Zach Stepek welcomes Luke and Jonathan as guests to do a deep dive into the world of Woo. They discuss the history of WooCommerce and the tension between open-source ideals and monetization. Zach shares highlights from his new role at BigScoots and his perspective from contributing to the hosting team. They debate the current state of WordPress, dark patterns, and what the future might hold for WooCommerce. Oh, and an attempt is made at a cricket reference.

Transcript#

Transcript generated via Auphonic and hand-edited.

Zach:
Hey, this is Zach Stepek. I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Crossword. I’m here with my guests, Luke and Jonathan, today.

Jonathan:
That was perfect. Nice work.

Zach:
Hey, you know, it’s almost like I’ve done this before.

Jonathan:
You’ve done this a few times. Luke, this is our second perspective episode of the season. And..

Luke:
I don’t know why you haven’t finished editing and publishing the first one yet, Jonathan. Slack.

Jonathan:
It’s been it’s been a lot of work!

Jonathan:
I’m developing appreciation for what AI can do, or at least claims to be doing these days.

Jonathan:
So our guest who’s already introduced himself.. well, okay, Zach, if we’re going to pull this thread all the way through, then we’re your guest today.

So why don’t you introduce yourself, please?

Zach:
So I’m Zach Stepek. I’m the director of agency operations at BigScoots, concert aficionado and photographer, and every once in a while I talk at WordCamps. Apart from that, I have a beautiful family and enjoy playing board games.

So my guests today, Luke and Jonathan - we’re just going to keep this theme going. Um, you may be familiar with them from the work they do with Crossword, but I need to tell us a little bit about yourselves.

Luke:
Very nice. I saw Jonathan’s eyes light up when you said board games.

Jonathan:
You did, yes. What’s a favorite board game these days, Zach?

Zach:
Oh boy, it’s hard to pick one, isn’t it? There’s a wall next to me that has a 25-slot shelf that is full. So there is no room left.

Luke:
What Jonathan really wants to know is have you played that stupid one that takes up the whole table and takes multiple days?

Zach:
I have a copy of Twilight Imperium on the bottom shelf down there. I also have both Gloomhaven and Frost Haven sitting over there.

Luke:
Nice. But it’s one thing to own it. It’s another thing to play it, right?

Zach:
I also have lots of board games, but I don’t play them very often. Yeah, my brother actually got me Twilight Imperium for Christmas a couple of years ago, so.

Jonathan:
Zach, my respect for you has only just gone up a couple of levels. That’s excellent.

So you’ve been in the WordPress space quite some time. And for those who haven’t had the privilege of knowing some of your background, can you give us some context for what you’ve done in WordPress, especially within the ecommerce context?

Zach:
Yeah, so I started in the WordPress space. I’d say it’s got to be about 15 years ago now, almost 15 years. And I started out just helping a local agency owner who needed help building WordPress websites. And I dug in and really got to understand the platform. And then he came to me with needs for an ecommerce site. And I started looking at options and came across this thing that had just come out called WooCommerce and started digging in and using that to build an ecommerce store for a record label.

It was kind of fun, you know, combining my love of music with my love of technology and the web.

Luke:
That’s cool. I also have a love of music, but a hate of ecommerce. So we’ve got one thing in common and one thing opposite. Do you remember back in those days - and I think this is a topic we’ve maybe covered to death a little bit on podcast - but I remember the genesis of WooCommerce as a complete copy paste of Jigoshop.

Zach:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was absolutely a fork of Jigoshop with, basically nothing changed for the first little bit. You know, and Mike and James both went over to, uh, to Woo Themes at the time to run the project. Um, and they had been working on Jigoshop prior to that.

Luke:
So. Yeah, it’s a bit dodgy. But that’s all right. That’s, that’s a long, time in the past. And WooCommerce is a completely different beast today. I mean, sorry, you continue on your story. Well, I’ll save my criticisms of WooCommerce for later in the show. How about that? So, hold on, I want to just situate us here, too, because you’re in Rockford, Illinois. It sounds like a cool place.

Zach:
Yeah, home of Cheap Trick. Miles from where Danica Patrick grew up, so we’ve got the GoDaddy connection there too. Yeah, a really a neat place.

Jonathan:
Cheap trick, for those who don’t know, is that a Cricket reference?

Zach:
Oh, absolutely.

Luke:
No, it’s a… That’s a hat trick, Jonathan.

Zach:
It’s a band that’s really popular in Japan, especially when they play at Budokan. No, they’re a very well-known band from the 70s that has done some amazing work. And, you know, they’ve written quite a few albums now. But, yeah, I think there’s, there are some, some staples that people would know.

Luke:
So you’re going to concerts, you’re photographing them and trying to actually earn a little bit of money as well by doing websites?

Zach:
No, it was the other way around. Oh, cool. Yeah, so I started building websites right out of high school, actually in high school I built my first commercial website. So that was a while ago - we’re talking 25 years now, maybe 26, that I built my first website commercially for a company, uh, in the Rockford area called Rockford Truck Sales. And they wanted a website to highlight all of the semi-cabs that they had available for sale. And so that was the first website I built.

Jonathan:
That’s awesome so you start out with doing some sites individually you eventually get into the agency world and you’ve worked on some major WooCommerce projects. How would you describe your background thus far within Woo specifically?

Zach:
Yeah, so I co-founded an agency called Mindsize that I left in early 2020. We did some pretty huge projects, companies like Native Deodorant, who from their WooCommerce site went on to sell to Procter & Gamble, which was huge, probably still one of the largest acquisitions in the WooCommerce space. So we worked with Moiz on that project, a great guy, great company, and kind of weird to see them in like every target in Walmart now because I was there when they were just on the web and hadn’t found their way into retail yet. So that’s a fun story. And, you know, we did some work for a grocery chain out of Texas called H.E.B. For their Central m<rket subbrand, building a website that had curbside pickup and market-based pricing and inventory all in WooCommerce. And that site was live when COVID happened. So they were actually prepared in advance for the way the world changed in 2020.

Luke:
How did your world change in 2020?

Zach:
Well, I left my agency, spent a few months trying to start another project, in the middle of economic uncertainty, so that was fun, and decided that, you know what, I kind of don’t want to do project-based work anymore, so I started to look at the hosting industry. And I’ve always been technically minded, and I’ve always been, I started out as a developer. I was definitely not in sales and marketing when I started. But I had to learn those things in order to run agencies over the years.

I gravitated toward that just because I talk a lot and I’m good at talking to people and developing relationships. And so that’s like sales and marketing 101 right there, right? People have a conversation, develop rapport with people and actually care. That’s probably the biggest thing that some salespeople miss is the actually caring. And I actually care. So, you know, it, I gravitate in that direction.

I’ve gone through a few hosting companies now. I’ve worked a short stint at GridPane, worked for Cloudways before the DigitalOcean acquisition. And then I was at Convesio until January of this year. And now I’m at BigScoots. And I love the hosting industry. You know, I love the challenges and the interesting things that we get to solve. that’s the reason I started my agency was to solve interesting problems. And at the hosting companies I’ve been at, in particular, they’ve all been working to solve interesting problems for people. And so we, you know, we’ve been very fortunate to see some pretty crazy things along the way at the various hosting companies I’ve worked for and continue the trend of media, being involved in just really high-scale mid-market and enterprise WordPress.

Luke:
You also contribute to the Make WordPress hosting team, right?

Zach:
I do. I try to participate in the group discussions and at least be there and understand what’s going on. I don’t do a lot of contribution to their current active projects, just simply because I’m settling back into a new role. Once I’m settled and really dug in, I’ll get back to contributing more actively, but I’m at least there to make sure that I know what’s going on.

Jonathan:
Zach, for those who don’t know, can you give some context on what the hosting team is and like what it focuses on?

Zach:
Yeah, so the hosting team is really focused on trying to make sure that all hosts are hitting the same kind of compatibility markers for WordPress itself and a set and suite of tools for testing, hosting, environments to make sure that WordPress runs optimally within them. And so there’s a host testing tool that they’ve been working on that is designed to kind of be the test suite to make sure that all versions of WordPress that are in current use can run in your environments and do unit testing across the, entire product suite to make sure that your hosting is ready.

Jonathan:
I’m curious too, Zach, with this WooCommerce and ecommerce background and this context for hosting, it feels like you have an especially rich perspective to bring to some of those discussions.

From your point of view, what’s the level of difference between someone using WordPress for standard content management site build stuff versus people using it actively for in ecommerce application? I’m asking specifically through the lens of a hosting company - from my point of view, it’s very different. Sometimes hosts will wake up and say, “okay, the needs of folks that are trying to do stuff, whether they’re using Woo or other solutions, a lot of it’s Woo.. and suddenly they’re pushing past how WordPress seems to be intended to run, right?

Like caching, for instance, is the, most basic example of how what typically is fine to do with standard content just doesn’t do well with an ecommerce application

Zach:
Yeah well it’s any of the the larger like ecosystem plugins - I think you’re the one that got me on to that term Jonathan - but these these ecosystem plugins tend to make their own rules once they’re big enough and it can break things like caching, it can break things that, you know, maybe there are functions that require a version of PHP that’s not the lowest possible denominator for WordPress or, you know, any of a number of other possibilities. And so I think that there is, there’s a lot to be said about trying to build a hosting environment that makes WordPress fast without caching. so that once you add that layer, it’s just faster. But that way you’re not reliant on it as this magic pill that’s going to fix everything, right? So that’s always been my focus is build an environment and build a site in that environment that is performant to begin with. And then caching just becomes this layer of awesome on top of that that makes the site smoother, faster for visitors.

Jonathan:
Zach, I’m going to, I’m going to pull what I would describe as a Luke perspective on this next question. When you think about ecommerce in the WordPress context, are we just trying too hard?

Luke:
What does that mean Jonathan? I don’t get it.

Jonathan:
I would argue that ecommerce was in the original vision for WordPress.

So you had Woo themes as the origin. Suddenly there was this ecommerce part. They took the Jigoshop, made Woo out of it, and it clearly hit a nerve. Like it took off quite quickly. And I think there was a fairly natural evolution. People started with form builders and say, hey, I want to take money and payment gateway integrations. There was a series of steps.

But then suddenly we’re in a situation where people are transacting in these stores. You mentioned Native deodorant. People are starting businesses that are growing and they’re sticking with this and it’s like at what point are we trying too hard to just make it all work? And I feel like you’re someone who has a qualified perspective because you’ve been on the edges of how far you’ve been able to go with this WordPress as a base for these ecommerce applications.

Zach:
Well, I mean, Native deodorant had an email marketing list that was millions of people large, right? And so we were able to build an environment that kept their site up and they made money. And they made money consistently. We used elastic beanstalk on AWS. This was back in, you know, 2018, 2019 timeframe. And we had it auto-scaling based on, you know, traffic. And we gave, uh, the owner controls to pre-scale when he knew he was sending out a large marketing blast so that he could spin up additional containers just in advance. And so are we, trying too hard? Maybe, possibly. I don’t think that it’s irrational to want WordPress to be able to handle electronic commerce.

I think that maybe we’ve been overly focused on building these giant functions on top of what WordPress is that might be sometimes better suited to external tools like Ecwid or, you know, the Shopify plugin or the BigCommerce plugin are good solutions for when you don’t want to have to worry about the hosting environment and what it’s going to look like and you just want WordPress to handle content. But I also think there’s a really genuine use case for tools like WooCommerce to build complete experiences that are self-contained within one platform.

I think we’re getting to a point as the WooCommerce team focuses more on performance and the enterprise needs that I was asking them to focus on in 2017, as it gets closer to that eight years later, we are getting to a point where it’s becoming more viable. Things like high performance order storage, which for those of you who aren’t familiar, separates the orders that are stored in the WordPress database out into their own tables. Those things are helpful, but they’re also hamstrung. And why are they hamstrung? They’re hamstrung because the community has had since 2017 to start building plugins that use these crud classes that are in WooCommerce core that abstract away how data is stored. And they never did.

Luke:
You could also say it’s hamstrung because it’s built on top of a blogging platform. But that’s not entirely fair.

I mean, I guess for me, I have this timeline in my head of WordPress where originally it was like the golden age of blogging, you know? And WordPress came out as this strong, amazing player in this blogging environment. And it was great. was a great platform for writing content for creating a website with a blog. You know, to the point where, if you recall, we used to even have like a blog roll links section in the admin area. That’s what it was. And then blogging started tapering off, didn’t it? And we started to get into this Web 2.0 sort of web apps sort of thing. And, you know, with the hard work of Ryan McCue and others, we got the WordPress Rest API. And suddenly WordPress was not just a blogging platform anymore. It was a platform to build any website and even web apps. You could build forums, you could build ecommerce, you could build anything on top of WordPress. Then we went into this sort of third age where we are now. And I feel like it just, with the launch of Gutenberg, it started to get a bit more muddy and unclear. What is WordPress for? Is Gutenberg our, you know, renaissance of content writing and blogging? Or are we still focused on this web app idea, in which case Gutenberg doesn’t quite make as much sense in that context where it’s, you know, the way that it outputs data? And then do we still need web app? to, you know, be built on WordPress or do we have other tools that are better for that? Or now, I mean, and we’re entering this new age of AI now where maybe it doesn’t make sense at all to build a web app based on WordPress when we can vibe code the whole thing, then put it on GitHub.

But WooCommerce was there in this age of like, you can build anything on top of WordPress. And its still there now. What else is there with that sort of scale? It feels a little like it’s standing on its own. Maybe I’m missing something.

Zach:
Yeah, so I think that the impetus there really was, how do we compete with Magento, which was at the time the only other viable open source solution for ecommerce, right? And so looking at that and having that be part of the PHP community and just knowing that WordPress was based on PHP, why couldn’t we do similar things? And I think that’s really when the Woo Themes team started to look at the option of building an ecommerce platform and they found Jigoshop as a platform that was trying to do it. I think that’s really where it started.

Jonathan:
Did either of you two play with WP e-Commerce before that?

Zach:
I did. So my past actually started with a product called Cartweaver, written by, my friend Lawrence that was originally Coldfusion and PHP tied to Dreamweaver and had a Dreamweaver plug-in written by my friends Dan and Angela, Dan Short, Angela Bralia, great folks who ended up working at Linda.com for a while before it was acquired by LinkedIn. So that’s where my ecommerce journey started was with Cartweaver. And so when I saw, you know, Magento and it was a nightmare to get into, and I needed something a little more robust for this site I was building. And I found WooCommerce.

It was kind of the perfect middle ground for me because it had these content creation features I was used to with WordPress and combined that with the power of being able to create products and handle orders. And, you know, I think there is a benefit to having all of that living in one place. I think that there is definitely some, you know, some semblance of order to that. But it can get pretty messy if you’re on crappy hosting.

Jonathan:
We had a chance to catch up with Beau at Cloudfest for a little bit. And Beau - I think his official title is Artistic Director, which is interesting - we should unpack that sometime, Luke.

But what I appreciate about that because Beau’s been at Automattic a long time he has a strong technical background and at least in that discussion I walked away with a sense of confidence and Beau and the team’s recognition of the non-trivial nature of these bigger moves and an affirmed commitment to solving those hard problems. We’ll see how it plays out.

I’m curious for your perspective, Zach, because you’re closer to it, but at least From when I’m recalling there’s a recognition that this is a really big thing Woo has gotten, it has quite the footprint here, and it’s not easy to make wholesale changes. And there’s a willingness to continue pushing it forward to try and address some of the longstanding concerns about performance and look to the future.

Luke:
Yeah, and I think the thing you’re not adding to that, Jonathan, or maybe implicitly is a commitment to backwards compatibility.

Jonathan:
Yes, which is non-trivial.

Zach:
It’ definitely a difficult thing. And, you know, therein lies some of the problem with high-performance order storage, right? When they built HPOS to be turned on by default for new installations, but for old installations that already have orders, you have to turn it on, and then it’s enabled with this compatibility mode feature to make sure that plugins don’t start failing. If they weren’t written to use those crud classes I mentioned earlier, right? So the compatibility mode, though, instead of reducing the number of calls and rights to the database that happened when an order is created, it actually increases the number of rights to the database because it’s writing things to two places.

And so while it is essential that it exists in order to make sure that stores don’t break because plugin developers have done bad things. It also hurts performance before helping it. And as far as I’m aware, and I may be wrong on this, I need to get an update from the team that’s working on HPOS. The last I knew, there was no tool, CLI or otherwise, to clean up all of the data that it leaves behind. So if you have a bloated database that’s, you know, one or two or three or 12 gigabytes of orders and product data, and you move your orders to a custom table, you’re duplicating all that data into the custom table, and it’s still leaving the posts and all of the post meta in place. And so until that’s cleaned up, until there’s a tool to remove all of that, and there may be now, I haven’t looked for a few months, but until there’s a tool to clean all of that up, some of that benefit is lost, right? And so, you know, if you’re using high-performance order storage and you have compatibility mode on, explore turning it off. Start storing things just in the tables.

Jonathan:
Zach, I’m curious. You have all this vantage point and experience with Woo. You’ve now worked at multiple hosting companies. You have that context for the hosting team. You’re at BigScoots now. As you look at Woo Commerce, where do you see the next couple of years going?

There’s a lot of innovation in the proprietary platforms. They’re continuing to move at rapid paces. How do you think about the current state? Is WooCommerce competitive today?

Zach:
Yeah, so I think it’s definitely competitive with the other offerings that are out there. The problem is one of maintainability and usability. So it’s still built in a way that it’s supposed to look like WordPress, right? And they’ve slowly been moving things toward this new paradigm, this new single page application.

Well, and that’s part of the problem with Gutenberg, too. There are all these plugins that have their specific UI and how do you make all of that that’s existed, you know, in the context of TinyMCE and all these meta fields and other things you have to worry about, you know, how do you get these meta boxes to exist in a Gutenberg context? And we’re looking at the same things here with how do we get all of the, the plugin data, are the plugins UI to exist in the context of a WooCommerce admin screen. And so I think there are some difficult questions to answer there still. I think that as the team leans further into utilizing Gutenberg as a block editor and not as an editor where you throw an entire page in as one block, though, you know, WooCommerce will start to grow in that area. I love the thought of, you know, enforcing things needing to exist on a cart page or on a checkout page. I get that that’s a thing. But I don’t think the solution to that is one giant block. I think it’s none of the blocks fully work in the browser outside of the editor until all the required pieces are in place. But let them put the pieces where they want, right? I think that’s really the path forward. So when we really start to look at the block editor in the context of, you know, kind of that block and element and modifier concept, right? That’s why we called them blocks in the first place was so that we had individual, independent, reusable units of UI. That’s the whole reason that was named a block. So unless we really get to this B.E.N. concept, and we start to, you know, solidify the fact that a block is just a building block as part of a pattern. And that patterns are building blocks as part of a page. And pages are building blocks as part of a site. And we really enforce where those lines are.

This is the important piece to really move forward with WordPress in general. And I think WooCommerce needs to do the same thing. So, you know, we can’t have a block that’s a whole pattern. It should be a pattern that’s comprised of blocks.

Jonathan:

Zach, I’m curious, why do you feel that Woo been so dominant in the space?

Wth forms, for instance, there’s a lot of different forms players out there, right? But we don’t really see that in ecommerce.

Zach:
I think part of the problem is that it’s a really difficult problem to solve, right? It’s a complex system that has many interworking parts that all have to execute properly all the time. Things from inventory management to product data to order management, customer data management, all of these things have to work in concert. And building a solution that does all of that inside of WordPress is not easy. And I’ve been a fan of, you know, some of the alternatives that are emerging on the market. But they have their work cut out for them.

I’m a fan of North Commerce. I think Kelly’s doing great work to try and build a platform there. I’m a fan of, you know, some of the SaaS providers that are out there, like Ecwid and even SureCart, who are trying to create alternatives that aren’t reliant on the WordPress site scaling as much

I’m also a fan of these plugins from, you know, Shopify and from BigCommerce that allow you to bring some of their shopping experiences into the WordPress space. I think there’s room for all three of those different layers. And I think that, you know, it’s important that we allow each of them to have space. But building a solution as big as WooCommerce is hard. It’s a very complex project. It requires a big team now. It’s a lot to maintain.

Jonathan:
Well, as Luke would recommend, can’t you just vibe code your way through all that stuff? The first thing that you could do is just rename it to Luke Commerce. And then there’s your starting point.

Luke:
Yeah, if I was going to fork WooCommerce, I would not change all that much except definitely the onboarding experience. I’d probably just pull that out entirely.

I enjoy having hot takes on WooCommerce, but the truth is I haven’t used it in over a year. And the main reason why is because I just can’t get past that onboarding. Like all of the upsells and all of the pushy marketing tactics, I just nope right out of that. And so that’s all I’ve got to say about WooCommerce, really.

Jonathan:
It is interesting how the degree to which it’s become a business on top of this, which is a non-trivial thing. Like there’s a large business. They have a full partnerships team. There’s a lot of money to be made in that space. And it’s hard to navigate the business decisions, like which are influencing who shows up as the partners when you’re first onboarding.

It’s the product decisions and all the non-trivial technical problems that are also being worked on by a lot of talented folks. But what tends to come up, you see a lot of this. And last I heard, they’re actually reworking a lot of the onboarding experience yet again to try and address some of those problems. So maybe you’ll feel differently, Luke, in another year.

Luke:
Yeah, give you another good year, WooCommerce.

Zach:
It’s really hard to balance those things. It’s really hard to balance the necessity for WooCommerce to make money to sustain its development and its footprint in the community. Community, the marketing needs, the sales needs of a platform at that level, while also balancing the fact that this is an open source tool that anybody can download and use for free. And so I don’t think they’ve found a healthy balance yet in how they market.

Luke:
I don’t know. Like I want to push back on that actually because I don’t think it’s a balance between being a nice community open source platform and, you know, doing the very bare minimum of sales because WooCommerce is a business and their job is to push sales and marketing as hard as they possibly can this isn’t a balancing act you know and fine you know i don’t begrudge them that. I don’t like the user experience, I think if there’s a balancing act the balancing act is how much can we get away with without annoying or upsetting or losing users. And, you know, it’s going to be different for everybody. In my case, it’s a, I just never use WooCommerce. I don’t have very many good things to say about them. I generally don’t recommend them because of this bad onboarding experience. So if that’s just me, I’m a weirdo, you know, not everybody thinks like me. And, but if you upset enough people, then maybe it’s time to address some of this aggressive marketing. And, and, and, and, but, if you’re upset enough people, then, and dark patterns.

Having said that, it is my hope that the WordPress plugin team will at some point get around to having guidelines and making new rules for the plugin directory around dark patterns.

Jonathan:
I was going to say, Luke, like aggressive marketing and dark patterns, I think it’s important to bring some contextual awareness to that because there is relative, to what’s done in the WordPress space, and there’s also relative to what’s done outside of the space. Like, I think I’d agree with the heart of your contention that WooCommerce more than most is definitely more like business oriented in terms of what you’re seeing and the very real commercialization behind it. But it is still quite relative to..

Luke:
No, I disagree. Jonathan, sorry, no, they’re as dark pattern as anyone I’ve seen.

Zach:
I think the point Jonathan’s trying to make, though, is that, you know, even the SaaS platforms in this space are just a giant sales funnel, right?

Luke:
Yes.

Zach:
They get you in on a $29 Shopify plan. You know, you don’t realize at the time that you’re signing up that if you use anything but shop pay, where they make money off of their relationship with their processor, that if you use anything else, you’re going to be paying 2% more on every transaction. You know, it’s because you didn’t read the file. fine print. You didn’t see that part. So if you want to support PayPal or Klarna or a firm or anything that’s not just built into shop pay, you know, a firm is now. But if you want to support any of those other processors at their $29 a month plan, you’re giving away 2% of your business. And, you know, that’s the reason why it was so attractive to WooCommerce to build WooPayments, because that’s a way to monetize a relationship. with the customer in a way that they need anyway, because everybody needs a payment processor. And they make money off of those transactions, which helps to fund the development. It’s the same thing Shopify is doing. BigCommerce does the same things. You know, it’s just, it’s kind of par for the course of the ecommerce space now. And we don’t even want to talk about what Adobe does to market all of what they sell people to Magento store owners now.

Luke:
So I’m happy. I mean, not everybody has the privilege of being able to just say, I’m not interested in ecommerce and I can just take a step out. But, you know, there are opportunities that I turn down because I just don’t enjoy being part of the ecommerce space.

My wife runs a pottery business and she runs a simple little website where she has her pottery listed. But she installed WooCommerce to try to maybe list some of the products, and it was just so overkill and so ridiculously hard and so many dark patterns. She said, you know what, I’ll just sell to people in person. I’ll just sell at the markets. You know, I’ll just sell from my studio. And I think I wonder how many opportunities are being lost because of that.

Zach:
I think that’s a fair observation. I think that there is a space in times like that, And, you know, in that particular use case for tools like Etsy, you know, a marketplace created for creatives who are making things at home or making things in a home studio. Those are kind of purpose-built platforms for that kind of thing.

Luke:
And then you have this whole like social media ecommerce trend as well, which is perfect for that.

Zach:
It is. And, you know, you have, even my friends who are running Shopify stores are, you know, now looking at social selling as, including live selling in some cases, as an option for a new sales channel where, you know, they’re doing live web shows.

Jonathan:
It’s interesting how this, a lot of this comes full circle, though, because one of the things that happens with Etsy, for instance, is that it’s really attractive early on, but then they start to change the policy. They change the rates, they start to capture more, which then goes back to part of, I think, for a lot of folks, and I think back to some of my early Woo community days, there is something about the ownership piece that’s connected to open source that increases the tolerance that people are willing to have for the issues.

I remember a good friend of mine built a multi-million dollar ecommerce business, and I tried to convince him to not do it on Woo. I was like, you got to use Shopify, man. Like, why are you? And this was years back. And what I couldn’t articulate at the time, but confirmed later in talking it over with him, is there was something to him that was comfortable about knowing that, like, he could, like, ask someone to modify the source code, that they could make changes to it, that it was his. And I think that there’s something non-trivial about that. And if I listen to your example there, Luke, with your wife, it’s a little bit of me that’s sad that, like, In theory, something like that should be just dead simple to do in WordPress. That Woo is overkill for that in its current iteration. But in theory, if I think back to the early days of why WordPress took off, people were like, oh, this blogging thing is cool, but I just want to make a site. Like, I want to, oh, can I do this? Oh, I can put a form here? Hey, that form thing works really well. Can I collect a payment processor? And suddenly people were building applications because it was easy.

Luke:
But the thing is, I don’t know if Woo is overkill on a technical level, right? Sure. Maybe it is. And then Woo falls into this difficult spot where it has this reputation for not being good enough for huge, big enterprise stores and then too massive for small stores. And so it feels like a large niche, but a niche nonetheless. But I think Woo could speak to a lot of the smaller ecommerce owners just by simplifying the onboarding, just by being less pushy, just by being a little more calm, you know, calm.

Zach:
Yeah, I think that’s a fair point. And I think one of the great things about WooCommerce when it first started was that it was this blank. slate that we had that we could build things with. And it’s definitely not that anymore, right? It doesn’t start you out and just throw you into an interface where you add products. You know, it tries to guide you quite a bit. And maybe the guidance has gotten to be too much. And maybe the suggestions have gotten to be too much. And that’s understandable. But they’re also there for people who aren’t like us, right?

Jonathan:
You know, I’m interested to take this back to some of your experience in the hosting world. One of the things for those who aren’t aware, some of the larger hosts actually roll their own WooCommerce onboarding experience, right? So if you install WooCommerce on GoDaddy, you get a different flow. If you install on Hostinger, you get a different flow. And they’re trying to solve different problems in different ways. Some of its audience-specific stuff.

So I know you’re only a month into the job so far, but like as you look at WooCommerce in particular through the BigScoots lens, lens, how do you think about that? Is the focus more on just supporting customers? How does BigScoots think about the WooCommerce space?

Zach:
Well, I think we look at it in much the way we look at the WordPress space as a whole. And that is our primary focus - and will remain our primary focus - is providing really amazing otherworldly support for our customers. And I say that because I’ve only been here a month, and I can tell you that I have never seen net promoters score scores as high as I’m seeing at BigScoots. Our customers love our support team. it’s kind of nutty to see an NPS score that average, you know, for the year right now is over 95.

Jonathan:
But, Zach, if I may, how much of that do you feel like is a symptom of or a necessary result of things being hard in WordPress or in the ecommerce context?

Zach:
I don’t know if it’s really a symptom of that as much as it is, just we help at a level that some hosts aren’t willing to. So a lot of hosts have this thought that support should be limited to the WordPress install and the environment it lives in. And that’s about it.

Jonathan:
So you’re arguing that there’s a philosophical difference there?

Zach:
Yeah, and so I think for us, the way we look at WooCommerce is how can we best support the customers that are using it and the store owners who need our support team. And if we can win on the support side, then we’re winning in general because when things go wrong, that’s when people want to know their host has their back.

We have our own data center, which is a huge differentiator. You know, it’s our hardware. We’re not renting the cloud from somebody else and then reselling that. So we have a level of flexibility that most people don’t and that we can deploy bare metal in a way that other companies may not be able to, where we can put a physical database server next to a physical web server and connect the two in the same rack. to each other, so they’re directly networked to each

Jonathan:
It sounds like you’re not vibe coding infrastructure.

Zach:
No, not at all. And we are, you know, it’s definitely kind of cool to work for a company that has its own data center, especially at our size, because normally you only see the really, really large players having their own data centers. So that’s a definite differentiator for us. And, you know, our architecture, the network topography of how our network is built is also very modern. It’s a spine and leaf architecture, which now provides for a level of redundancy and replaceability that’s normally harder to do. So it’s really cool to be in a place where, you know, the technology matters as much as it does and matters as much as it does. And we’re not just reselling some cloud providers hardware. right? There’s nothing wrong with reselling cloud hardware. There’s just, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just different.

So in those cases, when you’re working with a host that you’re paying a cloud tax, first of all, for being on cloud infrastructure, because the cloud infrastructure provider needs to make money and the host needs to make money. And then they’re charging you mainly for support layered on top of that, right? So if you are paying for support and your support experience is not amazing, then, you know, what’s that upcharge actually for?

Luke:
Zach, I actually spent a little bit of time chatting with the BigScoots support team when I was setting up a website on BigScoots. And you’re right, it was a fantastic experience. They answered every single one of my questions except for one. They didn’t have an answer to one question. I’m going to pose the question now to you. Are you ready?

Zach:
Okay. Yeah.

Luke:
What does the name BigScoots even mean?

Zach:
So the company was started about 15 years ago, believe it or not. And it’s hard to believe that because we’ve only really been visible in the WordPress space for the last two years. And so when the founders were starting the company, they thought that, you know, the name BigScoots was kind of weird and different. And originally the mascot that we have around that’s on the website was riding a scooter. So he was a big dude on a scooter.

Luke:
There you go.

Zach:
So that was just kind of fun, kind of different. And it’s evolved into what it is now from just kind of something they thought was funny that made them stand out in a world full of I this and I that. in the 15 year ago market space.

Luke:
That’s better than the origin story for GoDaddy.

Jonathan:
Speaking of visibility, you guys have been showing up more. You guys are also a sponsor of Crossword this season, which we’re grateful for. You’re going to be coming to WordCamp US, and one of the things that you’ve been doing for some time is, like, taking your love of photography and bringing it to WordCamps. What can you tell us about the photography work you’ve been doing?

Zach:
Yeah, so what I do outside of WordPress is I go out and I take photos of musicians - primarily hard rock and metal bands. And we have a lot of fun on the road, taking photos at music festivals. I was on stage in front of 40,000 people in Louisville, Kentucky last year, behind the drummer of the band Tap Root, taking a photo from behind his head during the Louder than Life Festival that Danny Wimmer puts on every year there. And it’s a lot of fun. You know, it brings out my artistic side, lets me do something that gets me out of this chair, which is an important thing for all of us. So I’ve been taking photos that way for about the same amount of time that I’ve been in in WordPress. And so I decided a few years ago that I wanted to contribute that back to the WordPress community, and I volunteered for the photo team for WordCamp US and had a ton of fun doing it. I ended up being one of the two people invited to come in as the official photographers for the keynote at that WordCamp US. And, you know, that has happened every year since. including last year.

Luke:
Wow. I hope you got some good photos.

Zach:
I did. I got a very interesting photo right before the session actually started with Matt and Brian talking to each other and the crowd behind them and you can see the crowd in front of them. Kind of an interesting thing.

Luke:
That’s cool. You like that behind. the speaker towards the crowd shot, hey?

I don’t want you to get that for me. You’ll just get a big bald spot.

Zach:
I like it for the context it provides from the perspective of the person. That is cool. Yeah. So that was a neat one to be able to get. And, you know, just some really cool photos in. I normally go around all the sponsor booths, try to get photos of the sponsors. and include those in what I’m giving to the photo team. And all of those end up going into an album online every year from all of the contributors. And I think last year we had eight or nine different photographers at WordCamp US who were photographing sessions and taking photos at the parties and things after. But I try to just bring the camera everywhere I go during US. And all the parties I end up at, I offer to take photos. photos for those teams as well.

Luke:
So for the photography geeks out there, when you’re at a WordCamp what sort of hardware do you bring?

Zach:
So I use the same rig that I use for my concert photography. I use a combination of, so I have a Nikon D-600. It’s kind of an older camera body now. It’s about 10 years old. But it’s a full-frame body with two Tamron lenses. I use a Tamron 24 to 70 millimeter F2.8 lens. And I use a Tamron 70 to 200 F2.8 lens. So, you know, that F stop is how much light the camera can let in, right?

Luke:
Because you’re indoors, you need it quite low.

Zach:
Yeah, a lot of the time I’m working in practical darkness apart from the lighting that’s available from the stage. And, And, you know, I’ve gotten really good at freezing beams of light and freezing dreads. Those are my favorites to photograph. And it’s just, it’s a lot of fun. I really enjoy, you know, that aspect of photography, capturing a moment and then having it to share with the people who were at the show. Or in the case of WordCamp, the people who were at the camp.

Jonathan:
Zach, it’s been a pleasure being your guests on this episode. Thanks for having us.

Zach:
Yeah, I really appreciate you joining me. It’s been great.

Jonathan:
Two things. How can folks go hold of you or can they best contact you? And tell us about the other podcasts that you’re involved in besides Crossword.

Zach:
So, yeah, I’m the host of the Expanding the Stack podcast, which is part of DevPulse, which is what was Do the Woo and is transitioning to openchannels.fm. That should be public, I think, by the time this comes out.

Jonathan:
Yes. Or this will be the breaking scoop.

Zach:
Yeah, either way. Bob will be okay with it. You know, I’ve hosted, I think, close to 50 episodes now of the Do the Woo podcast in various forms. Did some live streaming for Do The Woo. back in, you know, the COVID days. That was fun. But, you know, I’ve had a lot of fun with that. And then as far as where to find me online, I’m pretty much my first initial last name everywhere, including at Big Scoots. So my email is first initial last name at bigscoots.com. So if you’re an agency owner and you want to talk partnerships, yeah, I know. I did. I pitched.

I would love to talk with anybody who wants to have a hosting partner that has a stupid net promoter score. And look forward to seeing you at WordCamp US. Yeah, likewise.

Jonathan:
I look forward to seeing everybody there. You’ve been a great host. Thank you, Zach.