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I remember when WooCommerce was released in 2011. And since I had already been using several products from WooThemes, it was only natural for me to dive into it. And yes, Woo baby, you’ve come a long way. In fact, it has been with me through thick and thin.

For me, Jetpack follows the same pattern—in a way. A little research showed me that the first version was released in 2011, same year as WooCommerce. I did not know that. Although I have not used Jetpack on my own site from the very beginning, it’s been more on than off. And, of course, I remember all those client sites where I either added it or recommended it.

It, too, has come a long way. Fast forward to now. If you are using Jetpack, or have one of their premium licenses, you know what I mean. And if you also use WooCommerce, you have seen the integration between the two. To explore that more, and see what is coming down the road, I invited Nicole Kohler, who works on the Jetpack team at Automattic, to join me. Listen in as we not only talk about what is going on, but what you might be seeing in the future.

Note: The new features Nicole describes in this recording may not be available to you just yet, but if you’re a Jetpack user, you’ll see a notice in your dashboard prompting you to give them a try sometime in the next few weeks.

To kick off our chat, I asked Nicole to bring us to speed on three features recently added to help with the WooCommerce onboarding process.

That led into one of my favorite types of questions. What would she say if someone asked her, Why should I use Jetpack?

We talked about the store owner and their decision to use or not use Jetpack for their WooCommerce-powered store.  How should they approach the decision knowing that a lot of what Jetpack offers may already be provided 1) through other plugins they are using or 2) their hosting company’s plan that includes a higher level of security and backups? Or does the user even understands this?

Next, I shared my own experiences with Jetpack and how I have used it. This led me to ask Nicole if most users are deploying Jetpack as a full solution or do they use it and turn modules off and on as needed? I know that sometimes

In episode 16 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP invite special guest Mario Peshev to talk about his robust endeavors into the world of content creation, and we take a look at some Woo news.

Mario Peshev, when not running his agency Devrix, spends time pushing out tons of content across the web. He has been published on Huffington Post and Entrepreneur, to name just a couple. And he is very active on LinkedIn, Quora and numerous other platforms.

We start out the conversation learning more about Mario’s passion for sharing his content and what drives him to do it. He shares some very interesting insights around digital content and, specifically, how it plays in the eCommerce space.

We take a few minutes to look at the new Woocommerce Admin which includes tracking performance with statistics, analytics and reports with 14 unique data points. There are 12 new improved reports and a new activity panel.

Next we chat about the decision that WooCommerce made to pull the suggested plugin feature from the forthcoming update. This article over on WPTavern inspired our conversation.

With the newest release on Yoast SEO came some

In episode 15 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP fly solo and dig into some eCommerce news.

As you can see, this episode is coming out during my 48-Hour WooCommerce content marathon. In a nutshell, 48 posts on Woo, every hour for two days. If you want to see all that was pushed out during that time, you can find the links here.

There wasn’t a lot of news to share in the WooCommerce space this episode. So we dug into some recent news around the general eCommerce space, chatted about a couple of articles and shared our thoughts and perspectives.

If you use Instagram for your store, or have been considering it, you might want to check this post out. It has some interesting ideas of where Instagram is going. Brad shared some of his thoughts as between the two of us, he uses it more, although for personal use.

The one interesting fact that I brought up on the show was that Instagram now has 25 million active users. But half of them don’t list a website so that means their efforts are native to Instagram. Mmm. Food for thought, huh?

This one hit me a bit more as someone who is very active in the affiliate marketing space, at least in my own efforts.

And even though there are more businesses than you can imagine that have affiliate programs, I have been seeing this rise to the surface lately. Especially around the subject of influencers.

Brad and I chat more about this and more about affiliates in general. In fact, the article headline is a bit misleading, so you’ll need to listen in to learn more about that. Or read the article and decide for yourself.

Brad shared about the announcement of this year’s WordSesh, happening May 22, 2019. If you are a WordPress professional, you need to check out this

In episode 21, Brad Williams and BobWP are joined by Christie Chirinos from Liquid Web.

In this show, we chat with Christie about her work at Liquid Web, the Strong Customer Authentication and CBD products with WooCommerce.

Christie has been at Liquid Web for a just few months and has already proven to be a valuable asset in her role as Product Manager for WooCommerce Managed Hosting.

She tells us more of what she is involved with as well as how Liquid Web moved into the space as the only WooCommerce Managed hosting service available. It was an interesting story how they segued into the niche.

Christie also gives some insights on how the plugins and services that come with the hosting packages are chosen and the criteria around that decision.

You will get a deeper understanding of what you can expect from a niche service that comes from a veteran in the managed WordPress hosting space.

Next we chat about the post on WooCommerce about a new regulation via the EU that requires merchants to use multiple methods of verifying customers’ identities. Brad shares his thoughts from an agency perspective.

A bit ago, WooCommerce issued some guidelines for when you can and cannot sell CDB (or cannabidiols products). The initial release caused some confusion for store owners. The explanation left some hanging and it was later clarified.

In their final terms:

You can use the open source WooCommerce plugin to sell highly-regulated products, but you cannot:

• Use WooCommerce services that depend on a Jetpack connection, such as WooCommerce Shipping or WooCommerce Tax. 
• Host your site on WordPress.com.

With that said, we dove a bit into that and Brad expressed that it adds to the confusion of what WordPress users already have started setting in other instances.

Christie shared some great thoughts on both the new SCA and CBD products as she talked about compliance, regulations and how business use this as a competitive edge.

You can reach out to Christie at Liquid Web, connect via Twitter

In episode 20, Brad Williams and BobWP are joined by Jamie Marsland from Pootlepress.

In this show, we chat with Jamie about his years experience with WooCommerce, his latest products on the market and WooCommerce blocks, the new editor and page builders.

Jamie started with plugins for WooThemes popular theme Canvas. He’s been involved with WooCommerce from the beginning and has grown his company, Pootlepress, around WooCommerce. In addition, his company has provided training courses in the UK for the past eight years.

Jamie introduces us to WooBuilder Blocks, a much-needed approach to creating unique single-product pages in WooCommerce. From there, we talk about the challenges facing blocks and WordPress. This includes the issues many plugin developers experience with the the new phase of blocks, both within WordPress and WooCommerce core, as well as the numerous plugins out there.

We also touch on the perceptions and use of the new editor in WordPress and how its adaptation is moving along.

We share our individual thoughts around the idea of the Gutenberg, aka blocks, moving users away from page builders. As someone who has been successful with his own page builder, Pagebuilder Pro, Jamie has his own take on the topic.

It was interesting because we each had a different take on it and, as Brad said on the show, talk to us again in a year.

You can find Jamie on Twitter or check out his site his site, Pootlepress.com, where you will find Storefront Pro and Storefront Blocks. I also suggest you take a look at WooBuilder Pro as it gives you some great options to build out your WooCommerce product page.

In episode 19, Brad Williams and BobWP are joined by James Kemp from IconicWP.

In this show, we talk about about his journey with creating plugins and how James landed on IconicWP. We look at the recent acquisition of Prospress from Automattic and chat a bit about the 7-star review feature in a free plugin put out by Liquid Web. Plus more from the eCommerce world.

James tells us more about his start selling his plugins on Code Canyon and, after several years, making the decision to move to Freemius. We talk a bit more about his plugins and, specifically, the ones that extend variations, which is a much-used feature of WooCommerce and one that presents specific challenges.

We also chat about the recent acquisition of Prospress by Automattic and agree on what a smart move that was. With their popular Subscriptions extension, as well as their other products, it was a no-brainer. We also send our heartfelt congratulation to Brent and his team there.

Next we dive into the free plugin that Liquid Web released called Better Reviews for WooCommerce. We shared our own thoughts about the 7-start review aspect of the plugin as well. If you want to learn more about it and the option of using attributes in the reviews, you can check out our post here.

We ended our show with a couple of articles sharing the eCommerce growth of two of the big shops entering the online arena more strongly than ever, WalMart and

In episode 18, BobWP and Brad Williams are joined by Cody Landefeld of Mode Effect.

In this show, we are talking about agency approaches to growing WooCommerce stores, the Storefront theme latest update and WooCommerce meetups.

Our guest Cody Landefeld from Mode Effect shares how he took the approach of finding the right vertical for his agency and what he discovered to be the sweet spot for client work.

He also gives us some insights on how he built up his credibility and client list by producing consistent and useful content on their website. It’s something some agencies and store owners don’t understand: what strong content can do for the growth of their businesses.

He then talks about how themes and plugins that are used to start your WooCommerce site are often outgrown yet stay in place to only cause performance issues down the road.

I share the most recent Storefront theme update and how the cover block brings more design to the homepage. And Cody share his thoughts on Storefront and how he would like to see more WooCommerce store owners making the choice of the standard for WooCommerce themes.

We swap stories on the successes and struggles of our own WooCommerce meetups. This segment clearly points out that all meetups are not equal.

Make sure to check out Cody on Twitter and his successful efforts in creating content at Mode Effect.

And don’t miss WordSesh coming soon to the interwebs!

In show 17, we go for a different take on things. Brad interviews BobWP on the latest changes on his site.

Co-host BobWP turns guest as Brad chats with him about his newest project. BobWP.com has officially become All Things WooCommerce, which pretty much sums it up.

This huge project is dissected through the questions from Brad. In a nutshell, BobWP.com is now entirely devoted to WooCommerce. All of the other content has been moved to a new site, WPContentMarketing.com, which focuses on just that, content marketing. Specifically, blogging, monetization, podcasting and writing. This site is currently changing again… you can see what’s going on here.

We talk about what this kind of endeavor entails. For a teaser, this took analyzing 1,322 pieces of content. Listen in to hear the nitty gritty.

We wrap up the show chatting a bit about an article Brad shared: Hertz hits Accenture with $32 million lawsuit over failed website redesign . If you design sites, whether they are WooCommerce or not, Brad recommends checking out this post to put your life’s work into perspective.

In episode 14 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP invite special guest Daniel Espinoza to talk about his work and experience with WooCommerce and subscriptions.

Daniel Espinoza as been in the WooCommerce space since its release. Having working at WooCommerce and then going out on his own, he has discovered his niche is providing clients support for their WooCommerce subscription sites through his agency Grow Development.

Daniel also has a solid background in products as he runs the site Shop Plugins, which has some awesome WooCommerce plugins. I should know. I’ve written posts on every one of them here.

Brad and I were able to dive in with Daniel on his choice to focus on subscriptions with WooCommerce, as well as his experience in the product space.

He also shared some words of wisdom as Brad asked him if the WordPress plugin space has reached the saturation point. From his own experience, Daniel talks about what he would do if he was considering this as a plugin developer.

As we continued talking about subscriptions, Daniel gave us some great examples of what is working and why subscription sites have exponentially grown over the last few years.

The release of 2.5.0 of the Subscriptions extension went out in early February, and we had the chance to ask Daniel his favorite new feature. We also talked about a couple of the other added options that came with this update. You can read more about it over on the Prospress blog.

Not a major update, but a mention of the product blocks will now be in WooCommerce core vs. the blog plugin.

Post Mentioned: The Future of eCommerce at Shoptalk