WP Townhall 005: The Next Era of E-Commerce in WordPress w/ Adam Preiser

Through the experience I got with WooCommerce, having multiple WooCommerce stores, making products for WooCommerce, in 2022, we launched a product called SureCart, which is a different way of doing e-commerce on your WordPress site.

Since then, it’s doing pretty good, actually.

Just the other day, we passed another milestone, 70,000 websites using SureCart, which is good.

Now, there’s a long lead time from when you put SureCart or an e-commerce tool on your website to when you take your first transaction.

So the main challenge we face is to help people get to that point where they do the first transaction on their website.

There’s usually a few months lead time, so we’re trying to get that reduced.

But it’s been a challenge.

The hardest thing I think I’ve ever done is to do an e-commerce tool, because you don’t realize when you start how much needs to be built into it for regulation.

Just the regulation in Europe alone, the EU, is a little tough.

You have to account for all of these things, and then taxes, and then it’s just never-ending.

But we’re having a blast.

I have two co-founders, and we’ve become great friends.

They both ironically live in Wisconsin, and it’s going great.

So I’m happy to be here, talk through SureCart, answer any questions people have, even the tough questions.

Excellent.

I love it.

So I want to kind of just open the discussion with this.

I don’t know what everybody’s experience is with e-commerce and WordPress.

Some people only do e-commerce.

Some people never do e-commerce.

There could be people listening that they just don’t touch e-commerce.

Maybe they want to touch e-commerce.

I don’t know.

Maybe they’ve been turned away by the existing options in e-commerce.

But overall, what I think is obviously WooCommerce has dominated the landscape for a very long time.

I’m not super excited about that.

I’ve never been super excited about that.

I’ve kind of steered clear of e-commerce because WooCommerce was the only option in town.

And I am super excited that there are more players coming to the table now.

You mentioned that when you’re first starting out, first of all, I guess two things.

Did you initially start SureCart as an alternative to WooCommerce?

Or were you trying to do something different than WooCommerce?

And then it’s kind of graduated to this point.

And two, why do you think the landscape of options for e-commerce and WordPress is so small?

Why do you think there are no other players really challenging the status quo?

Is it because of all of the technical difficulties?

Well, those are great questions.

So the first one is regarding…

So when we launched SureCart, we had a much more narrow scope.

We were thinking of more just digital products, services, subscriptions, things like that.

That’s why from day one, we’ve been very strong with subscriptions.

Most of our merchants heavily use the subscription feature that we built.

And it’s second to none with all the options you have to take subscriptions.

But when we released it, people were like, where’s the shop page?

Where’s the product page?

You know, these things that they expect with e-commerce.

And we very early on decided, well, we do need to pivot this.

Not pivot this.

When you release a product, you don’t want to sit there and build it for five years and then release it.

Because you don’t know if it will even have been worth those five years.

You just got to get that thing out there.

And so we initially were going after digital, digital downloads, digital products, and subscriptions for services.

Not physical products.

But you could sell anything.

But we quickly identified, okay, we got to put our big boy pants on and compete with Woo.

But I don’t actually view it that way.

WordPress is an odd space, right?

Where, you know, you can be friends with your competitors.

You might want to, you know, have a strong competition.

But you’re friends at the end of the day.

There is that weird aspect that you probably don’t see elsewhere.

And camaraderie there.

So we are actually an alternative to WooCommerce.

But I like to say, you know, we’re the good neighbor.

You know, we’re their neighbor.

You’ll use us for this.

We’re probably better fit for you.

Or if you have these other requirements, that’s probably the better fit for you.

And we’re good neighbors.

It’s called the good neighbor strategy.

It’s actually a real thing.

So that is that.

I actually forgot your second question.

The second one is the technical implementation of creating something like this.

Is that why you think the landscape maybe is so sparse with options?

Oh, yes, absolutely.

That’s actually a great question.

So there was another e-commerce system.

It’s probably like six or seven years ago.

Most of the folks that maybe have been in WordPress only in the last few years and never heard of it.

But it was another e-commerce platform that was an alternative to WooCommerce.

They were getting started.

It was under that iThemes was the parent company.

And this was when they were like a big deal.

They had backup plugins and all that.

Corey was the founder of that.

And they came out and it didn’t go anywhere.

And I bumped into Corey two years ago in Washington, D.C. when we went to WordCamp US.

And I said, hey, Corey, you got to tell me what happened.

You guys were going you guys are doing what we’re doing years ago.

What happened?

And.

He echoed all the challenges that I already knew.

Number one.

It’s a massive technical challenge. challenge.

And it requires very intelligent people to be able to solve and build solve those challenges and build a complete solution.

A complete solution.

Right.

Where there’s taxation.

There’s there’s shipping.

There’s the validations.

There’s there’s like so many different invoice numbering has to be there’s it’s like a never ending.

Compliance.

And it’s very challenging.

But the other side of the coin is what makes it very hard.

And why they failed is are you going to trust the brand new e-commerce system?

You know, it’s the most important function of your business.

If you sell things right on a scale from one to ten.

The importance of that is a ten every single time of it being reliable, doing what it needs to do, being compliant.

And so it’s very hard to get someone to trust the new e-commerce system and actually use the new e-commerce system because it’s such a mission critical component of your business.

This is why people will just default to WooCommerce.

Now, we’ve been fortunately able to overcome some of that.

I think it’s because I have a I didn’t start as an unknown person in the WordPress ecosystem.

You know, I’ve been there with the videos, building relationships.

I’ve had the the experience building products.

So people gave me a little bit of slack and a little bit of trust and took a risk on using SureCart, which is why we’ve been able to actually get a user base that is solid.

We’re very happy about.

But honestly, I thought going into it that we would be much further along from a user base standpoint.

So there’s all of these inherent challenges with it.

And any newcomer is going to have it’s also very expensive to build.

Right.

Because you can’t have like you have to have your your your top tier developers on your team that are extremely smart and able to solve problems.

I’m not that guy.

You guys all know I’m not a developer, but both of you guys, Mark and Kevin, you guys have met Andre and have met Ben.

These are highly intelligent people, highly intelligent people.

So and they’re the ones building or leading the building of SureCart.

So I think those it’s unfortunate that there aren’t more options, but I can understand now having gone through this for four years that it’s extremely challenging.

Even for me, I’ve got resources.

I’ve got connections.

I’ve got an audience.

And even still, it’s hard.

Yeah, it’s it’s it’s not easy.

You know, we we are doing the stuff with automatic CSS at all of this.

It’s a it’s a real thing.

And we saw what happened with North as well.

North Commerce, you know, their their challenges that they’ve faced as well.

Like this isn’t just a little productivity enhancement plug in or something that people can freely say, oh, yeah, let’s experiment with that.

And then if they like it, they keep it.

If they don’t like it, they get this is like, you know, you’re you’re putting your trust and faith in this plug in to run your entire store and all of the payment implications.

Like you mentioned, all of the shipping implications, like you mentioned, tax implications.

It is a big hurdle to get people to say, I trust this team enough or I trust this product enough.

It’s kind of like a chicken or egg concept because you don’t have any users and everybody’s like, I can’t trust someone doesn’t have any users.

And it’s how do I get the users if they don’t trust?

Right.

It’s like it’s crazy.

And there are people because you’re prominent on YouTube and you have a big following.

This just always happens to anybody in your position.

Right.

This is even in my own inner circle.

People have said, I don’t know.

I don’t I don’t like the vibes that I get.

I don’t like the what.

And I’m like, guys, I get I’ve met these people in person.

You just mentioned your team.

I mean, not only highly, highly intelligent, but extremely trust.

Like I have a I have a very strong trust radar for people.

Right.

And like you guys are top notch.

Everybody that I’ve met that’s involved with Sherkart is top notch from skill and reputation standpoint.

So that was never that was never a thing for me.

And I’ve actually spent a bunch of time convincing other people to like, no, you need to switch to this.

And, you know, for many different reasons.

But I think you guys have have nailed it.

And I’m super excited about what Sherkart brings to the table and where it’s going.

I want to make sure I give Mark an opportunity to jump in here if he’s he’s got anything.

No, yes.

All great stuff, guys.

I mean, like I want to echo that, too, because I had a lot of a lot of different topics and ideas here for while we have Adam.

And one thing that I think is a little different because I’m my background is a little different than than Kevin’s.

I know that you, Kevin, you’ve steered a little bit away from e-commerce stuff.

I I like it because I like the complexity of it.

But at the same time, you know, coming from like years of using WooCommerce, it can be like it basically to be a cluster like very quickly.

There’s a huge third party ecosystem.

It’s vast.

It’s versatile.

But something like Sherkart that I’ve recently tried, like within the past year and everything, and I’m running it on my my personal site.

The one thing that I think Sherkart and you can attest this or, you know, like give your thoughts on this, Adam, is I think the thing that you guys have done really well.

And I think it’s a newer concept that a lot of other plugins and definitely the successful ones are doing now is you’re actually listening to your to your users, which is which is like a weird thing that like we have to say that.

But like you’re listening to as you build, like whether it’s a Facebook group or a Slack channel or something like that, like if there’s feedback, like your users are the ones that are in there deploying it for themselves or deploying it for clients.

And they’re running into issues here and there.

And then you as a team are taking that back to the dev to the dev team.

And you’re like, yeah, guys, maybe we need to change this and stuff like that.

So I’ve seen a lot of that just in the short time that I’ve been using Sherkart.

So I really love that because you don’t get that in these in this in a lot of the other like larger, like more we’ll call it like traditional, I guess, plugins or solutions and things like that.

So just I mean, kudos there.

I mean, was that like an active decision that you guys made or and kind of like what’s your what’s your philosophy around that?

That’s a wonderful question.

So we’re clearly not the number one e-commerce platform.

I think we’re the number one like I like in terms of user terms of users.

So you’ve got WooCommerce.

That’s millions of stores ahead of us.

We are number two.

We started as number zero.

We’ve blasted past Equid, Easy Digital Downloads.

We’re we’re solidly number two.

And what that means is when you’re number two, you just have to try harder.

Being number one can be a curse.

You get complacent.

You’re number one.

No one can knock us off.

I don’t need to try.

I don’t need to put that extra effort in.

I don’t need to listen.

But when you’re number two, you have to try harder.

And that’s our internal philosophy.

We’re number two.

And so we just try harder.

We’re going to listen to you.

We’re going to consider your requests.

And we’re going to do our best to deliver on it.

I think you recently tried our invoicing feature.

That was a user request.

It was actually the number one user request for a while.

And we’re like, OK, well, we’re going to build it.

It actually makes sense.

But we are really listening to show all of the merchants that have chosen to go with us that we’re going to try our hardest to keep them happy, take care of them, go above and beyond.

It doesn’t matter what time or hour it is.

We’re going to do that for you.

Yeah, I think I think the other thing real quick, too, is I think we hit it on a little bit earlier.

But if there’s one thing that we can clear up for anybody that it’s listening or listens to the replay that hasn’t tried SureCard yet is I think there’s definitely been just because of the nature of it being a we’ll just call it newer than woo, so to speak.

Right.

Like that there’s some misconception that misconceptions that I’ve heard, you know, maybe they were maybe they’ve been cleared up or maybe they’re not.

But I think you mentioned it earlier how like you the original philosophy.

And I remember when like you released the very first beta of SureCard, like like their initial philosophy was digital only.

So I still I think I still see like people here and there saying that you can’t do physical products.

I’m pretty sure that’s a misconception.

Some other capabilities and things like that.

And there’s just like once you start playing around with the with the tool itself, there’s a ton of little things in there.

Like like, you know, if you ever want to do plug in licensing.

Right.

Like it has licensing built in now.

Right.

We talked about we started talking about 3.0.

The release here of like invoicing.

And now you can do custom post types and custom fields and all that.

So, I mean, there’s probably a laundry list of things that have kind of been a little of misconceptions and stuff like that.

But I feel like have you do you get a lot of that?

Do you see a lot of that?

Is there anything specifically that that you hear more than others that it’s like now?

Oh, the other real quick on this, too.

The other big thing that that is super beneficial and I think is at least misunderstood, probably are not fully understood by a lot of people is the nature of like the headless, the headless aspect to it.

Or like, you know, kind of how that works technically and things like that, just because it’s newer and probably better.

I don’t know if you want to hit on any of those types of things, but just any sort of misconceptions that you see out there in the wild that that come up a lot.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for bringing that up.

And that always gets me in the gut.

Well, you know, so we started rolling out our feature set for physical product stores and, you know, for traditional e-commerce.

And we, you know, shop page, product pages, shipping rules, all the things necessary for inventory tracking, all the things, return processing.

I’m sorry, they just keep coming to my mind as I’m talking.

All the features required to support physical products.

And so we shipped all of those last year.

And so it does make me cringe a little bit, you know, and some is like, oh, it’s just for digital products.

I’m like, oh, but, you know, I don’t, I don’t blame the person that says that.

I actually blame myself because if someone has a misconception, it’s, I have to own that one and say, I got to do a better job of making sure people fully understand that this is for any type of e-commerce.

Physical products, we have the full feature set for everything you want to do there.

So, but that does kind of make me cringe a little bit when I, when I have heard that said, because it’s always said in a dismissive manner, you know, like, oh, but that’s just for digital products.

But, you know, that’s okay.

That just means we need to do a better job.

And, you know, identifying white people still might have that perception.

And you, you brought up another point of Shurkart being a platform powered.

So, essentially, most of the merchants, they just use Shurkart.

It’s all fine.

But there are, you know, since it’s a, there’s a plugin component and a platform component.

So, in a basic sense, Shurkart is a SaaS platform.

However, everything is done locally on your site.

You now have a custom post type.

You can add custom fields.

You can do all those, like, customization things that you want.

You, you manage your store fully on your site.

But technically, none of that data is sitting there clogging up your database.

It’s all protective in our platform, protected in our platform, which can have infinite scaling.

I mean, we use the same tech stack of Twitter, which handles tremendous surges of demand.

Probably last week was an incredible surge for Twitter with all the news going on.

So, so we do have this platform component where we’re able to provide more of a managed experience for merchants.

And there, there is, with a certain segment of the WordPress user base, it’s kind of controversial.

They want everything to be self-hosted.

And I totally understand that.

However, e-commerce is a little different.

It’s the most mission critical part of your business.

If you are selling anything on the internet, if it goes down, you’re going to feel the most extreme amounts of pain.

And so when it comes to reliability, active sellers value that above all things, right?

Because if you can’t take orders, you’re not making money.

You don’t have a business.

And e-commerce is this living and active thing on your website.

It needs constant eyeballs and monitoring.

So because we have this platform, we’re able to spot an issue before anyone even knows there’s an issue and resolve that.

So a lot of the problems that plague self-hosted, completely self-hosted, we don’t, our merchants don’t experience.

For example, something as basic as, and common for agencies, right?

Or just anyone with a website.

You’re going to have to make a staging site at some point, right?

To make some changes safely and then push it across.

You can’t do that with self-hosted e-commerce because it’s living and active on your site.

If you make a staging version and then a couple of orders come in and then you push staging to live, you just lost those orders in your database.

You don’t have that problem with shortcut.

It’s the platform is this, what’s called the single source of truth.

And because of that, a lot of the problems that plague self-hosted e-commerce, you’re not going to experience.

That’s actually a huge problem that we’ve had with, so when we redesigned the automatic CSS website, we’re on easy digital downloads for software licensing, which I despise.

And I’ve been pressing the team so much to like, hey, we got to switch over to ShareCart licensing.

Now we did for Etch, like just out of the gate for Etch, we’re on ShareCart for software licensing.

But obviously switching something like automatic CSS, it’s a big project to get everybody switched over.

But I want to make it happen.

But that’s a huge thing with EDD.

Like we have to like hand migrate around EDD.

There’s no just like easy, like, okay, we got the new design ready.

Let’s migrate it into the, like you have to manually migrate piece by piece around because you can’t touch EDD.

It’s just an absolute nightmare.

So I think that’s one of the, and the same is true for e-commerce, not just a software licensing issue in WordPress.

So I think that’s a huge thing that people should consider.

It really is, especially, well, so I didn’t talk about this prior, but this kind of goes with what Mark was saying about us listening to our users.

Every year we do a survey in December, we ask, hey, what do you want?

We, or what do you don’t like?

We want all the information.

Last December, it was clear agencies want more customization, which has led our development path this entire year.

But if you’re an agency, I understand why agencies have stayed away traditionally from e-commerce projects because of the added complexity.

You know, if you ask people that use traditional self-hosted plugins like WooCommerce or EDD, you know, what is it that you don’t, like, what is it that’s causing you to not want to use these tools?

You’ve used it before.

What don’t you like about it?

The number one thing is their dependency on add-ons and extensions.

Matoric put out a report.

They do reporting.

It’s a reporting solution for WooCommerce.

It’s a couple hundred bucks a month.

You know, we have similar features built into ShareCard for all merchants.

That’s beside the point.

But they put out this great report, and it said that the average WooCommerce store has 28 plugins on the site.

If those plugins have just one update per year, as an agency, you have to manage over 330 plugin updates, you know, where you’ve got to do the update.

You’ve got to make sure it didn’t break anything.

This didn’t cause a problem with that one.

And this and then, you know, that’s 30 different vendors that you’ve got to know who do I reach out to to fix the problem.

I mean, it’s a mess.

So we want to be an e-commerce platform that agencies can feel confident in that their customers are not going to, you know, all that, the burden of all that work doesn’t fall on the agency, right?

It’s just like this seamless thing.

We got you.

Anyways, so there’s just these basic things of having a site that are much difficult with fully self-hosted solutions.

The same thing with add-ons, too, that people need to keep in mind, because, you know, I hear all the time, like, whoa, WooCommerce is free?

Whoa, WooCommerce is free?

It’s not free.

It’s not.

Like, you get into any real project, all of the add-ons that you need, it gets very, very expensive very quickly.

And things like software licensing.

I think I pay $1,000 a year for EDD or something like that, right?

That’s costs that I wouldn’t have to pay with SureCard’s licensing system.

There’s another $1,000 a year I think I pay for the affiliate side of things, which I don’t think I would have to pay with SureCard.

So, and then bring SureTriggers into the mix versus the costs of Zapier.

That was actually one of the things.

This is, when I started using SureTriggers, this is one of the things where I was like, damn, this team has their shit together.

Because I fully expected, like, when you first showed it, I was like, oh, this is going to be, this is going to be, I don’t know, some half-assed version of Zapier or something.

It’s only going to be able to do very limited things, you know.

I didn’t even want to try it almost.

Like, I was just writing it off.

But Zapier kept getting more expensive.

And they kept, they changed the UI.

And it, to me, like, got harder to use.

There were certain things I wanted to do with it.

And I was like, you know what, I’ll just, all right, all right, I’ll give SureTriggers a shot.

So I install, I start setting it up.

And I’m like, man, this is like a, it’s not just good.

It’s not just as good as Zapier, in my opinion.

Like, it’s easier to use.

It’s easier to do more advanced things.

It’s more enjoyable to use.

Has a better UI.

Like, all of the boxes were checked for me.

And then the way it seamlessly works with SureCart and then all of the integrations that I’m able to do that I want to do behind that.

I very quickly moved everything off of Zapier and saved a bunch of money doing it, too.

So there’s a lot of good, good, good reasons.

Just if you’re looking for financial reasons.

We got to get rid of the WooCommerce is free thing.

Because there’s a lot of financial reasons for using SureCart, in my opinion.

Yeah, it’s funny.

You know, we come up against that, you know, especially in our ticket desk.

Well, WooCommerce is, you know, this perception.

And this is actually something else we’re working to solve right now.

We actually are going to release a new, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you guys or if I’ve talked too much publicly about it.

We are releasing new pricing plans to, and the problem we’re trying to solve is the perception that we’re expensive.

And, you know, it’s, I think it’s just one of the drawbacks maybe of the WordPress ecosystem.

And we’re trying to be more agency friendly.

But when I sit there and I add up our feature set and what it would cost with WooCommerce, WooCommerce comes to like over $3,000 per year for a similar feature set.

Now, obviously not everybody needs all the things, right?

Say you need half the things, you’re still at $1,500.

We’ll say you need, you know, 25% of the things, you’re still at $900 a year.

And that’s the reality.

And guess what?

That doesn’t even come with support.

I don’t know if you knew, like if you have a problem with WooCommerce, good luck.

There’s no one to go to, you know, and these are usually complex problems, maybe with your database or something like that or some negative interaction between plugins.

And so actually WooCommerce does have a support plan.

I think it’s, I was sharing a screenshot the other day.

I think it’s like $250 per month.

And so, you know, I’m like, don’t you dare tell me that SureCard is expensive.

You know, when you look at all of these things, but I understand where some people are coming from as well, especially the agencies.

But, and I’m glad you’ve tried SureTriggers.

SureTriggers is like the secret sauce because you can do, insane things all automatically with SureTriggers.

We’re about to, you know, we recently released an invoicing feature.

We’re going to make it so you can just automatically create invoices through automations and send them to your clients.

So you’re really able to do things that are just not possible with WooCommerce or traditional e-commerce, especially when you mix in SureTriggers because we control it.

And, you know, Kevin, we have, like, we’re there for you.

Like, if you need to contact Zapier, good luck.

100%.

If you need to contact us, if there’s, I think you had a question about Notion the other day and there was some kind of limit.

And, you know, we were able to get an answer over to you.

And, you know, we’re here for, we just have to try harder.

You know, I’m always going to go back to that.

And this is ingrained in all of our teams.

We have to try harder.

We have SureTriggers, same thing.

We’re the underdog.

Well, not so much the underdog.

We’re like the top platform now for WordPress, you know.

But, you know, we’re the underdog compared to like Zapier.

We’re going to always try harder.

Yeah.

Love it.

Yeah, I want to echo that real quick because, like, as we’ve been talking, I’ve been like, there is a list of things that I’ve used on past projects, like past WooCommerce projects.

And then now if you have, I can’t speak to specifically what plan, but we’ll just say, like, the full feature set of SureCard.

Like, obviously, all of the normal, we’ll call it standardized e-commerce stuff that you could possibly want.

Like, when you think of an e-commerce platform, you have that.

Now you have invoicing.

You have an affiliate platform.

This is all within SureCard.

Licensing, custom post types, custom fields, subscriptions, pay what you want pricing, installments.

I was just trying to do an exercise in my head of all of the extra extensions in the WooCommerce marketplace that you would have to get.

And you mentioned it, like, you know, you did the math and maybe like $3,000 or whatever.

Like, again, maybe not everybody is going to use those things.

But for somebody like me that I don’t know what I’m going to do, like, you know, like I look at my website and I come to Adam.

Adam knows.

I’ve probably come to him too many times.

Like, hey, can we, like, can we do this with this?

Like, is there a way I can do this or whatever?

And it’s like, it’s just, there’s so many options here.

And I didn’t have to, like, expand my tool set any further or try to, like, vet other, you know, plugins and things like that.

So it’s just, I don’t know.

There’s just a, there’s a lot rolled in here.

A lot of value.

There’s also a benefit of it all being seamless.

So this really comes to light when you use the affiliate feature that we built.

We’ve interweaved elements of that throughout the UI.

So if you’re looking at an order, you can see the avatar of the person that referred it if it was a referral.

You know, everything’s just interweaved, making a coupon for an affiliate, overriding rates on individual products for certain affiliates.

It’s all just a very seamless experience that you can’t even replicate if you’re piecing together third-party plugins from different plugin makers with different UIs.

You really can’t replicate the experience of a seamless solution like this.

And also, let me just say with affiliates, we’re about to launch payouts for that, automating the payouts, to give you a point of reference.

If you want to automate payouts with, say, affiliate WP, they haven’t, just make sure you look at the rates.

You know, it’s between 6% and I think like 11% of fee you have to pay to automate.

Payouts.

We’re not doing it via PayPal.

We’re doing it via Stripe.

So your affiliate goes, connects to their Stripe account, and Stripe doesn’t charge a fee for this.

You can just click a button, boom, pay them right on out.

I love that.

That’s amazing.

I love that.

Oh, yeah, right?

Because it’s a pain, right?

Yeah.

With EDD, I print out a spreadsheet, and then I take my little spreadsheet over to PayPal, and I manually, like a chump, type everybody’s name in and manually send their payment over.

It’s a pain in the ass.

Yeah, I can relate.

I’ve done that, too.

Jeez.

And then I have another thing, too.

The list goes on, obviously, but I think Sure Members is a separate product, but obviously, everything works together, so that’s fantastic.

I do have a question from some of the chat, because we’re simulcasting all this onto YouTube and stuff.

Do you have, a little bit outside the scope, but I know it’s all going to work in tandem, how is SureDash coming?

Do we have any sort of an ETA on anything there, betas or anything like that?

Because it’s going to be, you could heavily intertwine that.

I’m excited to play around with the possibilities there.

Yeah.

So let me mention to all the listeners, we started about six months ago building a new product called SureDash.

Well, SureDash is the working name, but we’re going to use that name.

I mean, I had to pay like $3,000 for the domain, so we better use it.

And the idea there is that technically it’s a community platform that will unify and create this.

It’s going to be similar to Circle to create a polished, beautiful, seamless, logged-in experience or portal, whatever you want to call it, for your website.

So someone logs in and it blends, you can basically do whatever you want with this thing, right?

You can have an announcement feed, you can have discussion feeds, you can have, but that’s not the main thing.

You can have courses, beautiful course interface, and it’s made to be flexible for multiple use cases.

So I’m kind of hesitant to use the word community because people’s minds immediately go to like a Facebook group.

That’s not it.

That is part of the feature set, but it’s more a well-rounded feature set where we give you all the tools to deliver value in this logged-in experience.

So we are, the plan with that is we, I can actually show you, I just got some, a login to a test site from our developers where they’ve started to apply our user interface to it.

I think what we’re going to do, but you can’t quote me on this, a final decision will be made today or tomorrow.

What we’re going to do is probably next week, we’re going to launch an alpha.

And what an alpha means is not, that means not that this thing’s buggy.

Alpha is going to mean it doesn’t have its full feature set and it’s probably not going to have the full feature set polished up for two to three months.

But people want this now.

So let’s make sure we ship the content feed and the course part now.

And then maybe in a month, we ship the discussion part.

We’ve already built it, but we want to do it right.

Maybe a couple of weeks later, we release leaderboards and then we release events and you’ve got everything going.

So that’s kind of what we’re thinking right now.

I actually haven’t communicated this to our group of users that are anxious for this yet.

But the idea is just to have this unified experience when someone logs into your site.

Because right now, if you say you want to have courses and you use a course plugin and then you want to have events and now you’ve got to find an event plugin and the user experience on the front end is different for both.

And it just looks, you know, just strung together.

And so we’re trying to solve that problem.

I think I can work on how I describe it for the future, but that’s the description I’ll give it right now.

So that’s kind of what we’re thinking as of today.

That’s awesome.

I’m probably going to experiment with it for the etch community at minimum.

Like I’m super excited about it, obviously.

Circle is great.

It’s great.

It’s expensive.

You know, I think I did ask you, there is one of the challenges is the mobile side of things, like the app side of things, the notifications side of things.

Have you guys discussed that at all more?

Yeah, we’ve got to have that figured out, like not like have executed a plan, but have a plan figured out by next week when we start letting people have access to Shoredash, this alpha.

Remember, alpha doesn’t mean buggy.

There might be a bug.

It just means it’s not the full feature set.

We don’t want to call it a beta because that assumes it’s the full feature set.

So we’re going to call it an alpha.

There are some ideas that we have there.

Ultimately, what I would like to do would resemble this.

There’s a core app for it.

So it’s not like a white labeled app, although I’m sure that could be done at some point.

And there might be like a QR code in the app where they would pull up the camera, scan a QR code that would be displayed inside of your Shoredash instance.

And then that would configure everything for the user.

And then they could get push notifications and things like that.

So, but that’s a high level idea.

We have to see how far we can execute on it.

But I do know that that is a big part of what makes Circle work or Facebook work when you’re on the go.

Excellent.

I do want to put this out there for everybody as a reminder.

If you’re in the X spaces with us, you can come into the speaker pool.

Even though this is a slightly different format than we normally do, you are still able to participate in this.

Whether you want to ask Adam a question or just bring up a general e-commerce topic.

So feel free to raise your hand there.

Hit the button to jump into the speaker pool and we will bring you on.

I also have a bunch of people watching on the YouTube stream.

And I’m sure Mark does as well.

And there’s a bunch of comments rolling in there.

I kind of want to put this out to everybody.

Like if you are, maybe you haven’t tried SureCart yet.

If you are on WooCommerce, if you are in the e-commerce space, if you are thinking like, you know, I would try it, but you have X, Y, Z kind of question or challenge or you’re not comfortable yet moving over.

Like tell us why, you know, I would love to hear why.

I personally think that SureCart is at a place where it’s an easy jump.

It’s a no brainer jump to at least experiment with it.

Especially if you have a smaller e-commerce project coming up and you’re, you know, you’re worried, you know, you’re not ready to tackle a giant project with it.

But if you have a smaller project, I would a hundred percent tell you to experiment with it.

But if you have objections or you’re not comfortable switching yet, tell us why.

I would like, I would love to hear what people’s objections are, what they’re currently considering.

I’ve also got a couple of people in the comments who are talking about they haven’t, they weren’t comfortable with any e-commerce in WordPress.

They’re currently on Shopify, but they hate the fact that it’s an owned platform.

It’s not under their control.

And they would love to bring it over to, you know, any e-commerce solution in WordPress, but they haven’t yet.

So I would love to hear why you haven’t made that jump either.

You know, let us know what these objections are and let’s discuss some of them.

We have Ruben in the speaker pool right now.

Ruben, are you with us?

Yeah, I am.

Can you hear me?

Yep.

Yeah, I’ve got a question for Adam.

I’m curious, what’s your approach or philosophy on third-party devs for SureCart?

I know I’ve used WooCommerce on a handful of sites and it always feels like a gamble when I install third-party plugins because I don’t know how well they’re developed.

So yeah, I’m kind of curious what your thoughts are on that and what your approach would be.

Yeah, that’s actually a really good question.

So it’s actually good.

It’s a sign of a good product when there are third-party developers that want to and actually are making add-ons for it.

For SureCart, we have one and we’re about to have a second one.

And what we do is, it’s actually a good thing, right?

Because obviously we’re not going to build everything.

So like some of these niche things that someone might want, we’re probably not going to build because it’s so niche.

We need to build what all merchants are going to use or most likely use.

So what we’re doing is being very communicative with them, engaging them, being very communicative with them to let them know what we are going to be doing and what we’re not going to be doing or what we’re not going to be doing for a while just due to our long-term plans.

And so we do encourage them if someone’s a third-party developer and wants to develop something for SureCart.

We are very encouraging for it.

In fact, there was someone that sent an add-on yesterday to me that I think it’s like a points and rewards system.

And I had to ask him to not – I had to ask him to change his product name.

So with that, our approach also is don’t make it sound like we’re the ones making it because we don’t want you to make market confusion.

So don’t call it Sure something because that would immediately put in someone’s minds that we made it.

So call it whatever for SureCart, please.

We’ve got trademarks for everything, of course.

But also, if a third-party developer makes something that we’re already planning on making, but they just release it quicker, that’s not going to make us change our plans.

We’re going to still release the same thing because it’s kind of a double-edged sword a little bit because some people are coming to SureCart because they don’t want to feel like they have to add a third-party add-on.

But these are like real niche things, very niche things that the one developer and this new developer is making.

I hope that answers your question.

I wasn’t sure if you were asking, is SureCart going to end up like WooCommerce?

I don’t anticipate that.

But we do have an open API and our code in the plugin is fully open and people can make it do things that are kind of outside of the scope of an e-commerce plugin.

Yeah, that answers my question.

Yeah, thanks.

Okay, thanks.

Awesome.

Thank you, Ruben.

We’ve had SK kind of bouncing in and out.

Are you with us?

I’m going to call you SK.

I’m not going to tackle this name every single time.

Sathi, are you there?

Yes.

Can you guys hear me?

Absolutely.

All right.

Okay.

So I was driving this.

I’m going in and out.

But with that said, Adam, I remember watching you like from 10 years ago, how to make a child team kind of thing.

So I’ve learned a lot from you.

Thank you for that.

But with that said, a lot of my clients.

So I run an agency in Asia, right?

So a lot of my clients during COVID, they needed WooCommerce or like some kind of e-commerce solution.

And that’s why we ran into WooCommerce.

And I quickly realized that WordPress is not a shopping cart because, you know, it becomes super bulky.

And some of the plugins won’t update in time.

So just randomly break.

And you’re going to have a lot of security concerns and all that.

And we cannot go to clients and be like, oops, we chose the wrong plugin.

And they will be like, no, no, you guys are the tech people.

And you guys are supposed to figure it out, right?

So we went through all of these.

And then we ended up like, you know, switching all of the clients on our own course to Shopify to avoid all of these problems, right?

But I’ve been looking at your product and I want to go to clients and pitch a product.

But I’m not exactly sure how to do that because you guys are not a name brand yet.

And I would love for you to tell me like, how can I go to my clients who are interested in e-commerce or already using Shopify?

Because we introduce it to them, right?

Because WooCommerce are just totally, completely, utterly shitty.

How can we like pitch your product now?

Give me the pitch.

And I want to try it with my clients.

And I’ve been like playing around with your product.

But I’m not exactly sure how to sell it to clients who have real money, real business.

And this is in Asia, right?

So we also need to like figure out the multilingual part.

But I think we can figure that out.

But more towards like how to pitch such a niche, new up and coming product like yours to a client that’s like already using Shopify.

Shopify and all that.

Well, that’s a great question.

And I appreciate you posing it to me.

And I will do my best to answer that.

So we’re getting into some sales aspects of it, which I really appreciate.

SureCart is actually not new.

There was someone had made like a video recently that I had some objections to.

They were calling SureCart new, untested and all this kind of stuff.

And I’m like, we’ve kind of been on the market for four years now.

Well, we’ve been building it for four years.

We’ve been on the market for about two and a half years.

We have social proof of merchants being successful.

If you go to the plug-in repo, it’ll show 70,000 stores.

And by the end of this year, we’ll pass 100,000 stores have or sorry, websites have SureCart running on it.

So I believe there’s enough social proof there to show people that it’s not new.

It’s not something that you have to worry about with reliability.

It’s not something that you have to worry about with are they going to be around in a few years.

We’re knock on wood.

If you understand the e-commerce business, you’ll know that there’s a certain point that you get to where you’re kind of too big to fail.

So, you know, kind of like the banking system of 2018, too big to fail.

It was certainly just too big to fail.

Like we were a very reliable platform.

So I think the angle that I would take is what are the reasons they wouldn’t, like, what are the reasons why it would be better to not have Shopify and have it, the e-commerce experience married to their WordPress site as well?

And I would approach it from that angle.

There’s more seamless experience.

I’m assuming that these clients also have a website, but the e-commerce is on Shopify.

So there’s a wonderful benefit of having it all seamlessly integrated on your website from a branding standpoint, from a customization standpoint, all of these things.

So versus having separate websites, essentially, right?

Because that’s kind of what Shopify is like, a website.

There are lots of benefits.

I think I’m struggling here to answer your question so well.

I mean, it depends also if your clients care about the costs that they pay for things.

Because we actually don’t try to highlight the cost benefits of using SureCart, but there are significant cost benefits to Shopify.

Our core feature set is not like a similar core feature set of what you get with Shopify.

For example, with the revenue boosters of Card Abandonment, Order Bumps, One Click Upsells.

At the very least, they should be using Card.

Every e-commerce store should have Card Abandonment.

Integrated affiliate platform, everything working seamlessly together on your website.

When you add extensions to Shopify, it gets really expensive.

You know, you think WooCommerce is expensive, it gets really expensive.

So there’s also cost benefits there as well.

So I think this is something that I should think about to help agencies that are in this situation where, you know, they would like to move someone to SureCart, but they kind of would benefit from having a list of all the angles that they can go at for that.

So, you know, what I’ll do here is I’ll make a note here and work on creating kind of a cheat sheet that an agency could use to crystal clear using their sales process with their clients.

Especially we’re switching over to have a heavy focus to agencies with our pricing, with our feature set.

So that’s my best job at answering that.

I hope I did okay.

Yeah, I think I should have refined the question a bit and told you about who are my clients.

So these are like, you know, personal trainers, people who sell stuff online.

They used to have like, you know, brick and mortar, but during COVID, they transitioned to selling it online first, right?

Which is why your product fits their need, right?

They can sell the membership, they can sell their training and all that, process the payment, all that.

But the thing is that they have heard of the name brand Shopify, right?

And it’s kind of easy to sell because if you go to Shopify website, they have like the use cases like how X and Y. personal trainers using our product.

Like, you know, that’s like already broken down.

So I’ll just show it and we’ll discuss and they get it right.

But when it comes to like new products, sometimes they’re like kind of scared because, you know, it involves money, they’re bread and butter kind of things.

They don’t want to take a chance unless it’s already like enough, as you say, like social proof or like something that’s already there.

You get what I mean?

So I totally get what you mean.

Let me, I think Kevin was going to jump in.

Let me add one thing.

One of the things we are working on is we’re going to be having a new website probably in the next three months that I think are going to help with this case that you’re talking about.

We’ll have better use cases, but we’ll also have case studies because I think that’s what I hear you saying.

Because Shopify, number one, obviously it has the brand recognition.

But number two, you go to the website and they’ve got the case studies here and they do a really good job of that.

I mean, you got to, you got to hand it to them.

I don’t know if you’ve seen on Twitter when the CEO is, or I think he’s the CEO or co-founder.

He’s going after brands saying, hey, I feel sorry for you.

You know, we could, we could take this over for you and you’d be, and then he wins them over.

He does an amazing job of that.

And Shopify is definitely top of their game.

And we’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll make those improvements because we have merchants.

I don’t know if you’re in our Facebook group, but we, we had one merchant like two weeks ago sharing, hey, you know this.

And it’s the same niche as you, by the way.

Here’s my client.

They processed $1 million in the last eight months using SureCart.

They love it.

And then that caused someone else to share their case study.

And so we have tons of those.

We just have to gather them and present them on our website, but this is something that we have already started working on, um, uh, to, uh, level up our own branding.

I mean, this is just me being like vulnerable here, uh, uh, level up our own branding and have those same things, uh, there to make it easy for agencies.

I really appreciate you posing that question.

SK, it sounds to me like, like if I’m hearing you correctly, you trust SureCart, you would go with SureCart.

It’s your clients needing to be convinced to green light that.

Is that what you’re saying?

Sothy?

Oh, he fell off again.

Maybe he’s, maybe he went out of his, his zone.

He said he was driving.

So also, also the, if he comes back, I’m sure SK is going to come back there.

The thing I would add to that, Kevin is, uh, we should roll into this kind of topic.

Like, it sounds like it’s not even, this isn’t even a question of like woo versus SureCart.

This sounds like a Shopify versus SureCart, which is a really big topic that Adam can hit on, but we’ll kick it back over to SK.

But like, that’s, that’s a, that’s an issue in e-commerce land, not just WordPress land.

So yeah, we’re not, yeah.

It’s not just an option against woo for sure.

It’s not, we should be having that Shopify conversation.

SK, you back with us?

Yes, yes, I am.

Uh, sorry guys.

Um, so I want to make sure that I don’t make the same mistake I’ve made like during like, you know, choosing WooCommerce.

So when I go with the clients, right, I got to go with them and be like, hey guys, we know we introduced Shopify, but there’s this another product that I’ve like these X, Y, and Z features that we like.

And I got to really evangelize it, right?

So it’ll be helpful if we have like examples.

Yeah, yeah.

Some kind of case studies in the same group.

So that it doesn’t seem like, oh, SK is going to make the same WooCommerce mistake again.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think for me, cause you said, who are your, your target market or your general customers again?

Yeah.

So these are like people like trainers, people who do like things from home, like, you know, therapies and all that, who used to do it brick and mortar.

What are they selling though?

What are they selling?

They’re not selling digital, right?

They’re selling physical?

Their sessions, all that online.

Yeah.

Their memberships, their courses.

Are they selling local or are they selling all over the place?

All over the place.

Okay.

Okay.

So to me, those kinds of customers, no brainer should be on, on WordPress with SureCart for all of the things they just get out of WordPress.

Right?

Like what, what is the case you’ve been making to them over going with Shopify?

I made a mistake guys.

WooCommerce sucks.

Let’s go with Shopify.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, SK though.

What is, what’s the downside been though?

Like not for, honestly, I feel like this, what Kevin’s saying is this is more of like an actual like marketing.

It’s more of a marketing platform question rather than just the e-commerce thing.

So like SK, so like you have this conversation with them, you tell them to go to Shopify because Shopify is a solid e-commerce platform.

But from all my experience, Shopify sucks for like everything else.

It’s not a CMS.

Yeah.

It’s like, it’s really good at one thing, which is fun.

You know, kudos.

But the fact that you can have a Shopify like experience in a lot of cases better with something like SureCart on WordPress and then those clients of yours that are making content, I’m assuming this is where it gets a little sticky, right?

Like, are they getting all their clients from just social media?

Do they give a shit about website?

Obviously that’s kind of your job to kind of get them to actually care about using their WordPress, their, their site in general as like a hub for the marketing.

But I’m seeing a lot of opportunity there to kind of, you know, paint WordPress with, with SureCart and all the other things that WordPress brings as an opportunity, a really good play for them.

They could build something incredible, like a whole marketing hub right on their website.

There’s probably, you know, pros and cons to doing those types of things and everything like that.

But I love going that way.

No, a hundred percent.

And then tie that in with what’s capable of sure triggers.

That to me is a no brain.

Like if you’re, if you’re going pure e-commerce, okay, you you’re, it’s going to, it’s, that’s a tough conversation.

Do I go WordPress and SureCart versus Shopify?

When you have somebody in this niche who absolutely should be doing content marketing, absolutely should be doing a lot of stuff with their website outside of e-commerce.

And then wants a very seamless experience, wants a very controllable experience, a very extensible experience.

That’s not going to be insanely costly as Shopify is without the downsides and limitations that come with Shopify.

To me, that is, we’re choosing Shopify in that situation.

That’s not even Shopify strength, right?

Shopify strength to me is just pure e-commerce.

If you have to do a bunch of stuff outside of pure e-commerce, you should 100% be on WordPress.

I think SK, this is one of those areas where you have to pitch the entire thing to the client, right?

Not just this e-commerce piece, pitch the whole vision of how this marketing tool comes together and all these pieces fit together.

And then reassure them because we are talking about a platform in SureCart that does have a massive team behind it, that does have a massive amount of money.

But it’s not, this is not a, like a test case scenario, right?

It is a very stable platform.

It is a platform that’s going to be around a long time.

So this is where your client has to lean on you.

And I know you don’t want to make a mistake like you made with WooCommerce, you feel.

I don’t feel that that’s going to be a mistake in this regard.

But they really need to lean on your expertise and what you know to be true about these things and not just focus on brand and name recognition and market share.

Yeah, I think that if Adam can put together like, you know, examples, then I can just point my client to have a look at it and then get me a conversation, you know?

Because now the website kind of looks as if like this is something for like, you know, people like developers to use.

It doesn’t seem like something that somebody, you know, who is like popular on Instagram, who’s a really good trainer and whatnot want to use.

You know what I’m talking about?

That’s what I’m looking for, which is what I asked Adam for.

What is, I think this is a really, really important question, though.

And I’m excited to continue to see this evolution here, SK, as you, as, you know, Adam gets more like, you know, the case study type thing going on.

Because I think this, I think it just makes sense to, I feel like everybody that’s, that we’re talking here, that this is the way to go.

But I think it’s a really important question that I don’t think we got fully answered here.

When you say that you made a mistake going from Woo to Shopify or like Woo didn’t work out, so you went to Shopify, was there something that was, was there like a shortcoming of like the WooCommerce setup?

Like, did something happen there?

Or was it, was it just like, we need to go to Shopify?

What happened?

Yeah, I can talk about this for hours, bro, because I lost a lot of money on this.

But one of the things that happened is like, when you’re testing out WooCommerce, right, when it’s like 10 example orders and everything, it’ll work perfect.

It’ll work with no issues at all.

Over time, some plugins will catch up with WooCommerce version, some won’t.

Some plugin will catch up with the, with the payment systems APIs and all that, some won’t.

So over time, you’ll have this kind of weird thing that’s happening, right?

So everything will start failing.

And then when you have 10 orders and then you shift at scale to 100 orders per week and all that, you will end up seeing a lot of issues and you don’t even know where to start.

You see what’s happening.

And then your clients are like, hey, I’m losing orders.

My people are like complaining to me like about, you know, these orders didn’t come in all that.

And then we will look as if like, you don’t know what we’re doing.

So that’s what happened.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

It’s a blessing and the curse of like the WooCommerce ecosystem, I guess.

Because like there’s so many things, but now there’s so many things that have to keep getting updated.

And you just don’t have that with, with the SureCard experience.

So I appreciate that though.

I think everyone here can learn from that, from that, uh, that experience he had to go through.

Yeah.

I think, uh, sounds like, sounds like SK has, uh, he has Woo induced PTSD.

It’s a thing.

It’s a real thing.

Go ahead, Adam.

Oh, okay.

I was just going to say, um, that, uh, uh, I appreciate, uh, this question being posed because it just, um, uh, as we’re transitioning to be an e-commerce platform that we know agencies are going to, going to love using, cause it’s going to be better off for their clients.

Uh, there’s tools that we need to put in place for those agencies to make it easier for them, uh, to sell SureCard as the solution, as part of their, uh, greater solution.

So, so, um, uh, that’s definitely noted.

And, uh, like Mark said, uh, we listen and we take action and that’s something we’ll take action on to a better support agencies.

Rob, are you with us?

I am.

Thank you.

Um, so I, my question is I’m ready to jump to SureCard.

Um, I have, I’ve been running a, uh, WooCommerce store for over a decade now.

And we have a situation where we sell a, uh, photography course, an online course, and it is the only one that is acknowledged by the software manufacturer and they sell it in their marketplace.

And we have an arrangement with them where they sell our course to their, um, new customers.

When they, when they buy the product, the software, they recommend our course.

So they are taking the sale on their end.

And then, uh, they, we, we provide them with a coupon.

So we provide them with a list of a thousand coupons in batches.

And then as those sales happen on their end, their person has provided a coupon, which blasts them over to our website.

They create the account and our LMS, and then they get into their course.

So the only sticking point with switching our site over to SureCard is simply this feature of being able to somehow put a thousand coupons into the system.

And I asked, and I was told it couldn’t be done currently.

And my question really is, this is the only sticking point.

And I’m wondering if there’s any kind of workaround in my mind, it would be a simple CSV that would be provided somehow into the system.

And then that would update a batch of coupons into the system.

And I’m just wondering if like, with this being the only thing holding me back and I want to jump, uh, I can’t think of a way around it without somehow having that functionality.

So how many coupons do you need to generate per month?

Per month?

Uh, that’s not really how we do it.

We would do it, say a thousand every six months.

A thousand every six months.

Okay.

So, uh, yeah, we don’t have an option in there, uh, to bulk create coupons.

However, uh, we have short triggers, uh, which does have the ability to create coupons and it can loop.

So you can get a free short triggers account, uh, which I think today allows a thousand actions per month.

I’m about to buy your short triggers.

Oh, okay.

Um, oh, uh, see, so that’s like, you can, you can do these like insane things with short triggers.

Uh, this is just one of them.

So things where you might in like, say the WooCommerce ecosystem might have to go buy a third-party plugin or something and just do it with short triggers.

Uh, but you can create a workflow.

So that’s a loop and you can have it loop how many, ever many times you want to have a coupon, a coupon code for it.

And it will make the coupon, uh, put it wherever you want, maybe a Google sheet, uh, or, uh, some notion database.

You can push that coupon to wherever you want to have it output as a list.

Uh, and then it would just loop and it would just keep doing that.

So you just say, I want, I want a hundred click enter boom.

And it just does it.

Uh, that’s just one example.

We do cross store selling ourselves by the way.

Um, and we pull that off with short triggers.

So, uh, we recently, uh, launched a form, a plugin and there’s a lot of great form plugins.

I’m not saying anyone should switch to this.

Uh, but we have our own and, uh, we used our one click upsell feature to sell and upsell to short triggers.

These are entirely separate stores.

And so we leveraged, uh, short, short triggers itself.

To automate creating the customer ensure triggers, emailing the customer.

Here’s your login.

Here’s your new account.

Thank you.

So like, there’s this, it makes it real easy to do these things like that.

Um, Well, that’s beautiful.

In fact, just you telling me that there is a way to do this.

I don’t even need to know the answer right now.

I, but just you saying it’s possible.

I can look into it.

So that is very promising.

Thank you very much.

Actually.

Yeah.

I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make a little, uh, video on this because there’s, so when you’re an agency, um, or just someone that has e-commerce, you might have some thing you need to do.

That is kind of not a regular thing you need to do.

It’s kind of intricate.

Uh, sure triggers can always solve those problems, always solve those problems.

Uh, but I’ll make a quick little video for you.

I’ve got a note already written down on how to bulk create coupons and I’ll do that for you.

Beautiful.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Thank you, Rob.

Appreciate it.

Uh, guys, let’s do a last call on, uh, people jumping into the speaker pool.

If you want to come on and ask Adam a question or talk about e-commerce in any way, shape or form, jump into the speaker pool.

Now, uh, we do have some openings and while we do that, um, Mark, I don’t know if you have any questions coming through on your YouTube.

I do have questions coming through on mine.

So I’m going to hit just a couple of them here and you can jump in with any you have on your end as well.

Um, the Boulder asks, I’d love to move all of my physical product stores to Surecart.

How are you guys doing on shipping integrations and inventory?

Uh, he says, I guess I’m asking what are the big updates so far for physical product stores?

Great.

Uh, so, uh, we have inventory management.

Uh, we launched that, uh, I think it was last late.

Last year.

So, uh, when you go in there and create your products, uh, you can manage the inventory right there.

You can create variations, variable products, all that kind of stuff.

So we, we have that, um, there.

Uh, now when it comes to shipping, we have shipping rates and all that, uh, shipping zones, everything you’d expect with shipping.

Uh, what we don’t have, uh, what we are going to be tackling here real soon is, uh, real time, uh, shipping calculations.

So right now you can go in there and you can set the zone.

You can set the rates.

You can set the methods, uh, no dynamically, uh, showed, uh, based upon how you’ve set it up.

But, uh, we’re not integrated with, say, UPS in the United States.

I have UPS everywhere.

Um, or FedEx to pull down a real time rate.

Uh, we don’t, we just, we just don’t have that yet.

So, uh, we will, uh, take whatever feature requests you have regarding that.

Uh, there’s one more thing, uh, with regards to shipping that, uh, we just started working on and that would be, um, uh, uh, with the shipping services and fulfillment services.

So we’re working on that as well.

Um, but yep, that’s, uh, uh, where, where we’re at.

I don’t know what specific requirements you have regarding shipping.

Hmm.

I got one we can, uh, we can touch on.

Um, I got Derek Hanson in over on YouTube.

What makes WordPress great is options to build, uh, options and people can build businesses around like anything in WordPress.

So a question for you, Adam was how do you see SureCart and WooCommerce coexisting?

Yeah.

So, uh, I, I alluded to this in the beginning of the town hall, uh, which is the good neighbor strategy.

Uh, that’s where, you know, I will say if you have extremely intricate requirements, WooCommerce, you’re going to be able to go and get, you know, be able to fulfill most very intricate requirements.

Uh, with that.

With SureCart, you might not be able to, uh, if there’s very intricate requirements, um, for. 90, 95% of use cases, SureCart’s going to go above and beyond anything that you need today or need tomorrow.

Uh, but if you are someone that has really intricate requirements, it might not, uh, we might not have that, uh, capability, uh, uh, right now.

If you know what that intricate requirement is.

Uh, we did build SureTriggers as a way to kind of, uh, bridge the gap to, to do some really amazing things.

Uh, but you can always reach out to our support desk.

Uh, we have a pre-sales team that’s there to answer any like specific request, uh, questions.

Uh, but.

Uh, anything that we do, gosh, this is not going to sound right, but I’m going to say it anyway.

Anything we do that WooCommerce does, we’re going to just do better.

Um, let me just put it that way.

When it comes to how we manage, uh, pretty much everything.

I was going to go to our subscriptions and installment plans and things like that.

Uh, but pretty much whatever they do that we also do, we will do better.

Gotcha.

Makes sense.

We have, uh, David and Alex, both in the speaker pool.

Um, let’s, let’s go to David first.

If you’re there, David.

David first, if you’re there, David.

Thanks, Kevin.

Uh, this is really a simple question.

Um, I’ve got a client that, uh, I’m rebuilding a WooCommerce site.

Well, it’s WooCommerce in the sense that that’s all I, that’s all I’ve been, that’s all what I’ve used with respect to, they want to potentially turn it into e-commerce site at some point, but right now they just want to request for quotation.

So this is pretty simple as, you know, you have a single product page instead of a, you know, you have an add to cart.

Could you have a request, you know, add to a cart then becomes a request for quoting.

I was going through your documentation.

Uh, I see certainly, uh, has it, has a series of add-ons that potentially could help, but thought I’d act to ask you, Adam, directly from the source.

Yeah.

So it depends on what the flow needs to be.

Um, uh, the, and I’m glad you actually brought this up.

Cause, uh, I was going to make a video.

I’ve been thinking through a video to make on this, making a store like this is probably a one of the things that I’ve been doing.

Yeah.

Especially as it ties in with our new invoicing functionality.

Okay.

So, uh, one thing you get out of the box with SureCart is, uh, the ability to make, uh, templates for your products.

So everything on a product page is, uh, templatized, right?

So you can have multiple templates that have different designs or whatever.

You can add things in and remove things.

So, uh, the way I would tackle this and it might not meet the exact flow that, uh, you’re talking, uh, that, that you require.

Um, but I would go in there and create a new product template.

I would remove the add to cart and the buy buttons.

And I would put in a button from my page building tool that says request a quote.

And I would probably have that trigger a modal where they can just pop in their name, um, uh, or whatever you wanted them to put in there.

And then they would push a button and then you would receive that response.

You can start the correspondence.

What’s nice about the invoicing feature is then if, if they do want to purchase, you can create an invoice that gets sent to them to actually make that purchase.

So it’s a solution for a request of quote, but it’s not going to be like, um, add it to the cards.

Um, and, and then I’m doing like this traditional checkout flow, but I wonder, is that really what would be required in that case?

Or would just having your own button with a modal or something suffice?

Well, I don’t know if it’s required.

And here’s what the client asked me.

They said, you know, it would be nice if somebody is looking at a product and they said, okay, this is, um, these folks, uh, they, uh, they’re a wholesaler of clamps that are imported hose clamps.

So, um, you know, they have a, somebody comes and looks at a product.

It’s okay.

Well, yeah, they have the size, they click on it and they see what the dimensions are, et cetera.

You know, it’s a, it’s a variable product, but you know, they would, they would like to be able to say, well, I want to add this to, you know, cause that won’t be the only thing I’m looking at.

Potentially I’d like to, you know, instead of, I’d like to consolidate all these, you know, requests and could you take that information or populate it into call it a, you know, a, you know, a form on another page.

And then they have, you know, a card page, if this makes sense.

And then they just click one button that says request for quote, they get an email with this information and you know, it’s, uh, the products that they populated.

So it’s not going through a full, uh, checkout with respect to, you know, like, uh, it’s just going to a cart, a cart page.

And then from there, we’re just, you know, be sent by email.

That makes sense.

Yeah, it does make sense.

Uh, I’d have to actually think about how that could be pulled off.

Um, uh, with the cart component.

Uh, so, I mean, you can make the cost of products zero, but then it’s still going to feel, it’s not going to feel like how your client wants it to go.

Right.

Your client wants to feel like, uh, e-commerce.

However, you know, we, we have added like, um, like you can custom, I don’t know.

I’d have to think about that one.

If you want to get in touch with me offline, I’d love to like, uh, through that, uh, with you.

And, and, and just to clarify, Adam, that they don’t want pricing to be shown because just the pricing is, is, you know, it fluctuates a lot.

And, you know, and, and it’s just, you know, they don’t want to show their competitors what they’re selling, you know, or, you know, quantity of package of a hundred clamps, you know, what they’re selling, uh, you know, or price that they’re selling at.

So, yeah, so it’s just, it’s kind of a unique aspect.

And I, to be honest, I’d love to get, we, WooCommerce is just, it’s clunky.

Yeah.

It’s just clunky.

And, you know, I’ve, I’ve used your products in the past and I think they’re really built for the user.

That’s exactly it.

Yeah.

We try to build everything for the end user, but still have the power for the, um, the developer or the implementer to be able to accomplish what they want.

But I like your use case.

Um, if you, you probably know how to reach me, if you could reach out to me, I’d like to explore that further with you.

Real.

Thank you.

I appreciate your response.

Yes.

Yeah.

Real quick on that too, David.

I literally had that happen to me before in the past.

I had to do that with WooCommerce and I think there was a plugin or something that I used at that point, but I’m very interested in that use case too.

So I’ll work with you guys and Adam and see if there’s anything I can experiment on my end.

Well, there’s all the requests for quotation plugins that, you know, WooCommerce add ons, but in my opinion, they’re, they all do something a little bit different and they’re just, there’s always something missing and they’re just, they’re clunky.

I don’t know if that’s a good way to explain it.

Yeah.

And it’s a perfect fit for our new invoicing feature where you, you know, so if we made it where you could request a quote via the cart system and just do it a little different there.

Right.

And you can fully customize that checkout experience to make it look like I’m now just requesting a quote for these products.

There’s no shipping and stuff like that.

It won’t, you can make it feel how you want it to feel.

And then later send out the, the client can send out the invoice to actually collect the payment.

It fits in perfectly with what we are doing already.

Excellent.

And just one last question.

I think I know the answer to this, but I just want to check in.

You guys are now integrated with bricks builder, correct?

Oh yes.

Version three, just fine.

The final version got pushed out to everyone a few days ago.

You can do spectacular things with bricks.

We, yeah, we put a ton of effort into that to get that done.

Right.

It’s very exciting, but yes, fully integrated with a bricks builder granular control over every little thing.

Okay.

Excellent.

And, yeah, and I’m also an AC, ACSS user.

So, so that’s important as well.

Excellent.

We’re about to do a bunch of work getting a ACSS seamlessly integrated.

So with the, everything that share cards doing.

Yeah, we want it.

Good stuff.

All right.

We got about eight more minutes to go.

Let’s let a, I got Ruben in the speaker pool.

Ruben you there.

Ruben, Ruben, the other Ruben, sorry, Ruben Garcia.

Whoa.

Thank you everybody.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

I have a question.

One of my clients for Adam, one of my clients as a, um, we moved her from WooCommerce to, to Shopify.

They make about $20,000 a month selling makeup and fitness related items that she does.

The, the reason why we moved was because of the Shopify checkout experience.

How they use shop pay is what they call it, where you put in your cell phone number.

Then all your data kind of, regardless of what website you want, if they’re on a Shopify experience, it’s all unified, right?

They put in the number, they count your credit cards on a file.

Is that something similar you guys offer for, uh, SureCart?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

Um, so we have a tight integration with, with, uh, Stripe.

And I would probably dare to say that Stripe’s link.

Uh, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it.

Uh, I’m sure everyone that’s purchased anything online in the last eight, eight to 10 months has used the link.

Uh, link is, uh, if you’ve ever purchased anything and it actually went through Stripe, you can do the same thing where you just enter your phone number in.

It sends you a text, you do the code.

Now all that is usually automated, like with iPhones and Mac computers.

Uh, and it’s kind of like the, the same exact experience.

Um, and I would almost think it’s probably better in the sense that, uh, ShopPay only works for Shopify merchants.

I’m sorry.

Uh, yeah.

Um, correct.

Yeah.

A store is there, uh, where link is not just one thing.

It’s like all across the internet.

Uh, link is right there.

And so I think they might even have a larger user base.

So we do support the link in, uh, I was actually thinking it was a crazy idea of, you know, uh, that, well, they let us use shop pay inside of, uh, SureCart.

Uh, I think they might be actually opening it up.

I was listening to one of their report, uh, quarterly earnings, I think last quarter in there, they’re, they might open that up, but we do have link and it’s a very seamless integration with link.

Um, uh, which is a very good alternative to that.

And it’s becoming more and more popular each month.

It’s a little scary, but, uh, I’m interested in moving her over to SureCart.

Yeah.

Uh, we, uh, I, I think it’d be a great move to have it all in one place, you know, her website, her blog, her brand, uh, and all of that.

Uh, and then when you mix in all the, uh, it’d be, you know, really good experience.

What I’ll, what I’ll say too, for anybody that’s kind of in the same spot as Ruben, uh, because my, there is a lot of friction in migrating.

And I talked earlier about migrating ACSS and migrating frames and the thousands of licenses and all of the, everything, everything.

Everything.

There’s a lot of friction and it’s, it’s not, um, it’s, it’s a scary, it’s a scary proposition, right?

Here’s the thing with SureCart.

Um, you reach out to their team and they’re going to work with you like almost one-on-one.

And I don’t think they do this just because it’s me.

Like I get the feeling and I’ve heard from other people, they just do this in general.

It’s kind of like the culture of, of their company, right?

So if you are thinking about making a move or a migration like that, just, you don’t even have to commit.

Just reach out to their team and, uh, kind of let them walk you through what the process will be like and, uh, what they can assist with or not assist with.

Because in my experience, they’re, they’re just very open to helping people make these.

My, and this is not the kind of service, the level of service that you’re going to get with, with woo.

And when we have people coming on saying like, Hey, I really wish it did this.

I really wish it did that.

Uh, if those are good ideas, the sure card team is the kind of team that is immediately going to start to implement that stuff.

Um, and you know, Mark alluded to that earlier and talked about that earlier.

And I’ve seen this in their Facebook group over and over and over again.

Um, they are 100% in tune with their user base.

And when people have great ideas, their team implements those great ideas.

You see them show up and it’s not a year and a half later, two and a half years later.

It’s very, very fast.

Uh, it’s the kind of stuff that one, you don’t get elsewhere.

And two, that should make you feel very, very, very comfortable about using a product like sure card.

Yeah.

Thanks for saying that.

And we, um, you know, like I said earlier, we just have to try harder.

Uh, we, we, and it’s in our culture to try harder cause we’re number two and we’re always going to have to try harder.

And we want to, uh, try harder for, uh, to, to win everybody’s business.

Um, before we wrap, I wanted to just, uh, mention something that we’re, we have going live soon, specifically for agencies.

Cause I know a lot of agencies, well, all the calls were like agencies.

Um, is it okay to talk about something we have coming for agencies for a minute or two?

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Absolutely.

So, uh, we’re, we’re releasing an agency, a program, uh, any agency can join this program.

We’re changing our pricing to be more agency friendly as well.

Uh, some of the cool things that we’re doing for agencies is we’re building in, uh, the ability for them to charge a fee.

Um, for the stores that they create.

So for example, now typically you, you create a, uh, a store, you charge a fee, an overall fee, like a couple thousand dollars.

Uh, and you might have an, um, a maintenance fee.

Well, you can also add a percentage fee to all transactions that, uh, will be taking out, uh, when each transaction happens.

Uh, this is actually very common in a lot of industries where, uh, if you’re the facilitator, you charge a fee, you take a fee of all the transactions.

We’re going to facilitate this for you.

So you can literally go in there, create your, the store and say, I want to add a 2% fee to every transaction.

And that money goes to you.

So it’s another revenue stream for agencies where, uh, use, you succeed when your client succeeds.

Uh, so there’s a lot of, um, industries where that’s a standard and, uh, it’s going to be a great opportunity for agencies.

We also have a agency referral, uh, program where if you’re creating a store that you then transfer to your agency, there’s this like, um, uh, sharing of, uh, revenue.

Um, uh, that happens there as well.

Uh, and, uh, ultimately we’re building sure card to be ideal for clients.

So, uh, it wasn’t mentioned, but if you’re, your client needs to manage your WooCommerce store, they have to log into the website and then they see everything that’s there and they’ve got to find the right things.

And it’s very WordPressy because sure cards platform.

We have a platform.

You can have your client.

We’re building this right now where they can actually manage their store from the platform.

So it’s a seamless experience for managing a store.

They don’t even have to go into WordPress.

So if they want to manage the products and the orders, we already have all the reporting and the dashboards, which we didn’t even talk about.

Uh, we have amazing reporting and dashboards, but we’re doing that as well, uh, for agencies that want to build an e-commerce store, but, but it’s just not the perfect environment for your client to log into WordPress to actually manage that store.

So we’re putting that on the platform.

Um, and then maybe in January, February, uh, clients can manage their store on the platform.

Uh, and one thing I would love to do, but I don’t know if we’re going to be able to pull it off, but we’re going to try.

This will be later next year is can we white label the platform.

Uh, so when they’re going in, they’re seeing your brand, uh, everywhere, um, when they’re managing the store.

Um, and then, uh, uh, when they’re going to be able to, uh, uh, when they’re managing the store.

Uh, so those are just some things that we have coming specifically for agencies.

Love it.

Those are some next level features.

They’re really looking forward to that.

Yes.

Thank you.

Um, when they’re managing the store.

Um, when they’re managing the store.

So those are just some things that we have coming specifically for agencies.

Love it.

Those are some next level features.

They’re really looking forward to that.

Yes.

Thank you.

I’m curious to see how people use that, uh, kind of percentage fee back to the developer and in their price and getting creative with their pricing and their packaging.

And, you know, e-commerce is very expensive to me.

And of course in the inner circle, you know, I’ve got almost 2000 agency owners and freelancers who we talk about pricing and sales all the time.

And I’m very, you know, keen.

Like I hear often people saying, Oh, I’m doing this e-commerce site.

And I ended up asking like, Hey, how much are you charging for the, cause they’re always doing so much work.

And I’m like, how much did you charge of this by the way?

And they’re like $5,000.

I’m like, no, no, no, no.

You can’t.

This is not, that’s way too low for e-commerce.

It’s very e-commerce needs to be very expensive because of how technical it is, how much work is involved, how much thought is involved.

But here’s the thing.

Like clients with new stores or concepts for stores, they may not have that.

They may not have that money upfront and an agency or freelancer now with that kind of thing can decide if they really like the concept of the store and they really think it has a bright future.

And they really think that they can contribute to that future can work it out with the client where it’s like, look, I, you know, you don’t have to pay as much upfront because you’re, if you just allow me to have a percentage of each sale, we can, we can work it out that way.

You can get very creative with your pricing.

Definitely mitigate some risk there.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

And there’s also industries where it’s standard.

I was thinking yesterday, well, what are some examples of this?

You know, we’re coming out of a political season.

There was actually a time 10 years ago, a friend of mine was running for an office here in California.

And I learned that all those fundraisers that get put on for politics, the guy organizing the fundraise is getting a 10 to 20% cut of everything that’s raised, which was kind of eye opening for me.

But it’s very standard in a lot of industries to have an extra percentage put on, you know, for the person that’s the implementer, they’re putting the whole thing together.

Yeah.

It’s very common.

A hundred percent.

All right, Mark, we’re going to close this out.

You got any final thoughts for us?

I think this has been fantastic.

Adam, thank you so much for joining us, man.

I think everybody had a blast.

A lot of value here.

Thanks for having me.

I got to say, this is like next, next level kind of experience because I love hearing people’s voices, them asking the questions.

This is, this is it.

The WP town hall.

There’s it’s, it’s not the same thing, you know, where this guy goes on the thing and answers the same questions and tells the same stories.

It’s, it’s dynamic.

I love this format.

You guys are onto something here.

I love it.

Well, thank you for coming on, Adam.

And, and thank you to all of the, the listeners who participated in the speaker pool today.

Right?

Like that’s, that’s the whole point of WP town hall is we want to hear from you guys.

We want to hear from people in the WordPress ecosystem, doing actual work, running into actual challenges.

Uh, we’re, we’re debating important topics and we’re having on great guests like, like Adam Preiser.

So thank you again, Adam, for coming on.

Uh, this one is in the books and it will be out to the podcast listening platform near you.

If you want to catch it later and we’ll be back next week.

Thank you, everybody.

Thanks guys.

Thanks guys.

Thank you.