with him, and he took his time to help me rebuild the operating system when I was nine or ten years old. That pushed me to understand that tinkering may have a cost, but it also has a benefit. I never stopped tinkering. I encourage anybody interested in development, sitting on the builder side thinking, wow, I really like hearing Zach and Carl talk about development, but it seems daunting to get into it. Just tinker. At the core of what we’re talking about, the block ecosystem changes tinkering in a way that makes it more difficult. I would encourage people who are newer to WordPress to look at the Roots Project with Radical. It uses the Roots stack and the Roots ecosystem. They have this thing called ACORN that lets you use Laravel inside WordPress. It’s a completely different way of looking at things than the block editor. It has ways to use and build blocks with an HMR-supported build setup. These are really cool things as part of a nice starting point if you’re interested in trying something different than what WordPress core does by default. It’s the power of an open-source ecosystem that allows people to build anything because we have all the code. That’s powerful. Sometimes we lose sight of that as a community that’s been in it. If we were working in a closed-source ecosystem like Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly, we don’t know the internal workings. We have a set of integration points, but that’s the limitation. We can only talk to the things we’re allowed to. It’s harder to build highly custom things. One of the things I talk about frequently is that Woo

Commerce enables non-traditional stores. We have a ton of capability for selling physical products, but we can also, due to plugins, do things that are significantly different. We can do event ticketing, bookings, hotel reservations. Try that with Shopify out of the box. WooCommerce is highly focused on physical products. It’s not particularly great at virtual products. It can do it, but not particularly well.

Beka:
You need apps to do that.

Zach:
Yes, you need the booking plugin. Virtual products, event ticketing, time and resource-based booking, accommodation booking, membership sites, online courses, charitable giving, fundraising, peer-to-peer software subscriptions—these are all business models powered by WooCommerce. Think beyond physical products. These are things plugins enable. All these things are possibilities inside the WooCommerce ecosystem. That’s insane. There’s no other e-commerce platform that can do all those things and do them well. That’s a strength.

Beka:
If you were getting into the Woo ecosystem to build things right now, how would you use that information? Would you be building booking plugins? What would you be doing if you were listening to this?

Zach:
I would shift my definition of e-commerce because what we think of as e-commerce is generally the Amazon model of selling a product and shipping it. Shipping at such a low cost that margins are low. It’s hard to make money without volume when your margins are low. Amazon changed the physical product world. I would change my definition of commerce to be anything that involves transacting through a website.

Beka:
Using Woo with a framework to do that.

Zach:
Absolutely.

Carl:
Exactly. I agree with that.

Beka:
You heard it here, folks. If you’re a new developer, building the next invoicing app for plumbers is the way to go. I agree. Service businesses and other kinds of businesses—you see them more commonly on Woo because they can’t use anything else.

Zach:
In addition to that, you have these restricted product categories that don’t have other choices. These restricted product categories are growing by leaps and bounds.

Beka:
Shout out to all the vape stores out there.

Zach:
There are sites I know of in restricted categories doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales in a month just through WooCommerce. That’s because we have the capability to build payment gateways and plugins that tie to high-risk payment processors willing to take that business. That’s the open-source nature of WooCommerce and WordPress.

Carl:
Or selling gray market stuff. But one of my favorite WooCommerce sites is a Canadian site to buy magic mushrooms. It’s WooCommerce, and it’s the coolest site. They went all out with a Miami Vice aesthetic. But they can do that. What you can host, what you can sell, what payment options you have is important. So I really like Zach’s idea of expanding, really think about e-commerce literally as electronic commerce. Are you doing commerce online for anything? Like you said, plumber, wedding DJ, book gigs as a wedding DJ and charge for it. Anything. It lets you do that. That’s the real way to think about the platform.

Beka:
I favor people I can pay online for things, even a DJ or booking something. If I can do it and pay online, I feel like it usually indicates people are more serious about their business versus someone I have to call and book.

Carl:
Oh, interesting.

Zach:
The four to six times a year I book a haircut, I do it online. That’s how I reserve that person’s time. I do the same with my doctors, my therapist, and all the other services I consume regularly. All the booking is done virtually now. I’m not calling somebody to set these appointments up. Building these tools increases accessibility to services for people who wouldn’t want to book them because of the friction involved. Friction is a killer. I know we’re talking about development, but these things are important to know. Friction is a killer. Statistically, the abandonment rate is 57%. Friction is enough for them after making a purchase decision to cancel, to abandon their decision. They’ve decided to give you money, and now 55% of shoppers say friction is frustrating enough to quit a purchase. Crazy. Friction can exist in multiple ways. For some people, making a phone call to a location to set up an appointment is terrifying.

Carl:
Don’t make me call. I’m extroverted and will talk to anybody at a conference, but don’t make me call for support. I just want to do it online or via form or email.

Zach:
Building these tools increases the accessibility of these services to people who normally would not want to book them because of friction. I think the future of commerce is going beyond the Amazon model. It’s a great model. It works well. But people who look at things more creatively and don’t just copy Amazon will see huge returns. Experimentation will be rewarded in the coming years because e-commerce is growing. The industry segment is growing. It’s already billions more than we thought it would be and will be billions more. I think we’re crossing the trillion-dollar threshold this year in the US for e-commerce transactions. So much money is being transacted online. For anybody thinking, wow, I really want to get into this space, do it. Beka is a testament that you can get into this space, build things people love, and get a call from someone as crazy as GoDaddy, be acquired, build product inside a large organization, then exit and come back in and start again with another plugin company, Kestrel. I can’t wait to see what you, Max, and Justin do with Kestrel. It’ll be a lot of fun to see the future unfold. But we’ll leave that for another podcast.

Beka:
You ended with a cliffhanger, Zach.

Carl:
That’s how we get you back.

Zach:
We’re talking about having you come back for a product chat in the near future. Be on the lookout for it. Have Beka come back in and talk more about the story behind Kestrel and where Kestrel is going. It’s been a joy talking the history of Woo and some of the thoughts we have around where things are going and development in general. Thank you for joining us this week. Before we wrap up, I always give Carl the opportunity to ask any final questions he has.

Carl:
I don’t have any follow-up questions. I’ve just really enjoyed the discussion. I thought it was really good.

Beka:
Carl’s going to ask when I start building block tooling. Don’t ask me that, Carl.

Carl:
I wouldn’t invest in block tooling until they can say, okay, we’re done. Some people tried to build abstractions around blocks, but it’s so volatile and unstable that it’s not worth the investment to maintain that.

Beka:
Yeah, I’d agree. You need to work with Woo and WordPress core to make those things happen. The cool news is we’re seeing it. It’s super exciting to see something change.

Carl:
There’s an opportunity.

Beka:
Yeah, that’s why I’m back, right?

Carl:
Maybe there will be an ACF for blocks eventually or something to abstract away and make it easier for people to do these blocks. But I don’t think it’s right now.

Beka:
I think ACF block is the ACF block.

Carl:
Yeah, ACF blocks are cool too, but you know what I mean. Something…

Zach:
Yes, absolutely. Something that’ll be a landmark shift in how we build with the block editor. That’s definitely something on the horizon. Some tools are really close already. We’re in a good position to usher in a new future together as a community. For those watching some of the drama in this community, remember you have a choice to engage in that drama or ignore it. You have the ability to change this ecosystem by participating. That’s the wonder of open source and contribution. Despite what some people may think or the feelings some may have, we all have the possibility and potential to influence where the future goes. That’s what I remain focused on. No matter how small a voice you have, you have a voice. Use it.

Beka:
Beautiful.

Zach:
Thank you.

Beka:
Well said.

Zach:
Now that I’ve ended on a high emotional point, Beka, how do people find you on the internet?

Beka:
I’m around. I’d love for people to check us out at kestrelwp.com. As Zach mentioned, we’ve acquired a number of plugins for Woo to ramp back up. We’re excited to be back in the space. I’m on Twitter, B-E-K-A-R-I-C-E. Happy to chat and love to hear what people are building. If you’re in the Woo space and getting into some new projects, let me know how I can help.

Zach:
Awesome. As always, if you have ideas for what you’d like to hear about on a Woo DevChat, go to your favorite social media platform and use hashtag bug Bob. We’re still going to make this thing happen. Hashtag bug Bob. Bob will listen to your feedback or just go to Do the Woo.io and contact us there. We want to hear your feedback. If you want to participate in a dev chat, we’d love to hear your ideas and hear from you directly. On behalf of myself, Carl, Bob, and the entire Do the Woo team, thank you for listening and being part of this amazing community.