Good and bad parts of the leading ecommerce platform

1. WooCommerce
• Giovanni Cappellini (@quacos)

2. The web and me
• Born in 1982
• One man digital agency
• Sysadmin by incident
• Currently in love with web marketing

4. 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

5. Ecommerce and me
• Almost 10 years of production
• Maybe one of the first implementation of AJAX
backend in Italy (thanks @antirez)

7. 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

8. 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.”

9. 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.”

10. Jigoshop
• In 2011, Jigowatt Ltd creates Jigoshop, “A
WordPress eCommerce plugin that works”
• Jigoshop actually works, and can be expanded to do
more, too.

12. 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

13. Mike Jolley (@mikejolley)

14. James “Jay” Koster (@jameskoster)

15. The fork

16. Jigoshop

17. 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.

18. 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”

19. 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

20. System status

21. System status

22. 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!

29. 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.

30. 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

33. 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?).

35. Extensions
• There is a plugin for that
• Free plugins are available at wordpress.org
• Premium plugins are available at CodeCanyon by
Envato

36. 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

37. Use cases
• The Spectator Shop
• Muraro Vini

40. Links
• https://it.wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/
• https://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
• http://www.rubbo.li/post/2015/12/the_era_of_the_ch
eap_web/