In this podcast, I had the chance to chat with Dale Reardon, owner of My Disability Matters. He keeps busy with his three sites: My Disability Matters, The My Disability Matters Club, My Disability Matters New Site and a My Disability Matters Shop, which will be coming soon.

In today’s show, we look at how Dale uses eCommerce on his club site, as well as reasons he chose WooCommerce, the roadblocks he has navigated, and of  his own challenge working on the web as a visually impaired professional.

We chatted about:

Why he chose to use WooCommerceWhat has been his largest challenge building sites as a visually impaired personThe accessibility issues he confronted and the solutions he came up withHis biggest challenge with starting a membership siteWhat lies ahead in the future for My Disability Matters and what is his big dream

Transcript

Bob Dunn: Hey everyone, welcome back to the WP eCommerce Show. Bob Dunn here, also known as Bob WP on the web. Today, we are talking with Dale Reardon from My Disability Matters. Hey Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale Reardon: Yes. Thanks for having me along today, Bob.

Bob Dunn: Now, I know that your newest venture is a social networking community, but I also know that you have run and are running several membership sites. Give us a short rundown of what you're doing. A little bit about yourself, Dale.

Meet our guest, Dale Reardon

Dale Reardon: Yes. I work in the online businesses with my wife Jo. Her primary venture, which we started off just as a blog and has now turned into a full blown consulting and membership site, is Move to Tasmania, where she helps people relocating to Tasmania, where we live. Over the time, she's built up a site of resources, a discussion forum and other things. That's all been implemented using WooCommerce and Woo Memberships, which is a terrific plugin that you've reviewed on your site. We have also offered a WordPress blog-building course that we designed videos and, once again, an online membership site using WooCommerce and Woo Memberships.

As you say, the latest venture is My Disability Matters, which we are concentrating on as our main business.  At the moment the primary focus is a social networking community for the disability sector. That's been built up using BuddyPress, bbPress, WordPress of course, WooCommerce and our membership site. Yes, that's been going along very well.

Why did you choose WooCommerce for your plugin?

Bob Dunn: Obviously you've kind of answered my first question, but I'm going to poke it a little bit more as far as you choosing WooCommerce for your platform, or I guess I should say, your plugin. Why did you choose WooCommerce? Was there any specific thing, or was it several things?

Dale Reardon: Yeah, really several things. As compared to a hosted platform like the other solutions that are out there or other plugins, WooCommerce gives us a lot of flexibility. It has tremendous support for a lot of payment gateways, which was always one of the problems. We're in Australia, so I mean we have access to Stripe and PayPal, of course, and some other gateways, but unfortunately not to Amazon Payments and other things that you've reviewed. Using WooCommerce on our own site gives us the ability to control the whole process and tailor the whole payment process.

You can, using one page checkout plugins that you've spoken of on your site, make the payment process very streamlined. People don't even know they're using a shopping cart plugin, which makes the whole checkout process and conversion much better. WooCommerce being open source means you get so much support from the community. There are so many plugins and add-ons to WooCommerce that it makes it much more powerful for our site. I guess they were the primary reasons we have chosen it, yeah.

The advantage of a flexible plugin

Bob Dunn: It sounds like you're like me. You've u