Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo, the podcast where we dive deep into all things WooCommerce. Today, co-hosts James Kemp and Katie Keith are joined by real ecommerce merchant Jack Roebuck, founder of Lumiere Home. For the first time on the show, we hear directly from a store owner about building and scaling an online business using open source tools and WooCommerce. Jack Roebuck shares hands-on insights into product sourcing, automating store management, integrating essential plugins, and leveraging both SEO and AI to drive growth. Whether you’re a developer, merchant, or just curious about running a WooCommerce store in practice, this conversation is full of actionable strategies, lessons learned, and practical advice for navigating the ever-evolving world of e-commerce.

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Takeaways

• Hearing from real merchants is invaluable: Katie emphasized that learning directly from merchants’ experiences is an effective way to understand how to get the most out of WooCommerce, as this episode featured Jack, a merchant sharing his journey building his store on open source and WooCommerce.
• Background and motivation matter for platform choice: Jack explained that his long history with WordPress and WooCommerce, combined with low setup costs and his technical background, made WooCommerce a natural and economical choice for his store, versus alternatives like Shopify.
• Growth is manageable with WooCommerce: Jack shared that WooCommerce was able to scale with his business, handling increased traffic and sales over a three-year period, with the main adjustment being server upgrades rather than switching platforms.
• Shipping complexities can be addressed effectively: Jack discussed sourcing products from different regions and how building strong supplier relationships allowed consistent shipping times (usually 4-7 days) despite international logistics, with plugins helping automate the shipping process.
• Plugin choice and customization is crucial: Jack uses a minimal number of third-party plugins, opting instead to build custom features and automation with his own development knowledge, highlighting Trackship for shipping and Klaviyo for automated email and cart flows.
• WooCommerce often gets blamed unfairly for performance issues: James and Katie pointed out that many perceived WooCommerce limitations actually stem from improper hosting or poorly managed plugins, not from WooCommerce itself.
• Smart hosting choices enable scalability: The group highlighted that increasing server resources and understanding hosting limitations (e.g., not overloading shared servers) are key for store performance as traffic grows.
• AI tools are rapidly changing store management and development: All speakers discussed how AI like Claude and custom LLM setups allow for rapid development of custom plugins, store management, support, and campaign ideation, but the human element remains critical for successful outcomes.
• Effective marketing flows utilize automation: Jack outlined his use of Klaviyo to create automated welcome, abandoned cart, and seasonal email flows, directly integrated with his store, and stressed the value of tailoring communication frequency and content to avoid customer fatigue.
• Data-driven decision making is essential: Jack highlighted the importance of deep reporting, especially combining sales, ad spend, and profit analyses. He built custom dashboards to track product-level ROAS and profit, enabling quick and informed adjustments to products and marketing.
• Tracking and refunds are commonly overlooked merchant areas: Jack pointed out that closely monitoring refund rates and ensuring conversion tracking are set up reliably from the start are critical, as mistakes can severely impact both profitability and confidence in scaling campaigns.
• Mobile management tools are improving: Jack praised the improvements in the WooCommerce mobile app, making it easier to manage orders, create discounts, and respond to customer inquiries on the go.
• Open source offers flexibility and control: Although not a deciding factor for Jack, the open source nature of WooCommerce allows full access to data and the ability to create bespoke integrations, which he recognizes as increasingly valuable as his store grows.
• SEO fundamentals still matter even as AI changes discovery: Jack stressed that strong on-page SEO, category structures, effective keyword targeting, and high-quality backlinks remain foundational, while also considering how prompts and AI-generated referrals are shaping future search strategies.
• Continuous learning from data and peers is vital: Across his own experience and his consulting work, Jack repeatedly noted that prioritizing analysis over chasing shiny new tactics leads to lasting improvements and should be the focus for any growing WooCommerce merchant.

Questions Asked in this Episode

Q: How can WooCommerce scale as your e-commerce business grows, and what are the common myths around its scalability?
A: WooCommerce can easily scale with your business by upgrading your hosting environment as traffic and orders increase. One common myth is that WooCommerce can’t handle larger stores and you must eventually move to Shopify, but as discussed, most issues stem from inadequate hosting or bloated plugins, not WooCommerce itself. By investing in better hosting and keeping plugins lean, WooCommerce remains effective for growing businesses.

Q: What are the most important steps for tracking and optimizing e-commerce performance in WooCommerce?
A: Accurate tracking is crucial — set up robust tracking for conversions, refunds, and advertising spend using Google Tag Manager, Woo’s REST API, and analytics dashboards. Regularly analyze data, especially refund rates and product-level profitability, to identify trends and areas to optimize, as this has a greater impact than simply focusing on acquiring new customers.

Q: What are some essential plugins or integrations for automating order and shipping management in WooCommerce?
A: Plugins like Trackship are vital for shipping automation, providing both customers and store owners with real-time updates on orders, including delivery status and customs clearance. For email and abandoned cart flows, Klaviyo integrates directly with WooCommerce, automating customer communication and providing useful attribution data for marketing optimization.

Q: How does AI currently help WooCommerce store owners, and what future potential does it have?
A: AI tools like Claude Code can assist non-developers in building custom plugins, automating backend processes, and generating marketing content. The panel predicts a growing role for AI as both a shop assistant and backend management tool, but notes that results depend heavily on well-thought-out prompts and active human involvement to ensure quality outcomes.

Q: What are common mistakes merchants make with WooCommerce in terms of hosting and plugins?
A: Many merchants overload cheap shared servers or use too many poorly maintained plugins, leading to performance and security issues often mistakenly blamed on WooCommerce itself. The speakers advise regularly reviewing your site for plugin bloat, keeping your tech stack lean, and scaling your hosting as your store grows.

Q: How should WooCommerce users prepare their stores for high-traffic events like Black Friday?
A: Begin preparations early by planning email campaigns and site assets, using previous campaign performance as a guide. Anticipate traffic increases by upgrading your hosting beforehand, and use automation for marketing flows while still personalizing and reviewing content to maintain a strong brand tone and avoid the pitfalls of obvious AI-generated messaging.

Q: Why is open source important for WooCommerce merchants, and how does it affect daily operations?
A: While open source wasn’t the primary reason for choosing WooCommerce for all users, it enables powerful custom integrations, access to all store data, and the flexibility to tailor analytics and reports. These benefits, such as building bespoke dashboards and analytics integrations, are especially valuable as stores scale or need specific business intelligence.

Q: What SEO strategies are most effective for WooCommerce stores, especially as search and AI evolve?
A: Focus on optimizing category pages for targeted keywords, addressing user intent, and creating valuable, structured content, including FAQs with schema markup. As AI-driven search grows, owning your entity in search, providing high-quality digital PR, and earning authoritative backlinks become increasingly important alongside conventional SEO tactics.

Audio Timestamps

• 00:00 Starting Lumiere Home for Fixtures
• 03:57 Managing international shipping logistics
• 08:59 Building custom e-commerce site features
• 11:46 Choosing hosting for WooCommerce
• 14:45 Discussing SEO and Web Vitals
• 17:47 Building a personal tech stack
• 22:11 Using Wayfinder for project planning
• 24:49 Handling marketing and automation tasks
• 28:37 Using Klaviyo with WooCommerce
• 32:56 Balancing AI with Human Input
• 35:52 Tracking sales and ROAS analytics
• 39:01 Using the mobile app for sales
• 44:03 Tracking and managing refund rates
• 45:10 Fixing tracking issues for ads
• 49:51 Improving e-commerce category pages
• 52:50 Adapting to Entity Search Changes
• 55:11 Contact information and dashboard offer

Mentioned Links

Lumiere Home (E-commerce Lighting Store) – Jack Roebuck’s WooCommerce-powered lighting store, referenced throughout the episode.
https://lumiehome.co.uk/

Roebuck Consulting (Digital Marketing & E-commerce Consultancy) – Jack Roebuck’s consultancy site, where he can be contacted for analytics dashboards and digital marketing advice.
https://roebuck-consulting.com/

HostPresto (Managed Cloud-Based Hosting) – Jack Roebuck currently hosts Lumiere Home on HostPresto and discusses migrating to Cloudways.
https://hostpresto.com/

Trackship (Automated Shipping Plugin) – Essential WooCommerce plugin for automated shipment tracking, customer notifications, and shipment status dashboards, recommended by Jack Roebuck.
https://trackship.com/

Wordfence (WordPress Security Plugin) – Jack Roebuck uses Wordfence for vulnerability scans and security notifications for WooCommerce sites.
https://www.wordfence.com/

Uptime Robot (Website Monitoring Tool) – Used by Jack Roebuck to monitor site uptime and get notified of downtime.
https://uptimerobot.com/

CookieYes (Cookie Consent Plugin) – Discussed by Jack Roebuck for cookie consent management but also notes a reported conflict affecting Google Ads tracking.
https://www.cookieyes.com/

Klaviyo (Ecommerce Email Marketing) – Jack Roebuck uses Klaviyo for automated abandoned cart flows, seasonal campaigns, and revenue attribution.
https://www.klaviyo.com/

Google Data Studio (Data Visualization & Reporting) – Jack Roebuck exports WooCommerce data into Google Data Studio for robust, customized analytics dashboards.
https://datastudio.google.com/

Funnel.io (Marketing Analytics Platform) – Cited by Jack Roebuck for e-commerce analytics and reporting.
https://funnel.io/

Google Tag Manager (Tag Management System) – Utilized for advanced conversion tracking and tag management in WooCommerce by Jack Roebuck.
https://tagmanager.google.com/

Conversion Bridge (Conversion Tracking Plugin) – Recommended by James Kemp and mentioned in the comments as a user-friendly WordPress plugin to streamline integration of tracking systems.
https://conversionbridgewp.com/

Claude Code (AI/LLM Coding Assistant) – Cited by Jack Roebuck as a tool for building custom WooCommerce extensions and plugins.
https://claude.ai/

PageSpeed Insights (Website Performance Tool) – Used for diagnosing performance issues and monitoring Core Web Vitals, as discussed by Jack Roebuck.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/

Google Search Console (Website Analytics Tool) – Used by Jack Roebuck for monitoring Core Web Vitals and search performance insights.
https://search.google.com/search-console/

Transcript

Episode Transcript

James Kemp:
Hello, welcome to Do the Woo, the podcast where we talk about all things WooCommerce. I’m James Kemp, the core product manager at WooCommerce.

Katie Keith:
And I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2. And today we’re speaking with a real e-commerce merchant and learning about how he built his business on open source and WooCommerce. Now, I personally think that talking to actual merchants is easily the best way to get insights into how to get the most from the platform. And we launched this podcast in January, and this is actually the first time we’ve had a real merchant on the show.

James Kemp:
Yeah, it can be hard to find merchants that want to do this sort of thing, um, live. So it’s, it’s a really great opportunity.

Katie Keith:
If you, well, before we get into the topic, um, please subscribe to Do the Woo if you don’t already. Like I said, we only relaunched this podcast back in January, so you may well not be subscribed even if you were like 5 years ago under its previous name, um, and guise. So dothewoo.com is the place to find the subscription link for all the different platforms. So whether you use Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, whatever, go to dothewoo.com and you will find all the relevant links.

James Kemp:
Yes, and let’s jump into the episode. So joining us is a merchant called Jack Robuck. Hey, Jack, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about, well, you, your store, how you got into running it, that kind of stuff?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, sure. Well, firstly, thank you for having me on it. As you said a minute ago, Katie, I think it’s always good to hear from someone like myself who’s started a very small store and kind of built it over the past 3 years to where it is now. So yeah, a bit about me and how I got into all of this. So I’ve been in the digital marketing and SEO industry for about 14 years. Started in SEO from a placement from university, then worked at an agency in Bristol and then was at one of the leading agencies in Bristol for about 9 years and then became the COO there. I think part of that journey for me over that 9-year period, when I first joined that agency, I was very much in delivery. And then as time went on, I kind of got more senior and moved away from delivery. So I set up Lumiere Home primarily, firstly, to have a trial site and for me to build something that was for myself. At the time as well, my partner and I were building a house, so we were looking at all of the light fixtures, sockets. I mean, I could bore you, I could go on to all the different choices and things you make, but through that, a lot of it was looking for different light fixtures that we wanted. So that’s how Lumio Home started, primarily to sell a few lights. I wasn’t really sure how it would kind of go, how it would take off. And I always remember first order was the 27th of April, 2023, and to where we are now, sold over 3,000 lights and 1,500 customers. So in a 3 and a bit year period, it’s really gone from something that was quite manageable in the evenings to me being able to leave my agency job, run it 50% of my time, and then 50% of it is my consultancy. So yeah, it’s been a busy 3 years.

James Kemp:
That’s very cool. I don’t know if we put the URL to that site up on the screen. I don’t know if you can do that, Katie.

Katie Keith:
Good point.

James Kemp:
But it’s a pretty cool site. It’s, yeah, something that I also bought a home a while ago and finding light fixtures was quite a struggle, like high quality ones. Yeah, I might be going off script, but where do you source the products from? I assume you’re not manufacturing them?

Jack Roebuck:
No. So originally sourced from China, then we’ve got a supplier in China, Germany, and then also I have about 100 to 200 of them here in the UK. So depending on what people order, I can ship from here or from Europe or direct from China as well. So that’s one part that I’m still very hands-on with. So when orders come through, it is entirely dependent on where I source them from. But with all of them, it’s 4 to 7 days shipping. So even if someone orders from China, from the UK, But if I need to source it from China, because it comes with FedEx and DHL Express, that would come, if you ordered today, would be here probably by the end of the week, if not starting next week. So because it’s grown to the level it has, I’ve been able to build those relationships so that that shipping time has been able to maintain, which is quite a big thing.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

Jack Roebuck:
Because some suppliers will take sort of 15 to 20 days, and that is not ideal. Yeah.

James Kemp:
I think that, yeah, that can be one of the hardest things. I know I set up a puzzle store selling like puzzle boxes and things. And the way that those manufacturers work is you have to buy the stock ahead of time.

Katie Keith:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
So I ended up buying a load of puzzles that I have to then ship myself from home, which isn’t, you know, long-term is not a good way to run a store. And so I know shipping can be quite complex.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, no, pause for me. But I think what you’re kind of saying is, yeah, you start with that and then build from there. I think, yeah, my store started with, I think it was 4 lights when I first launched it, and now we’ve got over 120 with about 10 to 15 variations per light. So that’s one of the things that I’ve had to learn and scale It’s just my own development knowledge of variations. How does that scale with me? Because to begin with, it was static URLs. Now we’ve got URLs where there’s loads of different variations that pull through. So that has been a good learning curve for sure.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s a good sort of segue into the question of, obviously, the store runs on WooCommerce, which is why you’re there. What made you choose WooCommerce?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I have experience with Shopify as well, but for me, they’re both great platforms. For me personally, I got 14 years of experience in WordPress and have used WooCommerce for about 7, 8 of those. So naturally, it was the no-brainer. And also setup costs, when I first started out, it was really cheap because you literally need to buy a domain, your hosting, and then if you know enough, you can build everything yourself. And you don’t really need too many additional plugins to get started. Obviously, you’ve got like WooPayments or Stripe, whichever people go for, but that fee obviously comes off the purchase fee. So there’s no kind of initial £100, £300, £500 kind of setup cost. So that was a big thing. And then also where I’m at with kind of my tech flow and what I run things on, a big thing is just the REST API that WooCommerce has as well. I know Shopify, you could do similar things, but the dashboards that I’ve got that pulls through live data, well, not live data, every hour it updates. It pulls through my ad spend from my Google Ad accounts, pulls through my Search Console data, and then I’ve got a dashboard that shows me absolutely everything of where it’s kind of at the moment. So that is a big thing because I knew as things scaled, I wanted to kind of structure it in a way that I could grow with it. And yeah, for me, it’s been great. Haven’t really had many issues with it. I have had some issues throughout, which I’ll come on to later on. But Woo itself has been a really good platform.

James Kemp:
That’s awesome. You mentioned sort of not really needing that many plugins at the start on top of WooCommerce and WordPress. I know most stores are going to need some additional plugins. Is there any that you’re running now that are like, you know, essential to the ongoing— I guess there’s some shipping parts.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, shipping ones are the main ones. So I’ve actually only got 3 third-party plugins on the site now. I’ve spent the past year or so building, well, internally plugins for myself and then also clients. So in terms of third-party plugins that I still use, the shipping, set up automated shipping, so customer gets an email when it is out for delivery, if they’ve missed it, so they can reschedule things. And then also it gives a really good dashboard for me on where are all the shipments, how many of them have cleared customs, how many of them may have been delayed, how many of them have been delivered. So it’s a good, really good plugin. That’s called Trackship. I don’t know if anyone, if you guys ever come across it or if people listening or watching this back, highly recommend it. I think it’s quite cheap as well, but a really robust plugin. And then in terms of When I first set up the site, I had things like sidecart plugins, cart upsell plugins, and I had loads of plugins on the site. And again, from a security point of view, just vulnerabilities with those, making sure that you’re updating them. But over the past year or so, with how much Claude and Claude Code has moved on, knowing enough about development myself, being able to build sidecarts, auto-apply coupon functionality, When you’re on the cart page at the moment, it has the light switches that is an upsell. So when someone’s buying, I don’t know, 2 outdoor lights, they can also see some of the switches and add that to cart. Things like that is all built by myself now. So yeah, it’s been really good from that side. And in terms of other plugins, you’ve just got like your standard cookies and tracking plugins. But yeah, try to keep it quite light on the third-party front.

Katie Keith:
Now you mentioned a minute ago that Woo has grown with your business. I sometimes hear what I consider to be a myth about when you get to a certain revenue level, it’s time to switch to Shopify. So I’m interested to hear your story and in what way has WooCommerce grown with your business so that you continue to be happy with the platform?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think I was probably at that point this time last year. I was on a previous version of the website. So the one you see today went live back in April or March this year. So going back a year ago, I was at that point where I was deciding, right, do I take what I’ve got now and rebuild it all in Shopify, or do I stay with Woo? Obviously, I’ve stayed with Woo, and I’m pleased I have. But I think a big part of that is, again, me personally, because of my experience with WordPress and WooCommerce. I have a good base-level knowledge there. To go onto a new platform, resync all of my Google Merchant Center shopping feeds, everything that I’ve spent the past 2 and a half years building, I didn’t want to migrate that across. And in terms of scaling things from where it was this time last year to where it is now, there’s been absolutely no issues with Woo. I think when you go to the next step from where I am now, which hopefully in a few years’ time, Maybe that’s where people have more of an issue, but for me personally, there’s been absolutely no issue there. I think the only other things I’ve had to do is just increase my server spec to account for bigger traffic, bigger amounts of traffic that’s come through. But in terms of volume personally, no, yeah, not had any issues there.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I was gonna ask about the sort of hosting environment. Have you sort of maintained the same hosting From start till now?

Jack Roebuck:
Yes, so I’m a big fan of Cloudways. So I’ve used HostPresto and Cloudways. It’s currently on HostPresto, and I’m due to migrate it across to Cloudways soon. Both similar platforms, so they’re both managed cloud-based hosting. Just as and when the server was needed, just to up to like the next level as traffic grew with me. But again, it goes back to what I was saying right at the start around setup costs, For anyone watching this thinking about starting their own business, maybe they’ve got a hobby, they build crafts or whatever it may be, and they want to get started. The cost to entry for WooCommerce is really small, especially with where Claude Code is at at the moment and where you can kind of do enough yourself to get to a level where you can start. So yeah, I think it’s a really big thing, positive in my opinion for Woo. is that you can start so easily with little kind of capital.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think the hosting question is partly where that myth comes from, of WooCommerce not being able to scale, because you might start on like a very, you know, I know for my store, I get access to WordPress.com. But if I didn’t have that, I would probably start on a fairly cheap shared host just to get things going, like test the concept. And then I think people tend to stick with that, and, you know, they get to a point where, okay, the shared host isn’t quite powerful enough to actually, um, you know, process the number of orders that we’re doing or, uh, deal with the traffic that’s coming through. And then they think, okay, you know, WooCommerce obviously can’t handle this, but really it’s, it’s the hosting. And simply uphost— upgrading your host to something more performant, uh, is a Pretty simple solution to that.

Katie Keith:
WooCommerce gets blamed for a lot that isn’t its fault. Um, that’s one example, the hosting. There’s also what Jack was saying earlier about things like plugins. Um, if you’re using the wrong plugins and they bloat out your site or add security problems, often people are like, WordPress or WooCommerce are insecure. And there’s a lot of that going around that people don’t understand the subtleties of where the problem is coming from.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, exactly that.

James Kemp:
I was gonna say, it’s something we’ve talked about where, um, we could potentially make it more obvious in, in Core by having like, you know, uh, a more visual health, uh, dashboard that kind of indicates where performance issues might be happening. Um, you know, you’re, you’re hosting, uh, we already have some level of that, but it’s it’s something you have to go kind of digging for. Uh, I think we could make it a lot smarter and, you know, actually call out extensions that are maybe slowing down specific pages, or, you know, your host, uh, is struggling with XYZ. Um, yeah, and you need this as a baseline.

Jack Roebuck:
I think also with, with my background in SEO, obviously Core Web Vitals was a huge thing when that came out. Um, And obviously within Search Console, you get reports on that now. So I think although what you’re saying there, James, is maybe making it a bit clearer inside actually WordPress, but then there are tools like Search Console, other tools out there where you can monitor that as well. Obviously, granted, that doesn’t give you the full view. It gives you arguably one of the most important views, which is how Google sees it and where you’ve got issues with LCP and different things where you need to compress images or minify JavaScript or whatever it may be. So that gives you enough there as well. So yeah, I think yes, could be inside WordPress, but then also you’ve got Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, other things you can look at for that too.

James Kemp:
For sure. I think one of the risks with Search Console and PageSpeed Insights is that they’re seeing that as like, okay, my WooCommerce store has this issue, and they’re not seeing that, okay, my WooCommerce store has this issue because Um, you know, whatever the reason is, um, which is what I, I feel like we could do a better job at, um, pinpointing so that people understand, like, okay, if I change this, uh, then my store will become more performant, or—

Jack Roebuck:
This performance uptake that would potentially happen. Um, and then from like a security point of view, you’ve got things like Wordfence, um, which I use, um, and that obviously just runs through any plugins or vulnerabilities that you may have if you’re not on the latest version of Woo, latest version of WordPress. whatever it may be. That’s a really good tool, which I’m sure most people will have heard of, but again, sometimes is overlooked just because of how good it is.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. And we’ve got someone in the comments agreeing with the things we said about the server side of things. Web Squadron says the mistake many make, as you said, is them overloading shared servers because they thought they could add unlimited sites without understanding their bandwidth, storage, and inodes.

Jack Roebuck:
Definitely overloading shared servers, I definitely understood and agree with.

Katie Keith:
The concept.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, exactly that. And when I was scaling, and I remember I went live with a Black Friday campaign and had a load of Klaviyo emails that were running, didn’t break the server, but it was noticeably slower. Lesson learned that I needed to anticipate for that before you do any big form of marketing activity. Yeah, just make sure that you’ve got the site set up ready to cope for that increase in traffic as well.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, we’ve got another comment from the same person. I did get a look at the Woo AI at WordCamp US, and I was impressed by that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, there’s, um, there’s a lot of stuff going on with Woo AI at the moment that, you know, is in the works, um, and should be available fairly soon, which is pretty cool. I think there’s, there’s tons of opportunity. there for just having an AI that helps you run your store. Like that, it’s a space that is missing a good player at the moment for WooCommerce. So that would be—

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, I’d agree with that. I also think where I’ve kind of built my tech stack, so I know everybody goes on about Claude Code and everything at the moment, but I’m still a firm believer that it’s only as good as the person that is using it, i.e., the prompts that you’re putting, the way that you set it up. I spent the past 6 months building my own almost robot consulting operating system because obviously I have my consultancy as well. So all of my skills and prompts sit within that. So I know that whatever task it is that I’m going to be doing, whether that be for Lumio Home, whether it be for the home sauna company that I’m launching, whether it be for a client, I know it’s done to my standards. So not quite what we’re saying there, but I think for me, Claude Code has filled that kind of gap at the moment until maybe the, the Weaviate kind of goes up to that level. I also think the ability with Claude Code for me personally, again, I’m not— my background isn’t development. My background is SEO and performance-based marketing. But through that and through the agency I was at, I was heavily involved in web builds. Because of that, I’ve been able to build these plugins that are bespoke to me, and I’d encourage people to do that more so, especially developers. With the advancements of Claude Code, again, you can very quickly build a test, put it onto a staging server, test it, break it, get it to a point where you’re happy, and then go live with it.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I’m personally having wonderful results just connecting AI to my e-commerce stores, and it can do everything. I totally think that Woo should be launching shop assistants and backend store management AIs, and for the people who are not going to connect something like Claude directly. But even now, you can get amazing results even without an MCP. There are other ways to do it, and it saves you so much time in store management.

James Kemp:
For sure. I think, like you were saying, Jack, it is vitally important that you know, you kind of know how to prompt when using AI. I think that can be a mistake. Like, I feel like these custom extensions that people can build now, you need to know— I feel like the small extensions you could build quite easily. Like, things that do very, like, one specific thing, you know, on your homepage or something like that.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
Whereas I think there’s going to be less of people building things like a subscriptions platform that requires a lot of domain knowledge and research and like historic context. Um, but yeah, definitely for the, for the smaller type extensions, I can see them being done quite a lot more by AI versus like custom plugins. But then, you know, some people don’t even want to even think about trying to create their own thing. They just want to get something off the shelf and use it. So there’s still audiences for both, I think.

Jack Roebuck:
Yep, 100%. Um, definitely. So I think that’s where I’m at though, is I would always love to try and build and tinker and get something built for myself. Um, you’re probably exactly the same, James, as well. Um, and there’s a point though where I’m like, okay, my knowledge is here, I can’t reach any further, I will go somewhere else for that now. But Um, I think the tools that we have at our disposal now, um, is— yeah, go back a year, 2 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to build half of the things that are on the Lumio home site now without where it’s all at today. So, uh, yes, it’s an exciting time for sure.

Katie Keith:
And Web Squadron has some advice on that. The mistake some make is asking a question without considering how they would plan it out on paper. before they discuss with a developer or colleague, which I guess also applies to AI in this case. The thinking process is key for a great result. Well, I like to do the thinking process with AI personally.

Jack Roebuck:
Right.

Katie Keith:
So just sending it an initial idea, and then as Jack was saying, I think the two-way is important. I would never just give AI a project and get it to do everything. I am always highly hands-on in getting to that result. But I like sending in a non-thought-through idea and seeing where we end up.

James Kemp:
I do the same. There’s a UK guy called Matt Pocock, who has been writing tons of skills for, like, developing, prototyping, building, all kinds of things. And he has a skill called Wayfinder. And the process is you kind of tell it what you want to achieve, and then it will run through, uh, essentially asking you questions about, um, you know, kind of really scoping out what that might look like to actually build. Um, and it creates essentially these tickets that, that form a plan for whatever it is you want to build, and then it can go away and build it. And I found that to be really useful to kind of think through a bit more. without needing to actually write it all out. Because typically, like, if you write something out in a prompt, you’re gonna have tons of gaps. So I found that the Wayfinder process to fill in those gaps and catch the things that you might not have thought about. But yeah, I completely agree. I like to do all my thinking and planning and stuff with AI.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, well, apparently Web Squadron does as well. He says brainstorming with AI is my fave too. Um, also it still amazes me how many ask very basic questions in forums without considering that they could ChatGPT it. The phrase Google it is yesterday’s way. I know, same things with like team members. They ask me a question. I’m like, just ask AI, you can find it.

James Kemp:
Yeah, it’s, um, it doesn’t have a catchy way to say it though, still.

Katie Keith:
No, it’s weird.

Jack Roebuck:
We need a phrase. We do need a Google it. We do need, uh, something different. We need to think of that. Maybe we need to prompt it to see what options it gives us.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, everyone, what do you think we should call the new Googling?

James Kemp:
Um, I’m interested to know a bit more about running, uh, the store and sort of what the day-to-day looks like. Um, because I know that that’s one of the— I think it’s one of the parts of WooCommerce that we hear the least about. Um, yeah. Like, typically, you would hear from developers or builders, especially, you know, in terms of GitHub issues and feature requests and things like that. But you don’t tend to hear from merchants on what actually managing a store looks like and where the sort of complexities are and how you overcome them, I guess.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, I think for me, so I’m very hands-on. As I say, my background is performance marketing. So all of the SEO, PPC, paid social is all run by myself. So most of my time is spent on that inside ad accounts. And there’s, from a Woo point of view, in terms of day-to-day, all of it is automated apart from the actual order processing. So abandoned cart emails, all automated, welcome flows, all automated, shipping, as we mentioned, all automated. But the part is Again, because I have either lights here in the UK or Germany or China, I still keep that part to myself so that I know, right, where’s the best way to do it quickest. And just from a stock point of view as well, to kind of minimize how much is in the UK, because again, shipping time from wherever is that 4 to 7 day period. I think the other part is obviously just maintaining the site. Wordfence is really good for that in terms of just reminding me to make sure that everything’s updated. Uptime Robot is a really good tool I use as well, just to make sure that the store is live. And when I have issues—

James Kemp:
Are you firing that at the checkout?

Jack Roebuck:
Yes. Yeah. So one issue I did have, and this is one of the things I was going to comment around, sort of like challenges that I’ve had, wasn’t with Woo, but it was with tracking. CookieYes is obviously quite well used across the industry. I went live with the new CookieYes plugin and crawled all— inside CookieYes, you have to fetch and scan any plugins or scripts that you’ve got firing. It will then update on the live site. An issue that I had was Google Ads. It started to strip the Google Click IDs from the cart and checkout pages. So people would still come through Google Ads. So to a user, it was no different. You’d come through, you’d click through Google Ads, go through cart, go through checkout, purchase, great. You’d know no difference. But this was about a year or so ago. And for me, I could still see performance across the board was great. Google Ads ROAS had dropped from about 5 right away down to 1.5. And I was trying to figure out what was going on. All of it came down to cookie ads and an issue with when I went live with the plugin. It, for some reason, was conflicting. I think it was something to do with Varnish cache at a server level. This is where my knowledge is at a ceiling. I had to get the guys who hosted me to look into it, and then we sorted it. But going back right away to the question that you asked me, James, that’s the bit where my— everything else I manage, but the server side, that is handed over to HostPresto at the moment, and then we’ll migrate to Cloudways soon as well.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, so that’s Klaviyo. Really, really good tool. And I’m pretty sure it has direct integrate— yeah, it does direct integration into Woo through the API as well. So as soon as someone goes on to Lumia Home, I think it’s within 10 or 15 seconds, there’s a bit of a non-invasive popup to sign up for 10% off your first order. That then puts them into Klaviyo. So they will go into automated flows then. So a welcome flow, there’s some seasonal flows, and then just some very soft touch, we’re still here sort of flows. And then from an add to cart and checkout point of view, as soon as someone goes to add to cart and then obviously on the cart page, that’s a trigger within Klaviyo. And then the abandoned cart flow then triggers as well. So I think it’s within 2 hours you get an email with the cart, 24 hours as a small follow-up, and then I think 3 days. I think that’s the limit in terms of people’s tolerance to reminders like that because it can get a little bit the other way where it’s too much. But yeah, Klaviyo, really, really good tool for those that haven’t heard of it. I’m a big, big fan of it.

James Kemp:
Yeah, it’s very good. I assume the abandoned cart requires them to have signed up to the sort of pop-up thing first.

Jack Roebuck:
Yes, exactly. So you need to have the consent from the pop-up. Yeah. Or if someone has gone through to the add to cart and put their details in and then again consented there, then they can obviously have that as well. Yeah, really, really good. flow Klaviyo. And another good thing with Klaviyo is that you can see the revenue attribution from all of your different campaigns. So you can see you’ve sent, I don’t know, 300 emails over the past 2 weeks and it’s attributed $2,500 to orders because they know that people have clicked through to it or whatever. So not only is it useful from a practical sense, you also get really good data to then decide, right, Is it actually working or not? Um, so yeah, again, highly recommend that to people if they haven’t come across it before.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think a lot of WooCommerce and e-commerce stores get that wrong, that they don’t think about that customer experience after the sale and when they’ve lost the customer. And so that’s really good that you’re thinking through every step of where the customer is in their experience with you and how to communicate with them. So we’re coming up a few months from Black Friday. How do you adapt your email marketing and your marketing more generally for that time of year?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, it’s a great question. Again, I have dedicated campaigns that I ran last year. So a lot of it is learning from what did work and what didn’t work. So different assets would be created, different offers, but then that translates also into the paid social ads that I’ll run and then also ad copy within Google Ads. Toying with the idea of, you see some sites, I think Dusk did it really well a few years ago where they completely changed the design of their site. I think it was Dusk, not entirely sure, but there was someone and I remember coming across it. They completely changed the style of their site for the Black Friday period. So deciding, do I do something quite interesting there? But yeah, I think you have to start planning it now, if not sooner than now. But again, the good thing is I’ve had 3 Black Fridays now since I’ve been running it. And obviously, having been in the industry for a long time, you kind of know what works, what doesn’t. And it’s like anything, when you find something that does work, double down on it and repeat it. And also try to keep things simple. We’re in an industry where there’s always something new, always something cool, shiny to try. And I’m guilty of it at times, but sometimes keeping it simple and just, right, going back to basics is, it also works. So yeah, definitely something that could be said for that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I remember being very, very stressful sorting out. I had a plugin store before working for WooCommerce. And every year it was, it was the same, like, we kind of know what works, we want to try something new, like there’s hundreds of emails that we want to set up. I feel like, and this was pre-AI, so I feel like now it might be a bit easier.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, very true.

Katie Keith:
It’s gonna be so easy this year.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, pre-AI, it was a lot. Now, yeah, it’s— but still, you need to review it, you still need to make sure that it hits the mark. You can’t just let it run away with things. So definitely helps the heavy lifting. But again, right back to what I was saying earlier, it’s still only as good as that person prompting it and the person behind it. You need to challenge it and direct it in the right way. I mean, there’s times where I’m sure you’ve both used it where it will suggest something that is just factually wrong or is not the right route at all. And if you don’t catch that soon, you’ve wasted another 2, 3 hours or whatever building out something that fundamentally hasn’t targeted the right thing because the context wasn’t quite there, hasn’t quite got the nuance of the business or client that you’re working with. I think that’s still the gap, those small nuances. are where it needs a human, it needs us to catch that, and then, right, this is the route you need to take.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, and also the tone. People can spot purely AI-written emails a mile off, and you need to work really carefully on that brand tone and avoiding the obvious AI tells and things like that. So I certainly wouldn’t want a Black Friday campaign to go out that just looks Like AI wrote it with all the em dashes and annoying wordings and all of that.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, no, definitely not. Um, but no.

James Kemp:
Yeah, that would just put people off straight away. I think it put me off anyway. Um, I’m interested to know, we kind of touched on it briefly, but your— what, what have you found sort of challenging with using WooCommerce? Like where, where has it not quite been good enough and you’ve had to, you know, work around and Implementing their own things?

Jack Roebuck:
I think reporting probably is the main one. So again, coming from a performance marketing background, used a lot of Google Data Studio reports, also Funnel.io, another really good tool. I think the kind of out-of-the-box reporting that you get with Woo inside WordPress and obviously in the analytics, you get enough data. Personally, I don’t quite like the way that it’s laid out. So I would always take that data and put it into Data Studio or into Funnel and then sort of create my own things off the back of that. But working with clients at the moment and also myself, I think the biggest gap I see still across e-com brands that I work with, my own, is not having a robust reporting platform that has everything in it. And when I say everything in it, I mean not just sales, ad spend, ROAS, take it a step further, look at your POS by product so that you can see what profit we’re running at per product. Because obviously a store like mine, margins change whether someone’s buying a 2-meter light versus an 80-centimeter light. And if it’s dimmable, if it’s a load of different things. So tracking ROAS as well is really key. So I think one thing that I’ve developed that if anyone’s interested in, drop me a message about it, but it brings through the REST API from WooCommerce It’s got all of the Google Cloud CLIs, and then it updates every hour. So it gives me a full overview of where I’ve spent, how many orders I’ve had, what’s our profit for the day. It also deducts VAT so that, you know, obviously a percentage of the order is the fee that you’re going to pay to WooPayments or Stripe. You’ve got VAT, you’ve got your tools, your costs, your hosting. It takes all of your costs into account so that every single day I can actually go through and see to the pence, what’s my net profit for the day? And then obviously do that over a 7-day period, 30-day period, and then you start to spot trends. So a big trend that helped me spot was when I looked through Google Ads, I was spending, I think 62%-ish of my budget was going on products that were generating a below 3 ROAS. So there was budget being spent, they were selling. So on the face of it looks good, when you actually drill into it and look at which products were, budget was going to those. And then I had 2 or 3 products from memory that were delivering a 15 ROAS, but because my spend was being capped, again, all of these things wouldn’t come out unless you had a report that showed all of that data. So coming back to what you were saying around what’s the biggest limitation, I think not having that out of the box, but also to have that out of the box would be a huge thing. You need to integrate loads of different tools into it to get to a point where you have that. But for me, that helps me sleep easy at night. I know where things are at. I know where if we’ve got an issue, it’s not a, okay, where is it? No, I can go into the data and see where we’re spending, not getting return. Do I need to tweak the ad copy? Is there an issue with the product? Have I priced things properly versus competitors? That’s the big thing that people forget to do. You get so fixated on your own store and what you’re doing. Periodically having that price comparison with competitors is key. So covered a lot in that answer, but hopefully that explains a little bit.

James Kemp:
Yeah, that’s really useful. I would love to see your, like, what to you is the ideal sort of analytics layout, which I assume is the sort of platform that you built.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, after this, James, I’ll send that over to you. So obviously it’s got all of my live data in it, um, but I could create like an anonymized one, um, and just show you what it’s pulling through. Um, but yeah.

James Kemp:
Yeah, that sounds cool. Awesome. Um, and what would you say— I, I feel like we’ve kind of touched on it, but what, what WooCommerce makes, uh, easy— I, I think we’ve touched on it at the beginning, you know, versus, uh, Shopify was the fact that you’re sort of fully baked into the system. But is there anything in terms of actually managing the store versus building the store that WooCommerce does really well?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, I think, I mean, I’ve obviously been using it for 4 or so, about 3 and a half, 4 years for Lumiere Home. I think the mobile app’s got a lot better, which actually for me is quite important because if I’m out for whatever reason, maybe with a client, and with the nature of what I sell, you have inquiries from sort of building contractors, it could be trade clients. And for them, I want to be doing more bespoke sort of orders. So that’d be a bespoke discount that may be applied to them. And having the ability for me to be able to go into the app now and very easily add in a bespoke coupon, create a draft order, apply that coupon, and then send them the direct checkout link. You could do it 4 or so years ago, but it wasn’t as easy as it is now. So I think a real case on where that’s helped me is that because, yeah, it’s gone from needing to get my laptop out of my bag to set it all up to quickly 5 minutes on my phone, go through, send it all through, and do it that way. So that’s something that’s definitely helped. But again, I think the reason I’m on Woo is my experience with WordPress and over the years, just how easy it is to use. I think when I’ve been in Shopify, I’ve had a few clients on it. It’s so easy to break Liquid files and trying to do anything custom. Yeah, whether that’s because I’m not in the platform enough, but for me, yeah, it’s just second nature.

James Kemp:
Would you change anything about— we’ve talked about, not us here, but previously, sort of tailoring the WordPress admin to ecommerce as an option. So if you’re running a store, The, the admin becomes less WordPress and more WooCommerce. Do you do anything like that already with like, I know there’s plugins that allow you to.

Jack Roebuck:
For me is, um, so the live dashboard I mentioned, if that or a version of that sat, you know, when you sign into your dashboard at the moment, you get all of your WordPress plugins, whether they’re up to date, notifications, all of that, remove those and have a dashboard that has your orders, your ad spend, whatever you pull through, your net profit, all of these different metrics, that would be way, way, way more beneficial. So for me, I have it on a local server and that is my dashboard. So I very rarely go into WordPress itself at the moment, to be honest, other than to deal with orders because everything else sits within that dashboard for me, or I’m in the ad accounts or analytics or whatever it may be. So yeah, I think if there was something that could be built, it would be that, a better overview when you first sign into your store.

James Kemp:
That makes sense.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, I’ll, as I say, I’ll send the, what I’ve kind of built over to you, James, just so you can see roughly what it looks like. Obviously that’s got a lot of other things integrated into it, but some of the raw information that comes from the REST API for Woo that could very easily be that initial dashboard that people see.

James Kemp:
Yeah.

Jack Roebuck:
Um, but yeah.

Katie Keith:
Open source important to you, and was that a factor in you choosing or continuing to use WooCommerce?

Jack Roebuck:
Um, I think it was a factor. Um, obviously some of the stuff I’ve spoken about there, um, requires some of the open source elements, but to be completely honest, for me wasn’t a deal breaker. I think for bigger sites where there’s a lot more technical aspects that go into a build, probably is more of a consideration. But for me, wasn’t a massive deal breaker, being completely honest, no.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think a lot of people, they benefit from the consequences of open source rather than the philosophy of it. For example, you mentioned some of the custom integrations with the analytics. analytics and all of that, which is largely possible because of it. So I think it’s more like the implications of it that matter to people.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, definitely.

James Kemp:
So you see people talking about, um, sort of owning their data as well, which I guess is, uh, it’s quite nice, especially if you’re building, you know, custom dashboards and things, just having access to all of that data in whatever form.

Jack Roebuck:
Exactly. And then you take it and use it however you see fit. for whatever you’re trying to get to. So in a way, yes, probably was a bigger thing than I thought, but because I’ve not had an issue and obviously have gone with Woo, maybe if I’d gone the Shopify route a year or so ago when I had to have that decision, when I was rebuilding it and redesigning it, would I have been annoyed potentially by the lack of kind of open source that that gives you? But yeah.

Katie Keith:
Okay, well, let’s zoom out a bit because you also see a lot of other people’s websites through your work with Robuck Consulting. Do you have anything in particular that you’ve noticed in terms of what merchants typically get right and what they got wrong that people can learn from?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, I think sometimes people still don’t go into the data enough, in my opinion. So one example of that is refunds and actually tracking your refund rate. So I did a big piece of work for myself on that recently and just really tracking if there are refunds that are coming through, what products are they? Have you acquired that customer through Google Ads or a paid form of advertising? Because then you’ve obviously paid your Google Ad spend to get them there. You’ve then paid for the cost of goods, the delivery, then you’ve got a refund that’s come through. So Always, people, obviously, yes, you want to grow, you want to develop, you want to be doing new things, but also make sure that things are in order first because sometimes getting a refund rate down from 12% to 5% has a bigger impact than growing and spending all of this time on acquiring new. Make sure that your fundamentals are there first. So I think that’s a big thing for me. And then also tracking is arguably the biggest thing from a performance marketing point of view that people need to do from the start. Because if you start spending decent volumes with Google, with Meta, and you haven’t got tracking set up correctly, either you’re double counting conversions, aren’t counting conversions correctly, things aren’t triggering properly, it messes everything else up. As I mentioned with my example with the CookieYes issue of stripping the Google Click ID, if I hadn’t spotted that within a 2, 3 week period, I could have gone 3 or 4 months with Google Ads saying that it was serving at a 1.5 ROAS when in reality it wasn’t. And then if you have those tracking issues, what confidence does that give you to then scale? So that is the first thing I do with all of my clients is get access to GTM, go through the tags and triggers that are set up, make sure that they’re firing correctly. And then once that’s done, then you build on from it. So in terms of the kind of biggest things I see, probably those 2 things is not overlooking the basics. And one example was, yeah, the refund rate. And, and then the second is your, your tracking from a performance marketing point of view.

James Kemp:
That makes sense. There’s a plugin that I’ve seen around a lot in, in terms of like tracking and doing it in a good way. I know Tag Manager is one way to do that. I use that myself. But even that can get— there’s like some level of expertise that you have to have there, I think.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, you need to have a decent level of knowledge. Because again, with tags and triggers, yes, let’s say you’re on a service-based client and you’re tracking thank you conversions. That’s dead easy because you redirect through to a thank you page and you track that page view as the conversion. But then for add to carts, it depends what fires when that add to cart is triggered. Same for the cart, same for the checkout. There’s some good integrations with Woo though. There’s some good third-party plugins that integrate. the WooCommerce goals into Google Tag Manager. And again, if people haven’t done it or experimented with it, Google Cloud has a really good integration for Tag Manager so that you can set that up in whatever LLM you’re using. So for me, I have that set up inside VSC for Claude Co, linked into Google Tag Manager. If I have any issues that come up, It can then go through, diagnose what the issue is, and then inside Tag Manager, you’ve also got a live view. So you can then see this was the issue, we’ve implemented this fix, go into Tag Manager preview mode, and then click what should trigger, and then it will give you a full view of if the tag fired, if it didn’t, and then you know, right, okay, cool, it’s fired, publish it, and then go from there. But again, that comes with Yeah, you need to have the experience to do that still.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think a good, um, sort of stepping stone to that is a plugin by, uh, Derek— I can’t remember his surname— uh, Ashour. Yeah, I wasn’t going to try and pronounce it, um, called Conversion Bridge, uh, which is conversionbridgewp.com. Um, okay, so it’s specifically built for WordPress, and it— he is basically creating like an easy way to to link one system to your WordPress site and whatever plugins you have installed. So yeah, that can be a really good choice for that if you don’t want to get too deep into the weeds of GTM, which from experience I know can be quite complicated.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. James, I actually wrote down while we were doing this podcast that we should invite him on to do an episode about conversion tracking because we haven’t quite covered that topic. And Elliot, uh, in the comments says the Conversion Bridge plugin is great for setting up tracking. So yeah, I think we should get Derek on.

James Kemp:
Yeah, very cool.

Katie Keith:
So, uh, Jack, what’s next for the stores or the consultancy? What are your kind of key plans for future growth given what you’ve already achieved?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, I think, um, for me a big thing is starting to scale Lumiere Home now. Um, I’ve kind of got it to a level where it’s at now. Um, obviously I’ve only been self-employed for 5, 6 bumps. So being able to get that to the level it’s at now is great, but I want to scale it. So scaling for me looks like almost doubling in size from where it is today over the next 2 years or so. A lot of that is going to come from the SEO performance of the site. So I’ve spent a lot of time since I’ve gone self-employed on the SEO for Lumiere Home. So to put it into context, it’s gone from just over 1,000 organic sessions to just over 3,000. Organic sessions recently. And the biggest reason for that is spending a lot of time on category page content and making sure that they’re optimized for the right keywords. So if anyone is looking at the site or has been on it, is it perfect? No, but the outdoor lighting category pages and the subcategories that exist for that is kind of the blueprint that I would give to people to rinse and repeat for their own stores. So by that, for those that may not know what I’m referring to, is obviously if you think of the different stages to your e-com site, you’ve got your first stage homepage, second category, obviously your outdoor lighting category. Then when you’re on that, there’s so many variations for that. You’ve got up and down outdoor lighting, you’ve got pathway lighting, garden lighting, bar lighting, you’ve got sensor lighting, all of these things. So do your keyword research and then You don’t just create the content for the sake of creating the content. It has to tackle an intent or an issue that someone has and firstly why they’re looking for it, but then secondly tally that back to search volumes and what is actually getting searched. So that’s a big thing for me is improving on the SEO performance because while when I was in my agency job, I obviously had limited time. So I spent a lot more on Google Ads because I just didn’t have the time in the evenings or weekends to spend proper time on SEO. Now I kind of want to lower the Google Ads spend and then increase the time I’m putting into the SEO side to scale that. And then from a consultancy point of view, I’m 50/50 between Lumia Home and my consultancy. So I’ve got 5 consultancy clients and for me that’s what I absolutely love is where you have someone will come to you with an issue that they’ve got and then fixing that for them and then seeing the tangible impact. is great. So for me, to maybe pick up 2 or 3 more consultancy clients would be the aim. But yeah, I just live and breathe it at the moment. So it’s a really exciting time to be in the industry though. I know there’s a lot of talk about AI potentially taking people’s jobs and limiting things. Like when I say limiting things, limiting prospects for people within the industry. I think that is true for, unfortunately, at a junior level. But for those who have been in the industry, I feel it’s still only as good, and I’ve said it a few times on this, is that it’s still only as good as the person that’s using it. So yeah, I think very exciting time to be in the industry.

Katie Keith:
You mentioned SEO. I can’t let you mention SEO without asking your views of the future of SEO. To what extent are you focusing on organic search versus getting AIs to recommend you? And I’m sure light bulbs is an excellent use case for AI discoverability because people would be typing like, what light bulb do I need for this type of light?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think the first thing, as far as Pride SEO this year was, I mean, that was the topic of everybody’s talk, which was great. And I think a lot of people were just talking about It’s entity search now, and you need to own your entity within whatever it may be. So part of that is looking at how keyword research is different and evolved now. And you touched on it then, Katie, it’s prompts. What someone puts into an LLM is maybe 10 to 15 characters long. So how do you account for that within your content? How do you make sure that it’s obviously picked up correctly? FAQs, making sure that schema’s on there. Obviously FAQ schema is discounted by Google quite recently where it’s still picked up, but it’s not got as much of a presence as it used to. Whereas LLMs are still using that as a sort of a form to obviously pass the data. So I think that’s really key. I still think that good SEO will transfer to whether people call it AEO, GEO, there’s so many acronyms for it nowadays. But I do think digital PR and That side is arguably the most important part to it and it’s something that I’m going to be doing more for Lumiere Home as well and getting good relevant citations from decent coverage, not what it was where you could obviously buy links and everything like that. I think it’s evolved so much now where Google is clever enough to spot that. So yeah, making sure that they’re good quality links that are being built.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s a significant challenge to face. And I think it’s going to evolve over time, right? We’re very early in this AI world at the moment.

Jack Roebuck:
Definitely so. But as I say, it’s an exciting time.

James Kemp:
I agree. Well, yeah, thank you, Jack. This has been awesome. I feel like there’s plenty we could still talk about. And I would like to invite you to reach out to me at any point to, you know, talk about WooCommerce and anything that would make it better for you as a merchant. I think there’s, there’s a lot we could do. So yeah, this has been really good. Where can people find you online?

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, I think best thing would be on LinkedIn or on my consultancy site, which is roebuck-consulting.com. Or just drop me an email as well, which is just my name, Jack, at rowbook-consulting.com. So yeah, either of those 3. Yeah, if anyone’s got any questions or wants to see a version of that dashboard that I mentioned that pulls through the different sort of data sources from Woo, then from Google, from Meta, yeah, happy to show what could be created for people.

James Kemp:
Yeah, if you anonymize it like you say, I’m happy to share that on X as well, I think. It’d be cool to see.

Jack Roebuck:
Yeah, perfect. I’ll drop that over to you either later today, James, or tomorrow.

James Kemp:
Awesome. Sounds good.

Jack Roebuck:
Perfect.

Katie Keith:
Well, next time we’re going to be talking with Chris Badgett from LifterLMS about subscriptions and recurring revenue. And that’s a really important topic that we haven’t done yet, how to get that ongoing subscription structure, whether you’re already doing it, how to maximize it. If you’re not doing it, how to consider how to, um, get that recurring revenue from your products. That’s on the 14th of September.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And in the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe. You can go to dothewoo.com to find all of our links, but we’re pretty much Do the Woo on most places except YouTube, where we are Do the Woo Podcast.

Katie Keith:
Thanks for watching. Bye.