 Let me start with my story, Mary thanks for the talk, I wish you had it about five years ago when I started with WordPress and so let me just give you a background of where I'm coming from now. I was back in 2013 or 2014, around the late 2013, early 2014 and I had this big profile client who was a hotel in Tanzania and you can imagine that time buying first of all a laptop was like really expensive, I mean you could get a small 12 inch laptop for about 40,000 and that time I had a really small laptop, it was an Acer, Acer Aspire D270 I think. So I was hard coding that website and the client needed of course perfection and everything. Then I accidentally give someone the laptop and I don't know what he did but the whole thing just disappeared. The whole website, all my data, practically everything and this is a hard coding website, you can imagine trying to go through almost 10, 20,000 lines of code. So fortunately I managed to get it back just a bit and I actually showed a friend and this friend actually laughed at me because it was not what he's used to really. So that's now where he introduced me to WordPress and by the way he mocked me and yeah so ever since I just went online, learned a few stuff on stuff like linda.com and yeah ever since when then I've never turned back so to say yes. So basically today I'm going to talk about why you really need to use WooCommerce to build WooCommerce stores and not any other platform. Oh by the way, I'm not discriminating any other platform, I know there's what, there's Magento, there's DrupalCommerce, yes. This is basically out of my experience with building e-commerce stores with WooCommerce and it's been a really good experience. I started with e-commerce stores about two and a half years ago. So that's my little profile, sorry, I forgot about that. So let me start, how many know, okay someone give me an example of an e-commerce site that you've seen online, yes. Another one, yes, anyone, Alibaba, yes, any other one, any other, yes. So there's so many and they've been used, they've been built with quite a number of systems and stuff like that but today I'll focus on two main platforms which we all know, WooCommerce and Shopify, how many have heard of Shopify, yes, great, how many have used it. So back to the guys of Shopify, so basically Shopify is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that makes it easy to create an online store, accept payments and manage inventory, all-in-one single platform without ever having to worry about technical aspects of managing a website such as security and hosting. I know, okay, what comes into your mind when you actually want to start creating an e-commerce store? Say for example, anyone, what comes into your mind? How easily someone can search and maybe comparing other products, if there's a product I wanted to listed, can I see maybe the other choppers, what experience they had and maybe another related items, maybe I had done before that. Okay, great, of course you want to get it up, like Mary said, to the fast page of Google. So well, let's break it down, just a disclaimer, whatever you choose to use is up to you, but just a side note there, you cannot always use WooCommerce and let no one short change you for that. So before starting to really build your e-commerce site, you must consider a few things. Number one, budgets. So I'll pose this to, rather, not developers, but people who actually want to have an e-commerce site up. And okay, my experience is with most canyons. So let me ask, how much would you put at stake for an e-commerce site? Allocating the budget, I'd base it on the value of the business, how much you're invested in the business and how much you're willing to put aside for the budget. And on average, just a rough estimate. Now based on a business that is worth like 200,000 shillings, let's say, I'd say like 5% of that. 5% would be about what, mathematicians? Anyway, as Lena has said, basically it depends on what you have at stake. And financially, also what you have in your stock, because whatever you have depends, you can't build a store like Safari Combs, Masoko, and you just have like t-shirts you're only selling, you get. So if all factors are kept constant, what will you really work with on the table? You get. So the second point is the ease of use, both to developers and your clients. So it should be simple to use, even to a nursery school kid. I mean, hysterically saying, because as developers, when we hand over to the client, we want them to be able to upload their products without having to... I mean, any developers? Developers, you know how stressful it is when a client calls you at 1 in the morning. I want this to be uploaded to be sold tomorrow. And at that time, it's a rush sale. You know how stressful that is. So you want basically the clients to be able to upload their products and be able to really interact with the system in the most simple way possible. So the third point is payment methods. So whatever you choose, basically it should have support for multiple payment methods. For example, PayPal, Stripe, and Maoko. I saw Maoko somewhere. Thank you, Maoko developed a plugin for WooCommerce and M-Pesa. So developers, I know you've been super stressed, at least prior to two months since it was launched here. So it should be able to also interact with M-Pesa. And even payment gateways such as IPA and PesaPal, whatever you choose to use. So the fourth point is on integrations. Basically, the number of services and third party tools you can use to integrate, to grow your business, such that if you want to integrate Facebook to market out your products, it's up to you to choose basically what platform will you use and which will be effective without having to change. Because you won't remain stagnant on one place for about one year. So you want to build your e-commerce store over five years without having to change. Like you say, you want to use Shopify today, tomorrow you want to use WordPress, tomorrow you want to use Joomla, whatever. But you should really remain on one place, you get? So the last point on that is scalability. The platform basically should be able to scale as your business grows. I think that's more explanatory on the previous point. Breaking it down, let's go down to the ease of use. And here we're talking about the advantages of why you should really use WordPress. So basically, most users starting an online store are not web designers or developers. Even those who are familiar with basic concepts need a platform that is easy to use and gets out of the way. Developers, I know you've seen this somewhere, or you've said it somewhere, to a client. Ah, there's this algorithm. Basically, you don't want to explain what is going on, but you just want to buy time. You really want your client to integrate with the system at large, and this is why WooCommerce comes in handy for that. So WooCommerce is not a hosted platform unlike Shopify. And this means basically you need to install WooCommerce, manage updates, keep backups, and make sure that your website is secure. There are plenty of ways, free paid plugins, that can automate and manage these tasks for you. Back to developers. Maybe, what are some of the plugins? Because WooCommerce is why it has a lot of extensions and stuff like that. What are some of the plugins that you guys use to make sure your e-commerce store is perfect? I don't know. Anyway, I'll use some of the ones that I personally use. Mainly, the payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal are some of the extensions that WooCommerce has. And really, it really enables you to make use of your e-commerce store. So WooCommerce is also super flexible when it comes to customizations. And basically, you have control of the whole platform. You can add any functionality imaginable to your website with numerous WordPress plugins. WooCommerce is actually really easy to use. And there's someone who said that they're not focused on WordPress because it's difficult to learn. It was you, yes? Trust me. If you actually focus once you actually get to know about WordPress. Personally, I took a month. I just blocked out everything. I was a very perfect coder. But I blocked out everything for one month and sent up to linda.com. And watched videos out of there. And trust you me, it didn't even take me two days after I'm done. Remember the previous website I talked about, the hotel? I still did it with WordPress. And a musician called me two days later. And this time, I have no experience. I just know WordPress has three themes. I didn't even know about Envato by our time and all that stuff. And really, it's that gave me an exposure to really come out of the closet and build very good and responsive websites. I can say basically WordPress for me, I've built almost about, for the five years, about 60 or so websites. So it's really, ever since basically in London, it's really assisted me to, and WooCommerce stores have built about 10 out of those 60. WooCommerce is super flexible when it comes to customizations. Now, the biggest downside of flexibility, it comes about the learning curve and requires more hands-on management on your website. Basically, you have to sign up for a merchant account or similar service like Stripe or PayPal. But the WooCommerce-guided setup wizard makes it helpful. It doesn't come close to the onboarding and ease of use of Shopify. Well, what did I say? Shopify, yes, is easy to use, but we all know until you, we know how expensive it is, first of all, let's even start there. I know it's on my next point, but Shopify is how much? There's someone who said they developed with Shopify? It's about $29. Yeah? Okay, yes, it's simple to use, but you don't have ownership of that system. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, so on to the second point, cost. So basically, WooCommerce is an e-commerce plugin for WordPress, also known as WordPress.org bloggers, this WordPress.org. It's also known as a self-hosted WordPress. It's open source and freely available as a WordPress plugin. However, you'll need to buy a domain SSL certificate, WordPress hosting, and to start an WooCommerce store. So basically, the cost of starting a WooCommerce store is significantly lower than Shopify. WooCommerce also doesn't charge you a percentage fee on your transactions, which is very nice. I mean, you have to pay $29 every month. So in a year, how much will you have spent on average? Again, mathematicians, any? About $300 a year. In this, you haven't calculated the amount they're going to remove for your percentage transactions and all that stuff. So WooCommerce, on the other hand, does not charge you for anything like that. So basically, all profits are on you. But the challenge comes when you have to set up WooCommerce costs starting up as you purchase paid extensions, your hosting costs will also increase as your online store grows. So I don't know. People start with the basic package. And sometimes the basic package ranges between $15 to about $60. And this keeps on increasing as your store becomes bigger. I mean, you can see someone like Jumia or Kilimol using about $60 a year to host that website because they have powerful servers. Jumia is across Africa. So they have bigger, bigger servers as you keep on growing. So but one advantage about using WooCommerce is that you can often find free alternatives to the paid extensions. And you can also keep your costs in control by only purchasing the tools and plugins as you need them. So on to the third point, we're talking about payment options. And there are many payment gateways that you can use to accept payments online. Some may not be available in the country and some may not be suitable for you and others might not be available to your customers. At the moment, I'm actually working on a small e-commerce store. It's mainly for selling tickets. And it's a Kenyan event. But the clients, because they have people abroad and stuff like that who are coming from the event, they really wanted PayPal to be on the website. And PayPal, yes, is available as an extension. Both we have, I think, PayPal and PayPal Standard and PayPal Checkout. We have one problem. PayPal cannot accept any or rather it accepts fewer currencies as expected. So on the front end of this website, basically it's showing in Kenyan shillings. And on the back end, when you're going to the checkout, it checks out in dollars. Why? Because again, you have to really tweak your site as much as possible. So that you can be able to accept payments. So that's why it's really important to, the platform that you choose to offer multiple payment options. For example, Shopify and WooCommerce compare when it comes to payment integrations like again, as I said, PayPal, Stripe or guys in Kenya, we know of IPA. Right? IPA is also really efficient. And really, it depends on what you really want to focus on. WooCommerce also offers, again, PayPal and Stripe as default payments, but it depends on what you want to add. For payment gateways, WooCommerce even has support for many regional and less popular payment services. Since there's no barrier to entry and any payments company can create add-ons for WooCommerce and provide support for it. Again, IPA. And Pesapal. I think even Jumbopay, yeah. So as a self-hosted platform, you are only charged transaction fees by your payment gateway, which is, which would be about what? It would range about between 1.9, I guess. 1.9 percent to 3 percent, yeah. Transaction fees. And unless you're using for events like Eventbrite or stuff like that, or Ticket Sassan that charges about 8 to 10 percent, really, and that's on their platform. If it's on your platform, I mean, you can always, I mean, even when you host and Pesapal charges what, 0.5 percent? Yeah. So payment charges are only on what's your provider, what your payment gateway will charge or your bank, of course. And if basically choosing your own payment's merchant account and using a third party service is important for you, then you will definitely save a lot of money by using WooCommerce. So on to integrations. I think we had talked about it earlier, but I'm just expanding on it. WooCommerce is an open source and built on top of WordPress. This gives you access to plenty of WordPress plugins and more paid plugins. You can also use this add-ons and payment gateways, SEO, Yoast, I know, again, as Mary had talked about it earlier, you can also hire a developer to create an integration or plugin just for your own website. However, it's important to keep in mind that WooCommerce is a lot easier to customize. Having personally gone through the process of submitting a plugin for WordPress and submitting it up to the Shopify store, basically we can say that the process is extremely harder on Shopify versus WooCommerce. I mean, like WooCommerce, basically you can be online in, if you even choose to even just use a free theme, you can be up in 15 minutes as compared to Shopify where you have to wait for approvals and customizations and all that stuff, which is a bit time-wasting. I mean, if you really want to sell something on the fly, you will be wasting your time with Shopify and WooCommerce will give you that opportunity to really put your products out there. I guess this is my last point on scalability and growth. WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform which is responsible for maintaining updates, backups, and security of your website. Your startup WooCommerce hosting plan would run out of resources as your store starts getting more traffic. Let me put something here across before I go to the next point. Shopify, if you really need to expand your store, you'll end up paying, what's the highest package? How much is the highest package? It should be about what, $150 plus a month, I guess, or more. As opposed to WooCommerce, WooCommerce just needs, I mean, you already have your theme live. You just need to expand your hosting package. I mean, you can always shift to we have Bluehost, GoDaddy, or if you really want to maximize on stuff like speed and stuff like that, you have Digital Ocean and many others. It really enables you to be able to scale your business and enable that growth progress. The good part is that you have plenty of options to manage growth as you're in full control of your website, starting with better management of resources with catching up to upgrading your hosting plan to more powerful servers. Basically, your WooCommerce hosting costs will increase, but you'll have to be better in control of your resources and you can make sure that you're not paying for resources that you don't need. Despite the control, WooCommerce offers some business owners simply prefer a hassle-free solution. Well, I don't see any need of really, again, back to my disclaimer, you can choose any platform that you wish, but WooCommerce is the way to go. Basically, in summary, we're saying that WooCommerce is open source and gives you full control of your website. It costs a lot lower to start with WooCommerce, especially with WooCommerce hosting companies. Let me pose a question here, which is WordPress recommended hosting company? Anyone? Oh, yes, the person who answers. I believe it is Bluehost, if I'm not wrong. Yes, you're right. This is for you. You're welcome. I'd recommend it also, myself. Basically, the disadvantage is that you have to maintain the software that comes with a bit of a learning curve. Again, back to you, sir. He said it's a bit hard to learn WordPress, but once you see, WordPress is really that thing that once you learn, you keep on increasing your knowledge. You don't learn and then you just forget overnight. It's not that as in it was built for everyone. Let me just create that way here. So once you're able to manage, it's a really small learning curve, but once you're able to get your feet up, you will really love it. However, millions of beginners are already using it and they get to overcome the learning phase quite quickly. If you're looking for a cost-effective solution and you want to have full control of your online store, then WooCommerce is definitely the best platform for you.