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Matt Mullenweg
CEO & Founder, Automatic

Matt Mullenweg Discusses Challenges and Growth in Modern Ecommerce

🎥 May 17, 2026 📺 Open Channels FM Podcast Network ⏱ 60m
In this episode hosts discuss WooCommerce's evolution with Matt Mullenweg, exploring its advantages, community impact, and future innovations.
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About Matt Mullenweg

In a 2021 interview, Matt Mullenweg recounted the early days of WordPress, describing a meeting at CNET where he demonstrated the software by publishing an article in seconds, a process that took the existing system 20 minutes. He noted that while WordPress was inferior in many ways, it was better in that specific regard. Mullenweg also discussed his decision to launch WordPress.com independently after CNET declined his pitch, eventually housing it under Automattic.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Matt Mullenweg's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (74 segments)
K
Katie Keith0:00
Thanks to Omnisend for supporting this episode. Welcome to the relaunch episode of Do the Woo, the podcast where we'll be talking all things WooCommerce. I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2.
J
James Kemp0:16
And I'm James Kemp, core product manager at WooCommerce. And as you can see, we were going to do a fancy reveal, but Matt is in the room already, so our special guest today is Matt Mullenweg. And we're going to be talking to him about his vision for the future of WooCommerce.
K
Katie Keith0:34
Yeah, so thank you, Matt, so much for coming on. I'm sure that everybody watching already knows who you are, so could you introduce yourself in the context of your work with WooCommerce because people know you're the CEO of the company that WooCommerce is now part of, but they don't necessarily know the details of your involvement and the history of it.
M
Matt Mullenweg0:54
Sure. So, gosh. Yes, as you said, I'm the CEO of Automattic and WooCommerce is one of the products of Automattic. So, I work really closely with Ole Evensen, who leads, he's the artistic director of the WooCommerce maison. We have some funny titles inside of Automattic. The gosh, how it started was, you know, I always have thought about WordPress as an operating system. And so, I want to study like previously successful operating systems, and so, I read a lot of computer history books, and of course, they had the history of Microsoft. And I felt like WordPress was our Windows, you know, we had the platform, but we hadn't yet found the killer app on top of it. The thing that both, you know, there's a ton of demand for and also elevates the platform itself. So, that was Microsoft Office for Windows, right? Like, when Office came along, that sort of like blew up Windows, and as I so, I just started like really digging in to the you know tens of thousands of plugins and themes that were out there and looking for trends and seeing what people were using and like listening to the community at work camps and things like that and commerce as a category started to stand out and within that category because there were a number of commerce solutions WooCommerce really started to be like something yeah I'd known about and automatic I actually looked at before but started to take pretty seriously and I believe 2015 you know we reached an agreement with the Woo founders to have them you know acquire them and have their team join and there were 43 people at the time the team was only a few developers though it was only like three developers and honestly that some of the code wasn't as like performant or scalable or other things but I was like okay well automatic has like some of the best you know engineers in the world so we can definitely fix all the engineering stuff Woo has nailed like the community and the branding and the user experience and all this other stuff which is actually kind of harder and so let's bring the best of what we've learned from building like WordPress wordpress.com everything we've done at automatic and start to apply it apply that playbook to Woo and that was 2015 so about is it a little over 10 years ago and it's been exciting right I think you know we don't talk about the Woo status much but I think some of like 8% of all websites in the world now run on WooCommerce.
K
Katie Keith3:29
Wow. I yeah I remember the 10-year anniversary I guess it was last year now in 2025 and a surprising number of the people who came over with the acquisition were still thriving and working on WooCommerce and in other areas of automatic as well which was nice to see.
M
Matt Mullenweg3:48
Yeah the team is hundreds of people now obviously and the community has grown so so so much. It's been very very exciting to be a part of. And also, it was humbling. Much in the same way I was humbled by Tumblr. In Woo, I was like, 'Oh, you know, we've been doing Woo this for a while. How hard could commerce be?' But, commerce has like a multifactorial complexity. Especially as you go international, you know, with payments and shipping and inventory and returns. And like there's so much because it really bridges for some stores, you know, the physical and the digital world.
J
James Kemp4:27
Yeah, for sure. And there's so many different combinations of, you know, apps and plugins and things that people are using. Different hosting software that there's I couldn't imagine how many different variations of WooCommerce exist in the world. No two are alike.
M
Matt Mullenweg4:44
Exactly. Yeah. Well, yeah. Thanks to everyone who has submitted questions beforehand on social media for Matt. We're going to walk through a lot of them and see what, you know, Matt's vision for the future of WooCommerce is. And also, feel free to ask any additional questions as we're talking that you would like us to put forward to Matt.
J
James Kemp5:07
Yeah. And before we get into the Q&A, Do the Woo is essentially a new podcast. It's part of the Open Channels Network, which is now much wider than just Woo. So, that's why we've re-launched Do the Woo as a dedicated WooCommerce podcast within Open Channels. So, that means it has all of its own channels like the YouTube and Apple and Spotify and all of that. So, wherever you watch these things, please subscribe there. And wherever you're watching now as well.
K
Katie Keith5:38
Yeah. We received a ton of questions, which we're not going to be able to get to all of them today. But, what we would like to do is put to him the most pressing questions that we felt, you know, his vision and input would be great to hear. And then Katie and I and potentially someone else from WooCommerce will do a follow-up episode in a few weeks to try and answer the remaining questions.
Yeah, and we thought let's start with WooCommerce's competitive advantage and the wider landscape that it sits in because a lot of people are talking about that and the big competitors that are in the e-commerce world both within and outside of WordPress now. After that, we're going to talk about the user experience of WooCommerce, the community, its features and priorities, and finally, we're going to ask Matt about his long-term vision for it. So, we're going to try and slot the live questions into that structure. So, first of all, we've got a question from Robin Peterson from Food Plugins, which is what is WooCommerce's biggest existential threat, internal or external, and what are you doing about it right now?
M
Matt Mullenweg6:49
Hm. This is a good question. So, with a product like at the scale of WooCommerce, they're never actually killed by competitors. So, I would say the biggest threat is internal. When products like that fail, it's always because of execution. People think it's competitors, but it's not. So, I would say the biggest risk is our ability to execute against, you know, what we're hearing from the community and what we know that the software needs and then the roadmap. Now, the competitive landscape is interesting. Certainly, it's with a company like Shopify and a product like Shopify, forces us to really like bring our best stuff. Because, you know what? Shopify's is good. They're quite impressive. And there are, you know, 6,000-7,000 people with a bajillion dollars. Now some people might look at that and say, 'Oh, wow, you know, WooCommerce has no chance.' But actually this sort of David versus Goliath thing is exactly where WordPress was in like 2008-2009. You know, if money was all you needed to create great software, right? Like we'd all be using Windows on our phone. But you know, it really like software built for love, not just money, and the community approach of something like WooCommerce can be very, very compelling. And then of course, in 2026, the first question you have to ask yourself when you're choosing anything is am I choosing software which increases my freedom or decreases my freedom? Which is fundamentally the question am I choosing open source or not. So, really before you look at any features or anything else, I think you need to choose like what how you like your freedom scale to balance and what direction you want to go there. And open source, that what differentiates WooCommerce from, you know, others in the market, other great e-commerce things out there, e-commerce features on Wix or Squarespace or Shopify or whatever there is, is it increases your freedom. And especially in the age of AI, I think feature differentiations are going to start to fade a little bit, right? So, Shopify has a feature that WooCommerce doesn't have, maybe before, you know, you'd have to wait for the Woo team to build it or someone to make a plugin or something like that. But now, that obviously that cost is going down. If you're pretty good with cloud code, you could probably whip something up yourself. And by the way, there's thousands of other developers out there using it. So, like I think we're going to start to see sort of the feature differentiations between things start to fade a little bit. And so really what you're choosing is a community, a platform, and like I said, that freedom stance.
J
James Kemp9:46
Awesome. Yeah, that's a good answer. I think the AI angle is going to change a lot of things. And it's moving very quickly, and I think those changes are just going to keep compiling over the coming years, so that'll be cool to see. The next question we have is from Nick McLaughlin. Hopefully I said his surname right. He says, 'What are WooCommerce's competitive advantages, and how do they set Woo up for success in the next 5 years?' And I think this touches on what you were just saying about open source just then. So I'm going to repeat it.
M
Matt Mullenweg10:22
Biggest competitive advantage is freedom. If you care about freedom, if you want more liberty, autonomy, you want sovereign software, Woo is the best e-commerce platform in the world to provide that. And the second I would say is Woo's open and infinitely extensible nature. So, we're in an interesting period right now where because you can kind of one-shot generate software, you get kind of this like it's incredible rush. Like if you've done this with the AI and you tell it to make something, or even like on Telex, you tell it to make like a Doom blog or something. You're like, 'What just happened? I just created Doom from some words I typed in a box.' And that is very very exciting. However, I think while there'll be like applications of that, I do feel like where we'll see the plurality of usage and commerce and interaction is going to be with malleable software. And I apologize, this isn't a term I came up with. I saw some designer say it. I'm forgetting their name, but this idea like malleable versus generated software. So, where you take something that is already there, it's you know, been built by humans and has the craft and security and you know, all the things that come from the decades of investments, the you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands maybe at this point of person hours that have been built into the engineering, the craft, the security and the platform of Woo. And then you create malleable software on top of that. So, you can customize it. This is of course what makes WordPress great and WooCommerce as well. Is that with the you know, hooks and filters and actions and everything, you can modify pretty much everything. For better or worse, of course, we know how this creates complexity and everything like that. But ultimately, I feel like that freedom and that creativity which is enabled, just allows for faster evolution. You know? If you know, for Shopify to get better, Tobi has to have a good idea. I'm saying Tobi as it's standing for like everyone at Shopify, right? Like I can't ship a new feature to Shopify. They have a platform as well, but it's like more limited, right? Now, for WooCommerce to get better, now I could be the biggest idiot in the world. In fact, I am. So, the beauty is that like, you know, not just the WooCommerce developers, but everyone in the community can make it better or just make it better for them. It doesn't even need to be better for everyone. And that sort of personalization I think is Again, the question was the advantages? So, you know, again, there's reasons to own an there's to rent an apartment versus own a house. Sometimes it's convenient and it's nice to use something kind of off-the-rack and if you fit into it, but you know, more power to you. Actually, one of my great blessings in life is I am very much a men's medium. So, like I can walk into a store and pick up a suit. I had to the other day because I was going to a funeral. So, I didn't have a black suit. So, they were going to get something off the rack and it fit quite well. I have other friends who have different proportions. You know, if they don't get something tailored, it looks ridiculous on them. So, if you can get the off-the-rack, that's pretty cool. And if you're happy with that, great. So, off-the-rack software can be fun. But, at the moment that you need any personalization or you want it to be more better fit to you and tailored, that's when I think open source really starts to shine and a platform like WooCommerce gets there. Now, what do we need to get better at? And maybe this is the existential threats is education. Yeah, I think one of the biggest opportunities for WordPress and WooCommerce is education. And that's why I'm so excited about like the WordPress education credits program. You know, what we're I'm calling 26th year of the meetup, actually. Going to be doing a ton to enable meetups, to make meetups better, to get meetup organizers better material and support and everything like that. And then of course meetups ladder into WordCamps, which as we know are part of the magic of whole WordPress community. But really what that fundamentally is is like there's this I'm sorry, this is a long answer. But, we're probably hitting a few other questions as well that I read. When you think about it fundamentally like how ideas spread or how innovation spreads, it's usually like a see, do, teach. Right? That's kind of the three things that are exciting. You see something that's exciting to you. It's a store or someone making something or someone doing something you're like, 'Oh, I could do that.' This is how I got started blogging. Right? There are all these blogs out there. I was like, oh, this is just a normal dude like me. Like I could blog. I thought to have a website or to publish you had to be like a journalist or like, you know, have certifications or an editor. It turns out no. Now, I'm dating myself, but in like early 2000s, like this was an innovative idea that anyone could start a blog. And so, having people see what they can do with WooCommerce is really, really important. That's why things like the showcase and demos are great. Then you do it yourself, right? That's the next level, which is very exciting. So, you kind of learn from that what you saw and you do it yourself. And then the final where you reach like ultimate status is when you teach someone else to do it, right? When you pass it on. And when you think about it, like WordPress and WooCommerce even hasn't grown because like our competitors who spent billions of dollars on marketing, you know? It's grown because of that see, do, teach, which is also kind of like word of mouth, you know? I'm sure many people listening here can imagine what their introduction to WordPress or WooCommerce was. And it might have been you just came across the website and figured it all out yourself. But for a lot of people, you probably had a friend or maybe an influencer online who said, hey, look at this. Check this out. And that was your entree into the community.
K
Katie Keith16:42
Yeah, well, you've talked about the open-source side of things. So, that leads us into a question that somebody else had, which is about the relationship between like WooCommerce and people choosing other WordPress plugins that also are obviously open source. So, Rodolfo from Business Bloomer and Checkout summit, I don't know why I've written e-commerce there. Says, what can we learn from SureCart, FluentCart, EDD, and the other e-commerce plugins given I suppose that they equally have that freedom of open source?
M
Matt Mullenweg17:13
Oh, well, the beauty of that is, you know, what we can learn is they can also exchange code. They can use WooCommerce code and WooCommerce could use their code. So, I think that's you know, being able to be inspired and share and you know, between products is like part of what accelerates the cycle of innovation. So, there's something specific. I don't have anything specific to say about any of those particular products except that I'm really glad they exist.
J
James Kemp17:43
I wanted to touch on your point earlier about just the extensibility of WooCommerce and you know, that being one of the main reasons that people would want to choose it is the kind of flexibility and the freedom you have to not only build on top of it but contribute code to it. That's something that we're really focusing on at WooCommerce is you know, making this the platform the underlying code of WooCommerce to be very it should have all of the base features that you would expect and you know, work in a consistent way that you can extend on top of. So, if someone chooses one person's bulk editor plugin they could easily switch to another one and it would work in a similar way with the underlying logic being the same. So, that kind of ability to choose to pick and choose which extensions you use on top of WooCommerce is something that we want to make very reliable for the people installing WordPress and using WordPress and WooCommerce. See, I just wanted to touch on that but moving on to user experience we have a question here from Ian and I know he said online how to say his surname and it's not how I would say it. I think he said It's Meissner. Not Mizner, Meisner. lands on woocommerce.com, what is the ideal path for them to get started, and what are the biggest obstacles?
M
Matt Mullenweg19:20
Ah, that's a good question. Well, I guess kind of the first fork in the road there would be, you know, do it myself versus do it for me. So, you know, hopefully at woocommerce.com, they get excited about the possibilities of platform, and see examples of stores like them that are very successful, or increase their business, or increase their conversions by, you know, utilizing some of the things on there. And, you know, so, either they go the direction of like going to one of the partner web hosts, which are not just automatic ones, by the way, we point to others, and get signed up with WooCommerce configured and everything like that, and then they can start to go through the configuring WooCommerce process. You know, I'll be the first to admit that that's a bit heavier than the WordPress process. And so, someone will have to have some motivation. Now, I'll also say that AI is raising people's ability to make it through these things, right? Because they just put a ChatGPT window next to it and say, 'I'm stuck, what do I do?' Or, gosh, even now we're having the browsers that have these AI agents built in, which I talked about at WordCamp US and State of the Word. And so, like, you can actually have the AI just kind of like watch it do stuff for you. You can say, 'Build me this,' and it'll start to like navigate WooCommerce and do it, and you can see it do it, which is also kind of like, again, making that do-it-yourself path way more accessible. So, pre-AI, I would have said probably 95% of the time they go to a developer or consultants. And, you know, we link to some great things there. We have agency partners, as great platforms like Codeable, and of course the big ones like Upwork and everything. Like it's one of the great things about the WordPress and WooCommerce communities is like so many people who are fluent in it. And so, you can really find someone who's a great match for you, whether that's in your language or in your country or whatever it is that's important to you, or they have a portfolio that matches what you want to build. Yeah, there's a great kind of ecosystem that two-sided marketplace. So, that would be one possible path. That percentage is probably going to come down in terms of total numbers, but I think the total demand for third-party developers is going to go up. Right? So, maybe let's say AI makes it so only, you know, let's just say half. So, half of people can do it themselves versus hiring a developer. So, you think, okay, if there were obviously a finite number of WooCommerce stores being created, that would mean less work for third-party developers. But actually what's going to happen is there'll be more demand for stores being created in general. And so, you know, there might be some dips and valleys in there, but ultimately like if I go out 10 years, there's going to be way more Woo jobs than there are today.
K
Katie Keith22:25
Yeah, I totally agree that it's a big benefit of Woo how many people are fluent in it. For example, we use Easy Digital Downloads on the Barn2 site, and it can be very difficult when we need to find an expert or hire somebody that's already experienced in that. With Woo, it's really, really easy. There are so many people that have all different skill levels, all different price ranges, so you can find an expert that easily. Which brings us on to the community section, where we have another question from Ian, who asks, 'What does healthy collaboration look like between the platform and the community?'
M
Matt Mullenweg23:03
Oh, I think it looks like what Woo has done for the past 10 years and before even the acquisition. You know, I always say Yeah, I usually say this for WordPress, but I think it applies to Woo equally well. Its success has been predicated on how closely it has that collaboration with the community. What that looks like. And gosh, there's so many examples of things like I talk about Wapu. I would have never approved Wapu. And how amazing is like Wapu for the WordPress community? Like that is something that comes up from the community. You know, the cool thing about open source is that community happens whether you want it to or not. Right? People because people just publish plugins or fork the software or whatever happened. Like so you kind of get one thing I love about open source is that it kind of forces you if you're the steward of the software, it keeps you honest, you know, because there's a very natural market forces that you know, unless you're like the most stubborn person in the world or blind, you'll just like wake up one day and be like, 'Okay, everyone's using this plugin. We should just build it into core.' Whatever it is that's happening. Or every time I go to work camp, 10 people tell me this. So, you know, those sorts of things. So what that looks like in the future is you know, if I had to say something I'd like to see more of this year in terms of collaboration is I'd love to see more talks at WordCamps around WooCommerce. I'd love to see more either dedicated WooCommerce meetups, which you know, WooCommerce does have its own meetup.com thing. Or like topics. Like how do we you know, teach more broader WordPress developers like how they can learn Woo and how that actually probably increases their economic value in the marketplace. Right? One nice thing about working in the e-commerce world like we said there's a store that's making 5 million bucks a year. They're making let's say they're making 5 million bucks a year from their website like they're going to want you know feel comfortable investing in that. So if you think of what their threshold is versus like you know someone else building a website a coffee shop you building website for a coffee shop they're making most of the money from people coming through the door the website is nice to have but they you know of their revenue how much will they spend? Let's call it half a percent 1% on the website or like an e-commerce store where the revenue might be higher but also like the percent they're willing to reinvest into their infrastructure and their website and development and customization and everything is probably much higher hosting you know they'll want to pay for more performant hosting and invest in those things. So you know we track 30 something billion of GNV happening through WooCommerce and the actual number is higher than that because we're not able to track everything. So when you imagine like the economic opportunity for doing things in the WordPress ecosystem it's pretty huge. I would say bigger than WordPress actually.
J
James Kemp26:09
Yeah for sure I think it touches on a point why I've always said you know I started as a WooCommerce plugin developer. And I chose that route because the types of clients we were getting were the ones that had money to spend on this stuff because their store relied on transactions going through it and that's how I kind of fell into the e-commerce side of things. So it's definitely true that it's a profitable area of WordPress and of any online business I would say. I'll touch quickly on the healthy collaboration as well because there's a lot of projects where we have collaborated last year. One being the accessibility project that we had for WooCommerce. We collaborated with Equalize Digital and that was just a case of, you know, myself and Amber getting in touch and talking about what that might look like and that's came to fruition. WooCommerce is now fully accessible, which is awesome on the front end. Another example is we worked with Becca at Kestrel on scoping out what shipping fulfillments might look like in WooCommerce and that is also a feature that Becca heavily helped to scope out what they've been hearing from customers and clients around what people want and that work is now also in WooCommerce core behind the feature flag, but it's there to be used and tested. So I'd love to see more stuff like that, just more collaboration of what people are seeing in the ecosystem. And, you know, just putting that out there to someone like me or any other product person at WooCommerce so we can talk about it. GitHub is a great place to do that. The next question you actually touched on already. It was from Rodolfo and he said is there going to be any more WooCommerce or is there going to be more WooCommerce coverage at flagship WordCamps? It sounds like he thinks there should be.
M
Matt Mullenweg28:25
Well, should is relative. So if people want it, there will be. So I'd say like, you know, be the change you want to see in the world. If you want more WooCommerce at WordCamps, if you are listening to this podcast, you probably could be a speaker. So, you know, make the pitch. And if you're, you know, helping an organizer work a WordCamp, you know, all right, understand your audience, obviously. Like, look at who's coming and I do think that with, you know, almost a quarter of all WordPress websites using WooCommerce, like, you know, maybe something like a quarter of sessions at WordCamp should be about WooCommerce. WooCommerce more broadly. Like you said, there's other solutions as well. I think that's great. As long as things are open source, they're welcome at WordCamps.
K
Katie Keith29:12
Yeah, well, that's what I would have thought. But the last few flagship WordCamps that I've been to, I have submitted a talk about e-commerce or WooCommerce. I've tried both. And a talk about myself, like my story. And my story is always the one that's been accepted. Like, WordCamp, I think Asia last year, but there's been three or four. And nobody accepts my e-commerce talks, which I think are really interesting. So, I'm a bit
I'm concerned about why that is, because all the data you said is totally correct about how many sites use WooCommerce and e-commerce generally. That's where the money is. And yet I am finding it really hard to spread the word about WooCommerce and e-commerce at WordCamps. And I don't know why that is.
M
Matt Mullenweg29:58
Well, Katie, your story is really good. So... But everyone's heard it. I think e-commerce is more interesting these days. Okay, well, then don't submit it. And just submit the e-commerce or submit it and then when do a little bait and switch. When it's like, my story actually turn it into an e-commerce talk.
K
Katie Keith30:17
Yeah. But yeah, I agree that's definitely needed. Whoever does the talks, there should be much more representation at WordCamps.
M
Matt Mullenweg30:25
Well, and I'll keep that in mind. The WordCamp I'm most active in choosing the content for is WordCamp US. So, as that comes around and I look at things, I'll keep that in mind.
J
James Kemp30:37
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K
Katie Keith31:29
So the next group of questions are about the features and upcoming priorities of WooCommerce. So the first one there was from Ian again. WooCommerce has intentionally served merchants, product builders, and agencies. Are their goals and targets aligned to those segments and how are they prioritized?
M
Matt Mullenweg31:49
Merchants, product builders, and agencies. Yes, there are goals tied to each one of those. How are they prioritized? Off the dome, not certain right now. James might be able to answer this better, but those are I would say some of the big personas that as we build things in Woo, you try to often sometimes when we build things it addresses all of them, but like you know, as we make it more usable or something like that, like that benefits everyone. But yeah, there's definitely been some I would say some more specific outreach around like growing the agency program or other things like that.
I also saw feedback that there's WordCamps might not want pitches for a specific product. I think I agree and I would say that once a product also becomes a platform itself like WordPress, and if you go to WordPress plugins directory, there's hundreds or thousands of WooCommerce plugins. It's okay, you know, once it becomes not just about itself but actually something that a lot of people could build on. That's okay for a WordCamp.
K
Katie Keith32:59
Interesting, yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point. You don't want to promote a specific product, I guess, but yeah, I mean, WooCommerce is huge at this point, so deserves to be talked about. And people want solutions, so...
M
Matt Mullenweg33:12
Yes. Exactly, yeah.
J
James Kemp33:15
I've always found that on Reddit, actually. They block a lot of comments when you provide a solution to the question because it looks like promotion, but actually it solves the issue that they were having, but sidetrack.
M
Matt Mullenweg33:28
Often a product does, yeah.
K
Katie Keith33:31
So, we've got a couple of follow-up comments from people watching live about the WordCamp discussion. So, let's do that before we move on to more pre-submitted questions. So, Dave has suggested next flagship, a separate room for e-commerce. I would love to see that. That would make a lot of sense, actually. That would be cool to see. Yeah.
M
Matt Mullenweg33:55
You know what? I'll tease something as well, which is this could be an interesting year to have a dedicated Woo event again.
K
Katie Keith34:03
Yeah, well, we've got a couple of independent events popping up, which is interesting. So, we've just had, well, it was kind of I think a WordCamp affiliated e-commerce day for WordPress in Porto, which James and I both spoke at. And then we've got Checkout Summit in Sicily in April. So, it's interesting to see that community interest is growing in the e-commerce side of things. And Checkout Summit is specifically WooCommerce rather than e-commerce, as well. So, I am liking that direction. There hasn't been a WooConf in a few years, and I think this would be a cool year to see another one. Yeah.
M
Matt Mullenweg34:39
And we got a comment from Brent. All right, this is what I addressed earlier. This is the one I was responding to. If it's a platform and there's like hundreds of plugins in the directory on top of it, I think that that sort of it's a spectrum, but that's where it makes a little bit more okay, I would say, to talk about or a lot more okay to talk about a specific, you know, plugin or solution or things.
K
Katie Keith35:01
Awesome. Was that all the questions that you had, Katie? Yeah. Um, I think it's worth touching on the prioritization point because I think I can speak to that a bit more. Um, one of the focuses this year will be that every release should have something beneficial for each one of those target groups of people. Um, and to more clearly, you know, put that out there in writing like this feature or this enhancement is specifically targeted at this group of people or group of users. Um, so I think we'll definitely see a lot more of that this year, which will be great to see.
Um, we have a question from Ian. Of course. Our list of questions are all from Ian. Uh, if developer resources were not a constraint, what would you do? So, what would unlock the biggest leap forward? Uh, so if you had unlimited developer resources, where would you put them?
M
Matt Mullenweg36:10
That is a really good question. And Ian, I'll say that it's very prescient with this idea of intelligence being on tap with AI agents. Yeah, what we're seeing... If you're listening to this and you haven't been cloud code pilled yet? Take some time. Nothing else from this podcast. Take some time, go through some tutorials, install Claude code. By the way, it's not just for code. You can use it for any other files on your computer. You can use it with your notes. You can use it with so much. Um, I saw some crazy stuff with it being hooked up to playground and beeper today. Like you can do some really, really neat things. Um, and that kind of is an unlimited developer resource in some ways that we haven't seen. And it is the 1.0 version. And the capabilities that are coming out this year as the new Nvidia chips come online, all the new data centers you heard about get built, you know, especially some of the Elon Musk stuff, which is moving very quickly. But also the investments from Google, Meta, everyone, like Anthropic, like we're going to see some... If you thought last year was exciting from an AI point of view, I think this will actually be the year that is a little more jaw-dropping. So, January 14th, mark my words there.
J
James Kemp37:37
To touch on the Claude code, they just released in the Claude desktop app, which is Claude code under the hood. You set it up. You choose a folder to run it in. Uh, and it runs in exactly the same way as Claude code, but it's a lot less technical. You know, it's not a CLI-based interface, which is very useful for, you know, non-code-based work, where Claude code seemingly excels, which I don't think was the expectation when they released it. Um, so, yeah, definitely worth checking out. It's just going to get better.
M
Matt Mullenweg38:19
So, yeah. And this also, you know, it's back to the brilliance of Ian's question is it's almost like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing like the answer when you can have any answer, like what you ask and what you build is really important. And so, you know, I would pick... I mean honestly I would pick what WooCommerce's roadmap is because like that was kind of the, you know, it's not that we have unlimited developer resources but we do have, you know, a pretty active process of the hundreds of people who work on WooCommerce and the investments that are happening into the scalability, um, you know, the sort of idea of the interface will be more radically accessible and kind of unifying some of the things that are right now like sort of some classical WordPress interfaces but could be like maybe like reduce people's clicks, reduce kind of the friction they have when they're running the store day-to-day. Um, you know, the earlier, you know, there was a mention of merchants. I'd say very much the merchant experience is on my mind. And sort of like if you're running a store every day, what do you do 10 times or 100 times and how can you make that like a little bit smoother? You know, and again every click you can remove, every sort of like way you can sand the edges of that experience multiplies, right? Because people are doing it hundreds of times a day just across millions of times a day across the WooCommerce ecosystem. Um, checkout's already getting a lot better but of course anything in the checkout is a multiplier for our ecosystem. Um, it's already there. There's probably some things in Stripe Link or Shop Checkout that we don't match yet and um, for some stores or some geographies and so that could be improved. Uh, for main ones like US stuff I think it's pre-parity now in terms of conversions. Uh, performance, you can always be faster. There's no one who says I would love this website to load slower.
K
Katie Keith40:23
Yeah. Well, that brings us quite nicely to the next question, which is what are the top milestones WooCommerce will deliver in 2026, which is from Robin. James, I feel like we should point to a WooCommerce blog post or something here. Like is there like an official resource? I don't want to...
J
James Kemp40:39
Yeah, I mean Bo actually published, I believe it was late last year and I'm sure Brent in the comments will be able to drop a link in. Uh, but his vision for 2026 for WooCommerce, which is something that, you know, we're really sticking to and I think one of the... So, the quality is high on the list. Um, performance is high on the list. Uh, builder experience is high on the list as well as merchant experience, which is always high on the list. Uh, and also, I think, you know, evolving with the AI ecosystem as it moves and just adapting to that, integrating things like the Stripe Agnostic Commerce Protocol and the new Google UCP protocol that they announced and just really working and refining those experiences are always top of mind. Uh, hopefully Brent can drop in a link to the relevant blog post from Bo. Um, but yeah, that should be sufficient, I would have thought.
K
Katie Keith41:51
Yeah, you mentioned the builder experience. We've got a live comment from Jerry who says, 'Is there any roadmap for the block editor on the single product?' There has been a lot of... So, I guess the block... There's two ways you could understand this question. One is kind of using the new interface, what we call data forms as the interface for the product editor, which is one experience and that replaces the whole experience of the product editor. Uh, and the other one is the block editor existing as a way to update the product description, which the way I read that question is more in line with that.
J
James Kemp42:37
Um, yeah, I think so. Like creating multi-column layouts with blocks and things like that for the product page instead of just the template-based layout we're used to. Yeah, and I would say there's no official roadmap, but it's something that for me is high priority to dig into like that experience of using the editor to customize your product pages. Um, is just awesome. Like it's much more flexible and impressive than, you know, a standard text editor. Um, Matt, I don't know if you had any thoughts on that.
M
Matt Mullenweg43:11
That sounds good. I apologize. I am not the like biggest WooCommerce expert in the world, which is funny. I'm... Thank you for having me on your show. Um, I think about it a lot more from the sort of like broader ecosystem and the strategy and those sort of things I can speak to probably a little more or like the future of like development and computing and those sorts of things. But for a specific like question like that, I think James is a much better person to answer or Bo if he was here.
K
Katie Keith43:41
Yeah, agreed. There was quite a lot of questions that were really specific that when we went through them, we thought actually we've got James, the core product manager as a host. We don't need... whereas for this interview, we wanted to go high-level and talk about the wider vision and the future, bigger picture stuff. So, that's what we were expecting. And sorry about that for the audience. But you know, there are James or like other guests I think to do some more of those like super deep dives. So, think of this as like the appetizer for Do the Woo. Tune in for future episodes to go much, much deeper.
M
Matt Mullenweg44:18
Yeah, I think it's just, you know, really great to hear what you envision e-commerce or WooCommerce could be. So, I think we've touched on that quite a lot, which is good.
I see a few questions coming about UCP, so I'll speak to that. And someone's like, 'When is part of the announcement or whatever that is?' Um, oh, there we go. Yeah, any update on UCP, which just Google recently launched? How will WooCommerce move forwards with this? So, I mean, without speaking specifically to UCP, I will say that it is funny given how much bigger and more money they have that Shopify is kind of scared of WooCommerce. So, often they will negotiate to be sort of an exclusive day of launch announcement. If you notice with like the Stripe stuff, I mean, we were there on day one, but it didn't get announced a few days later. Um, or if they just negotiate to like for us to find out about when everyone else does, like you know, it'll come really quickly. So, um, don't worry about that. It'll all be supported. Uh, the second thing I'll say though is that, um, and there was an article in the Information about this a few days ago is that these things are not being used at all. It's very telling that almost a year after some of the stuff was first announced, um, there have been almost no one talking about how many transactions have gone through this. And it was like a headline feature like the Stripe conference and the Shopify thing and all this sort of stuff. The CEOs are there, and it's moving the stock prices and like so, it's very interesting. This happens in software kind of frequently is occasionally there's something that everyone's like, 'Oh, that is the best idea ever in the world.' And it gets a ton of hype and a ton of everything. And then once it kind of lands in the world, users are like, 'Mhm, nope, doesn't fit or there's something missing.' Now, I'm not saying that it's in the commerce 10 years from now won't be like a double-digit percentage of commerce or something like, you know, that we'll probably figure this out. But it might also be, you know, the Google Glass or, you know, one of these things where you can put a bajillion dollars into and it seems like the coolest idea, but like when it meets the reality of real world, there's something about it that just kind of like doesn't make it gel.
K
Katie Keith46:37
Yeah, I agree. There's some barriers that are going to put people off. Um, things like buying in AI, well, how about buying multiple things in order to get free shipping? Just having one product recommended isn't that relevant. James and I discussed this in the Q&A at e-commerce day that there's a few things that need to really change about the nature of people shopping before it gets that widespread adoption. And in the Information article, I found it very fascinating because with Woo, you know, some of this stuff is a little tricky to support and because we don't host every Woo store in the world. So providing like a universal catalog for every Woo product in the world is like kind of jerky. I mean, there's ways to do it. Uh, I certainly if they sync with Jetpack or if we build some sort of crawler or opt-in thing like we can centralize some stuff. But um, it turns out even Shopify, who I would assume this was much easier for, has huge data issues. And it's because people run their stores in different ways. They might say something is in stock when it's really not. Or there might be different shipping variations or there might be, you know, there's just different ways that people show product variations when they might not exist or you know, there's all sorts of stuff out there that apparently even for Shopify, which host and has all the data, you know, it's all on their servers, um, sort of normalizing it in a way that's accessible to the users in a way that's also useful and accurate and true inside the chat interface has been a bigger challenge than certainly I would have imagined. So, that's been something surprising to me as well. The Information is like a paid site, but maybe someone can like actually... someone should... I'm surprised a WordPress news site hasn't covered this yet. So, maybe request for a blog post for someone to summarize some of the stuff from that Information article and yeah.
J
James Kemp48:26
Yeah, I think another point to consider is just how quickly AI is evolving. To kind of set a standard protocol now is challenging, but you know, a worthy exploration for sure. Um, but yeah, our teams are digging into both ACP and UCP. Um, and I'm sure if you keep an eye on the developer blog that we will have some information about that very soon.
M
Matt Mullenweg48:56
If I had to make a bet, um, well, I guess I will. A prediction. It's the amount of commerce that'll happen from people just in a chat interface versus the amount of commerce that will happen from AI agents driving browsers. And so, using the normal website, the normal human interface, but some of that might be more like the autofill might be better with AI or finding the product or navigating the site. Like those sorts of things. Maybe even discovery of the product might be driven by the AI. That second part will be way, way, way bigger.
K
Katie Keith49:39
Yeah. Discovery's an interesting one because I always use AI now to recommend products to me. Um, but it's still not great. So, I use Claude most of the time and it's still not great at actually providing a link to the product on any specific store. So, it will say like, you know, you want this product and it would just be the name of the product and then I have to go and search for it.
M
Matt Mullenweg50:02
I would say Anthropic is the worst at that actually. Uh, but AI Perplexity and Gemini Google have gotten really, really good at linking to sites.
J
James Kemp50:12
Yeah, and I think we'll see that evolve over time, but yeah, a part of that experience is like reading the reviews yourself. Um, and like Katie was saying, you know, comparing free shipping costs and getting discount codes and all that kind of stuff. Um, so, yeah, it's definitely a challenge, but something I'm looking forward to seeing how that shapes up this year and I think it's going to shape up pretty quickly at the rate things are going.
K
Katie Keith50:41
Um, we have a question which I'm not sure if you'll be able to answer. Uh, from Tommy on X, he says, are there any plans to bring back Woo Express? Uh, it was an easy way to onboard less technical clients that don't know what hosting, etc. are, but still want the flexibility of Woo and the scalability of wordpress.com.
M
Matt Mullenweg51:02
Oh. What I will say is that, you know, just like every other WordPress host in the world, um, on wordpress.com we're making a ton of investment into sort of making things easier and that onboarding. Um, you know, one thing people don't realize is now every paid plan on wordpress.com supports full plugins and themes. So, even the four buck a month one, um, you get the full wordpress.com's scalability, the platform of WP Cloud, um, on every single paid plan. So, there's not the two tiers of paid plans anymore. So, which kind of puts us in a similar category to every other web host in the world, right? You pay for it, you get full WordPress. Um, now that capability and our, you know, sort of the very, very deep technical investments we've made that done to make that scalable, um, performance, secure, everything. Um, like wordpress.com sites basically never get hacked. You know, you don't have to worry about security in the same way that you might on a host that does not invest as much in the security. Um, those sorts of things are available and we're very much thinking about tailored experiences. By the way, not just for WooCommerce, but also other plugins. So, other plugins, um, that all the other e-commerce plugins in the WordPress community or anything. On wordpress.com, I want it to be kind of one-click easy. And in fact, just you know how there's blueprints for playgrounds, where you can kind of like pre-configure something. Um, I think we're going to start to see that become more, you know, common in like kind of pre-configuring a hosting setup as well.
K
Katie Keith52:52
Yeah, so you're kind of saying it's not really needed because things have moved on more generally with wordpress.com and the different options and so on.
M
Matt Mullenweg53:00
Well, and no, I think it's something like it still might be needed. I mean, so Woo Express, whether that's needed... Oh yeah, well, so take at the scalability and everything, you don't need it anymore. Um, scalability, security, upgrades, everything. Uh, the onboarding experience, I think, could definitely still be very much improved. So, that's something I still do think is needed. So.
J
James Kemp53:23
Yeah. And it was touched on in Porto, having WooCommerce installed in WordPress is very much like you have a plugin installed. WordPress is the main site and you have this kind of e-commerce section. Uh, and I think what something like Woo Express offered was a flip of that where you've got this e-commerce admin experience versus a WordPress with e-commerce. Um, so I do feel like that side of things is needed and I think that'll be interesting to see.
K
Katie Keith53:55
And when you put it like that, I almost feel like it should just be a setting in the plugin, right?
M
Matt Mullenweg54:00
Well, yeah, that's been discussed. Well, wait. Well, it was a minor thing. For some things, some sites it's a whole thing. And in which case I know there's... it is tricky because a lot of plugins fight for real estate in the sort of navigation, the sort of standard Chrome of WordPress. Um, but I think with user control again, you know, it might be aggressive to do this by default or something. Um, in the plugin, but like, you know, having it be like so people know what they're doing, they can switch it on and off and like, you know, um, for a plugin with the sort of surface area of Woo, um, you know, certainly putting things at top level navigation, I think is okay.
K
Katie Keith54:41
Mhm. You can have a few things there. And two, you can imagine something where it does become a bit more primary. Now, that said, I'd say like don't completely hide the WordPress stuff. People still are going to have pages and blogs and everything like that and it's nice to have the dashboard where they see the news and you can involve the community and all that sort of stuff.
M
Matt Mullenweg55:00
Yeah, so.
K
Katie Keith55:01
Cool. I think we're coming up on time. So, how would you like to wrap it up? Um, let's wrap it up with one more question about the future, which feels like a good ending. So, let's go to Robin's question, which is long-term, what does WooCommerce look like in 3 plus years?
M
Matt Mullenweg55:22
Oh. Um, so things I'm certain of. It'll be faster. We're going to turn our investments into performance. Um, updates will be seamless. Uh, I deal with a lot of things in the world, so despite people's perceptions of me, it actually takes a lot to get me like truly riled up. But the one thing that will do that without fail is when an update breaks a site. To me, that is the worst thing you could ever do as software. It makes me furious. It like is totally unacceptable, and it needs to happen zero times. And it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. And um, I think not just Woo, but every WordPress plugin developer has a responsibility to really put in the work to make updates as seamless as possible. Otherwise, once you lose that trust in updates, it's gone. So, I'll say that updates will be frequent and seamless. Um, and the interface will be much, much more modern in the sense that it'll feel a lot more like a sort of modern app. Um, and by the way, WordPress is going to evolve alongside that. So, we're doing some fun stuff to sort of spruce up the WordPress admin a bit as well. And so, Woo will both benefit from that, and I think build on top of it as well.
K
Katie Keith56:50
Awesome. The update point is very relevant. Um, do you feel like that's something that needs to happen at the plugin level or at the WordPress/hosting level as well?
M
Matt Mullenweg57:05
Hm, that's a good question. Um, I think there's work at every level. It's sort of like a defense in depth. This is the idea in security. Like, you don't just want one layer of security. You want multiple things because one of them's probably going to fail inevitably. So, then you have all these other layers in place that still make sure the bad thing doesn't happen, the fatal thing doesn't happen. Um, so I do really appreciate at the hosting level, you know, the investments people make and so auto rollbacks or some even do it like with visual testing on the front end and stuff like that. And of course, providing an ability for users to do that on demand is that sort of undo button. Beautiful. Uh, that's very important. Um, as a last resort, I think that the other important thing, and this is also getting easier with AI, is testing and sort of like having a great beta program, getting things out there in the world, uh, doing automated testing on various, you know, since you can get telemetry or feedback from users on what the most common things they use WooCommerce with or your plugin with is. Like how are you testing that? If you're a developer, are you testing the beta versions of both WordPress and WooCommerce? So finding any changes that might either you need to update for or that maybe, you know, the core platform needs to be informed that they messed something up because they missed some edge case or some API you were using. So that it is going to take a village, but we've done it with WordPress. Um, you know, now for, you know, knocking on wood, but for many years we've had many, many, many years of a very smooth update process. And you know, for also hundreds of millions or billions of times now for plugins and themes as well. Um, but of course, core has become, I think rightly so, very trusted top grades. So.
K
Katie Keith59:02
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on and also thanks to everybody who submitted questions. I really appreciate it and congrats on this new format, new show, everything. Um, I will definitely be a listener and watcher and can't wait to see what y'all do.
M
Matt Mullenweg59:20
Amazing. Thank you. Next month we have James LePage joining us. Uh, we're going to be talking about how, well, the title is AI meets Woo and how AI is already reshaping e-commerce. So, pop that in your calendar. It's on Tuesday the 10th of February at the same time, no? An hour earlier. It's an hour before. ET and 5:00 p.m. CET. Uh, and hopefully, there won't be any technical issues on that one. Yeah, we'll be experts by then. And after that, James and I will be back every month to discuss a different area of WooCommerce. So, please subscribe. This is a new podcast. All our accounts are new. So, even if you subscribe to Open Channels, you also need to subscribe to Do the Woo. So, subscribe at dothewoo.com. Um, and that's where you've got all the links to the different places where you can watch or listen. Thanks for watching. Bye.
K
Katie Keith1:00:14
Thank you.