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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 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 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

In episode 13 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP invite special guest Patrick Rauland to talk about his new product, the board game, Fry Thief.

We also chat a bit about my other podcast with Matt Mullenweg and Todd Wilkens on WordPress and WooCommerce, plus some other news of stuff going on in the eCommerce world.

Patrick Rauland has been in the WooCommerce space for several years, and was WooCommerce Product manager in the past. He currently is a WooCommerce consultant, but also is creating his first product, a board game called Fry Thief.

He recently just completed a Kickstarter funding round for the game that was very successful, and he touches on some of what he has learned through the product development stage so far.

If you are thinking of creating and selling your first product, you will want to tune in.

We also touch a bit on my other podcast and the show I had with Matt Mullenweg and Todd Wilkens. Brad was particularly interested in the comment Matt made:

Something very fundamental happened when Automattic acquired WooCommerce. Previously we had mirrored our mission as Automattic to the same one as Core WordPress, which is to democratize publishing. When WooCommerce joined the family, we added two important words: to democratize publishing and commerce. So, it was a fundamental shift in the mission of the company.

Brad also shared the community on reddit for WooCommerce if anyone is interested in that, as well as the upcoming Pressnomics conference, number 6. As far as the latter goes, if you are running a WordPress business, this is one conference you won’t want to miss. Also, a good chunk of the Woo community is represented there as well.

Patrick is in the works with the next

In episode 12 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad, BobWP and special guest Chris Badgett have a conversation about:

• LifterLMS and WooCommerce.
• WooCommerce opens the door to bitcoin SV.
• WooCommerce dev chats starts up again.
• Winners and losers in 2018 eCommerce

Chris talks about Learn Management Systems, his journey in creating LifterLMS and the newest integration with WooCommerce. We also go deeper into the space of LMS and look at its significant growth over the years.

Brad touches more on Bitcoin and an article that announces a plugin that allows WooCommerce store owners to sell only using Bitcoin SV. We also reflect on how much we have seen ourselves with online stores offering this as a payment option and discuss the question: is it a good idea to only accept Bitcoin?

Just a bit of news: the dev chat for WooCommerce returned Jan. 31st and you can catch future chats over on the WooCommerce Community Slack.

This article talks about the winners in the space, and you can probably guess who they are. Also those who are fading away. We talk about a few of the numbers the article shares and what we found surprising, or not.

Bob – Upcoming Podcast

Tune into our BobWP eCommerce Show on February 19th when I chat with Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and Todd Wilkens, lead of eCom

In episode 11 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad, BobWP and special guest Jonathan Martin have a conversation about:

• WooCommerce blocks is now a featured plugin with 6 new blocks
• ACF vs. Gutenberg blocks for WooCommerce
• Wc-admin 0.5.9 release
• The new Woo mobile app

Our guest Jonathan Martin, founder of Coolblueweb talks about his agency and how it started.

We talk about the newest WooCommerce block, how that it is now a featured plugin on WordPress, it having first come out as a grid with categories being the only filter. Now you can filter using these blocks: best- selling products, top-rated products, newest products and on-sale products. Two additional blocks, feature products and products by attribute will be added by the end of January.

Jonthan and Brad, as agency owners, talk more in depth about creating blocks for WooCommerce, either as Gutenberg blocks or ACF (advanced customer field) blocks.

Since none of us have dabbled in this yet, we shared how those who are interested can learn about the latest updates.

We dive into the new mobile app and share some of what we are seeing. The new app, both for iOS and Android, has some key features around tracking, managing orders and real-time order alerts.

Jonathan – VerifyWP

I asked our guest, Jonathan, what is new with him and his recently launched new site, which is currently in beta.

In episode 9 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP give their thoughts on:

• The release of WooCommerce 3.5
• Post-WooSesh, a virtual online conference for WooCommerce store builders
• The New Woo and the additional analytics coming to the dashboard
• An article that observed 27% of online store customers do not use tabs

The latest version of WooCommerce came out only an hour after we recorded this show. We had talked about it in an earlier episode, but are making a quick revisit. The new wording on emails sent out to customers is moving in the right direction. And in 2019, they are looking at even doing more. In addition, the new, various endpoints are something that devs have been looking forward to. You can read more about the release on the WooCommerce blog.

Brad was able to get some data from Brian Richards, the co-organizer of WooSesh. The conference was a virtual one for the first time and from the data he shared, coupled with the feedback we heard, it was a great success. For those who attended, videos will be coming out soon on Brian’s site and we will wait and see if there are opportunities for others to access them as well.

I was only able to listen to a couple of the sessions, because of my busy schedule. But I was impressed not only with the delivery of the session, but the active conversations going on in chat. I am guessing that we can expect to see this one again.

In the keynote of WooSesh, we were introduced to the New Woo. This includes a developing project and a new plugin called WC-Admin. It’s based on Gutenberg and a much improved way for store owners to get data and records. WPTavern has a helpful article on it, or you can go to GitHub and download it to test. Of course, it’s not ready for a live site, so it’s best to play around with on a demo site.

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