Thoughts

At a recent product team meetup for WooCommerce I remembered one of the first ‘ideas’ I had after joining Automattic as part of the WooThemes acquisition in 2015. After joining I was intrigued by all the different products Automattic had within the company, but found myself wondering if there was not a way that all these products could work together to create a unique product experience and vision.

I shared this vision at the 2015 Grand Meetup (a time where the entire company came together for a week in a chosen location) as my flash talk and actually found the notes for it in Simple Note (interestingly enough) when looking for it during that meetup – and thought I’d share it here again for posterity.

It was written as if someone was recounting their experience to someone else:

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I had so many ideas.

I just needed a way to keep track of them all.

I decided to install this note taking app I’d heard everyone talking about. (Simplenote).

It offered such a clean and simple interface – it was all I needed to help me keep track of my ideas and thoughts. I found I could use it anywhere and anytime, it magically synced everything seamlessly between my phone and my computer. It kept all my information safe, secure and private. (VaultPress).

I found it made it so easy to start capturing and storing my ideas, when all I had at that stage were lots of ideas and I just needed a way of capturing them for future reference. For a good few years all I did with the app was take notes as well as store and share photos and links with friends (Cloudup).

Later, after much prompting from friends and family, I decided that some of the ideas I was storing in that little app would be much better shared with the world.

So I decided to find my voice, vocalise my ideas and share them with the world (.blog). With just a simple swipe I was able to take one of my favourite ‘ideas’, converted it into a draft ‘post’ and had started my my own place on the internet (WordPress.com).

With what felt like just a “tap of a button” I had published that idea, and now it was out there – for the world to read!

A few weeks later I received a notification on my mobile phone – an alert that traffic to that post I had published had been unusually high! Apparently my article had been shared on some ‘feed’ (Reader) that curated the best articles of the week I think, and it now been shared all over the internet!

That idea was no longer just ‘my’ idea! I ended up spending most of that morning looking through various stats and insights (Jetpack) that gave me some clarity on just where all that traffic had come from and where my idea had been shared and I quickly start engaging with all the feedback via the comments (Akismet).

After fair amount of time and effort, that first post had now become the spark for a thriving blog and community and I was starting to think – where to from here – what’s next? I had seen a lot of people were getting into ecommerce and setting up their own stores online – but the idea of creating an online store was intimidating – the time and money needed, added to the uncertainty of success – that was just scary!

But, what if I could simply add a product to my existing blog – and start selling to the loyal following I had already spent all this time creating?

To get started I took five of my most popular ‘posts’ and created a poll (Crowdsignal) which I sent out to my readers to get a better idea of what product might resonate with them – it did not take long and the answers came in. There was interest. There was potential to take this further. It was time to started selling!

Instead of writing a new post now though I chose to add a product to my blog. After uploading a photo, adding a product description, setting a price and some basic shipping details I was ready to start selling (Payments Block). The best thing about it was that I never had to worry about ‘what was happening in the background’ it just worked.

I kept adding products to my site and sales kept growing as did the demand for new products. I started to realise that the future of my business lay in adding a fully-fledged online store (WooCommerce) to my blog and to start offering more complex features like earning recurring revenue through creating subscription based products and started putting a bigger emphasis into optimising my site and customer experience to take my business to the next level.

Now, several years later, I am the owner of a very succcesful company with multiple employees. I still struggle to believe where it all started – with that simple ‘app’. I am now considered a VIP customer apparently (WordPress VIP) – which gives me access to a team that have come alongside me to help me grow and scale my business to meet the continuously changing demands of my customers and stay ahead of my competitors. All this would not have been possible without that app it feels – it just worked, automatically.

Imagine it.

It’s Automattic.

Now in 2024, I feel that vision could be quite different with the additional products Automattic now owns, and if anything, it could be even more compelling. I do acknowledge that this is just ‘one’ way someone could encounter all these products, and that they could well exist independently. To me though, there was something powerful about a product like this, if it could be pulled off of course!

It was interesting to note recently that Fast.co closed a $102 million Series B. As that TechCrunch article goes on to share:

In the “last month we’ve seen $927 million — at least — flow into startups with overlapping ecommerce infrastructure market targets.

TechCrunch

That’s a pretty significant amount of investment into a relatively ‘new’ space — but obviously COVID has also increased the amount of people shopping online — and the need to solve this problem is one of growing importance and opportunity which a few companies are clearly looking to take advantage.

Personally I look forward to see how these products grow and how they plan to differentiate themselves from each other — as having one or two solutions in this space will make things easier as a shopper — but getting presented with multiple options might only serve to create additional friction during the already friction-filled checkout process.

Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Elves, Christmas Jumpers – as we run into the end of 2019 I had a moment the other day where I wondered – where will it all stop?

Where will the commercialisation of everything actually stop? I can imagine a day in the not too distant future where there will be a major sales event attached to at least every day of the week.

I know in a good few countries it is almost possible to sometimes find local events tied to every day of the week – but I can see, due to the continued success of international events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, new sales events emerging that target every day of the week – all in an effort to close more sales and make more money.

As of today, December 10th, Creative Market increased the commission they take on each sale from 30% to 40% – yes that’s a 33% increase.

They announced this change to shop owners in an email a few weeks back and it created a lot of discussion on the Creative Market community forums amongst shop owners. As you can imagine – most were not happy at all.

This change from Creative Market comes on the back of a few different things they have been trying over the last while, one of which was the equally contentious Certified Products Badge they launched and are interestingly ending with this commission increase. Here is a short quote from the email on this:

Effective December 10th, Creative Market’s Commission will increase from 30% to 40%, and Certified products will no longer have a different Commission from non-Certified products. We’ve heard your concerns about Certified, and this change is the first step in improving the program. We know buyers love Certified, so in 2020 we will explore ways to maintain that trusted shopping experience for buyers, while ensuring Certified works for Shop Owners as well.

Now, to be clear, I have had a shop on Creative Market for a long time, I joined just after it launched in 2012 and released my first product in 2013 and even motivated my wife to start a shop of her own on Creative Market in 2015 (and she has seen the same impact on her store as what I describe below). I was a big fan of Creative Market and really believed that a marketplace that did the work to attract and build an audience in turn allowed shop owners to focus on what they were good at. But sadly, as of today, my opinion has changed.

Creative Market has always been a side project for me and as such I was more than happy to give 30% of my sales to Creative Market for the work they did in attracting customers to the marketplace who in turn found my products and bought them. Over the years I have had some months where my shop made really good money and then it ran on autopilot while maintaining a reasonably steady stream of sales.

However, then came 2019 and suddenly sales dropped – with no changes to the store or its products – sales just seemingly dropped overnight. Interestingly, when looking at the comments in the support forums around the commission increase – it appears my shop was not alone – many shop owners on Creative Market saw their sales have equally abrupt drops around the same time, and they have yet to recover.

You can see the sales below for 2019, steady growth in the first few months and then the cliff…with some slow recovery and then another cliff….

Interestingly, Creative Market launched a beta test of the Certified Product Badge in Mid Feb. What was also interesting was that in order to have your product certified you had to be willing to lose an additional 10% of your stores sales – so effectively the 40% they have now made standard in these changes – but now they doing away with that, and just making the 40% standard. 🤔

With all this said, as I mentioned earlier, fortunately our stores were not our main sources of revenue – it was just a fun side project – but for many other shop owners on Creative Market it was not. I always knew that ultimately, by selling on a marketplace, I was giving up a percentage of my sales and in so doing was also tied to the rules of the marketplace – but this change really hurts when it comes on the back of already decreasing sales.

In the future I will have second thoughts about using marketplaces and rather look to create my own site (after all I do work for WooCommerce now – lesson learnt) and rather use the 30% (or 40% in this case) of my sales to do my own marketing and build my own brand and customer base rather than rely on someone else to do this for me. Yes it will require more work and effort, but then at least I am not “renting” a place to sell my products and a customer base from someone else.

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To give you an alternate view to mine you can also read this post from a fellow Creative Market shop owner.

We are currently getting feedback on some new designs (using Lookback – a great product if you have not tried it) as part of the cart and checkout redesign I am working on for WooCommerce. During the sessions, in the final step, we ask the person testing the prototype to view what the new checkout page (which they have just made changes to) would look like for their customers on ‘their’ live site. Simple enough right?

Well, considering this is a prototype of static design files (using Figma) – and the person testing it is not actually testing it on their live site – it’s obvious that they are not going to actually get to see what the new checkout literally looks like on their own site – so for the sake of the prototype and tests it would have been easiest to just insert a ‘generic’ logo in the header of the ‘prototype’ site and expect the person testing it to imagine they looking at their own site right? Maybe.

As we began the first session I thought – what if I tried to create a small moment of delight during the test (beyond the new designs obviously 😆 ), and take it from being ‘just another test’ to something a little different.

So, while the first test was running I quickly went to the url of the person’s existing site and copied their logo across to the prototype (which automatically updates, thanks Figma!) so by the time they got to the last step – when they opened the ‘live preview’ – the first thing they saw was their own logo – in the prototype. The very first comment as they opened that screen was:

Oh, there’s my logo!

Which was followed by a big smile. Win!

Needless to say, on every test thereafter it got nothing less than an immediate smile and in one case a series of questions on how did we actually manage to do that in a prototype and an acknowledgement of how something so seemingly small created a moment of delight for them.

So – don’t stop at good enough, push for moments of delight – even in your prototypes if possible.

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