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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
It's the WP Minute Plus, your home for long form discussions around the WordPress ecosystem. Deeper insights and conversations that you won't find on that other five minute WordPress podcast that we do. Follow both podcasts at thewpminute.com/podcasts. Did you know there's a professional group of WordPressers excited to meet you? If you're looking for a more casual WordPress Slack membership to join, chat about the news, and share your own content with our members, consider joining the WP Minute membership for $79 a year.
Speaker 1:Get access to our group of merry WordPress bandits and help support our show. Head to the wpminute.com/support to join. Hey, Jocelyn. Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Senior product manager WordPress commerce. That's the title at Bluehost. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yep. That's that's me. WordPress Commerce.
Speaker 1:I wanna break that down. The Bluehost and WunderSuite team have been chatting as you all have sponsored the WP Minute, sort of talking about what you all are doing with Wondersuite, telling that story, breaking apart the different components of what you have to offer. Selfishly though, I want to talk about the product manager role if we could, because it's something that I touch at my day job at Gravity Forms. What's your day to day responsibility as product manager?
Speaker 2:Oh, man. My day to day, it is so much fun and so exciting, and it changes every day. I wanna say that I don't have clear You log in and you have a set of tasks, You know? Other jobs are like, you have these tickets that you're kind of working through. I feel like a lot of my responsibility is pushed by myself, by my own agenda.
Speaker 2:And so it really kind of depends, but a lot of it, what it comes down to is I have a development team that I work very closely with. And my current development team that I'm working closely with, one is in India, and I have another team in Italy and Spain that I work with. And then I also work with local developers. So sometimes my day starts really, really early for me or ends really late due to the time differences. But just making sure that they have their work and their projects kind of prioritized.
Speaker 2:They know what we're working on. Everything's spelled out. They have all of the requirements of features and everything going down. So that way, when I'm sleeping and it's, you know, their daytime in India, then they're able to just keep working and moving forward. But to get to that point, it starts with a lot of research, both competitor research, customer research, just a lot of analytics, understanding the behavior of our users, how the products are performing, constantly checking the products.
Speaker 2:And so I create test sites almost every single day, and I'm there all the time making sure that things are working as anticipated and nothing's going wrong, you know, just to make sure the performance is is up there. Another thing that I love is we talk to our customers a lot. We do interviews with them to see how it's going, see how their experience was, negative or positive. You know, there's a lot of insight both ways and taking those items and translating them into very actionable follow ups, you know, and which can be difficult because sometimes you hear the squeaky wheel and you're like, oh, I gotta get that w d 40 and Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And stop that squeak. But is that really the right thing? You know what I mean? Sometimes it's not always the easiest, but, yeah, prioritization, decision making, lot of documentation.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I find It's fun and exciting to talk to customers, but it's also very difficult to get them on a Zoom call, get them chatting with you. Do you actually schedule time with customers without giving any secret sauce away that Bluehost might have in order for you to connect with customers, but do you just, Hey, reach out to them, say, I'd love to schedule thirty minutes and just show me how to use the product? Do you have them send you videos? Because that's one of the hardest things that I Not hard, but it's more challenging to get people to spend that thirty minutes with you and give you give us feedback from, like, Gravity Forms and stuff like that. So do you have a way that you ease people into that that relationship?
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. We've we've done multiple different ways here at Blue House. Most recently, we have been leveraging some customer satisfaction surveys to kind of reach out to a particular segment to see, okay, how was the ease of use of this product or this product? So it depends on kind of how they answer, and we kind of figure out who we may wanna talk to based on the type of customer they are, the actions that they've done, their current journey when they signed up.
Speaker 2:And typically, depending on when they fill out that form, and if we reach out to them pretty soon after, they're more willing when they're like, oh, somebody wants to reach out and learn more and help. And oftentimes, the sessions come with both help us understand what you went through, and then let's see what resources we can provide you. And so oftentimes on those calls, we'll walk them through features or did you try have you taken a look at this? You know, are you aware of this feature in WordPress or Bluehost? You know, either way depending on what it is.
Speaker 2:And then following up with an email and say, here's more. Here's some videos. Here's some articles. So that's one way that that we are doing things right now. But a lot of times too, if we do if we're coming out with new features, then we'll just say, hey.
Speaker 2:Do some user testing. Can you take a look at this? Give us thirty minutes of your time. So sometimes it's like a screen recording, and then they type in feedback.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think that that depends on really what you're trying to get after.
Speaker 1:I imagine, especially if if, like, your core responsibility is the ecommerce side, which can I assume it's just WooCommerce, or is it other what other ecommerce falls under your title other than WooCommerce, if there is any?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I think I think it's kind of interesting because commerce is huge. Right? So a lot of it is the integration with BlueCommerce. But within that, I feel like it's a disservice to say it's just from commerce because then it's all of the extensions that feed into a commerce on top of that.
Speaker 2:So all the payment solutions, shipping solution, creating products, other plugins. So it kind of everything that encompasses what somebody might need when running a WooCommerce shop with their WordPress site.
Speaker 1:Got it. And I can imagine that those, scenarios when you're either having customer feedback or when you're actually helping develop WunderSuite that, hey. You could have somebody who is I don't know. They're making little bracelets and they're selling stuff as a hobby and it's, Hey, I make a couple $100 a month. But then you might also talk to somebody who's making thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in sales a month with their WooCommerce store, and those needs can vary probably pretty greatly.
Speaker 1:How do you think about serving such a wide range of customers who are selling to their customers, right? Hobbyist to I'm trying to run a business with this. How do you think about that?
Speaker 2:Right. So I love that question because it's one of the things that's the most difficult, complex, but exciting part because we have to make sure that our products will serve all of their needs. Right? And, essentially, if you if you break it down, I think, number one, creating a WooCommerce site on a WordPress installation is gonna be the same regardless as far as setup. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, you still have to get the WordPress installation done. You still have to add WooCommerce. There's still needs for adding business information, taxes, etcetera, etcetera. Getting the shop page up, getting the various pages. But then when it comes to, okay, am I going to be shipping things?
Speaker 2:Are my products digital? You know, so no shipping is required. During our onboarding, we've you know, we talked about Wondersuite. I know Mike dived into it last one of your previous episodes. You know, we ask a lot of questions and kind of try to tailor their experience based on what they say they're trying to accomplish as well as if they're creating digital products inside WooCommerce.
Speaker 2:We can tell the type of products that they're creating, and we can kind of give recommendations and information based on actions that they're doing and kind of what what they've told us as well and just making sure that we're very clear about other offerings. You know, if they say I wanna have bookings, well, bookings don't come, you know, out of the box for WooCommerce, so you're going to need an alternative solution. Yeah. And just making sure that we try to understand as much as those customers as we possibly can.
Speaker 1:I don't envy your position because it is such that is such a hard thing to do. There are so many little niche services and products on the internet that serve just somebody who wants to do booking. You're a yoga instructor and you need a booking tool. Oh, there's a whole suite. There's many, many competitors in that market alone.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm just a digital creator and I want donations for my podcast, right? So there's a million solutions for that, and then there's e commerce. It's not easy being catch all is not the right word, but you're a web host, WordPress host, and WordPress can do so. It's a love hate relationship we all have with WordPress, right? It can do so many things that it's not great at one thing right out of the box until you fine tune it.
Speaker 1:And what happens, and this is a soapbox moment, and then I love your feedback after this. What happens is, average user comes into this experience, somebody told them, Hey, you got to go use WordPress for your store you're setting up. It's so easy. You can get all these things for free and you can publish and blog and sell. And then they get here and they're like, Oh my God.
Speaker 1:What am I doing with this? I don't get it. I'm not flying an airplane here. I just want to sell a product. And then they look at something like Shopify and Shopify is like, All we do is sell products.
Speaker 1:Somebody goes, Okay, I'll take it. Then before they know it, they're spending $1,000 a month on Shopify and just add on fees. So bit of a soapbox moment, but is there a way that you do filter down and say yoga instructor, product creator, digital product salesperson? How do you get down to those niches?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for our onboarding, when a new customer signs up or they're installing a new WordPress site, we ask those questions. We say, what type of business are you? And we have different options, and and that's something that's seen across tons of products. You see it at GoDaddy.
Speaker 2:You see that at Squarespace. You see that even in WooCommerce with their onboarding. They ask those questions. Tell us a little bit more about you. And then we ask them, you know, what type of products you're you're trying to sell.
Speaker 2:What are you trying to accomplish? And by understanding those things, you know, for example, if they say, oh, I'm gonna be doing bookings or I'm gonna be doing courses, then we go, we know that you need more than out of the box WooCommerce, and here's some suggestions for you. If they're saying, I'm just selling my bracelet. Like you're saying, I make these friendship bracelets online, then okay. Great.
Speaker 2:You probably don't need a whole lot of extra customization for for your shop. And I think that the biggest thing is there is so much you can do with your commerce shop. There's so many customizations that you can make and so many plugins that are out there that it gets really overwhelming for a new user. So really, the goal is for me for a new user is, like, what do you need to be online and selling online and monetizing your your website or your products? Right?
Speaker 2:And it's having that site up and live, having product listings. And how do we get you there? And then how do we get you to where you can accept payments and get you connected to payment? And then, okay, do you need to ship? Let's get you to that step.
Speaker 2:And so once they hit some of those major milestones of just these are the bare minimum things you need to be established on online, then I think you can start thinking about, okay. Now I want to add a wish list maybe to my site, or I want x, y, and z customization. And those are some things that we try to surface as recommendations as they're growing throughout the product as well.
Speaker 1:I talked to Mike about this. I'm not a super fan or power user of any AI tools yet, but I can I'm starting to see some of the use cases. Right? Like, I'm starting to learn how to make better prompts and stuff like that. And and, again, I'm not, like, this huge power user of AI tools.
Speaker 1:But I can imagine for the small business owner, they receive an order and maybe they don't ship it right away, or they don't market shipped in WooCommerce. Because what I found as an agency owner way back in the day is, Hey, they want to come and build an e commerce site. That's great, and we'll help you do that. But you also have to remember, you're selling stuff. You have to respond to emails.
Speaker 1:Have to ship that product. There's a bunch of overhead. It's not just easy people just send you money and you're good. There's a whole other scenario to this that you might not be ready for. All of that is to say is, are you part of that AI discussion and how that trickles into the products?
Speaker 1:And is there any advantage you see for AI and all of this stuff?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. I do. So it and you're right because there are different stages. There's the conversation about getting started, getting online, then the conversation of growing online, and then, well, and even before that, the conversation of managing your product, managing your orders. Right?
Speaker 2:Check your email. Check your dashboard. See how things are going. And then on top of that, then it's it's even more than that where it's, you know, most of your products are on average, $50 a piece, but your average order value, we're seeing it as $30. So people might not be, you know, they're buying certain products, or how can we increase that for you?
Speaker 2:How can we make it more profitable for you? And so a lot we have been having a lot of those conversations of it's a let me back up. It's an interesting position, and you kind of refer to this as well as that I have to tailor to our customers, our merchants, or our agencies, or whatever it is. But they're trying to tailor to their customers. And I have to remember that both of those layers.
Speaker 2:And so not only is it helping them be successful, but then moving on to that next period and helping them think about what their customers need and what they need to do for, you know, the user experience on their end for their customers. So all that to say coming back to the AI part is if we can understand their products and what they're doing online and those things, then we can use that to build recommendations for them using AI knowing, you know, you have a lot of inventory of sorry. I've got my daughter here in the background that's joining You know, you have a lot of inventory of this one product that's not really selling. Why don't you do it? Get it half off when you purchase it with something else and running promotions to try to clear that out.
Speaker 2:So I think that that's part of it too. So as we understand more of how shop owners are managing their WordPress and their WooCommerce shops, you know, hey, man, did you know that on average, it takes you about six weeks to mark an order as shipped, you know, and Yeah. That's not and even if they did ship it, but they're not doing those things that it's going to trigger those emails to their customers, You know, we can find ways to help them make their business more successful and and then make them more successful as a merchant as well.
Speaker 1:From the ecommerce side, is there is that is it that team, the Blue Sky team, or is there, like, a hands on I'll air quotes, hands on piece to onboard people into this world of ecommerce? Because there is so much. There's the finances. There's the email. You know, I bet I'm sure you help them with everything except make the product, but is there like a hands on component or resources that you help clients with?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that with that Blue Sky team does help out with that. They have people on the team that are more WooCommerce focused, more shop focused. We also have a design services team who are if you're like, I just want I I don't know how to do this. Can you help me get it set up just like a simple page?
Speaker 2:They'll do consulting, and you can tell them kind of what your vision is, and they can get something up, and then they'll work with you back and forth on make these changes. It does get to a point, though, that regardless of what a freelancer or what a design team does, you as the business owner still need to do. Like, you probably should go set up your you know, connect to your own PayPal account. Right? You know, we can get it there and ready for you.
Speaker 2:But I I think that one thing that helps a lot with especially novice merchant is to really take a minute and think about your goals and what you're trying to accomplish to take the time. We talked about product management at the very at the very beginning. And when I talk to customers about their struggles or what they're going through, I say, take a minute. Who's who's your target audience? Right?
Speaker 2:Are you writing things that are spoken in a language for those customers? Do you have a list of things that you want to accomplish? Do you know what pages you want? Do you know as far as do you need to ship stuff? Have you written out your plan?
Speaker 2:I think if people take a minute to kind of write that out, and that's what a freelancer and an agency or our team is gonna do anyways, ask you all these questions. And so I think that if merchants take a step back and try to kind of really flesh out a plan, they can do that. And we've got a couple of really good webinars that go over, okay. I have an existing WordPress site. Now how do I add WooCommerce?
Speaker 2:How do I monetize that by adding WooCommerce to go over those things?
Speaker 1:Earlier, we're sort of setting the stage of who's listening to this. And it again, it might be the freelancer. It might be the advanced freelancer, the small agency owner. Is and, again, as a former recovering agency owner myself Yeah. Does Bluehost offer any kind of solution for the agency owner specifically targeted for agencies so that maybe they can do white label invoicing or customization of the dashboard?
Speaker 1:That way it feels more of an experience for your customer's customer rather than them like saying, hey. You know, we also host at Bluehost. Here's your Bluehost control panel.
Speaker 2:Is there a pro so currently, not at the moment where it's it's white labeled. But, you know, there's a lot of reseller hosting that's kind of out in the space that and we used to have reselling reseller hosting where they could do similar to that. At the moment, I think that the closest thing would be we have a program called Maestro, but that's more of as an agency where you're able to connect to your client side and do more management all from one within one interface face versus logging into each of your client site individually. But it's it's interesting that you ask because somebody at WordCamp US this year said something very similar with our Wonder Suite that was like, if I could put my own logo on this, like, would be incredible. You know?
Speaker 2:This is this is great. So, you know, there's there's always solutions like that that we're looking into, but for right now, there's not anything that's available.
Speaker 1:My own feedback on that is I would hope that because the way that I see it is is it's not just a for lack of a better phrase, it's not just a money grab where when we look at our clients, we're like, hey, we do hosting for you. We're not trying to lie to the customer. But it's more of just building out that experience, an agency experience, it elevates it a little bit more and it feels like the customer's just joining this one thing versus The world of WordPress is already so fragmented. If you start talking WooCommerce, WordPress, Bluehost, Gravity Forms, you start bringing in all these brands and licenses and the customers are just, What the hell am I buying here? We want to just give them this one experience.
Speaker 1:That's sort of the idea. Yeah. Zooming out a bit and talking about almost that same thing, but for WordPress, I was exploring the new upcoming default 2024 theme, And Rich Taber, one of the lead designers for Core in Gutenberg, has been posting the patterns that they've been designing. And they look great. And everything looks great coming out of a designer's hands.
Speaker 1:It's wonderfully balanced. There's the perfect text to image ratio and everything looks good. The problem is, is when the common business owner, she's running her business, she's working sixty, seventy hours a week, and then it's go build a website. There's no time for looking at all of this stuff. It comes to designing with Wondersuite, Wondersuite is it also taking that design aspect and helping out that end user as well as I'm building a bracelet shop and it presents one theme, but I'm building a restaurant or a sneaker shop.
Speaker 1:Does it present a different theme based on those keywords?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's a great question. So, actually, we present, I mean, to the end user, they it may seem as though it's a theme, but we're using one theme and using the AI. And based on what they answer, we will show them different building blocks. So sometimes it can be a full page.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it's just sectioned like a a header or testimonials. But the both the copy and the photos that are shown are changing based on what you tell us that you are. Or, know, say if you're a restaurant, there's and there's a lot that we're adding to it. That's just launching. There's a lot of features.
Speaker 2:But, you know, there'll be things like maybe there will be a menu block, you know, because you said you're a restaurant. So, obviously, you need these things. And so taking those PDFs. Right? Taking different segments and understanding, okay.
Speaker 2:Like, what are the common things that they need? And I think that that's the hard part is that websites can be so unique, but there still are depending on who you are and who you're trying to sell to or even publish to. They're still with very common aspects of you need these things if you're this person. And that's really what we try to focus on is what does this type of customer or shop need and how do we get them there.
Speaker 1:Content especially being one of the biggest challenges from an agency owner to pull out of the customer. And one, it's because they're just not used to talking about themselves. I remember starting my agency, again, is twelve, that's more than that, it's fifteen years ago when I first started it. And it's, Hey, we need an about page. And they're just like, I don't even How do I get you an about page?
Speaker 1:It's like, Why did you get into business? Why? Tell me why you got into business. Let's start with that. And I can see AI being this advantage and disadvantage.
Speaker 1:If it spits out this generic about page for you, not saying that Wondersweet does this, but if it did and it did help you create content like that, but it's a great starting point, but now let's go through and refine it and at least give them something. Especially from the design aspect of balancing, I don't know, the text to image ratio, because if it's a wall of text, it's just unreadable. You know? If it's just two words, it's not enough. So if AI can help them, like, fine tune that, I think that'll be, you know, a sweet spot for these kinds of tools and onboarding people to WordPress.
Speaker 2:And that's the biggest goal, right, is just to get you somewhere because I think one of the most intimidating things is seeing that blank page and, okay, get started. And you're like, okay. So I press the plus and now a paragraph Right. Column. What do you mean by this?
Speaker 2:Right? So I think that that's really where it helps us that if they can start seeing it, they can start imagining it. You know, they've already given us their, store title or their logo potentially. They can see their name embedded into this. So it starts becoming more real.
Speaker 2:And I think when they view it as more real and it's more concrete and more than, it's easier to go in and be like, oh, I like that sentence, but it doesn't quite fit. Let me just tweak, you know, tweak this around a little bit, or they can use that as just really a jumping point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there ever a point where a store owner on the platform levels out of the core offering of what Wondersuite can handle, or does Wondersuite span the hosting resources across the board? Somebody starts doing a million dollars a month on their WooCommerce store, do they still get to stay in that environment of Wondersuite, or do they have to go to an enterprise plan that's more lean and mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we have the different levels, right, of of the Wondersuite. So Wondersuite comes with all the levels. We do have store based portions of Wonder Suite that come with, like, the Wonder Cart that for any WooCommerce install, you're not gonna have it unless you're paying for our store plan. And that allows you to create super quick promotion, sales, everything on your store within a matter of minutes without having to have a million different plugins running it.
Speaker 2:But if they do end up having to grow their resources up, you know, we have VPS and dedicated offerings that Wondersuite is still available for them to be on for those WordPress installs. So Yeah. The tools are there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else that is a standout feature of what you're working on with either Bluehost or part of the Wunder Suite product that you wanna make sure people know about?
Speaker 2:I mean, I did I touched on a bit. The the Wondersuite is one of for me being commerce owner, getting sales and promotions on products is really difficult for users, as well as we talked about a little bit before, like, how do what do I do if I need to add a wish list? What do I do if I want to customize my customer's actual page? And so we've partnered with YES, and we've built out some plugins that are exclusive to Wunder Suite. So, again, they go back to that store plan that we have.
Speaker 2:But if you wanna add a wish list for your site, that part of your plan, and you can quickly enable it and then immediately on your site. You know? So customers can then go hard things, sign into their account. And the sales and promotions tool, there's currently 13 different types of sales and promotions they can create, whether it buy one, get one half off, or if it quantity discount or a free gift in the cart, they can easily go and pick the products or categories that they want to add those sales for, create banners, put some text that goes into their product, and completely customize the messaging and the call to actions that are there. And to me, what's exciting about that is that, typically, if it if a merchant or a small business owner wanted to do that, they would need a myriad of plugins.
Speaker 2:And then it's okay. Do they look the same? Right? Does it does it match my site? Is it customized to my site, or does it look like is the UI so different?
Speaker 2:And then they have to understand five or six different dashboard and go into different plugins to manage those.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so that's kind of built all in one into the offering, these added plugins where they just can go in and manage those right within the Bluehost plug in and makes it super easy for them. So that's exciting. And, yeah, we're constantly adding more features to that and working on it more integrations that are just right there embedded into the Wondersuite Bluehost plug in. Because that's another thing too is that you mentioned before is that you start tacking on WooCommerce to WordPress, then you tack on Gravity Forms, then you tack on, you know, then so where do I go? How do I manage this?
Speaker 2:How do I how do I do this? And I think one of our biggest goals is to help be the bridge of, okay. You need all these things or you want these things or they serve your purpose. How do we bridge you to getting those set up and getting those ready to to be on your store?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can hear the the, you know, fifteen year WordPress user right now listening to this going, anyone can figure that out. No. They can't. Right?
Speaker 1:The average person who's running their store cannot. Yeah. Once they know where to find plugins and get the mashup of them, but then also, like you said, you install the mashup of plugins and everything looks different because it's six different developers who have put these wonderful plugins together. But if you don't know what you're doing, then there it's just gonna be this mashup of stuff. And that's what leads to people going, I hated my experience with WordPress.
Speaker 1:Right? WordPress was terrible, and they blame WordPress for seven different developers that had seven different plugins running on their site. No fault of anyone's other than just seven different plugins. So I think it's fantastic. Check out Wondersuite.
Speaker 1:All of the links will be in the show notes. Jocelyn, where can folks find you on the web to say thanks?
Speaker 2:Yep. So I'm on Twitter. It's Joss Hendrickson is my Instagram handle or Twitter handle and my Instagram handle. And then just on LinkedIn, Jocelyn Hendrickson as well.
Speaker 1:That's it for today's episode. Get the weekly newsletter at the wpminute.com/subscribe. It's the number one way to stay connected. And we're looking for sponsors for the podcast. You can get your business in front of the w p minute audience starting for as little as $475 for the year.
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Speaker 1:Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.