Welcome to another episode of “Do the Woo,” where we get deep into all things WooCommerce. In this episode, James Kemp and Katie Keith are joined by Roslyn Lavery, General Manager of the WooCommerce Marketplace, and Ian Misner, General Manager at Kestrel.

Together, they look at the ins and outs of the WooCommerce Marketplace. From what it is, who it serves, and how it’s evolving, to the challenges and opportunities it presents for merchants and developers alike. Whether you’re a seasoned extension developer, an agency building for clients, or simply curious about the growing ecosystem around WooCommerce, this conversation offers valuable insights into discoverability, quality standards, and the future of plugin development in an AI-powered world. Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at the Woo Marketplace and hear first-hand experiences from those building and selling within it.

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Takeaways

• Marketplace Serves Multiple Audiences: The WooCommerce Marketplace is designed to serve both merchants, by providing a curated selection of themes, extensions, and business services, and sellers, by giving them a platform to reach WooCommerce store owners. Rosalind emphasized the multifaceted nature of the marketplace and its evolution from Woo-owned extensions to a broader ecosystem with many business models and third-party products 02:01, 05:49.
• Discoverability is Crucial: Both Ian and Katie highlighted the importance of product discoverability within the marketplace and via the WordPress admin. Improved search, in-app surface, and combined plugin search would benefit both merchants seeking solutions and sellers looking for new customers 09:28, 14:01.
• Trust and Quality Matter: The marketplace’s strength lies in its authority and trustworthiness for buyers. This is being reinforced through initiatives like the new Woo Excellence badge, which recognizes consistently high-quality products based on code quality, support, and customer satisfaction. Rosalind mentioned this badge will soon be merchant-facing 28:23.
• Support Structure and Customer Relationships: Selling on the marketplace provides sellers with some relief from handling billing and account support, as WooCommerce manages these aspects. However, a drawback noted by Ian was the limited direct relationship with end customers, making it harder to gather meaningful product feedback or cross-sell 43:21.
• Marketplace Entry is More Selective: Entry requirements for new vendors and SaaS products have become more stringent due to the need for quality control in an era of fast, AI-generated code. Rosalind explained there’s now a two-step onboarding process and more emphasis on business value and code quality 46:22.
• Healthy Competition but Need for Differentiation: While competition is encouraged, new extensions must demonstrate a unique value or serve an existing user base rather than duplicating what’s already there. Rosalind underlined that simple duplication without differentiation generally leads to rejection 54:53.
• Open Ecosystem Has Benefits and Challenges: The open nature of WooCommerce allows non-exclusive selling and broader extension availability, unlike closed systems like Shopify. This increases choice but also fragmentation, requiring the marketplace to balance curation and openness for the benefit of all stakeholders 21:35.
• Changing Business Models with AI: Small, single-feature extensions may become less viable as merchants increasingly turn to AI-generated code for custom solutions. Rosalind, James, and Ian agreed that while large, complex solutions will remain valuable, there will be pressure for business models to evolve (potentially towards usage-based pricing) as code becomes commoditized 58:03.
• Interoperability and Compatibility Still Developing: There are ongoing efforts to improve interoperability between extensions on the marketplace, such as with test packages and QIT. However, true compatibility (ensuring extensions work well together) is not fully automated and still relies heavily on vendor effort 01:46:37.
• Continuous Improvement in Support and Feedback Loops: All participants agreed that collecting more actionable feedback from merchants, improving feature request visibility, and providing vendors with better analytics about product discovery would help make marketplace products better and more responsive to user needs 52:28.

Questions Asked in this Episode

Q: What are the main benefits for developers selling extensions on the WooCommerce Marketplace compared to selling directly?
A: The WooCommerce Marketplace provides built-in discoverability, a trusted platform for buyers, and handles billing and account support, which reduces workload for developers. While developers are less connected to their end customers, the marketplace can be especially advantageous for small teams or new vendors seeking credibility and reach.

Q: How does the Woo Excellence badge work in the WooCommerce Marketplace and what does it signify?
A: The Woo Excellence badge is awarded to extensions that meet a combination of code quality and merchant-focused criteria, such as product ratings and customer satisfaction scores. This badge helps customers identify high-quality, well-maintained products and will be surfaced more prominently to build trust and highlight top extensions.

Q: What challenges do sellers face when listing products on the WooCommerce Marketplace?
A: Sellers often face a vetting process that checks for product quality, business model viability, and differentiation from existing extensions, which can lead to longer wait times and higher rejection rates. Additionally, developers need to market their products actively, as simply being listed does not guarantee sales due to the competitive and curated nature of the marketplace.

Q: How does discoverability for extensions work within WooCommerce and WordPress, and what improvements are needed?
A: Discoverability currently relies on Marketplace search, in-app recommendations, and category filters, with many merchants searching for brands or categories. However, several guests noted that a more integrated and visible search experience—especially combining free and paid options within the WordPress admin—would help merchants and motivate more developers to list on the marketplace.

Q: What is the WooCommerce Marketplace’s approach to duplicate or competing extensions?
A: The marketplace requires new competing extensions to demonstrate differentiated features or have an established user base; identical or “me too” plugins without unique value are typically rejected. The goal is to provide variety for merchants without overwhelming them with redundant options, maintaining a focus on quality and relevance.

Q: How does the rise of AI and automated code generation impact the plugin business on WooCommerce?
A: The conversation acknowledged that simple, single-use plugins may become less viable as AI enables merchants to generate code for small features on demand. However, complex, mission-critical solutions—like memberships or subscriptions—will likely continue to be developed and supported by specialized teams, as ongoing support and reliability remain crucial.

Q: What kind of support do vendors give up or gain when selling through the WooCommerce Marketplace?
A: Vendors sacrifice direct customer relationships—such as the ability to cross-sell or engage for reviews—but they gain from WooCommerce handling a significant portion of billing and account queries, reducing their support load. Communication with end users is mostly limited to support tickets and reviews, which can make gathering customer feedback for improvements more challenging.

Q: How does WooCommerce ensure extension quality and compatibility within the marketplace ecosystem?
A: WooCommerce uses a combination of code checks, support and satisfaction metrics, and minimum update cadence requirements to maintain quality. For compatibility, mechanisms like test packages and QIT (Quality Insights Toolkit) are being developed, but full interoperability—especially with third-party integrations—remains a complex and evolving challenge.

Audio Timestamps

• 00:00 WooCommerce themes and extensions overview
• 06:40 Growth of marketplace platform
• 11:52 Tailoring agency solutions for merchants
• 18:17 Trust and benefits of WooCommerce
• 23:56 Challenges of WooCommerce Marketplace
• 29:15 Balancing marketplace quality and relevance
• 36:19 Keeping plugins up-to-date
• 41:25 Adjustments to product ranking system
• 44:08 Support and distribution with Woo
• 48:08 Adjusting product and business model
• 58:03 Future of Plugins with AI
• 01:00:46 Future of WordPress and WooCommerce Extensions
• 01:06:37 Addressing plugin compatibility challenges

Mentioned Links

WooCommerce Marketplace – Official marketplace for WooCommerce extensions, themes, and services.
https://woocommerce.com/products/

WordPress.org Plugin Repository – Source for thousands of free WordPress and WooCommerce plugins.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/

WooCommerce Marketplace Slack Channel – Community and support channel for WooCommerce vendors and developers.
https://woocommerce.com/community-slack/

Kestrel Vendor Page on WooCommerce – Kestrel’s official marketplace presence and support contact.
https://woocommerce.com/vendor/kestrel/

LinkedIn – Find Roslyn Lavery for professional connections.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roslynlavery/

X – Follow Ian Misner for WooCommerce and product updates.
https://x.com/ianmisner

SkyVerge – Vendor mentioned as a trusted WooCommerce extension provider.
https://skyverge.com/

WooCommerce Docs: Quality Insights Toolkit (QIT) – Tool for quality checking extensions in the WooCommerce Marketplace.
https://woocommerce.com/document/quality-insights-toolkit/

Transcript

Episode Transcript

Katie Keith:
Hello and welcome to Do the Woo, the podcast where we talk about all things WooCommerce.

James Kemp:
I’ll go first. I’m James Kemp, uh, and I’m the core product manager for WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
And I’m Katie Keith, the, um, founder and CEO at Bantu.

James Kemp:
Uh, today we’re gonna talk about the WooCommerce marketplace. Um, we’re gonna try and talk about it from both sides of the, uh, equation, so whether you’re building products for the marketplace, I think this will be a valuable conversation to listen to, but also to get a deeper understanding from behind the scenes of how the marketplace runs. And, you know, potentially like gaps in the market and things like that. So I think it’ll be a very interesting conversation. And before we dive in, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel on youtube.com/dothewoopodcast. You can follow us on X @DoTheWoo, and you can find that and some previous episodes and other links on dothewoo.com.

Katie Keith:
Yep. And now let’s get into the topic. So to discuss the Woo Marketplace, we’ve invited 2 guests, Rosalind, General Manager of the Woo Marketplace, and Ian, who is the General Manager at Kestrel and sells on the Marketplace. Hey to both of you, and thanks for coming on.

Roslyn Lavery:
Hello. Good to see you both. Well, everyone, I guess.

Katie Keith:
Rosalind, do you want to—

James Kemp:
Not me. Yeah, no, not Ian. Just me and Katie.

Roslyn Lavery:
Never.

James Kemp:
Rosalind, do you want to introduce yourself and give a bit of an overview of what your day-to-day looks like?

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, sure. And thanks, first of all, for inviting me to join. This is a fun experience, and I’m actually looking forward to the discussion as much as contributing to it.

James Kemp:
You just got back from sabbatical, right?

Roslyn Lavery:
Exactly, exactly. So, you’ll have to forgive me if I need a little bit of catch-up on my own things. But I think that, you know, the fundamentals are always the same. So, yeah, so I’m GM of the Marketplace. And really, I see that more as a role or a function rather than, like, an org structure position or anything like that. We’re a team of people that is constructed from various different areas of the organization. And broadly, our goal is to deliver the marketplace features, think about the strategy around how we want to approach that, how we engage with the ecosystem, as well as how we support the internal structures for our own Woo-owned products and our partners that exist in the marketplace. So it’s quite a multifaceted area, and I think potentially more multifaceted than a lot of people might think. And that, yeah, so as we go through the conversation today, I’m sure some of that will come through as well. But my understanding is today we’re going to focus a little bit more heavily towards the side of the marketplace that is the paid extensions that exist in there, which is the sort of feature-based plugins that get added onto WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, no, it sounds like an interesting role. So So Ian, could you tell us a bit about Kestrel, the products you have, and how long you guys have been selling on the Marketplace, which I know actually goes before Kestrel, doesn’t it?

Ian Misner:
Yeah, the how long is a weird question because as Kestrel, we’ve only been doing it about 2 or 3 years. But I mean, in some form or another, our team’s been selling on the Marketplace for like, I don’t know, like at least 10 or 12 years at this point.

James Kemp:
I don’t—

Ian Misner:
I should probably know these things. But yeah, we— Currently run about 40 listings on the Woo Marketplace. Um, and you know, to Rosalind’s point, the whole what’s a feature, what’s a product is one of the things that I’ve got in my notes about this. But yeah, the, um, catalog that we currently offer came largely through acquisitions. So, you know, like Coilab, Skybridge, some stuff in there, 99W, whole bunch of things that, you know, we’re helping build and maintain and continue to Push through the marketplace.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, perfect. 40 is a lot as well. That’s impressive.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, small team too. It’s 4 or 5 of us depending on how you count.

Katie Keith:
I know, you put me to shame with that because we often discuss team size, don’t we?

Ian Misner:
Yeah, I mean, the marketplace is one of the answers to that. We can get into that later, I’m sure.

Roslyn Lavery:
Oh, interesting.

Katie Keith:
So Rosalind, uh, let’s start by talking a bit about kind of what the marketplace is for, like, who is it built for? What sorts of products is it aimed at and things like that?

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, I touched on a little bit of, on, on that already potentially, but I think this is where things are maybe a little bit broader and complicated. But so we currently have 130 themes as well as extensions. So there’s 1,350 extensions currently listed. We also have 17 business services, which are not plugins, but are businesses that might be able to work with WooCommerce stores to help them grow in some way. And then within all of those, we also, and mostly the extensions, we also have Woo-owned products. We’ve got some products that are sold for a license fee, kind of the sort of standard model and a little bit more of what we’re going to be discussing today. And we also then have what are free extensions, but are more integrations into external services where the payment or the, the cost of the, the service sits outside of the WooCommerce environment.

James Kemp:
Which, Katie, you have one of those products, right? I think Satori is one of the first products that was added to the marketplace that kind of used that model where, okay, Satori has its own system behind the scenes for managing users, but the, uh, if a user comes via the marketplace, The transaction happens on the marketplace. Like the subscription exists on the marketplace.

Katie Keith:
I’d forgotten that I was a marketplace seller because of a product which was initially yours that is now half mine. But yeah. Um, but that applies to a lot of SaaS type products of which there are many on the Woo marketplace. Um, shipping and payment providers are other good examples that they might be much bigger services and then they have maybe a bridging plugin or something like that. or WooCommerce, and the marketplace is often a very logical place for them to be listed because of the official status of it.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, and I think over the years that we’ve had the marketplace, that side of the marketplace has actually grown a lot faster and a lot more, and it’s where we see more of the majority, or the majority of our orders tend to be on those kinds of things, which I think logically sort of makes sense as the platform grows. And as we build more into core and enable more features, which is great for merchants, and something that we need to do to ensure more stability and to ensure that it sort of caters for more types of users by default without the need of all of those plugins. But that is obviously always a tension in the market as well. Maybe one other thing slightly unrelated that’s also worth mentioning, just in the context of kind of what the marketplace is. The other thing as well that I think is worth understanding is, is that the marketplace is in some ways just the website. And I think that’s a lot of what we, we tend to— when we visualize what the marketplace is, we visualize the website that lists products that you can then buy and download and add to your store. We also then have an in-app experience of that marketplace that sits inside what we call So that’s a different sort of delivery mechanism. And then we also have the A4A market, the A4A program, which is the agency program. And some of those products then surface within that channel as well. So in some ways, it’s also the sort of backend infrastructure for some of the channels and where we actually serve those. And that would be .com as well, WordPress.com. And so there’s, it sort of serves a few different areas and we, as the marketplace are always kind of looking at how we balance between supply and demand. How do we make sure that we’re serving our merchants in the way that we need to? And also, how do we make sure that we’re servicing the sellers on the marketplace that are looking to grow and to exist in the ecosystem and build their business on?

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s interesting. You mentioned, you know, all of these different methods of distribution, which I think is Interesting. And I know there’s discussion that happens around how we can make the in-app experience a bit more contextual. So you don’t have to go to this, you know, marketplace page, find something that you might be looking for. But, you know, if you have it enabled, perhaps you get presented with options when you’re actually, you know, doing the task at hand. Which I think is a nice way to get third-party extensions in front of people as well that, you know, may be hard to— you may not realize you need until you see it.

Ian Misner:
Yeah. I mean, the marketplace does give us analytics on where, you know, just Google Analytics access to show where, you know, the actual traffic comes from. We don’t see where the actual purchases come from. But, uh, you know, you can actually see in the existing, the Woo Admin does have like the get more options on the product data. Most people don’t go there. No one’s really looking at it, but it drives a surprising amount of traffic to our various products actually. And that’s the, you know, when Katie mentions the team size difference, you know, we do rely on a lot of our smaller plugins here to get all of the discovery. Via these channels, and it’s it’s often not. I mean, the Woo domain has a lot of you know. You put a well-named listing on WooCommerce.com; you’re going to show up in Google. Pretty simple. But honestly, this other traffic from these other sources is one of the unique values that it brings that lets you have like really small, ultra-specific products. You know, like a connector for one little SaaS. that people only are searching for if they’re already using it, it makes it really easy to discover these sorts of things. And to your point, James, it’d be really nice if these were not quite so subtle, um, because they already are such a great tool. Uh, but I understand, you know, community pressure to not put it everywhere is a, is another aspect to consider, certainly.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I guess if it’s something you can turn on or off, um, So, if you’re a merchant setting up your own store, I don’t think you’re as concerned potentially about, you know, seeing these helpful apps that might help you achieve what you want to achieve. But if you’re building a store for someone where you already have a plan of what you’re gonna add, you know, what tools you use typically, then maybe it’s not as useful.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
Because it is advertising, essentially.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, and I think that’s always the sort of balance that we need to be achieving is it is some level of advertising. I also think that there’s value to merchants in understanding what is available, particularly in the current market when I think what is available changes so much. And figuring out that balance and understanding how the suggestions are less focused on marketing and more focused on use cases or benefits.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

Roslyn Lavery:
That’s really where we need to be leaning in more, I think. And I think there’s a lot more we can be doing there. But yeah, and I would also, I would also say that I think there is a— my understanding of some of the, the sort of signals that we see in our data is that agencies that build for, for merchants that are building sites for other people, I expect them to have a little bit more of a vertical focus. But in reality, that’s not really true. Actually, very often range of different types of businesses that they are building sites for tend to be quite broad. And then in actual fact, your stack, there are some fundamentals that you may choose like a very sort of limited set, but I think there’s often a need to be serving those bespoke needs. And in many ways, I see the, the plugin ecosystem as being particularly strong in serving those unique needs. As much as possible, we should have the less unique needs in core. That’s better for everyone. It’s better for the merchant. Yeah. So I think there still is space in that context. And this is where potentially sort of surfacing that in different ways, potentially in different channels through A4A or something similar like that is potentially the better way to do that. But I still think that there’s value in doing that.

Ian Misner:
Yeah. And I think that it might be not ideal that my stance on what the market, the question, what the marketplace is actually for is, you know, Rosalind, I hear you saying it’s for the merchants and for the sellers, but like, I personally think that leaning into it being for the merchants benefits all of us basically. And I think I’m supposed to take the other stance here, you know, being the person selling on the marketplace, but ultimately if Woo is better for more people, you know, if you’re putting everything in core that everyone needs, so you don’t have to pay. $29, $59, whatever for that, that’s great. Who cares? Ultimately, if you’re surfacing the user needs, it’s better for all of us. And, you know, we could be a little bit— I’m sure you hear a lot of feedback from people just getting started on the Marketplace that maybe differs from that though.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, I think that’s the right way to see it though. I think if you had to pick a hierarchy, it needs to be merchant first.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, and hopefully that benefits everybody. On the discoverability side of things, another thing I’d love to see would be discoverability via the Plugins, Add New, because of course WooCommerce is part of WordPress. And so it would be kind of a bit weird to have an extension. So maybe it’s already there, I can’t remember, within WooCommerce because it’s part of a WordPress site. So if WooCommerce is installed, then it should be part of the bigger whole. It is now an e-commerce site. I know there are some challenges with that, such as Matt Mullenweg not wanting paid extensions to be on there and so on. But, um, putting all of that to one side, I think that would be good because I think the marketplace needs to be doing everything they can to aid that discoverability, which, well, one, it benefits merchants because they get the features they need, but they also need to be benefiting these sellers, uh, to create that incentive to sell on the marketplace. Like one of a major reason that I don’t sell my, my plugins apart from Ceteri, which I’d forgotten about, um, on the marketplace is that I haven’t seen enough evidence as to the extent to which it would increase my sales to justify the work to go on the marketplace because we’ve been selling plugins for 10 years. We have very established marketing and all of that. So I, I kind of keep my eye open to look at what is the marketplace doing to aid that discoverability above what I can do myself and things like better discoverability in the WordPress admin, which I do not have for my plugins at the moment would be a good incentive.

James Kemp:
That makes sense. I think I’ve seen, I can’t remember who it was, but there was a plugin company that when it was activated, it kind of pushed all of their products to the top of the plugin list. I can’t recall which company it was. I shall name no names, but it was very much frowned upon. But I agree that there’s probably a way to integrate into that area. more thoroughly. Like, that’s where you’re trained as a WordPress user to go there if you want to install a new product. So it does make sense.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, the option of a combined search would be super helpful. There is a WooCommerce Marketplace tab on the Add Plugin list when you have it installed. I mean, I personally, as a user, have never clicked it there a single time though. Like, it’s very subtle and out of the way. If there was a way to do a combined search though, I think it does— like, I fully agree, Katie, that it would help the merchant as much as the seller as well, right?

Katie Keith:
Yeah. Well, there’s no difference from the merchant’s perspective because they don’t know if they want an extension from WooCommerce.com or a free— there are thousands of plugins with WooCommerce in the title and so on, on WordPress.org. So they don’t know where to look, do they?

Ian Misner:
And it creates a weird disjointed experience too, because you have stuff on .org that is for WooCommerce and you might find that, but then you get all this like pro upsell stuff anyways, where the real plugin, you have to go buy it. Whereas as a buyer, as a customer, I could just search and be presented with a paid option next to a free option. And, you know, that would just be a shorter, quicker, easier experience.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. We’ve got a comment from Simon Harper who says, as a buyer for clients/merchants, I see the marketplace as the place of authority. I think that is a really powerful argument, which I’m always aware of as somebody who doesn’t particularly use it, that Some people do see it as the one-stop shop for buying WooCommerce extensions. So by not selling on the marketplace, you are missing out on that opportunity.

Ian Misner:
I think it is a different kind of buyer a lot of the time. You’re going to catch the people that are doing their deep research with the way you sell, Katie. I think I’ve talked to you about this before though. It’s like, I don’t think you’d see much in the way of like cannibalization if you also listed on the marketplace. There is a pretty significant subset of buyers. that they’re going to WooCommerce to find what they need. And like, they’re not even really exploring beyond that. And it is, I sell off the marketplace and on the marketplace. And like, there is a weird amount of people will even discover us through our own website. And then when they find out it’s listed on the marketplace, they’d rather go buy it there instead.

Katie Keith:
Bad thing, isn’t it? Because you’ve got to give them 30%.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, but it’s also that, that the amount of those people that are discovering us just from the marketplace that we get for that. But then the ones that find us direct and then go buy on the marketplace, that trust is something that we are able to offer them, you know, via proxy from WooCommerce that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. And honestly, the low effort, just, yeah, go for it, go buy it there. And then, I mean, there’s other benefits I could get into why that doesn’t— the 30% is still worth it. I feel like I don’t want to be like the one pitching Woo here though. I think that’s what Asli’s doing. So I’m just like questioning, like, should I get mean all of a sudden? Like, what’s the— You know, but I think we should go pitch Woo.

Katie Keith:
Fine. What are the challenges? We’re a bit off script here, but nevermind.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, no, I mean, there is definitely a number of challenges too, but it’s like, the reality is that, that the buyer that’s finding— well, here, I’ll elaborate a little bit on the whole, we have the 40 extensions and a small team, right? A lot of those are things that we wouldn’t even really bother maintaining if it wasn’t for the discoverability through the Woo Marketplace. And I know that sounds bad or whatever, but honestly, there’s niche single-use features that as a product, building distribution would be a huge waste of time. Like why bother? But if it’s available through search on WooCommerce.com, then great. Then there’s a market for that. And I mean, the biggest risk we face there is that James decides it should be in core. Cool, whatever.

James Kemp:
You know what I mean?

Ian Misner:
Like that’s sort of the downside to that, but that’s going to happen with or without us selling via the marketplace. That’s irrelevant for us really. So now, as far as the actual downsides of the marketplace, there is like this, I think, misconception a lot of, you know, new people entering the marketplace have that Woo’s going to do a lot of work to push you forward or whatever. And to your point, like you do sell, you do pay out 30% for that. And, you know, you’re getting the brand, the trust, and all that, but like there’s, you still have to go push it. You still have to go market it. Because just relying on the, the occasional search isn’t going to do much. Uh, another reason we have 40 products instead of 10, right?

Katie Keith:
So.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it’s like we touched on earlier, like improving discoverability inside WooCommerce and WordPress would add to the, like hugely add to the benefits of selling in the marketplace. Um, I know when I sold on the marketplace, I, I always saw the 30% in the same way that I would see an affiliate’s commission. And, you know, like they’ve discovered it there.

Ian Misner:
I mean, one of the downsides for me on that 30% is I now anchor all of my marketing efforts to that number. So like if I’m running Google Ads and if it costs me more than 30%, I feel like I would’ve been cheaper on the marketplace. And like, that is not a mental model that helps much, frankly. But, you know.

Katie Keith:
30% is more than reasonable because of the affiliate comparison. That’s what we’ve always paid our affiliates. Also, So it’s reasonable given what it used to be. It used to be more like 70% and there were exclusivity clauses, which have gone now. It’s not as generous as Shopify’s where you can earn a million and then it’s 15%, but in the Woo space, it is generous. Um, we’ve got another perspective from Saimi.

Roslyn Lavery:
I can also add maybe a little bit to that sort of, and this kind of comes back a little bit to what the marketplace is. In the context, and if we’re comparing against Shopify and all of these things, a closed ecosystem versus an open ecosystem just is a different thing. It’s something that we need to navigate differently. And one of those differences is the fact that there is org. So there are ways and you can, you don’t have to be exclusive. And the marketplace sits on top of that. So the Woo marketplace is really much, it’s It’s meant to be a much more curated, finer set of things that comes with additional trust, that comes with additional quality measures that are incorporated into that so that we can add confidence choice to the merchants. And yes, that also includes some discovery and those kinds of things, but we also need to acknowledge that there is this ecosystem that we live on top of, and that does change the economics quite a lot as well. And there’s also that point of sort of contributing to the success and the growth of WooCommerce as a platform is partially contributing to extension sales that are on top of that. So we don’t require exclusivity, but my view is that unless we can actually join forces on a universal basis and get away from the the thinking that everything is about acquisition source, and that it is a bigger question than that. Things like trust, brand association, the connection to WooCommerce core, all of these things, those are not things that are specific to acquisition source. And I don’t think that anyone wins in a universe, it just creates fragmentation. And that’s, that’s a difficult one for us as well, because we also need to be delivering value against that. But, yeah, I think that’s maybe too many points at once. But I do think that this is kind of where, and it’s wonderful to hear Ian kind of helping us push some of these benefits. But, yeah, there’s always two sides to it. And I think that is the sort of the difficulty of managing in this ecosystem that we exist in.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a little bit messy because it’s like, you know, Woo is a commercial entity on an open source structure and all that, but that makes it, people sort of struggle with, you know, the two things can be true of it all, right? Which I think ultimately though, like, again, we wouldn’t spend our time pushing our marketplace extensions if we didn’t believe in, you know, helping the growth of Woo itself as well, right? And our teams made small contributions to Woo core. We do the, the things that we can to help drive things forward as often as we can. And I mean, the reality is that that 30%, again, it’s just discoverability, whatever. It isn’t as simple as just the transaction of just, you know, money in, sales come out. And again, I follow some of the public channels, you know, the Marketplace channel and the Woo Slack and all that. And like, there is definitely this, you know, people think they’re just jumping in to cash in or whatever vibe that you see at times. And I mean, ultimately, if you’re not helping Woo unlock a use case that they couldn’t do before, or you’re not making the customer experience better for a certain type of user, then like, why bother, basically? I think that’s, is that kind of the direction you were pushing there, Rosalind, or am I sort of off to the side on my own with that one?

Roslyn Lavery:
No, I think that, yeah, I think that makes sense. And it is, yeah, I would say it sort of supports a little bit of what I was saying, maybe in addition to, yeah.

Ian Misner:
Yeah. And I mean, there is one more point on that that I will say is that as the marketplace has expanded and opened up, and I mean, I’m guilty of this myself, but it’s, there’s not as much creativity coming out of it as you would almost like expect or hope for. You know, there’s a lot more, you know, me too extensions, things that, you know, there’s 5 ways to do something now instead of 2 ways or 1 way. And, you know, that’s great because then there’s open competition and the ecosystem can, you know, benefit from that. And that’s wonderful. But at the same time, like, we as product makers need to come in and, you know, a verticalized solution for something or, you know, a bigger, better way to solve a problem. And there’s just less of that than would be ideal, I think.

James Kemp:
Because like these are premium extensions, right? To collaborate on that.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the roles that we should be playing and, and sort of leaning in more to is. is that in some ways, I’m not sure if this is the best way to word it, but it’s kind of, I see our role as actually from an ecosystem perspective, reducing the number of plugins, not increasing it. And, but doing that with a lens of what is actually valuable to the customer and what are the right extensions. And that requires us to be more open, as you would say. So I think, Ian, speaking a little bit to, there are There are some histories to the marketplace that I think are maybe not relevant in terms of where we are now, but change, or at least give context to the picture of where we come from and why certain things exist. And the marketplace very originally was just a store for Woo-owned extensions. And it has kind of evolved through a few different phases since then and been more sort of closed and more open as it’s as it’s called, I don’t see the sort of closed versus open as being very valuable to a customer. To me, what’s important is that we focus on quality, we focus on how customers are finding those extensions. And in order for us to be able to present the best extension, the best extension is not static. 10 years ago, the best extension for XYZ was not— is not the same as it is today, necessarily. Teams change, use cases change, all of those things. So, I think in order for us to actually deliver that and to deliver a more curated fewer extensions, it requires us initially to kind of open up a little bit more of that competitive space, and then kind of figure out where we then add those layers of how are we making that more curated? How are we finding signals from customers that mean that these extensions are the ones that are actually serving them better?

Katie Keith:
And you could do some sort of trust badge. So, you allow the competition out there supply and demand, you allow the merchants to make those choices, but there could be something equivalent to Built for Shopify, like Built for WooCommerce, whatever, but less copying, that adds that extra credibility that the best extensions on the marketplace. And of course that would benefit the merchant as well by helping to do some of that curation for them while still giving them genuine choice to choose an alternative.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah. And, and that’s actually a great point because it’s something that we will be releasing next week actually. So it’s, it’s already available to vendors. So our developer market is already kind of using or seeing what that, that Woo Excellence badge— so it’s called the Woo Excellence badge. It’s not released to the merchant-facing front yet, but it will be next week. And that’s exactly kind of— that’s a lot of the sort of some of the work that has been happening and where we are shifting towards. So kind of opening up, allowing some of that competition. And I think each step sometimes looks potentially backwards or not, not moving in the way that people are looking for, but in, in, in total, sort of, it requires the future steps to also come with that. And one of those is focusing more on quality, having this excellent badge, being able to define what that looks like. And I think, as we As we do that, so we’re releasing it kind of— there’s always a bit of a tension between covering enough of the marketplace to make it relevant. So you can’t cover everything because then it’s not relevant. You can’t cover 2 extensions because that’s not relevant. So we sort of found that balance. And then now, as it goes, we will continue to add requirements into that and use those as measures for what’s good for the merchant and how do we actually make sure that we’re delivering that. So, 100%, like, I think those are all things where we can also be doing better. And we can be, we, you know, that’s where we, that’s where we’re already leaning in. And it’s, yeah, I think, I think we’re now getting to the stage where some of those things are hopefully a little bit more kind of apparent as to the broader strategy of where we’re trying to go and the, that sort of trust and curation layer that the merchants are looking for and asking for.

James Kemp:
I have some questions about quality because I know, um, when I was joining the marketplace years ago, it must have been 2019 or something, um, the quality process or the the kind of verification that your product is good enough to be on the marketplace was quite intense, but very much worthwhile, because you’re, you know, once you’ve implemented whatever it’s suggesting, your product is better, whether you sell it on or off the marketplace. So how has that evolved? And what is the current criteria to be awarded A Woo Excellence badge?

Roslyn Lavery:
So that will change quite a lot. At the moment we have, it’s kind of a combination of code checks plus some measures that are more merchant focused. So things like your CSAT and your rating on the, on the product itself. So it’s a bit of a combination.

James Kemp:
So you have to maintain it.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah. So there has to be maintained. And I think the thing is, is that we must also, you know, in this market, we’re not selling code directly. Code is needed to be able to continue updates and offering new features and that kind of thing. But we’re also offering support. We’re offering stability. We’re offering continuation of that plugin, that it’s still going to exist, that this business is good. So those kinds of measures need to be part of that quality score. So it will continue to evolve, but the, the foundation for what we’ve looked at is sort of where we can find objective measures on some of those different aspects. And right now, things like ratings is kind of one of our sort of stronger ways to be able to indicate support quality and user preference and usability, I guess. Yeah. It might actually be worth at some point doing a bit more of a deep dive into actually what all of those measures are. There’s Our Quality Insights Toolkit is kind of the piece of what does the more sort of code-level checking. And then we’ve sort of layered a few of the other things on top of that.

James Kemp:
Is there any mechanism— obviously, an extension that has the Woo Excellence badge could lose it. Is there any mechanism that if they don’t have the badge and they’re just consistently bad quality that they end up being removed from the marketplace.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yes, 100%. And that actually is something that we’ve put sort of more concerted energy into for the last year or so, maybe a year or two, is one of the, is one of the areas. So in combination with being a little bit more open, which has resulted in a little bit more competition, that has also meant coming up with sort of triggers, I call them, as to what indicates that you now need to actually be removed. And there have been a lot more sunsetting of extensions in the— we need to take that sort of carefully as well, because there is merchant impact to us removing support for those products. So it’s something that we are kind of incrementally working on. And we sort of find a relevant trigger, and we will implement just that one trigger at a time so that it doesn’t become a sort of universal blanket kind of decision. And again, that’s sort of something that we will continue to refine.

Ian Misner:
I have so many thoughts on this part, but I, you know, the main one is I think you guys are being too nice about it, is my immediate thing. It’s the, um, I mean, first of all, when you introduce the, the one that I actually like the most so far is the, the minimum update cadence is like a literal requirement to stay listed. I mean, my team, we have so many extensions. We now, like, we have some with thousands of users, some with dozens of users, you know what I mean? It’s like— Ultimately, the ones with a very small subset of users, we weren’t doing a lot of work to. Now we have a minimum expectation that you’ve set that requires that those people get meaningful value added. That is more than just because we feel like we should. Like, there’s like a, there’s a reason, there’s a, there’s a game, there’s a strict requirement that forces us to do it. And like, that’s a good thing from our side. And like, similarly with the Excellence badge, you know, it’s, I mean, it’s great. You give so much time for us to, you know, do what we need to do to make sure we’re addressing. those items and all that. But again, it’s like, I hear to your point that it’s like a step among many, but it’s sort of the, the bar is not quite as high as I would hope for, essentially. Right.

James Kemp:
I was just gonna say, you mentioned, um, Ian, adding, adding value, like over time. Is that a requirement? Like, because in some cases I can imagine an extension to just continue to be valuable in its current state without needing Well, and Rosalind, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but, like, the actual requirements is just that it gets an update.

Ian Misner:
But, you know, we’ve sort of interpreted that as providing a meaningful update, just compatibility checks. You know, if the changelog is compatibility checks for 4 years, that’s embarrassing. I don’t, I just don’t want that. So, you know, if we’re doing a bunch of stuff, we add things each time, but I don’t know if that’s the rule or our interpretation of the rule, you know.

Roslyn Lavery:
I don’t think that is the rule. I think there’s, The sort of foundation of it is WooCommerce core and WordPress are regularly updated. And we can’t expect extensions that were updated 4 years ago that have not even done anything on new versions of WooCommerce and WordPress to continue to function. So the sort of like foundation of that requirement is a little bit more around making sure that it actually is compatible and has been tested against the newer versions of the underlying software that it lives on top of. So, that, to me, is kind of minimum baseline. I do also think I agree with you. I think that, and I hope that in developers that are interpreting it a little bit more than that, of we should also be adding features, and we should actually be doing work on this product, that should really be a sort of kind of commercial incentive in some ways of a, You are not going to grow your product if you are just continuing to do the same thing forever. So I would hope that those products then become the ones that start to actually see better sales and use that requirement, as you say, as a little bit of a way— sure, you can just check the checkbox and you can get the minimum, or you can see it as an opportunity to think about and have a regular cadence for what does growth look like for this product? How else do I serve these merchants? Where do I where do I go next?

Ian Misner:
And, and it doesn’t mean like we need Woo to say, here’s what to do next either, but it’s like some form of, I mean, like algorithmic ranking in the marketplace or something, right? Something where, and I will, and I’ll say this myself, like my team benefits from like the, the incumbency effect of the marketplace more than most. The fact that once you rise, you know, to a relatively high spot, you basically stay there, you know, like that is. Relatively easy to maintain right now. Uh, I shouldn’t complain about that basically. Right. But ultimately the, that, that as you expand the number of options on the marketplace, the, the driving your way to the top of the list should become more of a game, more competitive. And I could share an example of that even. It’s, um, we have a memberships product, SkyVerge’s WooCommerce memberships has been There the entire time, and you know ultimately as we have built ours out, we’ve actually done more to be able to sell it direct than via the marketplace because there is such a strong incumbent there that is hard to displace. And like we do update it more often; we are driving more value to users, etc. And there’s just there’s no way for me to like I mean I could go push it. directly into that platform, but then I’m basically doing that 30% fee in addition to the full effort of marketing, right? So, you know, a way to climb those rankings or lose your spot that isn’t so binary as something like an excellence badge or a delisting is, I guess what I’m saying is maybe missing still, right?

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah. I think the realities of that have been So, we’ve done quite a deep dive into that for the last year or so. And it is, there are some complexities, one of which is the range of things that we offer and the range of different business models. So, because there are, there’s been such an increase in the number of integrated products that are more the free products, and those tend to have big brand names associated to them, or a lot of them do have big brand names associated to them. So, one of the interesting findings, for instance, is that the majority of search— so, we talk a lot about discovery, and I think it’s easy sort of philosophically to say that discovery is one of the things that we should be doing better and search ranking should be better. And that is true. We also see that a lot of the search behavior is single words. People are searching for the brand. So, Right. In reality, the kind of the behavior of customers isn’t necessarily what you expect. They’re using a lot of category search rather. We get twice the number of category filtering rather than actual search experience. That is also obviously now something that’s changing quite a lot with AI and discovery and how things are discovered is very different. And that’s something that we’re investing in as well is kind of understanding how we show up in those environments, how we improve what the product data looks like, that AI can be searching that, which a lot of the time is actually documentation-based more than it is the kind of sales page. And I think that’s also something, you know, like, not necessarily where our energy as teams is focused often, is on making sure that the— we make sure this documentation is accurate, but not necessarily sort of, like, as verbose as it needs to be necessarily to be able to actually be useful to AI, as an example. Anyway, I digress slightly. But But I think there’s a— that ranking is a little bit influenced by this, of sort of having those different kinds of products. The current ranking actually— so historically, there was a heavy weighting towards Woo-owned products, and it was one of the things that we got feedback from, from vendors. That now has shifted a lot. So there is a better balance of extensions across different vendor owners. WooCommerce is still going to show up fairly high up. The majority of how we rate or how we rank right now is mostly on popularity. So actually what’s interesting about that, and this is why I say that the sort of, until we figure out better models or better kind of incentive structures that mean that we are all working towards the same channel, the distributed channels sending traffic to other places, whether that be org or your own sales or whatever is actually hurting your ranking ability within the marketplace itself as well. And so I think that that’s a complicated problem to solve as well, because I also understand there’s the 30%, there’s a, and, and that’s a little bit of, we also need to be commercially involved in that for it to make sense for us to be implementing what we’re doing and kind of growing how that ranking works and where the discovery is and all of those things. kind of contributing back into that ecosystem. And at the same time, a lot of where the effort ends up going from developers or from vendors, particularly when they are selling in both environments, tends to actually hurt them more than it helps.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, well, Ian, I’d love to hear some more specifics about selling on the marketplace, particularly how it compares to selling direct, things like how the customer relationships and things like support support are different and anything like that that you think would be useful to people?

Ian Misner:
Yeah, I mean, I guess there’s some upsides and downsides with the customer relationship. The biggest downside, of course, is that it’s, you know, you’re once removed. They are WooCommerce’s customer and you are supplying them code. Your contact with your customers is essentially via support. I mean, that’s a good thing and a bad thing though. You know, the bad thing being, you know, you can’t really like cross-sell to that audience or, you know, Do you find them? Finding the things that people need from your product that aren’t just the things that are broken can be very difficult. You know, things like that. Um, uh, even little things like being able to ask for reviews at meaningful moments, you’re restricted by as much as what you’re willing to put in the product itself, which, uh, you know, they, it does create that little bit of a reverse incentive to put in junk in the dashboard that, you know, people tweet and complain about. Every chance that they get from not just Woo, but from everybody, right? Uh, so that’s definitely one. Um, the other thing though is like, I think people may not think much about the support load that Woo handles for marketplace vendors. You know, we do sell some things off the marketplace as well. There’s like 30% of our conversations in support tend to be billing and account issues and that sort of thing. For our other products, Woo just handles all that, you know? So as much as you’re once removed and there is some downsides, the benefit of that is you just do less work. Uh, you know, and similarly with distribution, as much as I complain about, you know, how do I rank higher and what do I got to do? What’s the game to play? I mean, we get sales every month that Woo just handled, you know, money comes in. We just got to make sure the thing is good. That’s very nice. And especially when you tie it to the question of should you sell on the Woo Marketplace, if you’re a small developer considering getting started, I mean, I wouldn’t start anywhere else. You get to just go make something and, you know, hope that it lands, right? That’s, you know, you, you, you shave off a significant amount of the work and the effort there, right?

Katie Keith:
Yeah. That linked with a comment that Simon has made, which is that there are vendors he will directly buy from. But they’re often from historical vendors that he trusts, such as Barnetou, Kestrel, and Iconic, RIP. So yeah, it’s like if you’re new, as you’re saying, Ian, then the marketplace can be a good springboard before you have built your brand, or maybe you don’t even need to, to that extent, because I suppose it gives you that credibility that is very difficult to get if you’re just starting otherwise.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, I mean, it does pose its own problems for new vendors. Like, I mean, the wait time to get listed is a little longer than people would like. I mean, it varies, of course, but I think it’s in the weeks again right now. I have seen a few reports of people saying that like the rejection rate has increased as well. So like, you know, it’s not as simple as build it and just put it in place. I actually, I mean, Rosalind, if you don’t mind sharing a little bit about, you know, the, because that feels like a shift from the last year or two, right? That’s sort of happening, right?

Roslyn Lavery:
It is. And that’s, it’s a little bit connected to the sort of what I’ve been speaking around, you know, that being that kind of trust authority layer is This is one of the steps, I guess, into that. Particularly, this has been seen even in the .org marketplace and extension directory of, with AI and vibe coding, the volume of not necessarily always, but often sloppy plugins is high. And that is something that we need to be kind of handling in different ways. So yes, I would say our rejection rate has gone up. The, the process of listing, and this is maybe also worth just sort of understanding about the marketplace. Yes, we are ecosystem. Yes, we are first the merchant and how we serve that merchant. Part of that is also ensuring that there is an economic model that sits behind how we earn revenue from that plugin. A lot of the, a lot of the time we get submissions from people that don’t understand that. And that don’t— they see us as the WooCommerce, the .org version of WooCommerce. And I understand in this ecosystem why that perception still sort of holds or why people have that perception. But it’s still a commercial space that needs that. And often there isn’t that, or there just isn’t enough value in doing that. So we have kind of revamped that onboarding process to include 2 steps. So it first is we approve you as a vendor and then we look at your products. So that’s one of the things that changed is that now there’s this kind of 2-step to that. And then there’s also making sure that it is a product that has a business model that works and that is something that is valuable to the customer. There’s obviously a lot more security and kind of quality checks in that process as well. So, that has meant that the number of rejections is higher. But the goal there is that that is for good reason, rather than just we’re saying no more often, you know. I think the methodology is that we should be trying to say yes to the right things. But yes, the realities of AI are a little bit—

Ian Misner:
I mean, I stand by the shortcuts on, you know, distribution and the support reduction effort and all that. But I mean, yeah, like, obviously, you still need— it needs to be a good product worth selling. Feels like something— there’s no downside to you guys vetting against that.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

Roslyn Lavery:
And I also wanted to sort of go back quickly to what you were saying around the customer and the sort of one step removed. I do see that as one of the things that we need to be working more on, on actually Figuring out how we close those gaps. I see that as something that is a requirement for us to be able to deliver properly, both to the merchant and the developer, because you do need that insight to be able to build better products.

Ian Misner:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of risks to opening it up, but things like we do a very big update that, you know, like maybe there’s some potential impact to, you know, old, old installs that are updating from version 2 to version 5. We like to notify those people when we have the opportunity to. And I mean, to your team’s credit, I mean, I’ve been able to do that as needed, but mostly because I’m just willing to be super annoying and you guys just handle it basically, right?

Katie Keith:
You get them to send an email?

Ian Misner:
Well, I mean, just if it’s going to be potentially customer impacting, they’ve always been very accommodating. It’s like, uh, you know, this is going to cause a problem for the user. So it’s never been useful for, you know, Please buy more of our stuff, but it has been super useful for, you know, this might break if you’re not careful, go do these steps. And yeah, like, I mean, at this point, just send a partner’s email and they’ll tell you no sometimes too, but they’ll mostly, you know, if you’re focused on the customer, it’s been no problem, basically.

James Kemp:
I think that, that was one issue I always had was, um, you know, one of the best ways to improve your product is to talk to the customers using it. Uh, and when selling on the marketplace, you don’t have that opportunity necessarily unless a support issue ends up coming through to you, which sometimes it does, uh, or they leave a review. Um, yeah, which I think you can, you can reply to maybe. I can’t remember if that’s— you can.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, there’s a couple of weaknesses there. So the reviews are helpful, but honestly, 90% of the reviews we’ve ever received are because we’ve asked them to do it via support.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

Ian Misner:
And even that, like, the review ask rate is very low because I mean, this, this is just going to be complaining real quick, but there is no mechanism to put like, ask for a review in product or via support. You just send them to the Woo Marketplace. And then if it’s say the developer and they’re not the one who owns the license, they literally can’t leave a review. Like basically the review pipeline is very challenging. But also you don’t get great, you don’t get great feedback there because there are always people that love you because you’ve done a great job helping them. So.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

Ian Misner:
Even the things they say are just positive and nice. And I mean, you get bad reviews too, but those, you really messed up when that happens, because it is hard. They have to go out of their way to, to do that. So, you know, that’s a meaningful signal. There is a feature request board that Woo provides to us as well. And so we do get occasional feature requests logged by the user, but again, there’s really no discoverability of that. So people that have found that have gone very far out of their way to find it.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah.

Ian Misner:
And usually have already talked to you via support. It poses a big problem where it’s very easy to get over-indexed on fixing the things for the users you already have. And you have to be very deliberate to avoid, you know, getting tunnel vision there. You know, what, what is the thing, what is the job this product is doing and what gaps do we not yet serve? You have to go do your, on your own and without talking to those users can be challenging.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And I guess you don’t know, like, maybe you do now, but at the time, I didn’t know what terms they were searching for to like find my products. What were they looking for that landed them on my product? Like those things are useful to know.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah. And I mean, this is why I say like, I think this is one of the kind of areas that we need to lean in more on as much as possible. But our sort of, it’s still gonna be secondary to focusing on quality metrics and the way that we can serve trust to customers. I think that’s still sort of paramount for where we are. Yeah.

James Kemp:
Yeah. I wonder if they’re in some way related, or they can be. You can provide a higher quality product as a vendor if you have more information.

Roslyn Lavery:
And this is why I think that it is kind of the next, or some of the next steps that we need to be looking at as well. Yeah.

Ian Misner:
And I know this is a potential rabbit hole, but I’ll also say that, you know, a lot of the quality measures there are about, you know, code security, whatever. But with Woo and WordPress specifically, it’s, you know, the compatibility with all the other products sold via the marketplace is something that there is really no mechanism for right now. Um, and. You know, making sure that your plugin works very nicely with other popular plugins is something that our team’s very committed to. A lot of the other larger vendors are as well, but you don’t have to be, which causes this problem where, you know, if somebody is a smaller vendor via the marketplace that isn’t doing that, it puts a lot of burden on the larger vendors to build around or to harden your product against that. And that doesn’t get caught by any of the quality measures today. Which is, I mean, as much as anywhere else, you should, as a merchant or as an agency, look for developers you trust, even when sold via the Marketplace.

James Kemp:
I had a quick question for Rosalind regarding, I guess, competition. So if there’s an extension in the Marketplace that does one thing, and then a new vendor uploads an extension that does the same thing, I know we briefly touched on this, that in the past that wasn’t even an option, like it wasn’t allowed. What’s the view on that now? Like if someone uploads a very much same functionality product, what happens there?

Roslyn Lavery:
It’s always going to be a bit nuanced and it’s always going to be a kind of case-by-case basis for the most part. But the sort of overarching principles there are going to be that we we tend to still preference and kind of focus more on, there needs to be some differentiating feature. It doesn’t need to be completely different. And that maybe is a little bit of a shift from where— and somewhere in the middle between we’re not allowing any of them and we’re allowing all of them. So, there needs to be something that you’re doing different or a strong existing market. So, you’re an existing product that the customers use. But if you’re brand new and you are just offering exactly the same thing, I would, that to me would still fall to a rejection today because that’s not adding value in, in any context. So there needs to be something either unique or some kind of existing user base that can kind of warrant saying this product has value against what is there, what is there today.

James Kemp:
I have this feeling. Um, so one of the reasons a lot of people used to choose our plugins was because our support was so good. Um, so I guess like that isn’t a differentiator in terms of the marketplace because I, I found anyway that we, we maybe got like one support issue from WooCommerce, um, every 2 months or something like that. It was very, very few, uh, because WooCommerce handles it for you.

Roslyn Lavery:
We do have a little bit of a, you know, there’s obviously sort of existing knowledge with vendors that we already have relationships with. And the way we make decisions with those vendors would be a little bit different to somebody coming in brand new. So, I think that’s probably, again, where there’s sort of, there’s slight nuance in it. And I would agree with you, that’s something that, that’s why there always needs to exist a little bit of that kind of nuance, because we do need to consider. And I think, actually, this is probably somewhere that is another area that we sort of can lean more into is not just the quality or the measures of the actual specific plugin, but also of the vendor that sits behind that.

Katie Keith:
Mm-hmm.

Roslyn Lavery:
And thinking a little bit more about how we support the representation for the status of that vendor as a vendor of all of their products potentially, rather than always looking specifically at that one Yeah, I think that’s a nice idea.

James Kemp:
It’s like, uh, the vendor gets an excellence badge versus the specific plugin gets an excellent badge.

Ian Misner:
The best ranking for all your products.

James Kemp:
Yes, perhaps, um, you know, making the feature request stuff more, more apparent and easier to access, uh, opens up that gap of like maybe not being able to talk to customers.

Ian Misner:
I don’t know why I was taken away, but back in the day there was also a feature request board for just like Woo as a whole that we used to identify potential gaps.

Katie Keith:
That was amazing.

James Kemp:
Ideas board. Yeah. I used that.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. That’s where my earliest plugins came from and they’re still selling now.

James Kemp:
Same.

Ian Misner:
Yeah. Same.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, we haven’t touched on this at all and I think we’re now out of time, but, um, and probably needs a whole nother discussion, but I think it’s remiss not to at least just mention that I think the plugin business as a whole, like we’ve spoken a lot about the specifics of being in the marketplace and plugins and the ecosystem and how these exist and sort of why you should exist in one versus the other. And that’s, that’s great. And I think that’s still something that is a big area for us to be considering. There’s also a bit of an existential threat of what do, what are plugins in a universe where vibe coding and AI exist and features, particularly smaller features, there’s both the kind of what Ian referenced earlier of, is James gonna decide to put that in core? There’s also, is the merchant just gonna ask AI to build it for them? And I think that’s particularly more true potentially for the sort of smaller feature, very small use cases that used to have a stronger market that potentially now does not have as strong of a market. I don’t think we have good answers as to kind of where that goes. It’s a little bit of where some of our hypothesis is that leaning into how we evaluate plugins and understand compatibility and bring in some of those quality layers and understand where merchants are actually receiving the right support that they need is where we need to be investing more. Even when we don’t necessarily know the exact end goal, those feel like fundamentals that continue to exist regardless of who or what is writing that code or who or what is writing those plugins. So I think there’s that kind of thing is a little bit more of a sort of philosophical, like existential, like how do we deal with that? And I also think that there’s the, there’s the kind of quality delivery, what the plugins are, what still remains relevant in that universe. And then there’s also a kind of business model. How do we charge for those things? And does that change? And my impression is, is that it leans more towards usage-based or something along those lines, also partially because that’s the cost base of AI. So, I think that, like, amplifies a little bit more of leaning towards that direction, which we see anyway in the market and have already seen, kind of, with SaaS and with the integrations and the proliferation of the number of extensions that are actually integrations into external systems. I think we’re already seeing it. I just expect this to be something that actually like accelerates that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s interesting. I, I agree that I think the smaller extension types will become mildly irrelevant, um, because it’ll be so easy to just create them and, and replicate them. Um, I, I see a future where it’s something that you could ask within WordPress or WooCommerce to say, I need my website to do this, and it builds it for you. You’re not you know, you’re not in Claude or something and uploading a plugin as such. But I do think that the larger solution-type products, like something like vendors or subscriptions or memberships, aren’t— and maybe this will change in the future, but I don’t feel like there’s something that you should have an AI build for you. Like, these are deeply technical products that your business relies on. Uh, and I think part of the reason WordPress and WooCommerce and everything is so successful is because you have these, uh, teams that are just fully focused on that one thing, you know, keeping, like we were saying before, the quality of that product up to date and the value of that product, like to keep offering additional value month over month, uh, is not something I believe you would get from uh, vibe coding your own solution to it. Um, especially if you’re a merchant that ultimately just wants to run a store. Uh, I, I don’t believe those types of products will be replaced anytime soon.

Roslyn Lavery:
And I don’t think it’s an either or. I think it’s going to shift things and it’s going to change, but I agree. Like, I don’t think we end up in a universe where what exists now completely disappears. And I also think that what exists now will probably fairly dramatically change. And that might be sort of more of a consolidation around sort of larger features that— and that, I think, is also what I think motivates for a little bit of a different thinking around business models potentially, because that changes the dynamics and it changes the calculations of things.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, I just wanna agree quickly that that is— that change is already happening. Like, some of our smaller, very simple features are already shifting in sales volume. And I will say though, the code was always a commodity is what I’ve been repeating. And, you know, we were always selling support and a better experience and everything James said. There is a third thing that I think is important that maybe is true today and won’t remain true, but we don’t sell our stuff for expensive enough. Like, you know, ultimately, you know, rental products or CheckoutWC, like these things, you can’t even vibe code something without spending just as much on tokens as the product is anyways. Um, so, you know, get the support on those things while you’re at it.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, definitely. Now, before we finish, let’s whiz through a few remaining comments. Um, we have a question from Clifton Griffin from CheckoutWC who asks, what are the criteria for SaaS products in the marketplace? I got rejected. The rejection didn’t really say anything specific, implied perhaps that SaaS products have to have a minimum number of installs? I suppose that’s one for Rosalind. I know this is Ian’s product as well.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, so the SaaS is a, is a little bit more tricky. It requires a little bit more effort on our side. So there is a slightly higher requirement for that than there is the normal kind of paid extension. Again, that is an area that I think we need to review a little bit more and kind of think about how we can bring it into a state in which it can bring earlier stage products. I will say it’s hard for me to know without like specifics around what this is. But if there isn’t enough information given, that’s something that 100% could be just respond to that and, and kind of ask for a little bit more detail. I will say that the, the rejections are normally it is predominantly around Is there enough of a business case? And, or there’s a code quality. And I think the business case question is often the one that people understand the least, kind of because of what I was saying, of it’s sort of, it’s seen as a market, as a place where everything exists and you need to be on there to list anything, rather than kind of what Ian’s been talking about as well, of like, you still need to actually put effort into selling, into making a successful of that product. And yeah, so that might be it, but it’s hard for me to answer completely given that I don’t 100% know what the actual situation was.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, it sounds like the best advice is just to reply to the email and ask.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’ll go into the— I think Ian mentioned as well, we’ve got a marketplace channel within the WooCommerce Slack, and that’s also somewhere where our team is on there and can answer specific questions as well.

Katie Keith:
Okay, and we got some comments from Nick, uh, from Sky Verge, uh, very vague initially. Test packages, QIT. But then he goes on to say, that is to say, test packages will allow Woo to enforce interoperability at scale across the marketplace. Um, Ian, do you want to take that one?

Ian Misner:
Yeah, the little quote marks are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. He’s not wrong, you know, it’s gonna prevent fatals and, and all that fun stuff for sure. Woo’s doing a lot of work to make sure, you know, nothing can take down a site. And thank you. It’s wonderful. It’s great. When I’m talking about interoperability, it’s more like, you know, when you put these 2 things together, you know, they’re not stepping on each other’s toes in the way you operate and use them. And, you know, like, not so far as compatibility. I don’t know how you would measure for this. I’m not saying Rosalie, go figure this out, but it’s, you know, it’s more than just don’t take the site down in my opinion.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah. The goal is to get there, right? Like, I think it’s a— we all understand this is a complex problem. This is not a simple thing to solve in the ecosystem and for us. And so we do have the sort of test packages, which are— and you can write custom tests that can then be fed into QIT, which then become the way for QIT to test against other plugins what your plugin needs to check for. So that is one of the mechanisms that starts to create a little bit of this. The tricky thing there is that that requires effort from the vendor to actually build those tests and to have those available for other plugins to then be using against their plugins. So, but that’s one of the kind of concepts in which we start to step towards this compatibility, because I agree that it’s always going to be, and it’s the thing we hear from merchants all the time, is it’s not about the extension itself. It’s not about the plugin itself. It’s about how it works with others. And that is something that we sort of like need to figure out more and is definitely part of our, it’s a big part of our conversations and kind of how we, how we actually practically do that.

James Kemp:
Yeah. Um, we being WooCommerce, do we provide, uh, like agent skills and things for this type of thing? Um, like provide, cuz so for, for context, when I, ran plugins, uh, from like 2011. I literally never wrote tests. Like, I didn’t have any until I joined the, the marketplace, and then we were, you know, doing PHP CS type stuff and like properly testing everything. Um, but I think it could be useful to provide vendors with like agent guidance on the types of the, the ways that you can write these tests and, uh, you you know, have an agent create them.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, I believe we have something along the lines of recommendations, but not necessarily actually building it.

Ian Misner:
Yeah, there’s a place in the dev docs that I was just looking for it because I think there is something in that direction. I just don’t know. I don’t think it’s quite what you’re asking for.

Roslyn Lavery:
Yeah, I don’t think it’s quite doing that. It’s sort of, yeah, but agreed. I think it’s a good, it’s a, that, that’s kind of the direction that we should be going.

Katie Keith:
That makes sense. Well, thank you so much to both of you for coming on. Where can people find you online? Let’s start with Rosalind.

Roslyn Lavery:
In the WooCommerce Slack as well. I’m there if you ping me on the marketplace channel and otherwise LinkedIn, which I should be fairly easy to find. I think I’m still the only Rosalind Avery on LinkedIn.

Ian Misner:
And for me, I’m on Twitter more than I should be, just @ianmeissner. But then if you’re looking for anything around Kestrel, WooCommerce.com/vendor/kestrel. There’s a big purple contact support button. Go nuts, have fun.

James Kemp:
Nice. Thanks again, both. On our next episode, which is going to be the 25th of August, we have Jack Roebuck joining us, who is coming on to talk about why I built my business on WooCommerce. So I think that’s going to be a super interesting conversation. Jack’s got, you know, 14 years in digital marketing, uh, is a UK, uh, had a stint as a COO at a UK agency, uh, and he now runs 2 WooCommerce stores. So that’s going to be a very interesting conversation with a merchant using WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I know I don’t talk to real merchants nearly enough, so I’m excited to learn from him and his perspective from all the different angles he’s got on it. And in the meantime, uh, please subscribe to Do the Woo if you don’t already. All the places to subscribe you’ll find on dothewoo.com. So wherever you listen to podcasts, watch YouTube, whatever, please subscribe. Thanks for watching. Bye.