In this conversation, Ian Misner discusses his work with Kestrel and the importance of checkout processes in e-commerce, particularly through their product CheckoutWC. He highlights the features that differentiate CheckoutWC from WooCommerce’s default checkout, the significance of conversion rates, and the need for extensibility and customization in WooCommerce. Ian also shares insights on preparing for Black Friday sales and the balance between user experience and developer extensibility.
Links
- CheckoutWC https://www.checkoutwc.com/
- Kestrel on Woo https://woocommerce.com/vendor/kestrel/
- Ian on Twitter https://x.com/ianmisner
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Ian Misner and Kestrel
02:05 The Importance of Checkout in E-commerce
05:52 Features and Benefits of CheckoutWC
11:31 Optimizing Checkout for Higher Conversions
15:11 Extensibility in WooCommerce and CheckoutWC
16:43 Navigating Third-Party Code Challenges
18:08 Payment Gateway Integrations and Compatibility
20:00 Balancing Extensibility and Customization
23:06 User Experience vs. Developer Flexibility
29:49 Preparing for Black Friday Success
Brian Coords (00:00)
Welcome to Webmasters FM. Today I have my friend Ian on the show. Ian, can you give everybody a little bio of you and Kestrel and kind of what you do?
Ian Misner (00:09)
Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. My name is Ian Misner. I run Kestrel. We do Woo extensions. So we sell about 50 Woo Commerce extensions, doing a ton of different stuff like memberships, checkout improvements, upsells, add-ons, all the things primarily sold through the Woo marketplace, but also checkoutwc.com, some of our sites. And we’ve been in the space a while. I started out with a team at Skyverge about almost 10 years ago now. So we’ve been working in the Woo
extending it for a long time and yeah this is sort of our SkyVirge 2.0 is kind of what we’re going for here.
Brian Coords (00:46)
So in the context of this conversation, one person works at WooCommerce and the other person knows way more about WooCommerce is kind of how we should frame it. Because I think you know more than me for sure.
Ian Misner (00:56)
I mean,
it depends on what you mean when you say WooCommerce. I know enough about the company, a lot about the product or the platform, but I think that different experience, different knowledge, right? It’s all good.
Brian Coords (01:09)
Yeah. One of the reasons to have a podcast is usually to invite people that you wouldn’t normally get to talk to and get to like introduce yourselves to people. like, that’s why I started this. was like, I’m going to have a reason to ask, you know, specific people to talk to me for 30 minutes. But in this case, it’s kind of the opposite where I feel like it’s pretty easy to get you to talk to me. and I kind of already know the things we could be talking about in terms of, like you said, the platform, the company, all that sort of stuff, but I want to go.
different than our normal conversations, partially because we’re being recorded. ⁓ and just talk about, want to talk about checkout generally, because it’s interesting to me that you have a checkout product. WooCommerce has a default checkout. Checkout feels like a very important part in like the e-commerce world and stuff. And so I guess kind of to kick it off, what is your, what is checkout WC and why did you hate WooCommerce checkout so much you had to compete with it with a product.
Ian Misner (02:05)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I do have to give a bit of background to explain it, I think a little bit. So the original founder of CheckerWC is Cliff Griffin. We acquired it from him about a year, year and a half ago now. his reason for starting it’s a little bit simpler than why we wanted it. So I kind of have two answers for you. The real reason he started it is back in the day, he was an agency. He built a ton of stores on WooCommerce and started finding that there’s this list of optimizations you do every single time as a dev or an agency. And, you know, it’s nothing that
you know back when he started the Wu checkout was the legacy checkout we call it now was still like a perfectly acceptable it was good there was nothing wrong with it and everyone liked it still but there was a lot you could do to boost you know conversion rates and just really you know make it feel like a high trust environment basically right and so the original thing he built was a tool for himself and his team to just you know build stores faster basically
Brian Coords (03:01)
Okay.
Ian Misner (03:02)
Now, the interest that we had in it really came to, you you zoom forward and, know, the big, you know, block checkout change and, you know, everything in WordPress is blocks and it’s, you know, JavaScript and it’s different and all that stuff. Ultimately, Woo’s in this place where there is two checkouts. You got the legacy one, which again, looked great in 2012, 2015, and now it’s a little bit dated. And then you have the new one that is great and wonderful and does convert a lot better than the old one. But there is some restrictions and difficulties there.
So CheckoutWC, as Cliff built it, is a React-based checkout, but also it follows all the standard extensibility practices that you would find. Actually, we have a visual hooks guide on our website if you go to it. You could probably change more on ours than on the Woo checkout, actually. The old one even.
Brian Coords (03:36)
Okay.
Okay. So,
so then like what, I mean, there’s a, there’s like a bunch of different ways we could go. There’s like the extensibility thing, which I think we should talk about, but I think like first just setting the stage, when you say like, we want to like change a checkout for whatever higher conversion rate or maybe just some customization and stuff like that. What are like the top, I don’t know, handful of features that most people are coming to checkout WC to do that they can’t do in like a standard checkout and also
Compare that to like the Shopify checkout, which you kind of can’t touch at all, but seems to do very well for a lot of people. like, what are you offering? That’s not there.
Ian Misner (04:26)
Yeah.
So I will say 90, probably greater than 90 % of what we do, you could just go do, you know, either with extensions or custom code. Like it’s the magic of checkout WC is often that, you know, you pay one price, the job’s done for you. And most of our users actually, most of the sites on our platform are brought by agencies and they’re really doing it to shave, you know, time to deploy it more than anything. Now, as far as what it actually does though,
Brian Coords (04:46)
Hmm.
Ian Misner (04:54)
Well, first of all, one of our top search terms is Shopify style checkout for WooCommerce. So literally it does look more like Shopify. But there is a lot of independent research that goes into it as well. I mean, independent as in we go to first party sources that are doing real deep level research to make sure that the little optimizations we make matter. And then there’s really like kind of two parts to what the product really is. The main thing, which is actually, I don’t know if I should push this too much. It’s in our free plugin on WordPress.
Brian Coords (04:59)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ian Misner (05:25)
is the replacement to checkout that is it’s fast, it’s performant, it boosts conversions between 10 and 30%, depending on which data set you trust. And you know, it doesn’t do a lot more than just look better and feel more safe or, know, whatever that like subtle UX changes, just make people feel more comfortable with checkout and you convert slightly better. And that’s sort of the core value proposition. But then you have all the other stuff, the things that people actually search for and
Brian Coords (05:35)
Mm-hmm
Ian Misner (05:52)
and that’s how they find us and that’s why they upgrade. Some of it’s very simple of like address validation, and I know you guys added address autocomplete in a recent version. We’ve had that for a while, but then you have like trust badges. just being able to put Visa, MasterCard, or some awards you won, and reviews, testimonials from users, kind of near the place order button. Then little UX tweaks as well though of like being able to in the checkout,
Brian Coords (06:01)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (06:17)
page, know, tweak quantities or whatever, like very just minor things that we actually don’t encourage you to activate them all, but a testing framework to make sure that for your store is the best choice. Then there’s a few that are a little bit more blunt, is like let’s just get more stuff sold or more, you know, order bumps is a big feature that people come to us for and, you know, one-click offers and we have a very complex rule system that you can build, you you show an offer to someone because they’ve bought from you.
Brian Coords (06:21)
Mmm.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (06:47)
five times and it’s a special offer that you wouldn’t show everyone else. It’s really easy to set up those very complex rule sets to boost the order value. But then there’s also just like, again, the time to set up portion of things where we include like order delivery features where, you know, a very common thing for us is actually with like restaurants and stuff, you know, you have sort of a capacity of what you can have available for certain windows of time. And we include all the logic to put all that on checkout really easily as well.
Brian Coords (06:54)
Okay.
Ian Misner (07:16)
And so basically you can replace like 10, 15 plugins with ours. And the idea is we should have everything you really need. And if we don’t, please tell us. We will add it in most cases. Did I get to the question? actually kind of…
Brian Coords (07:27)
You
and
Yeah,
I think, well, I mean, you kind of covered a lot of the features, like that’s helpful. Like the trust badges and it’s like you said, like I can imagine I could probably do most of this in the block checkout. kind of forget how much you can mess with the inner blocks. And I think the other thing too is like a lot of the WooCommerce stuff, like it’s, it’s very, it’s a lot easier for developers to do. There’s not a lot of like UI for a lot of these things, like additional fields and adding some like
you know, trust badges or pricing things or whatever. Like a lot of that stuff is maybe possible, but it’s stuff, but I’m guessing even though you’re selling to agencies, like there’s a UI for all of this stuff. It’s not typical that they’re going to need to dig into code.
Ian Misner (08:09)
Yeah,
yeah, so we kind of see our customers as like a two-tiered setup, right? So the agencies who we try our best to cater to as often as possible, they’re actually buying our product because it is time to set up, you So a good dev can do everything we do. And in many cases, are, like an agency already has like a GitHub repo for a custom thank you page template and they pull it in and you know, like they can do all that, but.
Brian Coords (08:34)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (08:34)
The feedback we get from that audience is that being able to offload the responsibility of making sure this all stays up to date is meaningful. We’re no more expensive than any other extension. It’s a bunch of stuff and it’s easier. But the thing is, we do have quite a bit of data across thousands of WooCommerce stores. And then from a product perspective, we spend our time thinking about GMV within our legs.
mini woo ecosystem or whatever. And so every time we make a change or we improve something, our goal is just to make sure that stores using our product sell more in the future, which again, that confidence that that should bring to an individual merchant kind of ladders up to the agency audience and they get to show, you know, this is like your store gets better over time by using this. you know, again, those.
Brian Coords (09:00)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (09:25)
Those changes aren’t always felt by individual stores, but as in aggregate, there’s 8,000, 9,000 stores using CheckoutWC, and we’re able to tweak over time to ensure we’re doing that for as many as possible.
Brian Coords (09:38)
Okay. And when you say people search for Shopify style checkout, I’m like, just trying to imagine what it is they’re searching for. Like one thing off the top of my head is like the Wu checkout is very spacious. If you know what I mean? Like, like it’s very, ⁓ open user, you’re scrolling for like a day or two to like get all of your address fields filled out Shopify. feels like it’s like kind of similar to like the Stripe express checkout where it’s like,
Ian Misner (09:42)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (10:03)
I can kind of see all of it in my viewport at one point in time without scrolling or something like that. So there’s that visual element, but is there other stuff that people see in the Shopify checkout that they’re not getting?
Ian Misner (10:08)
Yeah.
Yeah, so different people seem to mean different things when they say Shopify-style checkout. And that’s sort of one of the struggles that I’m sure the Woo team has too, actually, when people are looking for these sorts of things. The things that it seems to mean most often, I don’t even think are actually the primary Shopify checkout today. But one is the multi-step checkout, you know, show as few fields as possible on each page. And it’s multiple steps. And theoretically, you would think that that’s more opportunity for people to drop off. But with the right UX, you know, it feels
Brian Coords (10:21)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (10:43)
very quick and fluid and your browser is auto-filling enough of it that they’re just clicking, clicking, until their order’s gone through. So that’s probably, close, that’s genuinely what I recommend for the vast majority of stores. But then the other thing that people tend to mean is just they actually are just asking for one page checkout, which is something that Shopify offers as well.
Brian Coords (10:45)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (11:04)
In almost every case, if you sell multiple SKUs, that seems to perform worse. And so we’ve actually tried, we do make it available, it’s really easy to use, but we actually kind of bury it a little bit as a setting where, if you’re looking for it, it’s there, but hey, you should try this thing that’s actually gonna work better instead. It’s one of the things they’re looking for though.
Brian Coords (11:21)
So
when you say like one page checkout, like explain, you mean like skipping the car page and like getting straight into checkout or?
Ian Misner (11:31)
No, so our product actually assumes there is no cart page. And again, you can re-enable it, we disable, side cart, default in our product, right? So it’s always, there is no cart page unless you choose to put it back. That being said, one page checkout is like, you know, have a SKU added to the cart and then it’s one very long form and it’s, you don’t leave the page basically. And it’s very, for single SKU stores, it might make sense, but I would still, even in those cases, encourage someone to test rather than assuming it’s the right.
Brian Coords (11:39)
Yeah.
Okay.
Ian Misner (12:01)
answer, which we have a lot of blog posts that do make that recommendation. again, a lot of search traffic exists for it, so we offer it. You can do it. I’m just not sure you should.
Brian Coords (12:01)
Yeah
So if you’re like building stores and sort of like that, what, what is kind of like the top things people should be looking at for their checkout? Like if people are concerned, maybe my checkout isn’t converting, but they’re not exactly sure like how to test it or how to like have that data and stuff. What are the types of things they should be like looking at trying to understand?
Ian Misner (12:29)
Yeah, well, I mean, the very first thing is making sure you actually have conversion measurement in place, some sort of telemetry. You’d be surprised by the number of stores we see where they don’t even actually keep track of that. So being able to test and we are actually working on a bit of an A-B testing feature that’ll improve the way you won’t need to go set up other stuff in a perfect world. We’ll help you with that actually. there is…
We do this whole concept of like a conversion rescue where we send out an email campaign periodically and people can opt in and we’ll just come in and make a bunch of recommendations on who to do better on your store. And I mean, there’s a few trends that happen more often than you would expect, frankly. Like number one, your site is very slow and check out shaving a couple hundred milliseconds does make a massive difference.
Brian Coords (13:06)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (13:14)
I
don’t want to tell everyone to go use a better host, in almost every case. That’s not what our product does, but that is the thing that’s going to help most. Now, as far as the things our product actually does to improve the experience…
Brian Coords (13:21)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (13:25)
The little tweaks which know address autocomplete makes a real big difference you know it’s the time through. We bump the the email field to the very top of checkout so we have an email card abandonment feature which I mean if you’re not doing card abandonment emails yet that is you know stop right now that’s one of the few things that works on
Brian Coords (13:37)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Misner (13:44)
Literally every single store I’ve ever seen, know, there’s no testing needed that will work for you if you’re not doing it yet. But then it’s like I was saying before, it’s thinking about the checkout is like, you know, are you maintaining trust through this space? And so little design tweaks, UX improvements do more than what you would expect, frankly, you know, little.
Brian Coords (13:46)
haha
Ian Misner (14:06)
There’s things like the transition between our multi-step checkout feels basic. It’s all react space so it feels basically instantaneous and that’s that little tweak of
Brian Coords (14:13)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (14:15)
It feels more serious, I guess, and whatever that feeling of trust is, there’s a lot of research from the Baymert Institute and all that that really focuses on it. And I know this doesn’t sound as exciting as like, you know, here’s the four cool tricks that are going to do it. But honestly, a really great checkout is kind of boring and predictable. It’s battle tested and it works. And the thing that you really need to do is zoom out like one layer and make sure…
Brian Coords (14:33)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (14:39)
you’re frequently doing something to test that it is the best solution for your store. We give you the tools to make it easy to test a lot of obvious things that everyone should try testing before you settle on the three cool tricks that are best for you.
Brian Coords (14:54)
Okay.
Ian Misner (14:55)
We can make recommendations based on your industry, the type of store you are, and all that. Feel free to reach out to our support and we’ll say, stores like you should do this, but ultimately, unless you do the work of testing at a meaningful scale, you can’t be 100 % certain.
Brian Coords (15:11)
And one of the things you mentioned was extensibility. You guys have some amount of like developer extensibility there. Extensibility is definitely a concept that I hear about a lot as a developer advocate at WooCommerce and just about somebody who worked in an agency and tried to use the block editor early on and stuff. think extensibility is still,
How do I say this? An open field in WordPress that needs to be cultivated a little bit. How do you guys think about extensibility and what do you think you’re doing that Core WordPress, Core WooCommerce are not doing for extensibility?
Ian Misner (15:46)
Yeah, it’s a bit of loaded question, I think, because I could give you the super friendly, happy answer, the one I really mean, right? So. ⁓
Brian Coords (15:53)
I’ll take both.
Ian Misner (15:55)
Well, I mean, right off the hop, do think that WooCommerce is great to strength against the other solutions that you can use for an e-commerce store is that you can build any experience you want, right? And that sort of, that assumption, the philosophical truth behind that being the thing that is at the core of it is I think the most important thing. And then you’ll see like, know, Matt Mullenweg at WordPress Canada, last week doing the defending of Hello Dolly in, you
WordPress core. It’s the tutorial, here’s how you do hooks and filters. In my opinion, is the magic of WordPress at the very root. That’s the thing that ultimately, it makes more developers to do more tweaks and the spectrum of what is a developer. Anyways, to zoom into the actual answer though, from there.
Brian Coords (16:32)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (16:43)
we do believe strongly with our checkout that, every feature, everything we do has to survive the whole universe of third-party code and the hooks and all the weird things that people can do. And I forget the name of it, but there’s like a rule of like, if any API will be used in any way, could potentially be used. like things as simple as like your error messages, you know, people are using those for logic in some way and like they shouldn’t, it’s absolutely absurd and ridiculous, but they do. So you do need to be thoughtful of that.
Brian Coords (16:58)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (17:12)
And because of, you know, we’re replacing checkout, we sort of have this inherent commitment or this implicit commitment with our users and especially the devs and agencies that, you know, we will survive that universe of third-party code.
We won’t always not break it, but we will definitely fix it. And to the point of supporting weird third party solutions and edge cases is a big part of what our support for this product looks like. And most of those are actually coming from combinations.
that like we wouldn’t test or couldn’t test if we wanted to. You you’re using like a shipping solution in Germany with WooGermanized, but also you’ve customized eight of the fields manually. You know, like sometimes we’re going to break that, but we will definitely, you know, fix it. have quick support. We will always maintain our piece of that, or at least tell you what you need to do to get it fixed. So.
Brian Coords (17:54)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Misner (18:08)
Yeah, we have sort of the luxury of not being WooCommerce in that way, right? We don’t have to think about seven million stores or whatever it is. We have to think of a couple thousand.
Brian Coords (18:11)
Yeah.
But how do you work with all the different payment gateways? Like who builds that integration so that you can work? Do you guys do that or?
Ian Misner (18:26)
I mean,
we rely, so two things, we rely primarily on just following the patterns that developers should be using, right? So that’s the default assumption, which does mean in almost all cases, if a payment gateway works with the typical Woo checkout, it will also work with ours. We do have specific compatibility code with, in many cases, Woo payments, also payment plugins with Stripe and all them.
Brian Coords (18:36)
Okay.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (18:53)
There’s
specific work we do to make sure it works better, but we’re not choosing those. We’re just, what are the most users using? What can we improve the experience further? And sometimes there is in support, we will recommend, it’ll work better with one of these gateways, but.
I mean in most cases that’s just because it would be too much work to go tell everyone what they’re doing wrong. We do that too though actually, which I’m sure you’re not surprised by. We do send them the emails. If you fix this, this will be better. We do that plenty as well.
Brian Coords (19:13)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
that’s kind of the platform responsibility. I see that internally at Woo too, lot of like, hey, if you just change this line in your extension, we wouldn’t be getting all this grief about performance, you know? It’s definitely a thing that happens, you know?
Ian Misner (19:32)
Right.
Yeah. And that’s actually one of those things that we don’t, we are careful not to make too many like broad recommendations for specific solutions within our plugin itself. But when we’re doing those like audits, you know, when we’re helping a specific store with their permission to make recommendations, I mean, some work better than others, right? That is just, I don’t know. That’s like the strength and the weakness of WooCommerce being the extensibility is one of the things we all.
maybe struggle with a little bit, but I mean.
There’s two ways you can focus on solving that, You can encapsulate everything, protect you from everything, really break down the, you ruin the ability to extend it further if you try to actually solve it at the root of that. Ultimately, you know, just being willing to be opinionated is a better solution. And, sometimes somebody’s using a worse solution for a good reason. And, you know, actually the most common case that I see of that is sort of those like gray market stores where, you know, they’re using a payment gateway where maybe there’s only like
Brian Coords (20:09)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (20:30)
lady people on WooCommerce even using it, so the gateway isn’t that great, but also they have to use it for whatever reason, right? And we want to support that too, just maybe not as much intentionality around it, right?
Brian Coords (20:42)
Yeah. There’s also like a thing happening. I think since the block editor came out where like there’s the term extensibility. And then I think there’s a separate word called like customization. And I think what we’re seeing is a lot more customization. It’s a lot easier to customize your site in the site editor and the block editor. It’s a lot easier to customize a lot of these things in a way that like puts the power in the user’s hands. think Gutenberg and everything built on after it is
Very like user centric and WooCommerce. would be like merchant centric. Like it’s very typical of that. And then developers are a bit like a second class just by default. And so there’s the customization has gotten way better. And I find myself doing so much less coding on WordPress sites than I used to in the past. Like it’s so much easier to just be like, okay. I can just do this thing now that I would have had to have written physical code for, but the, the like sacrifice of that is that extensibility, but like,
Where do you think that trade off is? Is there maybe just some benefit to saying, hey, we’re just a little less extensible because we’ve made everything a little bit more powerful inside of this UI that we’ve granted everybody?
Ian Misner (21:49)
Yeah, and I totally get it. And I will say like even pointing back to Cliff’s motivation for starting CheckoutWC in the first place, right? Like the idea that as an agency, even as somebody capable of writing all the code to make it perfect and custom every time, if there’s a tool you can use that to just skip that part, you’d rather do that, right? Like that’s totally understandable. And that’s kind of the direction both WordPress and WooCommerce probably should be moving and are moving, right? I don’t agree that you have to choose though. And that’s sort of the, the, the,
kind of broad as the feedback I provided the team in every place that I have the opportunity to do so, which is yes, you can make it easier to not need a developer. You can continue to do those things, but really there’s no reason that you can’t continue to maintain extensibility and interoperability. And it’s, you’re solving sort of two different problems there of like the user experience of making things as easy as possible for a non-technical user, which is like all of us should be doing every single person.
building any part of any product for these platforms should be doing. That’s hard to argue. But ultimately the thing that I see, mean, Woo especially, but I think this is not explicitly just Woo, is that sort of like trend towards, you know,
Brian Coords (22:50)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (23:06)
explicit APIs rather than extend anything anywhere. I think that’s sort solving a different problem and that’s sort of the perception of stability, the perception of security of the platform and all those things where, again, the greatest weakness of WordPress and WooCommerce is that you can install any code you want and it’s out there and every solution’s been made and…
Brian Coords (23:09)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (23:24)
You can dream it, you can do it. That’s why it’s great, but it is also why people are choosing. You’ll see a store with 95 plugins from 75 different developers, and like, yeah, something’s gonna break. There’s no…
Brian Coords (23:37)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (23:37)
There’s no way that that’s always stable unless it’s static. so people need to make better choices around that. I think that I do see Woo trending towards trying to solve that at the platform layer rather than sort of at the community layer. And I see that as a potential future problem rather than as part of a dichotomy there.
Brian Coords (23:58)
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, definitely a trade-off. think the other thing will just in WordPress in general, you’ll get a lot of, people will get upset about a thing, right? Like let’s take like admin notices in the backend of WordPress. Like everybody hates them. You get all these admin notices, they’re upsells and nags and give us a review and you know, and everybody hates them. Everybody, every month, somebody goes on Twitter and says like, why don’t they just like outlaw these in the plugin directory? As if that.
is one even achievable as like a thing a person could do. And two would even begin to solve the problem of, know, what people are actually doing on websites and how premium extensions and private extensions are a big part of this too, and stuff. it’s kind of like, there is sometimes a sense that like WordPress, like that’s the one thing about the site editor and everything inside of there is like, it’s kind of like, it’s all locked down. And if you want extensibility, you need to request it and we’ll think about it and we’ll add it.
because the alternative is admin notices on every page and upsell banners and ads all over your UI and stuff like that. And I don’t know if there’s like a right answer, but it’s definitely a conversation that comes up a lot.
Ian Misner (25:06)
Yeah, and I see the benefit to it and you know, I’ve seen all the GitHub discussions and it’s like, you know, these are things that have been developing over a long period of time. I think that there is room to allow it, but to default, know, default to restriction have sort of like the ability. The current Woo checkout, the default Woo checkout today is a good example of this. Go to like Reddit or all the Slack communities and all that. People asking what all those little locks are as they’re trying to tweak their checkout. And it’s like, you know, that confuses
around that, you know, they can’t modify it here, you know, there’s places they can add things and places they can’t. That confusion, it’s the user in that moment doesn’t understand that they’re being protected from bad decisions.
Brian Coords (25:50)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (25:51)
maybe it’s okay to warn them rather than prevent them. It’s sort of just the pitch that I continue to make. And ultimately, like even in CheckoutWC, we have a lot of settings, a lot of things you can change, but like you gotta go to like find the hook or filter and go write code to change a lot of things as well, right? Like you can’t, we protect you from bad decisions in a different way. And you know, that being said, if you wanna do it, you can still do it. And that’s, think, the big difference there. Now to your specific example,
Brian Coords (26:13)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (26:20)
I do want to highlight, I think it’s Jonathan Bosinger shared in 2019, the proposal for the WPnotify project that I know everyone’s mad that everyone’s putting admin notices everywhere all the time. That project’s on dot org somewhere and had precisely like zero volunteers. So I’m just throwing it out there.
Brian Coords (26:27)
Yes.
Hey, I was, I was a contributor to it for a little while and I won’t go into the
politics of it, but I think what it tried to do is solve a real problem, which is like, you can’t tell people not to do a thing until you give them the right way to do the thing. like first you have to at least have some sort of way to surface notifications. Like it actually is a little wild that WordPress doesn’t have a unified system. Like sometimes my emails come from here. Sometimes they come from like
WooCommerce, sometimes it comes from like the WordPress, a new user was registered and that’s just email notifications. That’s not even like, you know, updates are available and all these other sorts of things. Like, like, you do have to kind of give the right way to do it before you take away any bad ways to do it.
Ian Misner (27:20)
which I completely, exactly, and like, mean, ultimately, if you did have a right way, a place these belonged, the bad actors would be punished by the market without being limited. You know what mean? Like, they don’t need, you don’t need to prevent them if somebody’s abusing notices in the admin or whatever when there is a place to put it. I think people would be 10 times more mad than they already are, right? So, yeah.
Brian Coords (27:44)
Yeah. It also reminds
me of like you use Twitter a lot. I use Twitter a lot and I forget the guy’s name. That’s like the product guy at Twitter. That’s constantly tweeting. You know who I’m talking about? He’s always like tweeting what he’s going to do. Nikita. Yeah. And he had a tweet recently that like offended me, but I also agreed with, it was, it was that concept of like, he was just like, ⁓ he was whatever the bug people were mad about. I don’t know if it was like the feed refreshes when I’m trying to read it or whatever. He picked some bug like that, that everybody gets mad about. And he was like,
Ian Misner (27:53)
Yeah. Nikita. Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (28:13)
this bug has like 0 % like effect on our turn or our business strategy at all. And it was basically like a lot of times things that you think are like little product things that bug you and they are annoying. It’s like no one’s leaving WordPress because the admin notices. Like it’s probably not that important. You know what I mean? But I can understand cause it really does bother me. Those sorts of things, you know?
Ian Misner (28:33)
Right.
And in that example, actually, he did share one point that there’s some data to suggest that actually increases engagement because you’re looking for the one that you lost, right? And so their measures are actually benefiting them. It’s still a bad user experience though. That’s one of those like the short term versus long term, right? Like in the moment it’s boosting. The thing we care about right now is getting better. But in the, you know, the grand scheme of things, it’s a better product to use, to experience. It’s the balance of, to, to,
Brian Coords (28:42)
Probably, yeah.
Ian Misner (29:03)
Compare that again to admin notices. The reason everyone does them is they work. You put a pro upsell in there. I don’t think our products have too much of that, but if you do that, get a fair, the conversion rate justifies any complaints you get, and that’s why everyone’s doing it. It’s not because they hate you and they wanna notify you of nothing. so, yeah.
Brian Coords (29:07)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I really didn’t want to go into the weeds of like WordPress and extensive or like those kind of like more like a meta debates about it. So to wrap it up, I’m going to bring us to something a little more practical, which is you reminded me. don’t, I don’t know why I’d forgotten. Cause it’s, uh, I’m seeing it constantly at work, which is black Friday is coming up. have a ton of stuff internally. They’re like publishing things on it and guides and you know, this stuff. it’s like.
very much aware, but you reminded me Black Friday’s coming up. So I guess if you had like a concrete thing of like you’re managing WooStore, you’re like an agency, you’re managing WooStore, Black Friday’s coming up. How do you think people should prepare so that like their checkout doesn’t completely crumble under the pressure or they don’t, you know, miss out on this like, you know, windfall of money they’re about to make?
Ian Misner (30:09)
Yeah, so we do have a bit of a framework on the way I think about this that…
I don’t know if I’ve written up anything on this. I probably stole this from someone, it’s confidence conversion, sorry, confidence conversion continuity. So that’s what you should be thinking about leading into Black Friday. So system reliability with confidence, know, predictable behavior under load. If you are a larger store, talk with your host, try to do some sort of load testing, do the work to see, you know, what, you can do there. We do have, you know, within our product, you know, we aim to be
We reduce the number of changes we make to our products leading up to Black Friday, right? So, and I would encourage that in as far as confidence is concerned as well. You missed your window for conversion testing for the year. Where you’re at today is what you should be doing and just ramping up marketing leading into it. that confidence is really just don’t break things right now. Make sure that you can handle under load. And for smaller stores, like just at least do a test transaction.
leading into the Black Friday period, just know it works. As far as the conversion is concerned, this again, in the spirit of not changing a lot of stuff, this is not the time to worry about, know, what upsells should I be doing and all that. Like come up with the offer you’re gonna make and there is best practices there as well. I won’t go down that separate rabbit hole, but you know, just make sure that, you know, the time from the product page to check out, to order completed is a smooth.
Brian Coords (31:06)
Mm-hmm
Yeah.
Ian Misner (31:30)
smooth and as quick as possible. Again, serve the intent, reduce friction. If you are making any changes here, think about things like prefetching scripts, caching, like the things that are gonna, you’re not messing with the machine, you’re just speeding it up. And then, yeah.
Brian Coords (31:45)
Yeah. Throw an optimization plugin on there just a week before black Friday.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (31:49)
five or six of them, you know, just
make sure you’ve got all of the pieces. That is a joke. Please don’t do that actually. Just, just in case, just in case. And then continuity, which from my perspective, the biggest thing people actually miss from the monetization, the benefit of Black Friday itself is don’t just maximize for like that, the weekend sales. Think about the ways you’re going to retain them as customers beyond the specific event. And so, you know, one of our products, Constellation is a membership solution.
Brian Coords (31:55)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (32:18)
can do like an upsell post purchase to, you know, discounts in the future and gives them a reason to come back. Woo is a great gift cards plugin, you know, instead of making a huge discount, offer a credit for the new year or something as part of your offer, you know, do the things that bring them back after the holiday period because everyone’s going to make more sales on Black Friday. Very few stores do the work of actually making sure, you know, they’re thinking about it in terms of lifetime revenue instead of just.
You know, everyone loves the biggest day of the year feeling, but that’s actually, you you’re giving up half the money if that’s the way you’re thinking about it, basically.
Brian Coords (32:52)
Mm-hmm.
Awesome. That’s helpful. Can you give us like where to find you, where to find your products, where to find the podcast, the product talk, all that sort of stuff.
Ian Misner (33:08)
Yeah, sure. I will. So if you want to reach me directly, I am on, I guess, ex Twitter, basically all the time. Just Ian Misner there. I do. I will answer. I’m on there more often than I should be. As far as the products of KestrelWP.com, K-E-S-T-R-E-L, behind me, I think. But the KestrelWP.com has links to everything. Also, we have a vendor page on the WooMarketplace. You can find us there as well. And in fact, most of our products are
Brian Coords (33:17)
That’s true.
Ian Misner (33:33)
sold on WooCommerce.com so maybe check that out too. But then as far as the podcast I just recently joined with Matt Cromwell, Katie Keith and Zach. Gravity view, gravity kit.
Brian Coords (33:44)
Sidecats.
Ian Misner (33:45)
Zach’s
cats. do know Zach’s name. I actually have known Zach longer than the other guys. So here we are. But anyways, so I’m joining up with them as one of the co-hosts that’s just WP product talk on YouTube and Matt Cromwell will attack me if I don’t tell you. You must go there and subscribe to WP product talk on YouTube because we want you to do that. It’s very important to him that we say that a lot of times.
Brian Coords (34:11)
Awesome.
Thank you, Ian. It’s good to talk to you.
Ian Misner (34:14)
Awesome, cheers.
Welcome to Webmasters FM. Today I have my friend Ian on the show. Ian, can you give everybody a little bio of you and Kestrel and kind of what you do?
Ian Misner (00:09)
Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. My name is Ian Misner. I run Kestrel. We do Woo extensions. So we sell about 50 Woo Commerce extensions, doing a ton of different stuff like memberships, checkout improvements, upsells, add-ons, all the things primarily sold through the Woo marketplace, but also checkoutwc.com, some of our sites. And we’ve been in the space a while. I started out with a team at Skyverge about almost 10 years ago now. So we’ve been working in the Woo
extending it for a long time and yeah this is sort of our SkyVirge 2.0 is kind of what we’re going for here.
Brian Coords (00:46)
So in the context of this conversation, one person works at WooCommerce and the other person knows way more about WooCommerce is kind of how we should frame it. Because I think you know more than me for sure.
Ian Misner (00:56)
I mean,
it depends on what you mean when you say WooCommerce. I know enough about the company, a lot about the product or the platform, but I think that different experience, different knowledge, right? It’s all good.
Brian Coords (01:09)
Yeah. One of the reasons to have a podcast is usually to invite people that you wouldn’t normally get to talk to and get to like introduce yourselves to people. like, that’s why I started this. was like, I’m going to have a reason to ask, you know, specific people to talk to me for 30 minutes. But in this case, it’s kind of the opposite where I feel like it’s pretty easy to get you to talk to me. and I kind of already know the things we could be talking about in terms of, like you said, the platform, the company, all that sort of stuff, but I want to go.
different than our normal conversations, partially because we’re being recorded. ⁓ and just talk about, want to talk about checkout generally, because it’s interesting to me that you have a checkout product. WooCommerce has a default checkout. Checkout feels like a very important part in like the e-commerce world and stuff. And so I guess kind of to kick it off, what is your, what is checkout WC and why did you hate WooCommerce checkout so much you had to compete with it with a product.
Ian Misner (02:05)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I do have to give a bit of background to explain it, I think a little bit. So the original founder of CheckerWC is Cliff Griffin. We acquired it from him about a year, year and a half ago now. his reason for starting it’s a little bit simpler than why we wanted it. So I kind of have two answers for you. The real reason he started it is back in the day, he was an agency. He built a ton of stores on WooCommerce and started finding that there’s this list of optimizations you do every single time as a dev or an agency. And, you know, it’s nothing that
you know back when he started the Wu checkout was the legacy checkout we call it now was still like a perfectly acceptable it was good there was nothing wrong with it and everyone liked it still but there was a lot you could do to boost you know conversion rates and just really you know make it feel like a high trust environment basically right and so the original thing he built was a tool for himself and his team to just you know build stores faster basically
Brian Coords (03:01)
Okay.
Ian Misner (03:02)
Now, the interest that we had in it really came to, you you zoom forward and, know, the big, you know, block checkout change and, you know, everything in WordPress is blocks and it’s, you know, JavaScript and it’s different and all that stuff. Ultimately, Woo’s in this place where there is two checkouts. You got the legacy one, which again, looked great in 2012, 2015, and now it’s a little bit dated. And then you have the new one that is great and wonderful and does convert a lot better than the old one. But there is some restrictions and difficulties there.
So CheckoutWC, as Cliff built it, is a React-based checkout, but also it follows all the standard extensibility practices that you would find. Actually, we have a visual hooks guide on our website if you go to it. You could probably change more on ours than on the Woo checkout, actually. The old one even.
Brian Coords (03:36)
Okay.
Okay. So,
so then like what, I mean, there’s a, there’s like a bunch of different ways we could go. There’s like the extensibility thing, which I think we should talk about, but I think like first just setting the stage, when you say like, we want to like change a checkout for whatever higher conversion rate or maybe just some customization and stuff like that. What are like the top, I don’t know, handful of features that most people are coming to checkout WC to do that they can’t do in like a standard checkout and also
Compare that to like the Shopify checkout, which you kind of can’t touch at all, but seems to do very well for a lot of people. like, what are you offering? That’s not there.
Ian Misner (04:26)
Yeah.
So I will say 90, probably greater than 90 % of what we do, you could just go do, you know, either with extensions or custom code. Like it’s the magic of checkout WC is often that, you know, you pay one price, the job’s done for you. And most of our users actually, most of the sites on our platform are brought by agencies and they’re really doing it to shave, you know, time to deploy it more than anything. Now, as far as what it actually does though,
Brian Coords (04:46)
Hmm.
Ian Misner (04:54)
Well, first of all, one of our top search terms is Shopify style checkout for WooCommerce. So literally it does look more like Shopify. But there is a lot of independent research that goes into it as well. I mean, independent as in we go to first party sources that are doing real deep level research to make sure that the little optimizations we make matter. And then there’s really like kind of two parts to what the product really is. The main thing, which is actually, I don’t know if I should push this too much. It’s in our free plugin on WordPress.
Brian Coords (04:59)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ian Misner (05:25)
is the replacement to checkout that is it’s fast, it’s performant, it boosts conversions between 10 and 30%, depending on which data set you trust. And you know, it doesn’t do a lot more than just look better and feel more safe or, know, whatever that like subtle UX changes, just make people feel more comfortable with checkout and you convert slightly better. And that’s sort of the core value proposition. But then you have all the other stuff, the things that people actually search for and
Brian Coords (05:35)
Mm-hmm
Ian Misner (05:52)
and that’s how they find us and that’s why they upgrade. Some of it’s very simple of like address validation, and I know you guys added address autocomplete in a recent version. We’ve had that for a while, but then you have like trust badges. just being able to put Visa, MasterCard, or some awards you won, and reviews, testimonials from users, kind of near the place order button. Then little UX tweaks as well though of like being able to in the checkout,
Brian Coords (06:01)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (06:17)
page, know, tweak quantities or whatever, like very just minor things that we actually don’t encourage you to activate them all, but a testing framework to make sure that for your store is the best choice. Then there’s a few that are a little bit more blunt, is like let’s just get more stuff sold or more, you know, order bumps is a big feature that people come to us for and, you know, one-click offers and we have a very complex rule system that you can build, you you show an offer to someone because they’ve bought from you.
Brian Coords (06:21)
Mmm.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (06:47)
five times and it’s a special offer that you wouldn’t show everyone else. It’s really easy to set up those very complex rule sets to boost the order value. But then there’s also just like, again, the time to set up portion of things where we include like order delivery features where, you know, a very common thing for us is actually with like restaurants and stuff, you know, you have sort of a capacity of what you can have available for certain windows of time. And we include all the logic to put all that on checkout really easily as well.
Brian Coords (06:54)
Okay.
Ian Misner (07:16)
And so basically you can replace like 10, 15 plugins with ours. And the idea is we should have everything you really need. And if we don’t, please tell us. We will add it in most cases. Did I get to the question? actually kind of…
Brian Coords (07:27)
You
and
Yeah,
I think, well, I mean, you kind of covered a lot of the features, like that’s helpful. Like the trust badges and it’s like you said, like I can imagine I could probably do most of this in the block checkout. kind of forget how much you can mess with the inner blocks. And I think the other thing too is like a lot of the WooCommerce stuff, like it’s, it’s very, it’s a lot easier for developers to do. There’s not a lot of like UI for a lot of these things, like additional fields and adding some like
you know, trust badges or pricing things or whatever. Like a lot of that stuff is maybe possible, but it’s stuff, but I’m guessing even though you’re selling to agencies, like there’s a UI for all of this stuff. It’s not typical that they’re going to need to dig into code.
Ian Misner (08:09)
Yeah,
yeah, so we kind of see our customers as like a two-tiered setup, right? So the agencies who we try our best to cater to as often as possible, they’re actually buying our product because it is time to set up, you So a good dev can do everything we do. And in many cases, are, like an agency already has like a GitHub repo for a custom thank you page template and they pull it in and you know, like they can do all that, but.
Brian Coords (08:34)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (08:34)
The feedback we get from that audience is that being able to offload the responsibility of making sure this all stays up to date is meaningful. We’re no more expensive than any other extension. It’s a bunch of stuff and it’s easier. But the thing is, we do have quite a bit of data across thousands of WooCommerce stores. And then from a product perspective, we spend our time thinking about GMV within our legs.
mini woo ecosystem or whatever. And so every time we make a change or we improve something, our goal is just to make sure that stores using our product sell more in the future, which again, that confidence that that should bring to an individual merchant kind of ladders up to the agency audience and they get to show, you know, this is like your store gets better over time by using this. you know, again, those.
Brian Coords (09:00)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (09:25)
Those changes aren’t always felt by individual stores, but as in aggregate, there’s 8,000, 9,000 stores using CheckoutWC, and we’re able to tweak over time to ensure we’re doing that for as many as possible.
Brian Coords (09:38)
Okay. And when you say people search for Shopify style checkout, I’m like, just trying to imagine what it is they’re searching for. Like one thing off the top of my head is like the Wu checkout is very spacious. If you know what I mean? Like, like it’s very, ⁓ open user, you’re scrolling for like a day or two to like get all of your address fields filled out Shopify. feels like it’s like kind of similar to like the Stripe express checkout where it’s like,
Ian Misner (09:42)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (10:03)
I can kind of see all of it in my viewport at one point in time without scrolling or something like that. So there’s that visual element, but is there other stuff that people see in the Shopify checkout that they’re not getting?
Ian Misner (10:08)
Yeah.
Yeah, so different people seem to mean different things when they say Shopify-style checkout. And that’s sort of one of the struggles that I’m sure the Woo team has too, actually, when people are looking for these sorts of things. The things that it seems to mean most often, I don’t even think are actually the primary Shopify checkout today. But one is the multi-step checkout, you know, show as few fields as possible on each page. And it’s multiple steps. And theoretically, you would think that that’s more opportunity for people to drop off. But with the right UX, you know, it feels
Brian Coords (10:21)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (10:43)
very quick and fluid and your browser is auto-filling enough of it that they’re just clicking, clicking, until their order’s gone through. So that’s probably, close, that’s genuinely what I recommend for the vast majority of stores. But then the other thing that people tend to mean is just they actually are just asking for one page checkout, which is something that Shopify offers as well.
Brian Coords (10:45)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (11:04)
In almost every case, if you sell multiple SKUs, that seems to perform worse. And so we’ve actually tried, we do make it available, it’s really easy to use, but we actually kind of bury it a little bit as a setting where, if you’re looking for it, it’s there, but hey, you should try this thing that’s actually gonna work better instead. It’s one of the things they’re looking for though.
Brian Coords (11:21)
So
when you say like one page checkout, like explain, you mean like skipping the car page and like getting straight into checkout or?
Ian Misner (11:31)
No, so our product actually assumes there is no cart page. And again, you can re-enable it, we disable, side cart, default in our product, right? So it’s always, there is no cart page unless you choose to put it back. That being said, one page checkout is like, you know, have a SKU added to the cart and then it’s one very long form and it’s, you don’t leave the page basically. And it’s very, for single SKU stores, it might make sense, but I would still, even in those cases, encourage someone to test rather than assuming it’s the right.
Brian Coords (11:39)
Yeah.
Okay.
Ian Misner (12:01)
answer, which we have a lot of blog posts that do make that recommendation. again, a lot of search traffic exists for it, so we offer it. You can do it. I’m just not sure you should.
Brian Coords (12:01)
Yeah
So if you’re like building stores and sort of like that, what, what is kind of like the top things people should be looking at for their checkout? Like if people are concerned, maybe my checkout isn’t converting, but they’re not exactly sure like how to test it or how to like have that data and stuff. What are the types of things they should be like looking at trying to understand?
Ian Misner (12:29)
Yeah, well, I mean, the very first thing is making sure you actually have conversion measurement in place, some sort of telemetry. You’d be surprised by the number of stores we see where they don’t even actually keep track of that. So being able to test and we are actually working on a bit of an A-B testing feature that’ll improve the way you won’t need to go set up other stuff in a perfect world. We’ll help you with that actually. there is…
We do this whole concept of like a conversion rescue where we send out an email campaign periodically and people can opt in and we’ll just come in and make a bunch of recommendations on who to do better on your store. And I mean, there’s a few trends that happen more often than you would expect, frankly. Like number one, your site is very slow and check out shaving a couple hundred milliseconds does make a massive difference.
Brian Coords (13:06)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (13:14)
I
don’t want to tell everyone to go use a better host, in almost every case. That’s not what our product does, but that is the thing that’s going to help most. Now, as far as the things our product actually does to improve the experience…
Brian Coords (13:21)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (13:25)
The little tweaks which know address autocomplete makes a real big difference you know it’s the time through. We bump the the email field to the very top of checkout so we have an email card abandonment feature which I mean if you’re not doing card abandonment emails yet that is you know stop right now that’s one of the few things that works on
Brian Coords (13:37)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Misner (13:44)
Literally every single store I’ve ever seen, know, there’s no testing needed that will work for you if you’re not doing it yet. But then it’s like I was saying before, it’s thinking about the checkout is like, you know, are you maintaining trust through this space? And so little design tweaks, UX improvements do more than what you would expect, frankly, you know, little.
Brian Coords (13:46)
haha
Ian Misner (14:06)
There’s things like the transition between our multi-step checkout feels basic. It’s all react space so it feels basically instantaneous and that’s that little tweak of
Brian Coords (14:13)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (14:15)
It feels more serious, I guess, and whatever that feeling of trust is, there’s a lot of research from the Baymert Institute and all that that really focuses on it. And I know this doesn’t sound as exciting as like, you know, here’s the four cool tricks that are going to do it. But honestly, a really great checkout is kind of boring and predictable. It’s battle tested and it works. And the thing that you really need to do is zoom out like one layer and make sure…
Brian Coords (14:33)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (14:39)
you’re frequently doing something to test that it is the best solution for your store. We give you the tools to make it easy to test a lot of obvious things that everyone should try testing before you settle on the three cool tricks that are best for you.
Brian Coords (14:54)
Okay.
Ian Misner (14:55)
We can make recommendations based on your industry, the type of store you are, and all that. Feel free to reach out to our support and we’ll say, stores like you should do this, but ultimately, unless you do the work of testing at a meaningful scale, you can’t be 100 % certain.
Brian Coords (15:11)
And one of the things you mentioned was extensibility. You guys have some amount of like developer extensibility there. Extensibility is definitely a concept that I hear about a lot as a developer advocate at WooCommerce and just about somebody who worked in an agency and tried to use the block editor early on and stuff. think extensibility is still,
How do I say this? An open field in WordPress that needs to be cultivated a little bit. How do you guys think about extensibility and what do you think you’re doing that Core WordPress, Core WooCommerce are not doing for extensibility?
Ian Misner (15:46)
Yeah, it’s a bit of loaded question, I think, because I could give you the super friendly, happy answer, the one I really mean, right? So. ⁓
Brian Coords (15:53)
I’ll take both.
Ian Misner (15:55)
Well, I mean, right off the hop, do think that WooCommerce is great to strength against the other solutions that you can use for an e-commerce store is that you can build any experience you want, right? And that sort of, that assumption, the philosophical truth behind that being the thing that is at the core of it is I think the most important thing. And then you’ll see like, know, Matt Mullenweg at WordPress Canada, last week doing the defending of Hello Dolly in, you
WordPress core. It’s the tutorial, here’s how you do hooks and filters. In my opinion, is the magic of WordPress at the very root. That’s the thing that ultimately, it makes more developers to do more tweaks and the spectrum of what is a developer. Anyways, to zoom into the actual answer though, from there.
Brian Coords (16:32)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (16:43)
we do believe strongly with our checkout that, every feature, everything we do has to survive the whole universe of third-party code and the hooks and all the weird things that people can do. And I forget the name of it, but there’s like a rule of like, if any API will be used in any way, could potentially be used. like things as simple as like your error messages, you know, people are using those for logic in some way and like they shouldn’t, it’s absolutely absurd and ridiculous, but they do. So you do need to be thoughtful of that.
Brian Coords (16:58)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (17:12)
And because of, you know, we’re replacing checkout, we sort of have this inherent commitment or this implicit commitment with our users and especially the devs and agencies that, you know, we will survive that universe of third-party code.
We won’t always not break it, but we will definitely fix it. And to the point of supporting weird third party solutions and edge cases is a big part of what our support for this product looks like. And most of those are actually coming from combinations.
that like we wouldn’t test or couldn’t test if we wanted to. You you’re using like a shipping solution in Germany with WooGermanized, but also you’ve customized eight of the fields manually. You know, like sometimes we’re going to break that, but we will definitely, you know, fix it. have quick support. We will always maintain our piece of that, or at least tell you what you need to do to get it fixed. So.
Brian Coords (17:54)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Misner (18:08)
Yeah, we have sort of the luxury of not being WooCommerce in that way, right? We don’t have to think about seven million stores or whatever it is. We have to think of a couple thousand.
Brian Coords (18:11)
Yeah.
But how do you work with all the different payment gateways? Like who builds that integration so that you can work? Do you guys do that or?
Ian Misner (18:26)
I mean,
we rely, so two things, we rely primarily on just following the patterns that developers should be using, right? So that’s the default assumption, which does mean in almost all cases, if a payment gateway works with the typical Woo checkout, it will also work with ours. We do have specific compatibility code with, in many cases, Woo payments, also payment plugins with Stripe and all them.
Brian Coords (18:36)
Okay.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (18:53)
There’s
specific work we do to make sure it works better, but we’re not choosing those. We’re just, what are the most users using? What can we improve the experience further? And sometimes there is in support, we will recommend, it’ll work better with one of these gateways, but.
I mean in most cases that’s just because it would be too much work to go tell everyone what they’re doing wrong. We do that too though actually, which I’m sure you’re not surprised by. We do send them the emails. If you fix this, this will be better. We do that plenty as well.
Brian Coords (19:13)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
that’s kind of the platform responsibility. I see that internally at Woo too, lot of like, hey, if you just change this line in your extension, we wouldn’t be getting all this grief about performance, you know? It’s definitely a thing that happens, you know?
Ian Misner (19:32)
Right.
Yeah. And that’s actually one of those things that we don’t, we are careful not to make too many like broad recommendations for specific solutions within our plugin itself. But when we’re doing those like audits, you know, when we’re helping a specific store with their permission to make recommendations, I mean, some work better than others, right? That is just, I don’t know. That’s like the strength and the weakness of WooCommerce being the extensibility is one of the things we all.
maybe struggle with a little bit, but I mean.
There’s two ways you can focus on solving that, You can encapsulate everything, protect you from everything, really break down the, you ruin the ability to extend it further if you try to actually solve it at the root of that. Ultimately, you know, just being willing to be opinionated is a better solution. And, sometimes somebody’s using a worse solution for a good reason. And, you know, actually the most common case that I see of that is sort of those like gray market stores where, you know, they’re using a payment gateway where maybe there’s only like
Brian Coords (20:09)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (20:30)
lady people on WooCommerce even using it, so the gateway isn’t that great, but also they have to use it for whatever reason, right? And we want to support that too, just maybe not as much intentionality around it, right?
Brian Coords (20:42)
Yeah. There’s also like a thing happening. I think since the block editor came out where like there’s the term extensibility. And then I think there’s a separate word called like customization. And I think what we’re seeing is a lot more customization. It’s a lot easier to customize your site in the site editor and the block editor. It’s a lot easier to customize a lot of these things in a way that like puts the power in the user’s hands. think Gutenberg and everything built on after it is
Very like user centric and WooCommerce. would be like merchant centric. Like it’s very typical of that. And then developers are a bit like a second class just by default. And so there’s the customization has gotten way better. And I find myself doing so much less coding on WordPress sites than I used to in the past. Like it’s so much easier to just be like, okay. I can just do this thing now that I would have had to have written physical code for, but the, the like sacrifice of that is that extensibility, but like,
Where do you think that trade off is? Is there maybe just some benefit to saying, hey, we’re just a little less extensible because we’ve made everything a little bit more powerful inside of this UI that we’ve granted everybody?
Ian Misner (21:49)
Yeah, and I totally get it. And I will say like even pointing back to Cliff’s motivation for starting CheckoutWC in the first place, right? Like the idea that as an agency, even as somebody capable of writing all the code to make it perfect and custom every time, if there’s a tool you can use that to just skip that part, you’d rather do that, right? Like that’s totally understandable. And that’s kind of the direction both WordPress and WooCommerce probably should be moving and are moving, right? I don’t agree that you have to choose though. And that’s sort of the, the, the,
kind of broad as the feedback I provided the team in every place that I have the opportunity to do so, which is yes, you can make it easier to not need a developer. You can continue to do those things, but really there’s no reason that you can’t continue to maintain extensibility and interoperability. And it’s, you’re solving sort of two different problems there of like the user experience of making things as easy as possible for a non-technical user, which is like all of us should be doing every single person.
building any part of any product for these platforms should be doing. That’s hard to argue. But ultimately the thing that I see, mean, Woo especially, but I think this is not explicitly just Woo, is that sort of like trend towards, you know,
Brian Coords (22:50)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (23:06)
explicit APIs rather than extend anything anywhere. I think that’s sort solving a different problem and that’s sort of the perception of stability, the perception of security of the platform and all those things where, again, the greatest weakness of WordPress and WooCommerce is that you can install any code you want and it’s out there and every solution’s been made and…
Brian Coords (23:09)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (23:24)
You can dream it, you can do it. That’s why it’s great, but it is also why people are choosing. You’ll see a store with 95 plugins from 75 different developers, and like, yeah, something’s gonna break. There’s no…
Brian Coords (23:37)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (23:37)
There’s no way that that’s always stable unless it’s static. so people need to make better choices around that. I think that I do see Woo trending towards trying to solve that at the platform layer rather than sort of at the community layer. And I see that as a potential future problem rather than as part of a dichotomy there.
Brian Coords (23:58)
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, definitely a trade-off. think the other thing will just in WordPress in general, you’ll get a lot of, people will get upset about a thing, right? Like let’s take like admin notices in the backend of WordPress. Like everybody hates them. You get all these admin notices, they’re upsells and nags and give us a review and you know, and everybody hates them. Everybody, every month, somebody goes on Twitter and says like, why don’t they just like outlaw these in the plugin directory? As if that.
is one even achievable as like a thing a person could do. And two would even begin to solve the problem of, know, what people are actually doing on websites and how premium extensions and private extensions are a big part of this too, and stuff. it’s kind of like, there is sometimes a sense that like WordPress, like that’s the one thing about the site editor and everything inside of there is like, it’s kind of like, it’s all locked down. And if you want extensibility, you need to request it and we’ll think about it and we’ll add it.
because the alternative is admin notices on every page and upsell banners and ads all over your UI and stuff like that. And I don’t know if there’s like a right answer, but it’s definitely a conversation that comes up a lot.
Ian Misner (25:06)
Yeah, and I see the benefit to it and you know, I’ve seen all the GitHub discussions and it’s like, you know, these are things that have been developing over a long period of time. I think that there is room to allow it, but to default, know, default to restriction have sort of like the ability. The current Woo checkout, the default Woo checkout today is a good example of this. Go to like Reddit or all the Slack communities and all that. People asking what all those little locks are as they’re trying to tweak their checkout. And it’s like, you know, that confuses
around that, you know, they can’t modify it here, you know, there’s places they can add things and places they can’t. That confusion, it’s the user in that moment doesn’t understand that they’re being protected from bad decisions.
Brian Coords (25:50)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (25:51)
maybe it’s okay to warn them rather than prevent them. It’s sort of just the pitch that I continue to make. And ultimately, like even in CheckoutWC, we have a lot of settings, a lot of things you can change, but like you gotta go to like find the hook or filter and go write code to change a lot of things as well, right? Like you can’t, we protect you from bad decisions in a different way. And you know, that being said, if you wanna do it, you can still do it. And that’s, think, the big difference there. Now to your specific example,
Brian Coords (26:13)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (26:20)
I do want to highlight, I think it’s Jonathan Bosinger shared in 2019, the proposal for the WPnotify project that I know everyone’s mad that everyone’s putting admin notices everywhere all the time. That project’s on dot org somewhere and had precisely like zero volunteers. So I’m just throwing it out there.
Brian Coords (26:27)
Yes.
Hey, I was, I was a contributor to it for a little while and I won’t go into the
politics of it, but I think what it tried to do is solve a real problem, which is like, you can’t tell people not to do a thing until you give them the right way to do the thing. like first you have to at least have some sort of way to surface notifications. Like it actually is a little wild that WordPress doesn’t have a unified system. Like sometimes my emails come from here. Sometimes they come from like
WooCommerce, sometimes it comes from like the WordPress, a new user was registered and that’s just email notifications. That’s not even like, you know, updates are available and all these other sorts of things. Like, like, you do have to kind of give the right way to do it before you take away any bad ways to do it.
Ian Misner (27:20)
which I completely, exactly, and like, mean, ultimately, if you did have a right way, a place these belonged, the bad actors would be punished by the market without being limited. You know what mean? Like, they don’t need, you don’t need to prevent them if somebody’s abusing notices in the admin or whatever when there is a place to put it. I think people would be 10 times more mad than they already are, right? So, yeah.
Brian Coords (27:44)
Yeah. It also reminds
me of like you use Twitter a lot. I use Twitter a lot and I forget the guy’s name. That’s like the product guy at Twitter. That’s constantly tweeting. You know who I’m talking about? He’s always like tweeting what he’s going to do. Nikita. Yeah. And he had a tweet recently that like offended me, but I also agreed with, it was, it was that concept of like, he was just like, ⁓ he was whatever the bug people were mad about. I don’t know if it was like the feed refreshes when I’m trying to read it or whatever. He picked some bug like that, that everybody gets mad about. And he was like,
Ian Misner (27:53)
Yeah. Nikita. Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (28:13)
this bug has like 0 % like effect on our turn or our business strategy at all. And it was basically like a lot of times things that you think are like little product things that bug you and they are annoying. It’s like no one’s leaving WordPress because the admin notices. Like it’s probably not that important. You know what I mean? But I can understand cause it really does bother me. Those sorts of things, you know?
Ian Misner (28:33)
Right.
And in that example, actually, he did share one point that there’s some data to suggest that actually increases engagement because you’re looking for the one that you lost, right? And so their measures are actually benefiting them. It’s still a bad user experience though. That’s one of those like the short term versus long term, right? Like in the moment it’s boosting. The thing we care about right now is getting better. But in the, you know, the grand scheme of things, it’s a better product to use, to experience. It’s the balance of, to, to,
Brian Coords (28:42)
Probably, yeah.
Ian Misner (29:03)
Compare that again to admin notices. The reason everyone does them is they work. You put a pro upsell in there. I don’t think our products have too much of that, but if you do that, get a fair, the conversion rate justifies any complaints you get, and that’s why everyone’s doing it. It’s not because they hate you and they wanna notify you of nothing. so, yeah.
Brian Coords (29:07)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I really didn’t want to go into the weeds of like WordPress and extensive or like those kind of like more like a meta debates about it. So to wrap it up, I’m going to bring us to something a little more practical, which is you reminded me. don’t, I don’t know why I’d forgotten. Cause it’s, uh, I’m seeing it constantly at work, which is black Friday is coming up. have a ton of stuff internally. They’re like publishing things on it and guides and you know, this stuff. it’s like.
very much aware, but you reminded me Black Friday’s coming up. So I guess if you had like a concrete thing of like you’re managing WooStore, you’re like an agency, you’re managing WooStore, Black Friday’s coming up. How do you think people should prepare so that like their checkout doesn’t completely crumble under the pressure or they don’t, you know, miss out on this like, you know, windfall of money they’re about to make?
Ian Misner (30:09)
Yeah, so we do have a bit of a framework on the way I think about this that…
I don’t know if I’ve written up anything on this. I probably stole this from someone, it’s confidence conversion, sorry, confidence conversion continuity. So that’s what you should be thinking about leading into Black Friday. So system reliability with confidence, know, predictable behavior under load. If you are a larger store, talk with your host, try to do some sort of load testing, do the work to see, you know, what, you can do there. We do have, you know, within our product, you know, we aim to be
We reduce the number of changes we make to our products leading up to Black Friday, right? So, and I would encourage that in as far as confidence is concerned as well. You missed your window for conversion testing for the year. Where you’re at today is what you should be doing and just ramping up marketing leading into it. that confidence is really just don’t break things right now. Make sure that you can handle under load. And for smaller stores, like just at least do a test transaction.
leading into the Black Friday period, just know it works. As far as the conversion is concerned, this again, in the spirit of not changing a lot of stuff, this is not the time to worry about, know, what upsells should I be doing and all that. Like come up with the offer you’re gonna make and there is best practices there as well. I won’t go down that separate rabbit hole, but you know, just make sure that, you know, the time from the product page to check out, to order completed is a smooth.
Brian Coords (31:06)
Mm-hmm
Yeah.
Ian Misner (31:30)
smooth and as quick as possible. Again, serve the intent, reduce friction. If you are making any changes here, think about things like prefetching scripts, caching, like the things that are gonna, you’re not messing with the machine, you’re just speeding it up. And then, yeah.
Brian Coords (31:45)
Yeah. Throw an optimization plugin on there just a week before black Friday.
Yeah.
Ian Misner (31:49)
five or six of them, you know, just
make sure you’ve got all of the pieces. That is a joke. Please don’t do that actually. Just, just in case, just in case. And then continuity, which from my perspective, the biggest thing people actually miss from the monetization, the benefit of Black Friday itself is don’t just maximize for like that, the weekend sales. Think about the ways you’re going to retain them as customers beyond the specific event. And so, you know, one of our products, Constellation is a membership solution.
Brian Coords (31:55)
Yeah.
Ian Misner (32:18)
can do like an upsell post purchase to, you know, discounts in the future and gives them a reason to come back. Woo is a great gift cards plugin, you know, instead of making a huge discount, offer a credit for the new year or something as part of your offer, you know, do the things that bring them back after the holiday period because everyone’s going to make more sales on Black Friday. Very few stores do the work of actually making sure, you know, they’re thinking about it in terms of lifetime revenue instead of just.
You know, everyone loves the biggest day of the year feeling, but that’s actually, you you’re giving up half the money if that’s the way you’re thinking about it, basically.
Brian Coords (32:52)
Mm-hmm.
Awesome. That’s helpful. Can you give us like where to find you, where to find your products, where to find the podcast, the product talk, all that sort of stuff.
Ian Misner (33:08)
Yeah, sure. I will. So if you want to reach me directly, I am on, I guess, ex Twitter, basically all the time. Just Ian Misner there. I do. I will answer. I’m on there more often than I should be. As far as the products of KestrelWP.com, K-E-S-T-R-E-L, behind me, I think. But the KestrelWP.com has links to everything. Also, we have a vendor page on the WooMarketplace. You can find us there as well. And in fact, most of our products are
Brian Coords (33:17)
That’s true.
Ian Misner (33:33)
sold on WooCommerce.com so maybe check that out too. But then as far as the podcast I just recently joined with Matt Cromwell, Katie Keith and Zach. Gravity view, gravity kit.
Brian Coords (33:44)
Sidecats.
Ian Misner (33:45)
Zach’s
cats. do know Zach’s name. I actually have known Zach longer than the other guys. So here we are. But anyways, so I’m joining up with them as one of the co-hosts that’s just WP product talk on YouTube and Matt Cromwell will attack me if I don’t tell you. You must go there and subscribe to WP product talk on YouTube because we want you to do that. It’s very important to him that we say that a lot of times.
Brian Coords (34:11)
Awesome.
Thank you, Ian. It’s good to talk to you.
Ian Misner (34:14)
Awesome, cheers.