 To end it, we're going to end with a panel. So we have four different folks here on the panel. And again, my name is Chris Thelma, I'm going to moderate it. I was with most of you this morning. And what I'm going to do is have them introduce themselves quickly, and then I'm going to start asking them some questions. Now, because we're trying to make sure we still get wrapped up on as close to as time as possible, if you have a very broad, useful question, I will open up for you. If you have a very specific on my site, I have a button, and I can't figure out how to. That's not for the panel, right? Not a help desk. So let's start on the end. Give us the quick blurb of your name, where you work, and what you love about e-commerce. Sure, absolutely. My name is Mark Ratcliffe. I'm a sales manager at Avalara. We're a technology company that specializes in the automation of sales tax compliance. We've got a SaaS platform that can integrate with hundreds of accounting systems, invoicing platforms, as well as e-commerce shopping carts like WooCommerce. We can provide real time down to the rooftop sales tax calculations. We can automate the preparation and filing of sales tax returns. And that's really what we specialize. We've been around for about 15 years. We're really the first company to fully automate sales tax compliance in the cloud. Hi, I'm Zach Steppeck. I'm the CEO of MindSize. We're an e-commerce consulting firm that helps run really large WooCommerce sites and specializes in performance and scaling. Hello, my name is Bradley Cummins, and I am the co-founder of WM Digital, stands for Websites and Marketing. We specialize in e-commerce, and just romancing the whole concept of online shopping. I'm Cody Landefeld, co-founder at Modifex, and we do consulting for WooCommerce and e-commerce overall. Nobody answered the question about what they like about e-commerce. So I'm going to answer that. I like buying things from e-commerce stores. You guys feel the same way? All right. Awesome. All right. So we're going to get into it. The point of this last one, these guys have been listening all day, how to do things, what to work, what to think about, and all that. And so what I want to start with, especially for some of you guys that work in the professional services realm, helping people with their sites, I want each of the three of you to give these folks a not to do. A here's what you should skip. Like instead of them learning on their own, a mistake that they would likely make, help them avoid a mistake. So that if they got nothing else from today's day of e-commerce talks, they could walk away with, OK, but at least I'm not going to do that. And they'll save themselves and say the day was worth it. So what is a common gotcha mistake that store owners or developers make in the WooCommerce world? And we'll just start with Cody here, and then we'll just run down the line. I would say, I mean, it's pretty obvious I wasn't here for all the talks, but I would say, do not replatform your site to WordPress on a shared host. That would be the one thing that comes to mind. And maybe not in November, December, when you are trying to have your biggest sales month. So don't replatform, don't migrate to another thing onto a shared host. Does everyone know what a shared host is? No. OK. So if you're paying $1, $2, $3 a month, you're on it. Right? Think about a shared host like this, right? How many of you live in a house? Some of you live in a house? I know you're tired. It's been all day. You live in a house, you're like, look, my house. The only people that come into your house are the people that you open the door and let in your house. You have an apartment. It's smaller, but you know what? Sometimes you can hear that neighbor through the wall because they're right on the other side, right? And then you have like you live in a commune and everybody's walking in and out of your house, right? Shared hosting is that most generic sense of everybody can come anywhere, do anything, and you're like, who lives here, right? So that's how they get those prices down to $1, $2, $3 a month is because you're talking about 5,000 accounts per server. That's why you're paying what you're paying. But also, you're going to have a lot of noisy neighbors. And noisy neighbors will affect the performance of your site. All right? All right, big tip. Big tip, I would say, is come out with something authentic. Don't just copy and paste from another website. The pictures, the text, the exact format of what you saw from someone else that's doing something similar and doing it well. I think the key to web design and starting an online store is being authentic and coming out with your own voice so that people can start following you and you're not just trying to make a quick dollar off of someone else's idea. That's great stuff. So I'd say I was going to lead with hosting, but Cody stole that thunder. Trust the partners that you're choosing, especially when it comes to the code that's running on your site. If you don't choose plugins that are from trusted sources, no host is going to be able to help you run a successful site because you're putting code that might be putting your customers at risk or your business at risk on your site. Be careful where you're getting those things from. The trusted marketplaces that I use the most are the WooCommerce Marketplace and shopplugins.com. That's pretty much my primary sources or anything that an e-commerce agency writes for you is probably going to be trusted too. Yep. Let's pass the mic on because it's not going to blow their minds if we say that they should also not try and do every tax calculation on their own in near real time. Tell us a little about why customers choose an auto magic solution like yours. Yeah, absolutely. You all may be aware that states really vary in terms of their complexity per sales tax. There are some states out there that have their flat rates in Massachusetts. You've got a business in Massachusetts and you only have to file in that state. You have one sales tax rate you need to worry about. It's really not that complex. If you look at a state like Alabama or Colorado or Texas or California, there are hundreds of tax jurisdictions in those states. There are state level. Obviously you have to worry about counties, cities, local taxing jurisdictions. We try to simplify that. And not only do you want to down to the rooftop tax calculation for each order so that you can collect the proper tax and make sure the correct tax is remitted to the state or local jurisdictions, depending on the state. You want to make sure that you're taxing the products and services that you're selling correctly. And that's something that we do as well. So to give you an example, if you're selling brooms, that's kind of a general, tangible product. It's usually fully taxable as long as it's being sold to an end user. If you sell something like clothing, states have different laws on that. New York's an example of a state where if you go on a website and you buy a t-shirt, maybe a t-shirt's a bad example, a very nice shirt, if it's under $110, it's not taxable. If it's over $110, it is, right? So not using kind of an automated solution for compliance, it can be difficult to manage those types of things. Let's say that they sell, either if you're a seller or you have clients that sell, if you sell nutritional supplements online, depending on the ingredients in those nutritional supplements, they could be taxed, maybe they're not taxed, maybe they're partially taxable. So that's just part of the kind of long spectrum of tax compliance that we try to alleviate. Yeah, and the general takeaway there, guys, is if you are not a tax expert, don't play like one, right? So if you don't know that different products can be taxed differently based on their price or based on where you're selling them from or whatever, you're probably not gonna be the kind of person that's gonna figure out what the tax rates are and manually input them. Go and get a partner that does all that for you. And it really is in real time so that customers don't even know that it went off and came back, right? It's just automatic. You're like, oh, look, I know exactly what the tax calculation is. Yeah, and the big thing is what happens when that random county in California in six weeks changes their sales tax rate. What do you do then, right? So you need something in place that's gonna update that for you in real time, automatically. Zach, let's go to you. I know you do a lot of work. These guys' mindsize are the premier agency in terms of WooCommerce scaling and performance, right? So I've worked with them for a long time. They helped us with our platform at Look A Web, but also worked with one of their partners a couple years ago in scaling a site to lengths that no one had done yet. And when we talk about scaling, some people just think, well, WooCommerce doesn't scale, right? But your group has seen it scale and do a lot of things. So what are some of the tips you have for these folks about helping their store scale? Well, the start actually goes back to my first answer, which is run code that's good. That's a big piece. One of the other things that we worked on with Liquid Web is in WooCommerce three, they added this thing called custom data stores. And custom data stores allow you to abstract out how the data is actually stored for each individual piece of content in the database, so products, orders. And we knew from previous experience that orders were one of the larger bottlenecks because everything right now is stored in the post stable. So we worked with Liquid Web on a plugin that puts the orders into a custom table. It's new still. We're still working out some kinks as we find these edge cases, but it reduces the database load of inserting a new order into the database from something over 50 queries to about seven. And so if you're running a store at scale and you're getting lots of orders, seven queries is a lot better than 50, right? Especially when you have hundreds of orders coming in a minute. So that's a huge thing. The other thing that I would say is, just make sure that you're on the right server architecture for the type of traffic that you're getting. You're gonna wanna look at something that can auto scale or that has the capacity that you're going to need. You don't want to send a million marketing emails out and have 35, 40 people get to the site and the site goes down. Is that a successful day? No, that's a terrible day for a store owner, right? So you wanna make sure that you're fitting the hosting that you've chosen to the goals of the client or you as a store owner, what your goals actually are. Like Chris said earlier, the shared hosting is never going to really allow you to run a store at scale because of all of those noisy neighbors. Yeah, well, in one customer a couple of years ago, the shared host thought that all that inbound traffic was actually a denial of service request. So to help the store, they turned off all the traffic. But it was a result of an outbound email campaign, right? And so if you send out a million emails and you're like, ooh, I'm super excited. Look at all the open rates and all the traffic back and then your shared host goes, ooh, this looks wrong and turns everything off, right? You're gonna be really, really unhappy. So. Well, the one thing that I just wanna add real quick is if anybody ever tells you that WooCommerce can't scale, tell them that some crazy guy told you at WordCamp Miami that he knows of people that are doing millions a day. Yeah. Millions a day, millions a month. You know, I'm sorry. People think that just because there's this stigma about WordPress scaling in general that if you add something as complex as WooCommerce on top of it, that there's no way it will scale well. And there's, I think a lot of it is just people not knowing what they're talking about and talking about it. I've never heard of that happening before, right?