 Chris Lemma is the vice president of products at Liquid Web. He is also a blogger, public speaker, and WooCommerce evangelist. Please welcome Chris Lemma. I don't know if you know much about lipstick, but the latest innovations is to put some sort of metallic component into the lipstick so that your lips shimmer. And a couple years ago, it was introduced to the market by a Kardashian. Very famous. They sold out of all the manufactured lipstick and broke the website all in six minutes. And normally, you would think, this is horrible. The website went down. This is all bad news. MediaTemple wrote a multi-page post about how awesome it was. And the Kardashian was equally thrilled, because in the realm of selling hot products, what you really want to do is crash the systems. That's the definition of success. If you can completely bring Shopify down, in this case, it was WooCommerce, but they moved on to Shopify, and then they broke Shopify, and they love that. They were like, oh, if we can just get some downtime on Shopify, that would be awesome. That's not the way we think about anything in the world, but that's because we're not Kardashians. Like, let's just all agree, right? At the same time that they were selling that lipstick, and it crashed in six minutes, I was working on a WooCommerce site that also was selling lipstick, right? Different set of lipsticks, no foil. But we got a WooCommerce store on Cyber Monday to run up to 2,000 ad decart events per minute. Okay, so I want you to think about that. 2,000 ad decart events per minute, not just for one minute, but throughout all the minutes, throughout all the hours of Cyber Monday, several years ago. I worked with a small team, both inside an agency as well as with developers inside the company at the time, and we spent months, right? From February until November, doing all the things we had to do so that basically we could say, yeah, WooCommerce can scale, can deliver this kind of performance. Of course, we didn't realize that there was a new bar being set, right, by the Kardashians, which is, oh wait, your website stayed up all day? Okay, that was so last year. This year, it's all about crashing servers. So today what I want to do is talk to you about WooCommerce, but in the context of all the other options you have, right? Because the most important thing you need to understand is that you do have options, but there are a lot of different platforms out there. And one of the things that makes you and I look silly is when we talk like there's only one option, like just WooCommerce can do everything. So therefore only use WooCommerce and don't even think about anything else. And the truth is, there's a lot of options. So to get started, right, what I want to do is walk you through all the different options that are out there, and why you might think of some of these and when they may be okay, and then we'll wrap up with why in the midst of all that context would WooCommerce still be a good call? Does that make sense? You're in the right room, Dwayne's in the other room, he's awesome. If you're like, oh, where's the git stuff? It's the other room. All right, big cartel, craft commerce, square space, pollution shop five, big commerce, WooCommerce. There's a lot of players out there. There's even others that aren't on this list, right? So let's talk about big cartel. Big cartel is fantastic. If you have been on Etsy, and now you're like, oh, the problem is that when someone searches for men's leather messenger bag, I get my item up, but Etsy says you may also like and shows six of my competitors. I don't like that so much, right? If you decide, listen, I have a quality product, I've been doing well with that product, but I don't want to keep paying Etsy more and more money and I want my own domain name. Big cartel is great for that. In fact, if you only have a few products, right? If you sell three, four, five products, big cartel's super inexpensive, right? And it'll give you your own domain name. And if that's what you want, and I know people who are like, no, that's all I want. I just want my domain name. That's what I want to do. You're great. There's nothing wrong with this. In fact, it's pretty easy to get started, pretty easy to do. If you start adding more and more products, all of a sudden, you know, it's gonna get more expensive and it doesn't have all the features in the world. So you start getting complicated requests, it's not gonna do it for you. But if you're like, look, I have three, four products, all I do is ship them out. I don't even worry about inventory because it's my own stuff. I make it with my hands as I'm doing it, right? You go, I don't need an inventory system for this. I just either work this weekend or I don't, right? Big cartel is great. Does that make sense? Yeah, we're good? Okay. Craft commerce, right? Craft commerce, if you've heard of craft CMS, right? Craft commerce is kind of the sister to craft CMS. And if you are a developer or if you're hiring a developer and you go hire a developer, well, okay, first of all, how many of you are store owners? Just to get a sense of a couple of you, okay, awesome. How many of you are store builders? Right, okay, a lot more of you, awesome. So let's imagine that it's not you building the store. Let's imagine that someone has a store and they go hire someone other than you, right? By the very nature, you decided to take your weekend to come to a technology conference. So that puts you in the nerd category just all on your own. Just automate Saturday, what are you doing? I'm gonna go hang out, I'm gonna go to the park, I'm gonna read a book, I'm going to a technology conference. So you're a special group of people, right? Who's more special, right? The people that come to the conference or the guy decides to volunteer to speak, right? I don't know, I'm just saying, we're all special nerd group, but someone who's out there who's building something, doing something, creating something and says, I want a store and they go hire a developer. And the developer's a PHP developer. And they start looking under the hood at WooCommerce and they're like, oh my God, it's on WordPress. And WordPress isn't, it's a blog and you wouldn't build a store platform on a blog platform. So if you're hiring that kind of person, that person's gonna be like, I love Crafts CMS because the data structure's totally different, but it's still PHP. Now I can tell you in less than one finger, the number of customers who care about that, right? But if you were a developer and you were like, look, I like PHP, I wanna code store, I wanna be able to have more control, etc. There's a lot of things that Craft Commerce does well, right? But if you're building a store on your own or if you're comparing to this from WooCommerce, right? You're gonna go, full feature set isn't totally there. And the people who are gonna love this versus loving WooCommerce are gonna be developers who like to look under the hood and don't wanna see the impedance mismatch of a particular table structure that doesn't play well with what they're thinking about for commerce. And you're like, yeah, I don't know what you just said, I don't care. You're like, right, so don't worry about it. But it's an option. Squarespace, how many people have heard of Squarespace? See, that's just to me to get you involved, right? You were starting to wane off, you were starting to go away, right? I gotta bring you back. So even if you didn't raise your hand, you saw everybody else raise their hand, then you thought maybe I should raise my hand. Everybody's heard of these guys, right? Everybody's heard of these guys because they make really good looking websites. And if you pay them just a little bit more, they'll let you sell on their store and you go, okay, that's great. If you are someone who likes visual control, if your customer is someone who likes visual control, this may be it for them, right? A good friend of mine who lives in Tennessee and she has her own shop, a physical store, where they roast coffee beans, right? And she sell, you know, obviously they sell coffee, but the roasting of the beans is a big deal. They've gone to competitions all throughout the country. They've won competitions, they're amazing. They wanted a simple website. Her husband knows a whole group of people out in Tennessee that do WordPress stuff. And she's like, nope, I don't want any of you involved. I'm just gonna go, I'm gonna go look at Squarespace, I'm gonna look at this beautiful photo. I like this theme, I'm gonna pick it. And then she got the site up and running, all by herself, right, and she was loving her site. Then she wanted to add e-commerce. She added e-commerce and she was loving her site. Everything was awesome, right? And you go, that's great. That works exactly for what you're doing. It's great. Until she wanted to sell subscriptions to the actual coffee beans, right? Like every month, send you another delivery. She calls her friends up and goes, hey, where's the button where I can add subscriptions? And they're like, in WooCommerce. That's mean, by the way, that's mean. If someone calls you and asks you where to find a feature inside of Squarespace and you answer inside WooCommerce, you're being a jerk. Don't be a jerk, okay? They were close enough friends that they were like, I can pull this off and I can say this to you, but don't do that, okay? I don't want to advocate doing that, right? But yeah, it's great if you like visual, if that's what, and let's be honest, most people are motivated visually, right? Most people, I don't know how many customers you have who are like, I found this perfect theme on ThemeForest and you're like, oh my God, why'd you do that? That's horrible, you didn't buy that already. And then they're like, yeah, we already did, right? And what did they do? They didn't inspect the code, they didn't pull it down, they didn't look over it all. They just were like, it looks beautiful. We are all motivated visually, right? So that's not a shocker, but if that's where people end, right? I just want it to look pretty. I like that layout, let's do this. You can get going on that. If you're selling simple products and you care about visual control, no problem. And it's a hosted solution, right? And if I didn't mention before, right? Craft Commerce isn't, but Big Cartel is also a hosted solution, right? Why is a hosted solution important? Because it turns out after years of doing research, I can tell you that no single person who owns and runs a store cares about cloud, VPS, dedicated, Kubernetes, whatever else technical terms we care about. They just don't. They're like, I run a store, right? I pay attention to what my November numbers were. I don't pay attention to the underlying infrastructure. They don't even call it infrastructure, right? We say DevOps, they're like, did you say developer? You're like, no, DevOps, you know, it's different. Okay, forget it. They don't care, right? So hosted solutions are a big deal. Everybody make sense of this one? Yeah, we good? All right, Volusion. You may have heard of Volusion before. If you haven't, you may have seen ads on Google, right? In your search results for Volusion, because Volusion are the people who make ads that say, stop wasting your time with Shopify. Volusion is the best. That's like their ad. And you're like, that, okay. I mean, you gotta be pretty confident of yourself to start buying all your competitor phrases and literally just saying in black and white, stop wasting your time with them, they suck, right? And you're like, wow. Turns out Volusion has a whole lot of features, right? A lot of good stuff that's going on there. And you go, okay, this is great. They also have a mobile app, right? You can see, and tons of payment gateway options, right? And they're hosted. So you go, oh, this is kind of perfect. Well, it is a little bit more complicated to use, right? So someone who was thinking about Squarespace, right? And then going to Volusion would be like, whoa, this is complicated. And in fact, one of the reasons that Shopify was designed the way it was, was so that it wasn't Volusion, right? So that you could basically go in and go, oh, I can click this and this and this. And of course, over the years, Shopify has made that left menu longer and longer and longer and longer. But still, right? Volusion has a couple of nifty features in there and controlling your store from your phone. You go, oh, that's interesting, right? If you were looking at hosted options, you might look at this. This used to be more expensive. They've brought their price points down to compete with everybody. And so you might go, okay, this is interesting, right? The interesting piece, one of the interesting pieces is they include some products or some features that normally we would think of as other products, right? So you'd go and get MailChimp for newsletters, but they have a newsletter system. And you'd go get another program for rewards, but they have one in it. You might have to build or pay someone to build a whole other situation for PO's, purchase orders. They have it in there, right? So you go, oh, that's interesting. It may be the most feature-rich platform that nobody knows about, right? But it's still worth looking at. Then of course there's Shopify. Over the last several years, if you do a Google search for e-commerce, Google has determined that e-commerce is a synonym for Shopify, right? Not the other way around, not Shopify's synonym for e-commerce. It's e-commerce, like, oh, if you're asking for e-commerce, you must be asking about Shopify. So Google's like, here, let me show you all the Shopify stuff. They're like, ah! But it is, they've had this phenomenal run. They've been growing like crazy over the last two to three years. It is a hosted solution, right? And it starts at $29, except I have never found a company who pays $29. Every single person who's ever signed up for $29 is no longer paying $29 within a week. And you go, oh, why? Well, because every feature you want, you add, and it's just part of your monthly fee. Which is awesome if you think about it. If we had ever thought about it in the e-commerce world, if we were like, why do extensions, why don't we just add the feature and just add it to your monthly bill, right? Like, WooThemes would still be around, right? They would buy automatic. It would have been a money maker, right? You're like, this is incredible, because what they do is they go, oh, you wanna pop up as people are leaving for exit intent? Click here, and it's just, you know, 1999 a month. And you go, oh, okay, click. Right? Oh, do you wanna support, you know, specialized coupons based on someone purchasing kind of product? Yeah, click here, and 499 will be added to your monthly bill. You're like, this is sweet. I'm not even spending real money, right? I can just keep clicking. And it's never the developers that do this just to be clear, right? It's always the owners of stores. They're like, this was amazing. I saw this other website do it, and you're like, was the other website Amazon? Okay, stop, right? You're never gonna build Amazon this weekend. And you're like, well, I'm just adding features. And you're like, right, but for a fee, right? Someone did a study last month and month before, and they were like, the average $29 plan is paying $89 or something. And I did my math, it was like 106, but however you do it, right? You're not paying 29. So it's a great way to get you in, but of course you're gonna end up needing more and more. The pitch, the promise of Shopify is you need no web development skills. And that is true, right? It will help you if you know a little CSS. It'll help you if you know a little bit to tweak some things, but fundamentally they built a platform where you don't need to know anything about code. The other dynamic is you don't have to worry about DevOps or hosting or infrastructure at all. The flip side of that, of course, is that you could have a super awesome t-shirt store like my friends in Southern California, and then you end up on a server where something else is going wrong and so that server is really slow so your site starts getting slow. So my buddy, we're sitting at a weekend barbecue and he comes to me and he goes, you're the e-commerce guy. And I'm like, Rob, we've known each other for years. Yeah, what do you need? How can I help you? He goes, okay, I got a problem. Here's my Shopify store and he pulls it up on his phone. He goes, every time I click on one of these things, it takes seven seconds. And I'm like, wow, you used to have an e-commerce store. Now you don't. Don't say that to other people, that's mean, okay? But we're friends, so I can pull this off, right? And I'm like, seven seconds. You know that the average person leaves at three seconds, right? Like, forget it, we're not wasting our time, right? You don't sell anything unique enough to make me sit here for seven seconds and wait. He goes, I know, I call Shopify, they won't do anything. And I go, right, because it's a hosted platform, like they're not gonna change servers just for you. Right, so how do I make it faster? And I said, it's e-commerce. See, don't do that, that's mean. Don't do that, right? But he's friends with me, so I can pull that off, right? And I was like, yeah, here, let me show you our, I work at a company called Liquid Web and we have a hosted platform for e-commerce, dedicated to e-commerce. And so we have a sample site, right? 9,000 headphones are loaded up at finestheadphones.com. And I keep that, we use it as a way to test all the different things we're doing. And so I said, here, let me show you my headphone site on e-commerce, right? 9,000 products, here you go, and it just, it loaded. And he's like, are you on Steve's Wi-Fi? I'm like, no, no, it's just my regular LTE signal. Here, okay, click a product, I clicked a product. Click a category, I clicked. And it's just loading, right? 0.7 seconds, one second. He's like, how do I get my Shopify store to load this fast? You know what the answer was, right? Yeah, don't say it to people, it's mean. It's mean, right? But you're like, yeah, I can show you how to do this. Okay, nobody pays $29, that's my main point. You don't control infrastructure, that's my other main point. But it's easy, you don't have to be a developer, right? Super cool stuff. It has some themes. Most of the themes you have to pay for, right? And the price of those themes is reasonable, right? But if you change your mind multiple times in a year, it starts getting expensive, right? Then big commerce. Big commerce is a very interesting company right now. It's in the middle of its own shift. They've adjusted their prices. They've redone marketing and brand awareness. They're doing a lot to get out there in the market. They used to be for really big players. They're bringing their prices way down to be for everybody. But they're caught in this weird place where you're like, I don't really know who you're best for, right? They're more pro plans, whatever, which pushes you up into the two and $300, has an incredible API, one of the best platforms that has an API for an e-commerce store. So you can do things remotely if you're a programmer. And that makes really interesting stuff is you can start building other kinds of endpoints, whether you're doing voice commerce or whether you're mobile stuff or anything else. And you can just run it back to the API and run the store that way. And you go, this is really interesting stuff. Except that if I was a serious company, I'd be like, why is it only $200 instead of $1,000, right? Like if you're building an entire business on something, you don't want the discounted plan. But they had to bring their price points down to play with Shopify, right? They are trying to be the big player, but at the low player price, which is where Shopify has played. And so all in all, you just kind of get to this weird, like I don't really know if I'm in your target market, but it is interesting, right? There are days where it is a little slow. So again, from a performance perspective, because it's a hosted platform, you don't control that, right? Other days where it seems to be, you know, fast and fine and not an issue. Okay, does that make sense? Yeah, we're good. I haven't raised your hands in a while. I know you're getting bored. Equid, 3D cart, what about those guys? Well, the bottom line is they're interesting, except that there are other players in the list that are better than them in pretty much most of the categories. So you end up going, nah, I don't know that there's a good reason to talk a lot about Equid or 3D cart other than they both exist. They're out there, they're working hard to be a name, but I don't think they're rising to the level of, okay, we should take care of it. The other one name that's not on this list at all, right? Magento, what happened to Magento, right? They're still there. Yeah, they got bought by Adobe. People are unclear what's gonna happen in their future. They also defined a date and then shifted the date on when they're gonna stop doing support for the older stuff. You gotta move to 2.0, but moving to 2.0 is pretty much just rebuilding your entire store. And if you're gonna rebuild your store, Shopify would like you to build on Shopify. Of course, WooCommerce people would say, why don't you try WooCommerce? So there's not a lot to talk about Magento right now, right, it's on a steep decline. It's not worth a lot of our time, right? But here's the main point, right? Acting like there are no alternatives makes you and I look silly. If you are someone who knows e-commerce, if you're someone who works in e-commerce, if you're trying to help other people figure out what to do in e-commerce, it is incumbent on you. It is important, it behooves you. Every other three syllable word, you should pay attention to all the players in the space, it's not just WooCommerce, right? All the players in space and you should know what they're good for and what they're bad for and what the upsides and the downsides are and how to make an intelligent choice. Cause if you don't, it's not like those platforms get hurt, you get hurt, right? You look silly cause you don't know enough about the space that you say you know about. Does that make sense? Point made, okay. So there are some really good reasons to check out WooCommerce, right? So let's spend a little bit of time today talking about that. So first thing, price. How can you not talk about price, right? It's free and people can say, wait, wait, wait, hold on a second. It's not free, right? Just like Shopify is only $29, but it's not $29, WooCommerce is $0 until you start buying other things. So apples to apples, fair game. If you're gonna say that's $29, you get to say this is free, right? It is free code. Now you're gonna have to do more stuff on top of it that's fair, right? But the price is really attractive, especially when people are trying to figure out whether or not they're gonna make an investment in their store, right? When they're making an investment in their store, the more you can do to mitigate cost, the more interesting they have the opportunity to test out their idea. Oh, I have a t-shirt idea. Great, let's spin it up. Oh, I have, you know, I've been building these little wallets in my house or I've been doing laser etching on something. Great, let's try it out. You can do that with WooCommerce without making a huge investment. Right, so the price has to be something that you're talking about, okay? And there are themes and there are features, extensions, plugins that are all available for free. Now, if you are a, if you're a developer, right, your desire is to try and build the perfect store upfront. So you're like, oh, we need to buy this, we need to buy this, we need to buy this. Stop. When someone is just getting started, the evaluation here isn't how awesome can we make our store. The evaluation is how well can we get you selling? And more often than not, a simple theme, right? A simple base platform that works can evaluate whether or not they have something to sell. In fact, at Liquid Web, we evaluated 50 different themes to see which were the highest performing themes running a WooCommerce store, right? 50 themes, scan them all, ran them all, ran a bunch of tests. The fastest theme for WooCommerce is Astra, a theme that is free. And you're like, that's amazing. Like why wouldn't I start every WooCommerce store? We're just here. Let's just put on Astra and we'll start there and we'll go from there, right? And Astra plays well with, they have Astra Pro, they have a plugin that lets you add more WooCommerce features to turn things on and off. It also plays well with Elementor and Beaver Builder and other page builders. And so you're like, this is great. There are free themes. There are free extensions and WooCommerce is free sitting on top of WordPress, which is free, right? And so you go, oh, well we should definitely talk about price. That's a good reason to check it out, okay? Another really good reason to check it out is the community, right? There are people who all they do is spend their weekends going to conferences, sitting in rooms, learning about WooCommerce. Who knew, right? There are people who write blog posts about WooCommerce. There are people who create videos about WooCommerce. There are people who write code for WooCommerce and share it for free. The open source nature of the products is an open source nature of the community, a community that you can find because there's more than three million WooCommerce stores out there. You can find someone who's worked on it. You can find someone who's written about it. You can find a video of someone showing you what they learned or didn't learn. All available. And people are more than willing to share insights and learnings with you, often for free. And you're like, this is incredible. You can't do the same for Volusion, right? You go and you're like, okay, how many people, how many blogs are written about Volusion and trying to tell us how to do something in Volusion? And you're like, just the Volusion website. There is no community, right? We're starting to see some meetups that are focused on Shopify and that's cool. I'm glad that there's a group of people that are meeting and talking about e-commerce in general specifically how it works with Shopify. But we have, I think it's something on the order of 70 or 80 WooCommerce meetups around the country or around the globe, right? With tens of thousands of people showing up monthly to talk about and share insights on WooCommerce? That's incredible, right? Just about anything you want to do with WooCommerce, someone may have tried to do and may have written a post about it. Now, I know what you're inclined to do is you're inclined to go into Facebook, find a group called Advanced WooCommerce or WooCommerce Help and then go in there and say, what's the plugin that will do all my job for me? Don't do that, right? Don't do that because it turns out no plugin is gonna do everything that you want to. You're like, well, I want to receive a PO, right? And then I want to automatically send a fax back highlighting that we're still in the 1990s. But I also, I want to take that data and load it into a Google Sheet, put it into Excel, drop it out. I want us to be ranked automatically. Which plugin does that? And you're like, none, right? There is no plugin that does everything you want. But if you were to go to the same forums or go to the same Google and type, hey, is there a way to do POs in WooCommerce or is there a way to download orders into Excel? There are people who are like, yeah, you can do that, right, here's the code to do it or here's a plugin that does it. It's a massive community of people that will help you, right, and will help store owners and will help developers. I talked to an agency who does really high-end e-commerce work, right? In general, I say the average e-commerce store they build is over $100,000. Their minimums, I think, are about $25,000. They do e-commerce across all the different platforms, not just WooCommerce. But in talking with them, I said, so do you do any WooCommerce stuff? Like, you like WooCommerce? And they're like, oh, I love WooCommerce. Says they're senior engineer. I'm like, why? He goes, because you guys write so much code that you give away for free. So most of the time, I'm not starting from scratch. If I have to write something, I go find what you guys done and then I just go, oh, here, let me make a modification or let me layer something on top of that, but I don't start from scratch. Most of the other platforms where we're playing, we have to write it all from the ground up. And what he's really talking about is the community. Does that make sense? Awesome. All right, modularity, we've talked about this, the fact that there are tons and tons and tons of hundreds of e-commerce extensions that basically just give you new features, right? New features, you want another feature? You want another feature? That's when an extension or a plugin is, right? And when you start playing in the game of, ooh, I have a membership site and you're running a membership site and you're running it on WooCommerce, you're like, this is great. And then someone comes to you, right? I have a client of mine who said, hey Chris, we're running this online courseware, right? Through WooCommerce, it's awesome. Now I want to sell team membership. Can I sell like five person and 10 person teams? And you go, oh, I would love for that to happen, but okay, we're gonna have to figure out how to do this, right? So we built a version of how to do that a year and a half ago before there was a team-based module, right? And we built it and it was a little bit klugey, right? After you check out, it takes you to another form, right? So it's a custom route to a form and in that form you put in the emails of the people and then that generates a dynamic coupon which makes it free and sends it out to those people. Those people get to re-register, automatically uses the coupon to put them into the right product and we're done, right? And you're like, that's a lot of work, except my friend Becca was working on the membership plugin and added a new extension that was specifically for teams and then said, oh, it's now all done. And so even though we had custom written one thing, we could come back six months later, eight months later and just replace it with a new extension that did everything we wanted to do, right? Because constant innovation is happening on the platform and people are building out new features and you never know when you can take a proven, existing feature set that someone else wrote that will support it all day long and replace custom code with it. But it doesn't mean you can't write custom code to get the thing done that you need to get done. That's extensibility. Does that make sense? Integration. Year and a half, maybe two years ago, I had a Fortune 500 company call me and said, hey, so you probably already know this, Chris, because I looked you out, I found you on Google and you know WooCommerce stuff, but WooCommerce is big. And I was like, thank you for informing me, that's amazing, what are we on the phone for? And they're like, well, we have built a custom engine that will price the cost of moving goods from outside the country to inside the country, right? So if you've ever tried to buy leather shoes, I'm staring at a bunch of blank looks like no, I've never tried to do leather shoes from another country, but let's say you wanted to buy leather shoes from Canada and you're in the US and you're like, what's it gonna cost me? Well, they'll show you the price of the product in another country. They'll show you the price of the tax, but what they won't show you is the price of the tax of crossing the border, right? And normally what happens is it's either COD or it's just, ooh, we just charge your credit card for even more, right? And you're like, wait a minute, I didn't know I was gonna pay 40 extra dollars just to get it across the border, right? Which now makes these shoes ridiculously expensive and I'm not sure I want them. Well, these guys had solved that problem, right? And they were building it for WooCommerce. And I said, okay, so, but this is, I said, this is specific to, this isn't specific to WooCommerce, you're building this engine for all e-commerce across borders. And they go, yeah. I go, so have you done it for other products? They're like, no. No, we're starting with WooCommerce because WooCommerce is the big name in the game. And you take a moment and you think about that and you go, yeah, there are all sorts of third-party companies who when they start their plan to integrate into platforms, they start with WooCommerce. They start because of the market share that WooCommerce has. And they're like, we're gonna get it right there and then we'll do other things, right? So third-party integrators, more often than not, start with WooCommerce then go to other things. So you know there's a lot of different players that you can connect with. Of course, if your customers wanna get paid, WooCommerce has a ridiculous amount of payment gateways, like a crazy amount. If you are in Canada where one of my clients is and you wanna take American Express, you can do that. But if you wanna take US American Express in Canada, you can do that. What? What are you doing? And they're like, hey, we want our customers to take their American Express, right? I'm like, it's called American. We wanna take US-based American Express, but we wanna do it in Canada to our Canadian bank. And you're like, okay, let's go see if there's a, oh, there is, there's a payment gateway for that. So, okay, we can do that. And you go to other countries, right? And you're selling to another country and you're like, oh, I'm selling to Cape Town in South Africa. And they're like, oh, clearly you're supporting this bank and you're like, clearly, I've never heard of that bank, but let me go look at, oh, there's a payment gateway for that. So, yes, I will be supporting that too, right? Like, there's so many more payment gateways for WooCommerce than any other platform that is kinda crazy, right? And that's fantastic for you if you're building stores for customers and their purview, their customer base is spread out in different places than where you normally think. Most of us, we're just like, oh, we're gonna sell in the US. But it turns out customers are selling everywhere, right? And so having payment gateways that support all those different banks, especially when some of those banks are the main way people pay in another country, becomes really, really important. And then there's discoverability, right? If you do boring things like read the Shopify release information when they're having their quarterly announcements, you discover data that they just slip in there like something like 80% of their traffic for Shopify stores comes from paid social. 80% of the traffic to a Shopify store comes from Instagram or Facebook ads. And you're like, okay, first of all, that's kinda cool, but then second of all, that means people had to pay to get that traffic. But third of all, and maybe the most important question is, why not Google? Like, doesn't Google send traffic everywhere? And it turns out Shopify not as much. And you go, wait, wait, wait, hold on, that's, this is, what's going on here? Well, it turns out the SEO that's tied to Shopify isn't at the same level, right? As the SEO of some of the other platforms. And so what happens is it's hard for you to get discovered. It's hard for Google to lift you up to page one, right? Based on the code of your store. So what ends up happening? You buy your traffic from Facebook and Instagram, and that's where all your traffic comes in from, which is fine if that's what you're doing. But if you're trying to build a store, you want a store that pays attention to SEO. And of course, WooCommerce sits on WordPress. WordPress is known as a platform for making sure that all of its content is very Google friendly. They even have projects where they work with Google. And so it makes total sense that WordPress and WooCommerce would be very discoverable. And so if you're building a store on WooCommerce, or if you're choosing a platform for building a store, and discoverability is a big deal, and you don't want to do paid social to bring your customers to you, then WooCommerce is a reason their discoverability is a reason for choosing WooCommerce. Does that make sense? And then performance. I got a phone call three months ago, maybe four months ago, and the customer was running WooCommerce on AWS, and they had been prepping for months, months for a summer release of brand new shoes. Okay, now these were not ordinary shoes. These are wrestling shoes. Okay, and I heard a giggle over there. I giggled too, but I did it off camera, not when I was talking to them, because their site had gone down on AWS. It had crashed, and they had a problem, and they didn't know if it was the AWS configuration. They didn't really have a DevOps team. They didn't know if it's, is it WooCommerce, or is it AWS, or is it configuration in between? And I said, well, I can help you, right? And they're like, well, but you don't understand. We've been prepping our audience for months. We have the Michael Jordan of the wrestling world who has signed these wrestling shoes, and people are waiting to buy these wrestling shoes. And we're not just talking about high school wrestlers. We're not just talking about college wrestlers. We're talking about high school and college wrestlers' dads, right? The guy who wrestled 30 years ago, 40 years ago, he's buying a pair too. Not that he's wrestling anymore, but he's just like, dude, I totally love wrestling, and I love Kyle Johnson, and I gotta have his shoes. And you're like, oh, okay. So they've been prepping people for months. This is the day. This is the day. On the day, the site goes down three minutes after launch. It's crashed, their Midwestern company that is doing their development work doesn't know what's happening, doesn't know how to fix it. They somehow reach me and get on a phone call, and so we start Sunday night at 8 p.m. We're on a video call, and I said, we're not gonna hang up until we have a solution. We were on the phone until three in the morning. But by that point, we had pulled their code from AWS over to our servers. We had done a scan of all the code. I'd found all the different problems that were there. Also, the configuration issues were there. We'd spun up a new thing, and we said, here's what we're gonna do. There's too much that's wrong on this website to fix in short order. We can't fix it in a matter of days, right? It's gonna be weeks. It turned out to fix the site, probably took us like four weeks, but we can pop up a brand new store with a brand new domain name, right? Your name plus wrestling shoes. We can buy that domain right now, and in 48 hours, we will give you a pop up WooCommerce store. 48 hours from now. So two nights later, at midnight on the East Coast, we opened up a brand new store. At midnight on the East Coast, right? Midnight, open up the store WooCommerce. And their big question was, can we handle the load? It's gonna be a crazy traffic. But of course, at LookaWeb, part of us building the platform was all about building in performance testing and making sure that everything was right. So I said, yeah, we'll be great. They did a quarter of a million dollars in the first two hours of being alive. And in fact, there was so much traffic coming in that we could see, in Google real time, we could see that it was pooling at the API calls to PayPal, right? Because it was going through and hitting the checkout, and then the PayPal calls, the API, there was too much congestion there because it wasn't moving fast enough. I don't recommend you do this at home. But what we did is we said, let's change the payment gateway and just route people to PayPal to pay, right? Now, normally people go the opposite way. They want to stay on your website. But when you're talking about throughput, you're like, just get them over there to pay. So we did it in real time, right? With three of us on video, okay, three, two, one, okay, I deactivated this, you turn that on. Okay, the traffic was in the cart. And we're seeing in real time, there's another screen with a real time traffic, right? And the page that's getting the most traffic is the checkout page. And I'm like, don't worry, that's gonna go down. We're gonna watch it go down, and you're gonna start seeing floods of emails from PayPal as you start getting orders come in. And of course, within a minute, it all started happening, right? And they did, core million dollars. I mean, that was more money in two hours than they had done in their best month before, which had been last Christmas time, right? WooCommerce scales just fine. You just have to know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, find people who do and learn. Because as I mentioned, it's a great community. People will share all sorts of things. But it scales. I've helped it scale to 2000 add to carts a minute. I've helped it scale to a quarter million dollars in two hours. There's no problem with WooCommerce. You just have to know what you're doing. And of course, WooCommerce supports every kind of e-commerce, right? Membership sites, courses, everything. It's all there. This is the store I was telling you about, wrestling shoes, right? Wrestling shoes is physical, shippable products. This is a different store that I told you about that has a membership component for an online course that we added teams to so that teams could buy it. They are two so different websites you would never think of them using the same exact platform. And yet for WooCommerce, that's no problem at all. The reality is, right? If you know e-commerce well, you can do most things with WooCommerce. My name's Chris Lama. I do work at Liquid Web. You can find me online at Chris Lama. I also have a blog at chrislamma.com. Thank you guys very much. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. We've got a couple of minutes for questions and then lunches upstairs for those that have lunches. Any questions? Do you want to? Oh, C, and I totally thought you weren't going to ask questions. And then I was going to be like, do you all want to go to lunch early? Right? Yeah, right here. So the question that you studied was about 50 themes and what was that level for you? Yeah, so the question is, hey, you said you looked at 50 themes in performance and are you publishing that anywhere? Not yet. We're thinking about it, but we're also trying to figure out what's the consequence of telling the world that some themes are really, really bad. That's just like, well, can I call you and ask you, like, what about if I'm using that theme, but then I also do this instead? Does that make it better? And you're like, stop talking to me, right? So we're not sure yet. Yeah. Oh, hold on, there's one right behind you. Could you talk a little bit about tips for using WooCommerce with WP Engine? Sure. That normally is not what people ask, right? Like, because I work at Liquid Web, which is a competitor, though we're not really competing because they're so far ahead of us. But normally you wouldn't be like, hey, what do you think about WP Engine? So WP Engine is great. WP Engine, if you're doing a very small store, a medium-sized store without anything crazy, WP Engine is great at WooCommerce. You don't have any stuff to worry about. Make sure, just the general tips, make sure that you have excluded the slash cart slash checkout and slash my dash account from their caching because they have a cache system that makes their sites go fast and you don't want those to be cached. Other than that, what I can tell you is when you start getting to the more complicated versions of e-commerce where you're trying to do more things and adjusting things, they have said out loud, so I'm not trying to speak for them, right? They've said, that's not really where we want to spend our time. So if you're a smaller store, I think you'll be fine. If you're a growing and fast growing store, you may want to check us out at the Google web. Yeah, there was a question down here. Let's say you're on a different platform right now and you're happy with that platform, but you're hearing things that maybe spark your interest or eventually you find out that you're on a Magento or whatever name you said earlier, what would you recommend for people to do as they're building their current sites to be thinking of in the back of their head, things that they should save or do differently or plan ahead for if they were to switch platforms? So I think the most important dynamic there is don't build anything that is super specific in your business model, don't build anything that's super specific to your platform. If you're building something that only Shopify delivers or only Magento delivers or only whatever delivers, you're gonna have a hard time moving off. Other than that, image compression, CDNs, there's all sorts of things you can do that don't matter which platform you're on, keep making your site better, and then if you decide to move to another site, another platform, sometimes your customers won't even know the difference. And that's just an inside story between you and your infrastructure partners. But if you connect yourself up to something very specific, to a platform that's very specific, that's the thing you're gonna have to untangle. So I've seen people who have, say, big commerce and they have that API, but then they're using that API to do their fulfillment rather than doing the fulfillment with JavaScript connection back to the website. Now that it's tied into that API and they're super deep into it, they can't change their inventory system and they can't get off that API. So now you're just locked in. So you just wanna think about, am I locking myself in and can I get around that? All right. I think we gotta wrap it up, but... Awesome. Thank you guys very much. Thank you.