Ecommerce World, WooCommerce

WooCommerce

• Giovanni Cappellini (@quacos)

The web and me

• Born in 1982

• One man digital agency

• Sysadmin by incident

• Currently in love with web marketing

Ecommerce and me

• In 2005 I created an object-oriented ecommerce platform with PHP

• 6 months of development to manage 10k products, with their discounts

Ecommerce and me

• Almost 10 years of production

• Maybe one of the first implementation of AJAX backend in Italy (thanks @antirez)

Ecommerce and me

• Hardcoded VAT: I thought that it was not going to change, but it changed

• Payment gateway: I thought that it was going to change, but it didn't change

WordPress

• “People doesn’t use tools like joomla or wordpress because they’re free as in freedom, but because they’re gratis.”

• “Wordpress leads the cheap web because it comes with thousand of free (beers) plugins you (or your webmaster) can click-install.”

The cheap web era

• “In the market of lemons (the cheap web) end users are not able to understand security and anyway it would be too much expensive for them to implement”

• “Programmers developed the habit of patching the source code in a huge spaghetti code mix of contents and presentation stuff.”

Jigoshop

• In 2011, Jigowatt Ltd creates Jigoshop, “A WordPress eCommerce plugin that works”

• Jigoshop actually works, and can be expanded to do more, too.

Jigoshop

• Woothemes falls in love with Jigoshop, but daddy doesn't allow them to marry

• So Woothemes hires Mike Jolley and Jay Koster to create a fork

Mike Jolley (@mikejolley)

James “Jay” Koster (@jameskoster)

The fork

Jigoshop

WooCommerce

• The world's favorite eCommerce solution that gives you complete control to sell anything. Get started today for free.

• P.S. WooThemes now belongs to Automattic, the corporation behind WordPress.

WordPress

• You have to know the basic concepts of WordPress, aka pages, themes and plugins

• You will have to deal with “WordPress famous 5 minutes installation”

Technologies

• The classical LAMP stack we love to hate, also with tons of jQuery scripts

• The software is smart enough to suggest you server adjustments

System status

System status

The wizard

● The wizard takes you through all steps necessary to set up your store and be ready to accept payment.

● They really want to make it easy. Look mum, no developer!

The theme

● Storefront is the “official theme”. Mainly used when you have to exclude theme issues.

● Many themes are free. Premium ones sold at roughly 60$ on ThemeForest by Envato.

Features

● Lots of “hooks” to customize everything● The best mileage the poor man can achieve● But you can monitor your store with an iOS app

The bad parts

● Conflicts between theme and a plugin, or between a plugin and another plugin

● Many users around imply security issues: updating is quite easy (you didn't change core files, right?).

Extensions

• There is a plugin for that

• Free plugins are available at wordpress.org

• Premium plugins are available at CodeCanyon by Envato

Production

• You simply install WooCommerce, themes and plugins through WordPress

• 128M ought to be enough for anybody

• WooCommerce and W3 Total Cache play nice together

Use cases

• The Spectator Shop

• Muraro Vini

Links

• https://it.wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/

• https://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/

• http://www.rubbo.li/post/2015/12/the_era_of_the_cheap_web/