Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or marketing professional looking for straightforward non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Marketing Labs. I'm your host, Tilly Hayes, and I'm the SEO executive here at Marketing Labs. Today we're diving into the world of e-commerce with a big focus on WooCommerce. Whether you're a small business owner looking to grow your business online or even a developer seeking new tools to recommend to your clients, then this episode is for you. We'll be breaking down what WooCommerce is. Its many benefits, usability, and much more. Joining me to discuss this is our resident web dev, Josh Stapleton, our CEO, Matt Janway, and our creative director Tom Haslum. Shall we get started?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Yeah, I feel like you were reading from one of those
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Teleprompters.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
You know those radio adverts terms and conditions apply
Unknown Speaker - (?):
I'm good. Tilly, did you ask me how I was?
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
No, because she's roasted me straight off
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
How are we doing guys?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
It feels weird being on this side, not hosting
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And downstairs.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Yeah.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
New room, new room, new room,
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
New vibe.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And for the first time recording everybody, the first video episode,
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Everyone wave at their camera.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
So what's the agenda?
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
So we could start by giving a brief overview of WooCommerce.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Yeah I can take it. So WooCommerce is basically a plugin that you can instal on WordPress and it allows you to add e-commerce functionality to WordPress. The, I guess extent of it is you can do a lot with it. There's a lot of plugins for it that you can add to add extra functionality, but yeah, generally it's just a plugin that allows you to add e-commerce to WordPress.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
It's quite an intuitive platform, I think, which is one of its biggest benefits, but I believe the platform was launched in 2011 and then it's just gone on since then as a open source integration to WordPress really. And loads of e-commerce businesses are using it now.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, well I guess WordPress powers most of the internet, doesn't it? Yeah, so it's only natural that when a decent e-commerce solution came along, it follow suit. So I think also in terms of e-commerce websites, WooCommerce is the largest platform, possibly Shopify now don't have those stats, but incredibly popular.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I tried to find some stats on it, to be fair, it is quite vague. It's saying a large proportion of websites use WooCommerce, which
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Could have figured that out on my own.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
It is massive compared to, I dunno, as your alternatives, you've got Wix and Shopify and things like that. I think quite a lot of people still do use Shopify. They
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Do, and I think in the US that's fine. In the uk I think there are some limitations which we might come onto later or another episode I like Woo for certain types of websites. Depends on the goals, depends on the size of the website. There's lots of varying reasons why you might want to use it or potentially not want to use it. So I guess again, we'll come on to some of those.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
So the question, how customizable is WooCommerce as a platform?
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
I'd say a lot more than most platforms. I suppose with most things in development and I guess e-commerce in general, there's usually boltons where you can add additional functionality and stuff like that. WooCommerce probably one of the better ones with it being open source. I mean, you can just look through the code base and I mean a lot of developers out there are already developing plugins for it. So there's all sorts of additional stuff you can get there. And I mean if you can do some basic Googling, you can pretty much always find a solution to whatever problem you might find.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I guess you benefit as well, don't you, from the size of the community that many people use WooCommerce, if somebody has a challenge or an idea or something they're trying to implement, you could almost guarantee somebody somewhere has also had a similar thing. So finding a solution for that, whether it be a plugin or whether it be something that might be hard coded is generally relatively straightforward more often than not.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Again, with it being so open source as well, there's thousands of themes that somebody, if they were thinking of installing WooCommerce with WordPress, they can choose a theme from the thousands that are there. I mean, we take a bespoke approach with most of our designs and implement templates for product pages, category pages, things like that. But there's thousands of themes out there that people can just go and grab and use and
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Just ready to go. Yeah, ready
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
To go. Yeah,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Exactly. And on that note, I guess it's probably worthwhile covering that if you are not techie, let's say whether WooCommerce and WordPress would still be for you. So you mentioned Wix and obviously the Squarespace, if you add Shopify into there. I think one of the small disadvantages, although I wouldn't say it's difficult, one of the small disadvantages I think of WooCommerce is it's probably slightly out of reach for non-techies slightly. I think if they followed instructions, I think they'd be okay. Generally, however, Shopify is literally just a few buttons and away you go. Same with Wix and Squarespace. It's probably for a layman slightly more easy to use and I think that's where Shopify have cornered the market.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
I think there are a lot more intuitive like Wix and Shopify. You look at WordPress in general and it's not the prettiest backend and I think that kind of tends to put a lot of people off.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And I guess the reason for that generally I think is just because it's rather more capable from a dev perspective.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
The additional functionality that you had with plugins and things like that, they're all developed by different people, so getting a coherent design throughout the entirety of the WordPress backend is pretty much impossible. Yeah,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah,
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
That's a good
Unknown Speaker - (?):
Point. Just to add on to your point that it is intuitive, but I would say that because I've used it quite a lot and I'm familiar with it, which is why like you say, people would turn to Shopify or Wix or something like that first. But I mean from our perspective, we can customise it to the nth degree. We can work with clients to whatever they need, whatever integrations. We've done multiple different types, but it's what fits for you. There's things like obviously custom payment gateways that you can integrate, there's portals, you can add automations, there's all sorts of stuff that you can do with it. But like you said, I would say unlike Magento, whether that's really dev heavy, I think WooCommerce and WordPress is like middle ground, I think I would say. Would you agree me on that?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I would say so, yeah, depending on how complex the instal is as well. If you wanted it to be really basic, if you had a store of 20 products and you were happy with a generic theme that you found that you didn't really want to customise, I think somebody who has a low-ish level of TE knowledge could still be fine. I guess it's at the point where you really want to start dabbling and customising things where you might find it a little bit more difficult, but just off the shelf, I think most people might be okay with setting that up.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
What I'd say is if you've managed to set WordPress up, I think you'll probably be okay with WooCommerce. Yeah,
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Yeah. I think beyond the setup and design of your templated pages and things like that, I think the management of it is actually really useful. Managing products, stock control, categorization of your products and things like that because they will all fall then seamlessly into the structure that has been set up, if it's been set up correctly. So yeah, I think from a management perspective, I think it's really intuitive and quite straightforward. Once you've got that middle part sort of done design in your structure,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I think it does most things pretty well, doesn't it? Absolutely. Like you say, you could easily manage your stock on there. You might get some scenarios where you need more advanced stock management, different locations, or you might have multiple shops around the country or something like that. Obviously you'd need some support with that, but out the box stock control is pretty good. Inventory management is okay. Product management is fine. Yeah,
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
I'll say bulk management's a bit of a pain. There are plugins for it, but I mean just off the shelf it's not as good. What
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Do you mean by bulk management for those that might not understand what that is?
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
If you're wanting to edit inventory, for example, in bulk on, I dunno, a spreadsheet or something like that, you could select the entire column and just add, I dunno, two or four stock units to everything, doing something like that on woo. I mean, it's possible. Generally you need another plugin or some custom code or something like that, but off the shelf it's like you're pretty much stuck to just doing one product at a time
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And actually thinking about the bulk editor, while I think it's reasonable, it's okay. There are certain things also you can't do in there. So you can edit page product names, prices, things like that, but you can't edit things like obviously the content and things easily. So at least all elements of the content. So while it's useful, it's not like a full bulk editor, but again, I think that's fine for 95% of businesses
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
And if you do need that additional life flexibility, you can always export to a CSV spreadsheet and then edit it.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
To summarise, I think WooCommerce is the perfect sort of platform for someone that they've maybe been running a Shopify store for a while, they want to convert something that's a little bit more SEO friendly, WordPress and so on, and they want to work with a digital marketing agency that's us to help 'em. Other digital marketing agencies are available
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Apparently,
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
But I think that's the perfect scenario really. They're not a startup. They're established and they want to just take it to the next level really. So yeah, that would be my summary.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
I know Josh mentioned how the edit function can be a bit awkward on WooCommerce. Is there any other considerations that businesses should make before choosing it?
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
I've got one maybe not a consideration before choosing it, probably while you're using it, and I think this goes with a lot of things, maybe not just WooCommerce, but using it properly. I mean, it sounds kind of stupid, but there's no end of plugins out there. Let's say that will change the functionality to fit something you want to do, but you can actually just do that with the default instal. So you're adding a load of additional bloat and I dunno, stuff that's not really exportable in the future
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And potential for conflict.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Yeah, yeah. I mean those plugins probably won't be around forever. Maybe they will, but yeah, they might not be, and stuff could go wrong,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
But it is very common for us where we're not maintaining or managing a website. Somebody will come to us and say, okay, something's broke. I need your help. We'll look at it. And the plugins are two years out of date, four years out of date. The theme files are years out of date. The core WordPress files are years out of date. The challenge, I guess with all of that, and this is absolutely a consideration, is not all of those are going to be compatible with each other when you update them all. So you have to do it quite carefully. You've got to update them one by one, take a backup in between, check everything works when you've updated them. And even then you might get to the point where, for example, they're all designed to work on PP eight, but the server might be running PHP 8.3
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Or one of the plugins that props up the entirety of your shop, just doesn't work on BHPA and everything else needs to.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, exactly. Then you're in
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
A bit of a sticky
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Spot, you're in a pickle there. And that's where I think one of the most common mistakes with WordPress websites, in fact, I'd go a step further and say websites full stop is lack of maintenance and management. I think people treat a website like they've purchased something like, okay, well I've bought my tv, now it's there, it's on, it's working. Whereas actually a website is much more like a car where you've got to fill it up with fuel and you've got oil changes and you need brakes and it needs maintenance and it needs looking after. And I think that is probably the biggest mistake, and I guess that probably not in its entirety, but I think that's probably where Shopify might be more suitable for some businesses. If they're not mature enough, let's say as a business to want to maintain their website, you still need maintenance of some degree, but it's less complex, let's say.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
I was going to ask, are there any other reasons why someone might choose Shopify over WooCommerce?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
In my opinion, I think it's likely that they haven't had a serious conversation with a third party that might be agnostic on the subject. So for example, somebody comes to us and they'll say, okay, well I'm thinking about Shopify, what are your thoughts? We'd say, well, where do you sell to? If you sell to the uk, your Shopify store's going to be hosted in the us So there's a chance, not a complete chance, but there's a chance that search engines would rank your website more in the US than the uk. We would ask them whether speed matters, because generally Shopify stores are pretty slow, especially in the uk. That impacts conversion rates, it impacts user experience. We would also probably ask them whether at some point they might need more sophistication from their store integrations into things. Not impossible, but again, just slightly more difficult. So if the answer to any of those is yes, there might be another solution. So I would say it's most likely because they're not necessarily aware of the other solutions and they've not sought some advice from a third party.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I would also add to that and just say that I think budget speed of launch would also be probably the biggest benefit because we'll, some WordPress need a bit more work than Shopify, where you can just create an account, choose a theme, add a couple of products, and you probably have a site launch within a day, probably less depending on how many products you've got. So I think again, small business, they want to get online quick, don't really understand it, they'll probably go to Shopify straight away, which isn't a bad thing, but again, like Matt said, there's other reasons why you'd probably choose WooCommerce over it. With
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
That said though, I mean Shopify prices can add up after a while depending on what package you go for.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's the hidden fees. Yeah, it's the transactional fees and all of that kind of stuff. Absolutely. I think the other thing as well to note is where do you plan on getting traffic from? Firstly, have you thought about it because you might just think, well put a website out there, people will come. People genuinely think that obviously that's the wrong mindset because they generally won't not unless you have an audience already somewhere. So that's another question to ask really, because it could well be that if they're planning on utilising social media as the majority of driving their traffic, actually Shopify might be perfectly fine and other platforms, if there's an over-reliance, for example, on organic SEO, again, not impossible, but you are slightly hamstrung. There are certain things that out the box, it doesn't particularly do that well. URL structures, for example, canonical tags, again possible, but you definitely need developer support for things like that, making sure that the URLs, the links in the nav bar go to the correct URLs. Shopify has a great way of just duplicating URLs all over the place. That's not going to be great for organic performance. So it's another question to ask and it's another thing to consider. Whereas WooCommerce generally out the box, you are fairly good to go, especially if you utilise something like Yost or Rank Math or all in one SEO, that'll do a lot of the heavy lifting in that sense.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
Is there a chance that if you are a business is looking to grow pretty big that you could end up growing Shopify?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I think so. I mean there are some massive stores that run on Shopify. It's not impossible. I think there are certain limitations. That's the challenge in my opinion. Yes. I think if the most common, at least the most common path that I hear is somebody sets up a business out of their front room, they've used Shopify, they grow, they get to a certain point where they want to do things that is a bit more difficult and they struggle often. At that point, I'd usually recommend thinking about something like Magento or WooCommerce. Personally,
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I think the SEO capabilities of WordPress are much stronger than Shopify, so I guess it's form of a function when it comes to choosing initially and your growth as a business and so on. I think another thing to mention about WooCommerce is that you've almost got full control over the data is your data, whereas some third party platforms might hold back some data as well, so that's a good one to know. How in control do you want to be over your data? I think generally speaking, the main reasons why I would say choose WooCommerce over Shopify if they were on a blank canvas and had the budget for it is stronger SEO capabilities, longer term, functionally get a little bit more control over things and customization as well. If you're going to be working with an agency, then the customization is as much as you want it to be and you're not restricted to a theme or some styles that you might outgrow. Eventually they will be my three points. So
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
What's interesting just on that, one of the things you said a minute ago, I've just had a quick Google on my phone to see if I can find some stats to suggest how many Shopify stores run a generic theme, one of the three themes, and it looks to be 85 plus percent.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Really
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Compare that to WordPress, and it's about 45%. So I think that tells you who the audience is and it's a simple sort of one click setup. I'll pick a theme away I go. So yeah, absolutely to answer that question then in its entirety, I think people potentially will outgrow it.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
So what are the top five benefits of choosing WooCommerce?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I will start with one. Well, it's a free core plugin. I will add core because there are paid additions and integrations and subscriptions that you can add to it, like Woo, subscriptions and things. If you run a subscription model on your business and things like that, well you do have to pay for those, but the core plugin is completely free. So I think that for a starting point is a big benefit because Shopify, I think the minimum for that is like 10 or seven quid a month or something like that.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
There is a fee, yeah, yeah.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Also,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
There's a few free themes as well, but the majority of them are paid, don't get me wrong on WordPress as well. There's a lot of paid themes, but there's also, there's an awful lot more free themes you can get away with just paying for your hosting and
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Basically, yeah,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, absolutely. I'll go next then. Should we go around the table? Go for it. Okay, so I would go with power of community stole mine, did I? Sorry, Josh, we should have gone anti-clockwise. I think the power of the community is really strong. Any challenge you face, someone will have faced it. Support levels are high. There's an element of togetherness as well. You could go onto Reddit on a WordPress or WooCommerce subreddit and if you had a challenge, people would jump in and help and yeah, good community.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Yeah, I'm going to go with Power of Community. I'm going to kind of follow up on yours to be fair. So flexibility, the amount of plugins and things like that that are out there and the amount of other devs that have already tackled problems that you are probably going to have, chances are you can probably do anything that you need.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I think just to add a fourth, then I think the growth spectrum longer term is better on WordPress than it is on Shopify. Some might argue not, but I think mainly because of the SEO considerations longer term by using WordPress foundationally, I think you're going to be in a stronger position by starting with WordPress and WooCommerce.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, okay. I'll take number five. I'm going to go with performance. When I say performance, I mean speed. Controlling the performance of your website is a lot easier on WordPress than it is on most of the platforms. Self-hosted for one. So you're in complete charge of the server, the server specs, the resources it has, all of that stuff, and you can scale that roughly infinitely. I think also that you have so much more control over the code base that you can improve the performance so much easier than you can on other platforms.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Good five those
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
One. Maybe for Tom and Josh as designers, do you have a personal preference over one or the other?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Oh, and down Move Commerce. To be fair though, when I wasn't as technically attuned
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
To
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Digital marketing, basically before I started working at Marketing Labs, I used to use Shopify but not, I used to use the buy button version of it. So I would essentially create a website on WordPress, design it, and then implement what Shopify would give you as buy button codes. So essentially that's a little bit of a short code for a product or a category or whatever it might be integrated in. So I think I was sort of a middle ground, whereas I would never sort of use a Shopify theme because I always like to design things bespoke, but then again, you practically getting more by using WooCommerce. So now hands down WooCommerce 100% and work alongside this beast
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
We're
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Capable of doing, don't split
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
That jacket. Josh.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I think when we get most briefs from clients for e-commerce websites where we can do pretty much anything, can't we really?
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Yeah. Yeah. I'd say, you know what actually design-wise on the backend, I will say I prefer Shopify.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Backend. Yeah, backend.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
It's very pretty.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Backend of Shopify is good. It is a nice backend. It's easy to use, simple, clean. I think that's why sometimes when people move away from it, they struggle and it's a psychological thing because they're used to that backend.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
That big learning curve is switching down
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
There. I can remember, actually, I'm not going to name drop here because it's probably a bit unfair, but there was a while back we had a client move from Shopify to WooCommerce and they weren't very happy with how the backend looked, and obviously they were very used to how Shopify looked very user friendly and intuitive and stuff like that. We ended up re-skinning the backend just to copy the colour scheme. Everything else remained the same and they were much happier with it.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's funny that, isn't it very weird. We literally themed to the backend and yeah, came away happy just because it visually looked a bit different.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Think
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
People just pullers as well though. Not even that weird.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah,
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I think whatever works, I think the longer term considerations outweigh the functionality, should I say. I think once you get used to it, we help clients all the time train them into how to use these things. There's other businesses that will do that, but don't choose them.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
Let's say we're going to work with a client, we'll design it, Josh will develop it, we'll then fine tune it to whatever they think is suitable for them, and then at the end of that we'll offer them some training. So how do you use the visual builder that we've implemented? If we've done that, how do you use WooCommerce, backend, manage your products, categories, things like that, and fully train them on how to use it because then essentially it's their marketing tool. We want to help monthly if they need our support, but we shouldn't always be the bottleneck for little tweaks, like changing the price on a product that can be managed by the client fairly easily with some training.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And that's actually just a final, I guess, positive of using any of these platforms. The amount of businesses I speak to where they actually can't do any of this on their website is quite staggering, and they do get stuck in a bottleneck. They'll email their developers and they'll reply in five days and they'll charge 'em 150 quid for update in an anchor text on a link in the footer
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
And say it'll take two weeks.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, exactly. And it's literally a five second job for somebody, and like you say, we're always going to be here when our clients need our help, but actually the vast majority of things on these platforms, they can't actually do themselves without having to pay somebody or wait
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Who would work with the developer?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I mean, luckily for us, we always reply quickly and we're always on it quick.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
I was going to ask as well, I know that all clients are on a bespoke kind of design, but do you ever have a timeframe in mind when you're building a website?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
How long's a piece of strength? I think there's a number of different factors that come into play there. I think the main one when it comes down to e-commerce is the data. How many products do they have? If they've got any e-commerce website already, how good does that data look to then integrate into WooCommerce, things like that.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Just picking up on that migration's, totally different from building from scratch. If you're migrating from a platform and your data's already all over the place, then you're probably looking at quite a while sorting that out, whereas like a fresh design, fresh juststarting from fresh, yeah, probably a lot
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Easier. I think if anything came to us and said, we've got 15,000 products and we want to start from scratch, Josh would love that. He loves manipulating data, but they're starting from scratch. We know we're going to create it in such a way that is perfect. Whereas if they came to us and say, we've got 15,000 products on X platform already, we can do it, but it's just going to take a bit more work
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Without naming names. You did one of them actually Josh last year, but it came from Magento and actually the data was worse than a normal Magento export would be. So Magento exports generally are pretty good, aren't they? Yeah,
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Usually very well when they're stock.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
When they're stock, yeah. The challenge here was that it wasn't stock, was it? There were various systems built on systems built on systems.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Yeah. This actually goes back to a comment. I made it halfway through is using it properly. That applies to WordPress and Magento and anything on this particular Magento instal, they were using a plugin to give them better control over variance and things like that. So like sizes, colours, and all that. Whereas the system can do that on its own. They just wanted two or three additional things, which they probably could have done without. And by using that plugin to do that, it's all stored in the database in just stupid ways. There's no real good way to export that data and actually clean it up. So that took us quite a long time. I say that took me me quite a long time to actually clean.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah. Yeah, and also that slowed that website down. There's another thing coming back to thinking about considerations is a lot of WordPress builds. Some people will say this, and I think it's not correct personally, one of the things people say when they talk about WordPress is that over time they can slow, but it's been built incorrectly. Yeah. It's not WordPress's fault that the developers installed 65 plugins
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Or
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
That after it's been built, you've installed 65 plugs.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, yeah. Now it's just going to add bloat, and this comes back to what we were talking about with these products on the website where it was a mess, thousands of products in a real mess that took a lot of tidying up. So that kind of build is a lot longer in reality, we probably didn't factor that in as well as we should either. When you're quoting and when you're estimating for a build like that, it's actually until you really start doing it, sometimes you find gremlins that affect things like build time and how much effort needs to go into it. So
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Big old can of worms.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, you do. And there was a couple of can of worms in that one
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Again. Yeah, how long's a piece of string, but I think generally 10 to 12 weeks sometimes can go up to 20 weeks depending on data and how we need to manipulate it, but that's the part that takes the longest in terms of design can normally get that done within two weeks,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
That of site as well. So if it's a brochure site and it's four pages, we probably do it in quicker than that, quite a lot quicker as well, depending on what other work we've got on. But
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
If we're specifically talking e-commerce, there's lots more that go into it. You've got more templated pages we call them. They're not templated from a design. The design of the templated page is bespoke, but you've got to put more structure in.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
You've got to think about more as well, haven't you? Faster navigation. Exactly. Usability, features, usability filtering, all of that kind of stuff. So
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Much bigger. One thing I'd add to time actually is how much functionality do you actually want the filtering out the box WooCommerce is filtering isn't bad to be fair, just out of the box, but there are additional plugins that you can add that can make that hell of a lot better. But on top of that as well, do you need any of those custom functions that we spoke about? Booking or subscriptions and stuff like that? They tend to add a little bit more time to dev.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
Final one. Can anyone share any success stories of sites that we've built?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Yes,
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
All of them. We can
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Straight out the box. We worked with a client last year called plus compo. They sell plastic components for engineering products and hydraulic components in that industry. They had such a basic site from a front end perspective, the site actually looked okay, but from a functionality perspective in terms of them managing their products and how it was structured and categorised for SEO specifically and internally, they were using, I can't remember what the CMS was. I can't remember whether it was open cart or Big Cart. Can you remember Josh or plus Compo?
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
I think it was Open cart. I can't actually remember.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Essentially we recommended that they manipulate their data and we almost started from a blank canvas, which we didn't sort of migrate. We sort of migrated and adjusted to suit, but that's doing really well now from a performance perspective, from an e-commerce perspective, they're much happier with the way that it's working with orders coming in and how they manage it internally with their stock, getting vendors on there and things like that. So that's a really good example for me is plus Compo based in Sheffield.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
Nice.
Josh Stapleton - (Web Developer):
Yeah, atomic was a good one. So they're really large furniture company and migrated them from Magento to WooCommerce and whilst it was a bit of a pain with the migration, they seem to be doing quite well because of it.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Lots of opportunities on that side, to be honest. Massive. Yeah. I think in terms of managing and controlling their stock and managing the end, how it looks and how the products, whether they're running sales and things like that, it's working really well for him. I think the biggest problem that they were facing with Magento initially is how heavy it was, how much it needed maintaining and just I think the cost of maintenance ongoing that they were facing outweighed the investment to migrate to WooCommerce. So although that was considerable, I think they're in a much better place moving forward for sure.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, and the website's performing much better
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
And it looks better.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
The last one just kept falling over as well. It was so complex. Pulling
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Over this one's tape everywhere on the, yeah,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Literally just band-aids over everything. Yeah, this one is clean, crisp, working nicely, isn't it?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
I think that's probably one of my proudest designs. To be fair, I really like Atomic Site not to be big edited or
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
I'll have to check that one out. Tom not actually seen it.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Me not?
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
No.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
To Interiors, not good, are you?
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
It's nice. Tells no, I think together the dynamic duo Shined.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Shined Sean.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Yeah, I was really proud of that site and I think together we did a good job on both design and data and Dev. Happy with it.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Data mostly. Data.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Mostly design, yeah. Did you enjoy hosting that one till?
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
Yeah, once I did the
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Intro, yeah.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
Robot. The intro where you spoke about a hundred mile an hour. Yeah.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah. My name's till Hayes.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
My name's till Hayes and I'm an SEO O Daily Martin Lamb. I'm here. I'm talking about WooCommerce. I don't know why I always resort to Tennessee.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's the best, isn't it? Yeah. Enjoyed that. Till's. Well done. Yeah. Cheer you Chilli. Thank you. Thanks.
Tom Haslam - (Creative Director):
See you next time.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
See you guys. See you. See you.
Tilly Hayes - (SEO Executive):
That wraps up our episode on WooCommerce 1 0 1. Today we explored what WooCommerce is, its benefits, usability, and customization options, and even touched on some challenges you might face. We hope this episode has provided you with valuable insights into how WooCommerce can be a powerful tool for your next e-commerce venture. Thank you to the team for sharing their expertise and thank you our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with anyone who might find it helpful. See you on the next episode.
