Let us introduce our sponsor, WooCommerce, with a little interview. WooCommerce is the web’s fastest growing eCommerce software/platform, powering over 30% of all eCommerce stores and with over one million active installations. It integrates seamlessly with WordPress, making it the obvious eCommerce choice for existing WordPress users.
You have sponsored WordCamps all over. What is your main motivation for sponsoring them?
We’re proud to sponsor WordCamps around the world because it gives back to the community – but we love them because we get to meet our users. Selling digital products over the internet means many of our users are email addresses in our system, when we chat to real folk using WooCommerce.com products (and WooCommerce core) we learn heaps, which is why we staff our booths with Automatticians.
WordCamp Europe in Paris is going to be the biggest one yet with over 3, 000 attendees. What are your expectations this time around?
Vienna was pretty awesome, hard to beat! This year at #WCEU we’re hoping to meet a lot of users, find out what’s new in the world of WordPress, sit in on some of the excellent talks to spot opportunities for collaboration and partnerships, and of course share news about WooCommerce at the booth and in talks delivered by some of the Woo team.
Europe – with so many different languages and cultural differences – how important is WordCamp Europe for community growth?
Part of what makes WordPress magic is the sense of being connected to something bigger than your usual remit, circles and what you’re familiar with. WordCamp Europe is a wonderful way for WordPress people to gather, sharpen one another, encourage on another and build the relationships that make our community so unique.
In what way do you think you can best contribute to the future of WordPress?
We want to create the best eCommerce solution in the market. That means that people can look to WordPress to do anything online; whether that’s showcasing your portfolio, writing, setting up a site for your company, or running an online store. And, by continuing to push the boundaries of what WordPress can do, we think WooCommerce is a great showcase of what’s possible with WooCommerce.
WooCommerce 3.0 is out. What is the biggest improvement from the last version, and how do you plan to develop it in the future?
The goal of this update is to provide a consistent method of accessing and working with object data in WooCommerce, separating “where the data is stored” from “how the data is worked with”. This opens up a wide array of scaling opportunities for store developers (for example, swapping out a standard WooCommerce database in favour of an API to an external service), while also enabling the core WooCommerce development community to build out more scalable structures for data objects such as orders and order line items, bookings, subscriptions, etc, which could be better served in a dedicated database table. This is a part of our continued effort to enhance and optimise scalability and performance of WooCommerce, to help store owners to grow their stores, while the store owner focuses on growing their business.
WooCommerce powers over 28% of all online stores. What’s going to get you to 50%?
We’re actually at 41% according to the latest BuiltWith stats! But, seriously, we want to make it even easier to start a WooCommerce store and provide robust and scalable services that make store owners successful. There is a lot of decision making we’re putting on our users at the start of their journey with WooCommerce which can be daunting that we think we can simplify. Finding a good host, the right payment gateway or a good theme for your store; these aren’t easy decisions to make at the moment. And once your store is up and running, we’d like to simplify things like shipping, payments, and provide insights to store owners.
What’s the situation with, and how do you compete with enterprise solutions like Magento or Shopify which can be very popular with “beginners”?
Like I mentioned, there is some work for us to do to make it easier to get started with WooCommerce where I think those solutions are doing better than us. We also want to work closely with our developer community to find out why the enterprise is more likely to chose other solutions and empower them with the right marketing material.
Thank you WooCommerce for sponsoring WordCamp Europe 2017 (and don’t forget to stop by their booth)
Say hello to #WCEU sponsors
Sponsors are one of the most important parts of WordCamp Europe. With their help we keep the ticket price low, and the conference open to everyone. While in Paris, visit their booths, say hello to them, and talk with them about their products and services. Wondering who these companies are? Visit the sponsors page.
Thank you to our sponsors for being an important part of WordCamp Europe <3