Joining WooCommerce at their company conference

Sharing and learning with the team at WooCommerce

In February 2023, we were invited to join WooCommerce at their conference in Vienna, where 300+ of their team were gathered together for a week of talks, workshops, idea generation and connection.

WordPress and WooCommerce are at the core of our work and these platforms will stay at the heart of what we do at Atomic Smash in the near future and beyond.

It was an absolute pleasure to join WooCommerce to share our insights, representing our agency, team and clients.

Piers Tincknell, Co-founder & Managing Director of Atomic Smash, and Tess Coughlan-Allen, Head of Growth at Atomic Smash, flew to Vienna to join WooCommerce’s Agency Program Manager, Mary Voelker, on stage for a fireside chat.

First we had the opportunity to introduce Atomic Smash to the wider WooCommerce team who were sat in the audience. We talked through the business history, our goals for the future, and how we’re accelerating growth for our clients by helping them get more out of their WooCommerce stores.

We shared our journeys to working with WooCommerce as an agency partner, as individuals and on behalf of the rest of the team at Atomic Smash. We also highlighted the journey to working with WooCommerce on behalf of our clients who wanted to start selling online (and for whom WooCommerce was a natural fit).

Sharing insights as a WooCommerce partner

WooCommerce brings bespoke features, customisation, a better client experience and less limitations than competitors like Shopify or Magento. We gave the analogy of owning your house versus renting your house, and the freedoms or limitations different platforms bring.

Best of all, WordPress and WooCommerce have a global community behind them, bringing momentum and energy to continuously drive these platforms forward. This is something we champion about open source regularly, both directly with our clients and more widely through our networks.

Exploring eCommerce trends

During the chat, we talked through trends we’re seeing from merchants, shifts being driven by consumers that are gathering momentum, and other opportunities bubbling up across the industry.

This included the likes of increased flexibility of payments, consumer desire for digital wallets, connecting in-store and online CXP through a clicks and mortar model, as well as more personal and localised experiences.

We talked about the need for tight integrations, marketplaces, and the complexities of joining up systems into one ecosystem that can work harmoniously and connect to a central WooCommerce site.

77% of consumers globally continue to believe marketplaces are the most convenient way to shop online, a 10% increase year-over-year. Marketplaces are growing faster than standalone stores because people want choice and convenience.

We also covered sustainability, shipping, seamless checkouts and the opportunities that can arise from merchants owning and gaining insights from the entire user journey – data from search, to website, to sale, through the post-purchase experience and into remarketing.

An exciting opportunity that came up in discussions was AI, which has significant potential that we haven’t seen realised just yet, such as:

• Generating product imagery
• Writing descriptions for products
• Predictions for stock and sale surges based on historic trends
• Creating accessible experiences by auto-generating alt text
• And the list goes on!

Adapting to these trends, Atomic Smash has become increasingly forward-thinking with clients to help them stay ahead of their competition through our strategic website performance offering.

Meeting the demands of our clients

We were able to give our insights and feedback directly to WooCommerce, including how successfully the technology is meeting the demands of merchants when supported by talented developers, designers and specialist agencies.

We also shared some common challenges that businesses face when using WooCommerce and how these are currently addressed by our team, along with opportunities for the future.

Hearing from merchants firsthand about what they are struggling with is vitally important, so we discussed how WooCommerce and the communities working with it can discover what to prioritise and push forwards.

In practical terms, it’s now easier than ever to get direct feedback from customers – we are all globally, instantly connected – and use that to inform future roadmaps to build the best platforms we possibly can.

From an agency perspective, it was fascinating to hear how WooCommerce gains insights from their merchants and maps out their roadmaps too.

Challenges and opportunities

Our discussion covered challenges and opportunities associated with:

• Merchant onboarding, education and inspiration
• Getting meaningful data out of stores for informed decision making
• Integrating multiple systems with WooCommerce
• Choosing payment gateways and the launch and evolution of WooCommerce Payments
• Documentation and supporting the next generation of developers
• The balance between merchants having freedom to customise their stores with the risks of incompatibility of plugins with themes or frameworks, when not supported by a developer or agency

Another key challenge we highlighted was collaboration between WooCommerce’s in-house developers and the global community of contributors. From our perspective, keeping up velocity to push out changes without losing the community feel is what makes WooCommerce so powerful.

This also means that WordPress and WooCommerce have to appeal to:

1. Developers who are contributing — for instance with a pleasant codebase and solid documentation
2. Merchants — for instance through new features

It’s a fine art!

Drawing it together

Finally, as the fireside chat came to a close, we shared an example of the impact that a client is having through their WooCommerce store.

The Grand Appeal, Bristol’s children’s hospital charity, runs auctions through their WooCommerce store and the funds raised are directly changing the lives of children and their families. It was really special to be able to share that with WooCommerce and see reactions firsthand.

Outside of the fireside chat, we had the opportunity to spend quality time with our friends at WooCommerce over the course of our stay.

Being able to share insights between Atomic Smash and WooCommerce, while representing the agency, our team and our clients, was an invaluable experience. We’re humbled that WooCommerce invited us as their guests.