WooSesh is a virtual conference for WooCommerce that took place this autumn between 11-13 October and offered no less than 25 sessions and a workshop.
This edition of WooSesh offered a good range of sessions where both the small shop owner and the large web agency could take part in interesting presentations, with themes such as conversion optimisation, e-commerce performance and the future of WooCommerce. Something for everyone.
All presentations are available free of charge for a short period of time and after that at any time as a member of WPSessions.
(Some statistics from WooSesh are specific to the US market)
Keynote
WooSesh started with a keynote by WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana. Paul talked a lot about something that probably did not pass anyone by during the pandemic, namely that e-commerce developed and grew at a rapid pace. However, we are now seeing a slowdown with some commerce returning to what was normal before COVID.
However, e-commerce still looks set to rise steadily until at least 2025. In particular, B2B trade is growing strongly and many B2B companies are planning to invest in e-commerce this year.
With a shaky economy, many merchants are naturally uncertain about the future, and many are investing in payment solutions that offer invoicing (or buy now, pay later) to offset the declining purchasing power of customers. In Sweden, this type of payment solution has already been popular for several years.
Greater focus is also being placed on simpler marketing and SEO as a cheap way to reach customers.
WooCommerce in numbers
What’s a keynote without numbers on the WooCommerce market?
More than 3.4 million sites currently use WooCommerce, including 25% of the top 1 million stores. 93% of all ecommerce sites running WordPress use WooCommerce. WooCommerce has now been downloaded more than 160 million times in total.
The WooCommerce marketplace currently offers more than 848 products. There is support for more than 60 languages.
Upcoming news for WooCommerce
Several new features and improvements are being worked on for WooCommerce, some of which we will be able to take part in during the autumn.
Gutenberg and block editing are becoming an increasingly integrated part of WordPress and bit by bit also for WooCommerce. Darren Ethier told us about all the exciting news that is being worked on when it comes to block editing and FSE (full site editing) in his presentation “The Future of Personalising Your Storefront”.
For some parts of WooCommerce, the block editor has already been introduced. Darren also talked more about how the development is going and how FSE is the goal also for a standardised editing process in WooCommerce. An expansion of the block editor will be seen in 2023.
In a survey conducted by Woo last year, 35% of merchants responded that they were considering cryptocurrencies as a means of payment. With that, WooCommerce will provide a better support for cryptocurrencies with a separate category with more in the WooCommerce marketplace.
With the rise of social e-commerce, integrations for platforms like Pinterest and TikTok have also been created.
Woo hosting
One of the big news presented by Paul Maiorana in this keynote was Woo hosting. They are currently developing a complete solution for WooCommerce together with their hosting partners. This will be a hosted version of WooCommerce, not unlike WordPress.com VIP. They will present more information about this in 2023.
The presentations
WooSesh offered several interesting sessions from the 24 speakers. Here are some of the insights, tips and discussions we took part in.
Sale – Not just Black Friday
Kim Coleman had an interesting presentation on how to use sales all year round without making it a loss leader or devaluing your products. She says that as long as you have the courage to test different types of offers that suit your customers and plan this for the whole year (especially when you have dips in insurance), you can have both happy customers and make a profit from it. Kim’s key points to consider:
- Don’t try to oversell once or twice a year when competition is at its peak (e.g. Black Friday)
- Run sales when it suits your business (low revenue months)
- Don’t have sales for often
- Sales events don’t have to be price cuts, dare to test other concepts
Kim indirectly answered a question that might come up when talking about sales. Namely, that you may not have the margins to have several sales and that you then only focus on Black Friday.
On the other hand, it does not have to be sales with price reductions, although that may be what attracts the most sales. But it can also be other types of events. If price reductions are what attract sales, Kim suggested increasing the price in order to organise a sale.
This was probably what created the most questions during WooSesh, most likely because this is something that might work in the US, in Europe and Sweden we have rules around pricing and sales. Not least with the new EU directive for price information.
Automation can be a real sales boost with relatively small means even when talking about offers. Nirav Mehta talked about one of the tools, Offermative, you can use in WooCommerce to easily create additional sales in the cash flow, offers or other market automation.
Customer-First Marketing
For marketing, there’s a lot on the horizon to consider. Third-party cookies will soon be a thing of the past when it comes to marketing. Apple has introduced strict new rules on what data is available, Google is about to abandon cookies in favour of new technologies for third-party data.
It’s a transition that can be quite complex depending on how you used this data before. Ali Flowers had an interesting session about this during WooSesh. Her answers can be found in the playbook Customer-First Marketing: The new brand playbook for the privacy-first era.
Managerial monitoring
Monitoring your website in different layers becomes more important the bigger you are.
In Daniel Espinoza’s session “Monitoring Your WooCommerce Store to Avert Disaster!” daniel talked about the importance of monitoring your website to minimise the risk of downtime.
You can actually start as a small e-retailer with simple monitoring of your website with e.g. UptimeRobot or similar services. But as you grow, you also want to add several layers of monitoring. This includes, for example, monitoring that you don’t introduce code that makes the site unusable in any way, but also monitoring your checkout solution so that visitors can actually complete their purchase. An example of checkout monitoring is Monitorific.
It’s one of many benefits of management at Angry Creative where we have standardised monitoring in place to help you avoid unpleasant surprises.
An inspiring way to manage and showcase product variations in WooCommerce
On the second day, Krissie VandeNoord presented a very interesting case of how to let customers customise products in WooCommerce.
During a pandemic, it is very difficult to offer customers showroom demonstrations and with that, Krissie’s team came to the conclusion that they needed to find new ways to showcase and offer customisation of products.
They created a unique experience in WooCommerce for the Canadian furniture company Geovin, where customers can customise hundreds of variations of furniture using 3D rendering.
This solution was created using an integration of ShapeDiver into WooCommerce.
To summarise
These are just some of the sessions we could see during WooSesh. We got a lot of great tips and interesting solutions, but most importantly, we got more insight into the development of WooCommerce going forward.
If you want to take part in any of the sessions that were shown at WooSesh, you can become a member of WPSessions.
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