What is Woo Express and What Does It Mean for Hosts and WooCommerce Builders?
In a podcast we had Head of Engineering at WooCommerce, Beau Lebens. In the podcast he talked more about the newest hosting option on WordPress.com, Woo Express. I have taken the some of the conversation specifically on Woo Express, how it affects other hosts who offer WooCommerce hosting and what benefit it brings to the Woo builder.
What is Woo Express?
Woo Express is a simpler streamlined version of getting up and running with WooCommerce and with some of the solutions that we see as being really key or really important to many merchants. It's almost like a version of WordPress.com is to open source WordPress, where hosting is taking care of for you, there's a bunch of additional functionality that's included, and we try to make it just much easier to get onboarded, up and running. It's a bit more opinionated about here are these solutions that you should use, and walks you through the process a bit more.
Solving a problem
The versions of this have I think been attempted by different web hosts over the years. And it's something that we've heard over and over and over is that when merchants try to set up their own store as opposed to working with a developer who sets it up for them, they tend to just be overwhelmed by the range of options, and quite honestly, the complexity of setting up a full commerce experience. So they don't know which extensions to pick, they don't know how to configure things, they maybe don't even understand hosting. Especially these days, folks are expecting more and more that things just work on the internet, that you can just fill out a form and it'll just work.
And so over the years, we've had a lot of feedback that just getting up and running with WooCommerce is too complicated for people. And so this is our swing at solving that problem. So enabling merchants who want to set up their own store to get up and running and get moving a little faster than they could otherwise.
Measuring the success and impacting the ecosystem
I think the biggest thing that we are going for here is, through Woo Express, we should be able to get more active merchants. So people who have a store, it's set up, they're functioning in some way, and really just increase the size of the pie for everyone if you like. Because what we are seeing at the moment is a ton of people come, for example, to WooCommerce.com, to your point earlier of not everyone comes to this through the WordPress community. So people come directly to WooCommerce.com and they're expecting to get up and running with this thing called WooCommerce.
And we see a lot of them don't successfully get up and running. They come to the door, maybe they start dabbling, and it just feels too complex. And so they move on to something else. And so this is a chance for us to try and help more of those people successfully get up and running. And then once their business starts growing, that's when they get into customization or unique new functionality or whatever it is.
Navigating the needs of the builder community who somewhat relies on the complexity
We rely on WooCommerce being complicated and hard to use, people are just not going to choose it in the long run. And so if the area that people are making their money in as developers or builders or freelancers, if it's purely in that get it set up and know how to navigate this complex thing, that's probably not very sustainable for anyone. And so what we hear from most freelancers is that's not what they enjoy doing either. They actually enjoy more of the custom solution or really tailoring something to specific workflows or helping people set up and run their business in more unique ways.
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And all of that's still possible on Woo Express. And it's powered by WordPress.com at the moment. So the way that it's built is, it's actually leveraging the WP.Cloud infrastructure that powers the more advanced sites on WordPress.com. And a lot of cool things come with that, that really speak to the needs of developers. There's some that I can't talk about just yet, but there's some things like GitHub and SSH access, and you can install any other plugin or extension or theme on there.
So you have all of that power available to you. But what you get is some of the more monotonous bits and pieces taken care of. So there's definitely nothing stopping developers from using Woo Express as a, quite honestly, much cheaper and much better put together starting point to create sites for their customers and then tailoring them from there.
The effects on the hosting ecosystem
One of the things that we're already learning, quite honestly, with building Woo Express is, what works for merchants. We're in a interesting spot where, I think historically, we've taken a bit more of a put things out into the ecosystem and let them figure it out sort of an approach. And what this gives us is an opportunity to really focus on a more complete merchant experience and deeply understand what works and what doesn't for merchants, whether that's in the core WooCommerce software itself or in any of the extensions and other solutions that we bundle in there.
And so we're very much using this as a way to drive improvements on the merchant experience in WooCommerce Core. So that'll be available to everyone, including all other hosts. But it also means that, as a package, we can start to say, because we do partner with other hosts, we work with them very directly, and we can say, "Hey, look, this stuff works better." If you bundle all of this together, if you offer this with a free trial, if you keep your pricing in this range, whatever it is, the learnings that we have from doing this ourselves, absolutely we intend to share this with hosts and work with other hosts to implement this for the whole ecosystem.
At the end of the day, quite honestly, we Automattic, are a relatively small part of the whole WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem. Obviously, we play a certain role, but there are way more hosts out there, there are people doing their own things, building their own solutions, and we know we're just a part of that.
An existing challenge to confront
I don't know if it was an unexpected challenge, but I'll say that what was the most confronting challenge was the reality of what happens when you take a bunch of WooCommerce solutions and put them together. It's not always the best experience. And that's where we have done a lot of work and we've got a lot more work to do. The architecture of WordPress and thus WooCommerce is that you have these core packages and then you have all of these extra plugins, and they don't always play as nicely together as you would like.
Whether that could be on the UI level and it could just be what do they look like. Does it feel like a single product? It could be functionality. If you install... We have a saying internally that I love, which one of our engineering leaders refers to like, one plus one shouldn't equal two, it should equal 11. And if you install, what's a good example? Let's say a gift card plugin with a subscriptions plugin, you might expect that you could pay for a subscription with a gift card, but can you?
Not sure. Or can you buy a gift card on subscription? So there's all of these sorts of things where sometimes one plus one just equals two. And they're both there separately, you can use gift card functionality, you can use subscriptions functionality, but what would it mean if one plus one equaled 11? So that sort of interaction is another whole layer of complexity and interesting.