Name: Ecommerce today: Open Source vs Closed Source
Uploaded: 2026-08-26T16:19:43.215Z
Duration: 1 h 44 s
Description: Ecommerce today: Open Source vs Closed Source

Transcript for "Ecommerce today: Open Source vs Closed Source": Welcome, everyone. My name is Shubert Coon, and I will be your host for today's webinar. Just a quick introduction about myself before we start. I am a director of product marketing at WooCommerce, and I've been here for about four and a half years. Today's topic is open source versus closed source ecommerce. Over the next hour, we're going to get specific about when open source is a genuine disadvantage for our client, why AI makes open source more valuable, and also talk about where open source might not be a fit for some merchants. First, we'll start with the fireside chat with our panel for about thirty minutes. Then we'll have a ten minute demo showing what it looks like to work on Moo using AI and the tools around it. And then we'll close with about fifteen minutes of live q and a. Just a quick note about the q and a. You're all welcome to drop your questions into the q and a panel on your screen. We'll be collecting these, throughout the session, and then address them, at the end during the q and a session. Okay. Let me introduce our panel. Our first panelist is Shani Banerjee. She is a developer advocate at WooCommerce. She's been with Woo for about four and a half years. Our second panelist is Ian Meissner, who many of you may already know from the Woo community. He is a cofounder and general manager of Kestrel, which is a developer of WooCommerce plugins. And our final panelist is Brian Kortz, who is another developer advocate, at WooCommerce. He's been here for about a year and a half and previously spent many years on the developer and agency side of the WordPress community. Okay. Welcome to our panels. Let's get going. Okay. Our first question I'll, post to Shani. When should an agency recommend Shopify or Wix instead of WooCommerce even if it has the technical ability to build the project on Woo? So this has come up a few times, and I think that there's a lot of opportunity to really get to know your client and get to know what level of management, what level of interest they have, what level of sales that they're doing. Obviously, admin can be a little bit more intensive on WooCommerce because of customization. However, I think there's a lot of opportunity to, a, educate, and, b, for you as an agency to be able to, you know, pull some levers and really show what customization can do. So I think it really has to do with your merchant's needs. What are their hosting needs? What are, their end checkout needs? Like, what exactly again, looking at volume and scale. I think scalability is a a big one because eventually you end up getting out of that, you know, I have everything in a contained contained little box scenario. And, as you scale up, especially when you get to those, like, higher SKUs, you want speed and performance. And, again, if there's if there's a specific use case, for your customer that they want, you know, customization for a wholesale and maybe they want b to c as well, things like that. You want that flexibility for them. So I would say for, you know, somebody who's, you know, really small, not yet ready to grow, doesn't need a lot of customization, That might be just, you know, seeing that black box or you know, ideally, we would love for somebody who's really, you know, a high value merchant to be able to give you, you know, business and give us business as well. So, but I think the where cost effectiveness comes in is really in that, you know, 1 to 5 mil range. We can really be effective. So I would say outside of that, there's opportunities to sell sell, but, you know, again, I think it's really knowing your merchant, knowing what they're capable of, and then also what is your, you know, contractual agreement with them. How much do you wanna be able to help or develop with them? I'll also pitch that over to, to Ian because I think he has some really good perspective there. Yeah. No. Absolutely. And, I mean, I will share just, you know, full disclosure for anyone watching. Kestrel, we do mostly WooCommerce extensions, but we do have some Shopify apps as well. So, you know, as a company, we kind of work on both sides of things. That being said, like, the the the thing that I've always pitched for WooCommerce specifically is it's not about the merchant's needs just today. It really is, like, you know, as you're talking to them, are they the type of person that's gonna come to you every three months with a with a fun imagination of all the very cool things that their store should now do. And, you know, with WooCommerce, with, you know, open source, you can always say yes, and you don't have to wonder or question if that's going to be an issue. So, you know, when should an agency recommend it? I would very much align with what what you said, Shani, about the, the ongoing needs. But I would also look at it as, like, how likely are they to work with you on, like, a, you know, an ongoing basis rather than just on the initial setup and the build. Right? Awesome. Thank you, guys. Okay. Moving on to our second question, I'll pose this first to Brian, and then again, Ian and Johnny, feel free to to jump in. Okay. What does data ownership actually change for a merchant, and what deplatforming or platform control risks should agencies make clients aware of? Yeah. This is a interesting one because I think for those of us inside the open source world, we talk about things like open source and we talk about data ownership. And those sort of feel like moral choices that we all kind of stand behind and believe in. But for a business owner, if it's not a practical choice, then it's probably gonna fall flat as, like, a marketing tactic. So we know that. But there are very specific situations, around data ownership. I think we've also seen where proprietary platforms are much more limited in the types of products that you can sell and the types of markets that you can sell in, and that's definitely a big thing about Woo where you have total freedom for the types of products you sell and the payment providers and the hosting and whether you wanna comply with local regulations and host, you know, in servers in your country or you want to sell something that maybe is not allowed on a Shopify type platform, that's definitely a big part of it. Those are those, you know, deplatforming risks. The the idea that somebody can just take your entire store down and stop your business from running. Obviously, with WooCommerce, you can take your own store down accidentally with a bad plug in, but that's a a different situation and much easier to resolve because you own the stack. But I also think there's a lot of other benefits that come with that data ownership. We've been playing a lot with, local development environments and things like that where you can actually take your entire store locally. You can run it through an AI. You can get access to everything and how it works, how the pieces go together, all of the data that's inside of it. There's no rate limited API that you need to access to pull all of your historical data, all these sorts of things. So as data becomes more powerful with things like AI, there's just a lot of, like, advantages to owning your entire stack and having that full access to it. That's probably just one part of it. But, yeah, there's there's tons of reasons where open source and owning your data really affect the the things you can do with it. Yeah. I'd like to just add on that too is that one of the biggest issues with that whole the data ownership is the pitch is a lot of the times that until the merchants felt the pain of it, they don't understand the risk or the the the concern that there's been that that so you as an agency bringing that message to them, you know, letting them know and ensuring they can make the best educated decision based on that risk factor is probably really important, you know, to make sure you're delivering the best service for them as well. Yeah. And I think that adds to what you're saying earlier, which is the agency's job is not to just solve today's problem, but it's to help the client think ahead and strategize for where they wanna be in the next three to five years. And so some of these things, like you said, maybe it's not a problem today, but our job as experts coming to these clients is to give them that broader view based on our years of experience, based on all the other stores we've launched, and to bring that. And so there's probably ways where it's gonna become an impact later on, and you can, you know, kind of verbalize that early on. I'd also be curious, just for, you know, folks who are attending. Has there been a moment where you experienced that? You where you experienced that pain point for your merchant, and what have you done to resolve it? I would really love to know just, like, your personal experiences and what kind of, how do you sell it? You know? What is what is that moment where you're like, hey. Actually, I need I I really think we need to talk about this. You know, we've been doing this, but we have this opportunity available for you to really own your data. Curious how you guys sell it. Okay. Yeah. Feel feel free to drop your comments into the chat if, if you have, answers to to Shani's question. But let's move on to the the next question. I'll post this to Ian first. So beyond the value to the merchant, how does building on WooCommerce affect an agency's margins, delivery model, and ability to serve the client over time? Yeah. I mean, that's a very good question. It's very broad, of course. But, also, you know, when you look at the monetization model between some of the closed source platforms, it is very much defined for you. Right? And while you can certainly go and pitch your own rates regardless of what platform you're using, because a lot of the the one of the biggest benefits of using something like Shopify or Wix for a store is that it's got that more polished front end user experience. You know, day one, the merchant jumps in. They start clicking buttons. They don't necessarily, you know, need as much guidance at the very start. And I know that's probably not the best message for the Wu team here, but I think that is for those, like, lower end merchants very much to be expected. I also think, though, that from an agency monetization standpoint, that does also limit sort of what you can do as well, you know, because you're doing less to actually customize the experience for the specific merchant. So there's really a lot less to justify, you know, potential costs, fees, whatever. But then tying it back to specifically the open source side of things, you know, we have a very strong ecosystem. You know, you can work with a variety of hosts. You can, you know, make partnerships and agreements with all the various players in the space and, you know, come up with your own way of doing things and your own personal package where not just in pricing or fees or in, you know, the margins specifically. It's also just, like, how can you fully differentiate your offer and what you can actually do for merchants on the platform. And I I think that's easier on WooCommerce, at least. Brian, Johnny, do you guys have thoughts? I mean, I think also just, like, really thinking about the fact that a custom solution for one person is also a potential monetization stream for you as an agency. So looking at any sort of, you know, extension that you create, having that capability to access other merchants that need automatically just gives you opportunity. And so it's really what you wanna do with it and how if you can stabilize it and package it, right there, that's gonna, you know, separate you from, closed circuits where, you know, you're not really gonna get as much opportunity to, experiment. And I think the fact that, yeah, you can then partner with others' ecosystem. Say there is a solution that you really like. Maybe you can actually feed into one part of that stack that works well together, creating, you know, packages as partners. I there's just so much that you can do from smaller standpoints of monetization that are really just like, hey. This is a solution that I built, and now it's a solution for everybody. So I just really like that. I would love to yeah. What do you think, Brian Coors? Yeah. And I I wanna frame it. Like, said I worked at an agency for, like, a decade. And, obviously, one of the first things we're thinking about is how do we pay all of our developers? That was, you know, definitely a huge thing. And so you are looking for opportunities, especially in WordPress. You do things like care packages and maintenance plans and all these sorts of things. But you also have to be very cautious that what you're doing actually provides value to the merchant. Like, we don't wanna set up a situation where they're realizing that they're paying you for something that's built into a platform or comes for free or another platform offers it. But it is your job as the agency to look at their business from a more holistic perspective and find those opportunities where it's a a win win value situation for both of you where it's, you know, you could go to a proprietary platform and you could buy an app that might solve your problem, but it's also gonna charge you based on your growth, and it's gonna kinda tax you as you grow. Or as an agency, you can build something custom and you can build a really, really bespoke solution. And for the merchant, it's gonna end up being cheaper. It's gonna end up being a better value. It's gonna end up being exactly what they want. And so if you're focused on providing them value and kinda comparing to, yeah, you can you can use the off the shelf solution. In WooCommerce, off the shelf solutions are relatively, I would say, lower like, more value than, in other places. Other platforms, they do charge you as you grow. But, you know, I I do wanna make sure we centered on the goal is not just as the agency to pay your bills. Obviously, that's a big part of it, but also to do it in a way where your client is grateful that they're they're glad to pay you. And I think Ian's kinda said this before. Like, at least with something like WooCommerce, the crazy idea that the client has is pretty much always doable. It's not a question of if I can do it. It's just the scope of it. And so having those opportunities is pretty important. Yeah. Should you do it, not can you? Right? It's. a should. different. it's, a different question. yeah, is customizing your checkout that drastically a good idea or not? Those are the the expertise things that they're gonna bring to you because, you know, there's still so men so much nuance in how you customize the an ecommerce store, and not every idea is a good idea. Yeah. And I do wanna double down on the the whole, like, app versus plug in pricing there too. I mean, actually, Patrick Rowland did a really good talk, at Checkout Summit around the total cost of ownership comparison between Shopify and WooCommerce. And I I I think he has a blog post up, so folks should probably check that out after finish this first. But, the as you grow and as you scale on, like, a Shopify store, you're paying each individual app a scaling fee, percentage of sales, cost per order, or whatever it is. And on WooCommerce, I mean, a lot of the plugins I sell are, like, $79 a year. You know? We're not exactly breaking the bank on that. So the agency gets to keep more of whatever the budget is when using Woo. Right? Yeah. And if if I actually do really recommend his blog post and talk because one of the things he really did emphasize is that at a certain scale, moving to a hosted platform doesn't remove the need for developers. Like, they still had a full time development staff working on their store. It doesn't just because it's. a hosted platform, that's that's only one aspect of the value that a developer brings to it, and they still needed developers to manage it, and they still needed to do all the same testing of all the plugins, make sure that they work, make sure that it's the right solution. And so there's a lot of opportunities there, and there's also a lot of opportunities in automatic for agencies for those similar sort of revenue share type models. There's the opportunity to white label a lot of your extensions and hosting. Automatic for agencies offers, like, a a sort of dashboard and invoicing system so you can sort of white label, you know, find some value in there, get points on certain payment providers, that sort of thing. And so those those options are there. But instead of being sort of a flat fee, you actually can kind of tailor it, and it gives you a lot of room to negotiate with your potential customers and find ways where you can get a little bit of recurring value from them, but also give them, much more value over time as they scale. Also hopping on this, I think, one thing that I've really heard from agencies directly is your experience actually sells blue because when you encounter a problem, you've probably already addressed it. And that was one of the most interesting things to me to hear from agencies directly is that your like, just what you already know how to do can really put you in a place to confidently speak to what is possible and not not just allowable, but necessary. You know? And so I would I would just really encourage everyone, to feel strongly and, like, to to know that your experience brings sales. You know what I mean? That that is really what's going to Ascension. So, you know, there's there's an undeniable power to having said, like, yeah. We know how to do this with who because we've done it. And so that consistency, is is also a piece of of all of this. Awesome. Thank you guys for the responses. Okay. Next question. I'll just pose this generally to the panel. So whoever wants to chime in, feel free. What additional responsibilities come with choosing WooCommerce, and what capabilities does an agency need in place to manage those responsibilities well? I mean, not all at once. Right? I I will say the thing that stood my immediate thought on this is specifically the, the initial onboarding and training is something that I think especially with, you know, that 1 to 5,000,000 range, Schubert, that you mentioned earlier. It's a or is it me, Shani? Sorry. Whoever mentioned that earlier. But regardless, there is a little bit of, like, ensuring the team knows how to handle things like fulfillment and and all that in a way that is easy to manage and easy to use that I think is a little bit more of, you should be more deliberate about it on on WooCommerce stores, at least. And what do you guys think? I think bringing up AI as well. Sorry for being able to bring up, you know, the opportunities for AI to, potentially assist in some of those smaller areas. So if a merchant needs marketing, how can you have AI actually assist you in marketing automation? So there's aspects, I think, of an agency that you already have in terms of your own marketability, your own selling, and also what you see in terms of, you know, a wide range of clients, and to, again, kind of how can you create solutions that maybe is not going to be so, you know, human intensive, if you will? And so I I think that's a really emerging space. I feel like we saw it with, we're seeing it with, like, the Google extension being able to offer, you know, marketing campaigns and Google Ads. Automation for for merchants is a big deal because that means that they don't actually have to necessarily have a huge marketing department and somebody specifically running that. So even if you can kind of take off a little bit of that pressure, that that's an opportunity for the agency and not just, you know, the your merchant or client. Yeah. The the idea that an agency needs to be a little more full service and understand marketing and understand best practices is definitely critical. There's also a comment in the chat that I would summarize as reliability, which is, you know, is the store gonna go down? Is it gonna scale? Is it gonna handle high pressure moments like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all that sort of stuff? And that's a big a big reason that people do wanna choose a proprietary platform. They definitely have downtime. You know? Those other proprietary platforms go down, and you just kinda have to wait it out. With a WooCommerce store, if it goes down, you do have control and options, and you can make those decisions. And so also bringing that expertise of understanding, yeah, we're we're not just buying, you know, a host a cheap hosting platform that's gonna work today. We're buying the one that's gonna scale for those extremely high, high impact moments. And so one of the things we've seen internally is because Pressable, the host that, Automatic owns is, you know, the same company as WooCommerce. We actually see when we see issues on Pressable with a release or with a specific store, we have the opportunity of the same engineers that work on WooCommerce can actually look at that under the hood, figure out what worked, figure out what we need to change either on the platform of the hosting itself or inside of WooCommerce plugin, and it builds this really nice feedback loop. And so it kind of gives a little bit of the best of both worlds where it is almost like one stack because it's the same company, and there's, you know, communication between the engineers. But as an agency, understanding that reliability and a site staying online is probably their top priority. That does fall to the agency to make those proper decisions and understand the value of good hosting and the specific type of store and what types of things the store is doing and when it's gonna need specific types of performance improvements, whether it's, like, you know, making sure the checkout is more performant or making sure that high order load is more performant, making sure that object caching is in place, all those sorts of things. You kind of do have to bring all those things together, but you can tailor it and you can make better choices, for your clients. Yeah. I think there is definitely a bit of, there there's this sort of, like, this knowledge out in the world or this belief out in the world that for for whatever reason, Shopify is a safer bet for that uptime and reliability. But it it is only a safer bet because you're giving up the control. And, you know, when there is downtime, it's completely out of your hands. There's nothing you can do. Whereas on WooCommerce, you know, if you're preparing to be on Shark Tank, you can let your host know, and they can do everything it takes to make sure that you're gonna have that 100% uptime. It's the, you know, the burden and opportunity to to make sure everything works is definitely a trade off there as far as the whole open versus closed. setup. Mhmm. Right? I think also, Awesome. yeah, just real quick, the opportunity to create, you know, an umbrella, support, I guess, access point for clients, from the agency perspective. And then you get to really dig into so many different support avenues, whether it's, like, our actual happiness, customer support and success, if it's talking to us as, you know, advocacy, you have the community. Like, there's just such a wealth of knowledge that you can share, and then you can also really leverage for your agency to say, you know, if something isn't working, we can also give you this, you know, and these are our channels that we work through, and we'll do this for you. And I think people really appreciate that human touch on that actually, because people want to get a person still at the end of the day. So, yes, we can automate things. We can automate marketing and such. But when we need support, we still really want to know that somebody is listening to us, and then you have access to to all of us at any moment, really. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Okay. The next couple questions around AI. So how does AI change the relative advantage of an open source platform like WooCommerce compared with a closed platform? Yeah. I feel like I touched on this a little bit earlier. It's, you know, the idea that you have full access to your code. I saw somebody, I think, in the chat here. I I don't think it was on Twitter, but I think it was here talking about, you know, they use a an off the shelf plug in for something, and it doesn't quite have the API endpoints that you want. It doesn't quite have the access that you want. The great thing about WooCommerce is you can pull your site to a local environment, and you can, you know, point cloud or codex or whatever at it. And you can say, this is how the plug in stores its data. I wanna build, you know, an API to handle this. Obviously, you're gonna now own the maintenance for that, and you're gonna have to make sure that as the plug in updates, you don't do it. But the old days of I need to modify a plugin to make it work a certain way, modifying off the shelf plugins, but you absolutely have the ability to, one, fork a plugin completely and, you know, own the maintenance of it going forward, or you have the opportunity to understand how it stores its data, how it works, and use AI to do that a lot faster and find your own solutions. And then there's also it's not quite open source, but it is just the idea of hooks and filters and all those things that WooCommerce offers, which is there's really almost no point in the stack where we haven't made some availability to kind of access, modify, or pipe that data. And so being able to actually see every single piece and if there's no black box, it's really you have full access to it, maybe was useful in the past. But with something like AI that can read all that code a lot faster, it can experiment. It can do it on a local environment, which we know, like a lot of these other platforms, you don't even really get a staging environment. You get, you know, a fake, you know, store that's not your real store with your real data. So, there's tons of advantages to that, and there's an entire open source ecosystem. And AI understands WordPress and WooCommerce extremely well because so much code is public, so much code is in the training data. There's so many different skills and things. Most of these are solved problems. And so it's, you know, just a world difference of what you can actually accomplish these days with AI. And you can do it in a safe, secure environment that's, you know, not gonna break anything on your live store until you've actually tested it, QA'd it, and deployed it. Yeah. I actually think that's why we haven't seen as of yet, at least, we haven't seen, like, that one really amazing, like, AI product for WooCommerce or whatever is because of it being open source, because we're all sort of experimenting around the same ways of doing things with just the core underlying platforms and models and all that. The the thing that's most amazing to me is you can just make any change. You know, you can literally just do anything. And as far as, you know, forking plug ins, Brian, let's not encourage that too much. But, you know, lots of hooks and filters and all that that are well documented. And you point it at the docs, and it does all the extended extending it for you and all that. It's all very easy. Now, of course, all the other platforms are, you know, building their, you know, like, Wix's AI website builder and all that, and it's all very fancy and polished. But you're limited again to what they've built, you know, the the guardrails they've put up. Whereas with WooCommerce, every host has their own version of that, or you just go use the Ollie MCP because that's the one that's pleasant and easy to use. But, yeah, that's the the chaos is the thing, basically. Right? Also, like, you know, what's coming down the pipeline? So I just spoke at WCUS about, you know, the the rise of the agent to buyer who doesn't exist yet. Right? Like, we're really in a space where, we're not fully buying with agents. We're buying with assistance, and context is going to be key. And the ability to control all of that and are you know, really affect your architecture, now, it's kind of I I explained it as kinda like a middle out scenario on that. There's all this space in between right now that is going to be opportunity. It's going to be, you know, build opportunities, sales opportunity, for keeping really good records to protect you as an agency, to protect, your merchants, your clients, because, ultimately, we're still going to be, you know, subject to all the real world issues, and and rules, right, in terms of what a a merchant is on the line for in terms of a shipping and fulfillment fee, taxes. And if there's a, you know, an agentic buyer out there or somebody else that is really protecting themselves in terms of the the buying process, How are we really making it clear that if we're gonna have a dispute, how are we gonna win that dispute? So really clear data and schema, being able to, like, really organize and choose how you wanna do that. As a result, speed and scalability, making sure that your GEO is going to be, really at the top and findable for your clients and and through agents. And also instructions, really specific instructions for, each page even of your product. So and, ultimately, your product and your product metadata being exactly what you need it to be to be the thing that comes out on top. And so these are all the things that we are having to to now think about, and really start planning for. So even if that buyer isn't there yet, we are looking at, you know, a jump from 20,000,000,000 in sales on, agentic platforms to 144,000,000,000 projected in sales in three years. So what part of that are you gonna grab? And so that again, making those record keeping, dispute resolution protection of the merchant is gonna make you extremely valuable in in this shift. So I wanna talk about that. Get me up about that. What are you doing about that? Are you selling that? Like, let's let's actually look at it together because, really, there's a huge road ahead. And I would love for all of us to make money off of it. Awesome. Thank you, guys. So that basically closes our fireside chat portion of this webinar. Next, we will watch a demo of Brian walking us through a scenario using WordPress Studio, and showing how the benefits of using an open source system like WordPress and WooCommerce and how in conjunction with AI agents and developer tools, you can actually save time, improve work improve your workflow, and deliver more work to your clients. So we often talk about the open source advantage of WordPress and WooCommerce, but I wanna break down sort of what that means exactly. In WordPress and WooCommerce, we have a ton of developer tools that are really important, and, yes, many of them are open source. I'm talking about things like, WordPress CLI, which is sort of my personal workhorse. But we also have REST API. There's a WordPress and WooCommerce MCPs. There's the Pressable MCP that we'll take a look at. There's a just a ton of stuff inside of WordPress and WooCommerce, extensibility, hooks, filters, all that sort of stuff. Those are all great, and those are part of that open source advantage. But I think one of the main things is the fact that with WordPress and WooCommerce, you actually have access to the source code itself. So AI is trained on all the source code, and it knows it really well. But you can also open up your AI agent directly in your actual site, and it's gonna do basically anything it wants to because it has full access. It's not gonna change, you know, the core code and stuff, but it's gonna be able to read it, find exactly what it needs to do, find exactly why things work the way they work, and then create the best solutions. So we're gonna demo a little bit of that today. So in this scenario, I'm looking at my client site as a local copy on my local environment using WordPress Studio. It connected to Pressable. It pulled the site down automatically for me. There was nothing I needed to do to set it up. It just creates it locally for me to work on the site here. So in this instance, the client has come to us with a brief. It's Black Friday, Cyber Monday coming up, and they wanna do a little something extra on their store. They wanna do a free gift with purchase for customers. So if they spend a certain amount of money in their cart, then they're gonna get a free gift with purchase. So in this situation, the first thing you can do is check the Woo marketplace for an extension. That's probably the easiest way to get this functionality up and running. But maybe they have some really specific constraints or you wanna really control what this what it's gonna create. And so in that case, maybe we're gonna build a custom integration. So the first thing I wanna do is pick some products. In this case, I have codecs open at the root of my local WordPress because it's really the context for my whole client. It has their whole site. It has all their store information. I have maybe some, agent skills that do specific things for me. Maybe I have some agents MD or Cloud MD files that provide a lot of context for how I wanna interact. So I like to work there, but everybody has different workflows. But in this case, I'm gonna start with a prompt. So I'm telling it we're planning a Black Friday Cyber Monday gift with purchase promotion. Use the WooCommerce MCP and fetch the last few months of revenue for each of our products, and it's gonna basically do some analysis to see, like, maybe there's products that aren't selling as well that we could give away. Maybe there's products that are really popular that you could use in enticement. That sort of stuff you would work with your client. But the nice thing here is that the WooCommerce MCP is actually gonna connect to the live site with a read only command to get that information from us. So we're getting real actual store data. This is technically a demo store, but it's gonna pull all that. And then because it has the data, the agent itself is gonna do all the work of analyzing it and providing us with all the numbers. So I don't have to go in, log in, and pull reports. I can start working on the next task immediately while the MCP does some background research for me on the client's actual live site. While that runs, let's just take a look at WordPress Studio where I have full access to my local site. I can do things like pull it down from Pressable. That's something I could do here through UI, but I can also just tell my agent because my agent knows how to interact with Studio from the command line. So I can tell it, make sure you pull down the latest version of the site so I'm working on the real live code. And then I'm gonna use it to open up Versus Code and see all of the code based on my actual site. And in here, I have a nice agents file where I explain how to connect to it with different, tools that I have, whether it's the CLI or the MCP. It just kinda gives it some, advice to make sure that it works the right way. So meanwhile, while it's working on that, we're gonna start our next task. And now we can see here that it came back with some some revenue numbers for our live products. So I have a few different products here. It's giving me all the revenue information that I was able to pull from the live store, and it's giving us our recommendations. It's saying maybe you should give away these socks, lowest retail. It's a seasonal fit for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or this beanie, also low priced, seasonal fit. These would make really good products. And then it also mentions some stuff about tracking and things like that. So it's really seeing everything, everything, all of the information about your store. So let's put in our next prompt where we're gonna actually have it build the plug in for us. So now our agent is off and running with our prompt. Create a new plug in that rewards shoppers with a free gift with purchase. The plug in should register a block to show in the mini cart and extend the cart block to display the UI, and it should include a progress bar, how close they are getting to that free gift, and the gift they'll get. And then we wanna make sure that they have to manually add the gift to be able to remove it. We don't wanna automatically give everybody the gift if they don't want it. And you'll see as it starts working, it's gonna do things like run some of my agent skills that I've included in the repo that have really specific rules for how I like to build things. Agent skills are really great. There's a core set of WordPress ones that are available that you can use to kind of guide your agents towards best WordPress approaches. Or, like in this case, you might have some custom ones for your agency where you have the way that your team likes to work. So we're gonna let that run for a while, and what's gonna happen is it's gonna read all the code. It's gonna see exactly what points it needs to do. It's going to make sure that it's using the right kind of cart and checkout. Are they using block cart and checkout or the classic short codes? Because there's different extensibility pathways. It's gonna do all that research for us and build the plug in, and then it's gonna use tools like WP CLI that's built into Studio to make sure that it's updating the settings correctly, that things are loading in the right spot. And then it's eventually gonna pop open the browser and actually click around and test to make sure that the plug in works before you have to work on it. So this is kind of a nice thing where you get to go off and start working on the next task or working on communication with the client while the agent is actually building the functionality and testing it for you. So our agent has finished its development task, and we're gonna see what it came up with. Now in this case, I just gave it a prompt, and I let it run for a while. You're probably gonna do something more like work in a plan mode, come up with a more specific architecture, and really make sure you know what it's gonna build before it builds it. In this case, I just wanted to see what it would come up with on its own. But, you know, your workflows may vary. So if I break down all of the different prompts, I can see that it's finding the correct places to hook into the extensibility of WooCommerce. It's gonna start building files and, you know, creating the actual plug in that's gonna run this custom code. It's gonna do things like run WP CLI commands to make sure that things are plugins are turning on correctly, that pages are loading the correct stuff. It's gonna continue editing files, reading files. It's seeing some compatibility issues, all those things with, like, build processes and scripts and all those things that can sometimes be a little hard to track. It's just taking care of all of it, making sure it's, you know, using the right node version and all that stuff. It's just happening under the hood. I'm not really getting into the weeds with that stuff anymore. And then it goes through. It's a lot more testing in here. It's running a skill to actually do its own QA. So it's gonna load up a browser, and it's gonna gonna click through. And it's gonna try to add things to the cart and see if everything works, make sure the UI is showing up where it's supposed to be, and it's pretty cool. So I don't have to come in and check that work until it thinks it's actually completed it. So you can see here it's done a few things. It's taken some more screenshots, and let's skip down to the end where it gives me everything that it did and shows me the files that it wrote. And I can take a look at those in Versus Code, and I can review them and make sure that I'm happy with it. Maybe I'd have it run an extra security thing to see make sure it didn't make any, you know, additional API endpoints and stuff. It should be able to use all of the built in safe, extensibility of woo, and it looks like it did by using the store API, that sort of stuff. So I feel pretty confident. Let's take a look at what it looks like to actually see what it built for us. So here I'm at my local development store, and I'm gonna click on this simple sweater. And I'm gonna add one to cart. And you can see here, the cart pops open, and, automatically, I have a gift with purchase block that it's inserted and built in the page. Now maybe the design isn't exactly what I want, but that's fine because I can iterate on it, and I can get it to where I want it to go. But I can see it match my spec where it created a progress bar. It has the recommended free thing, and it's you know, I get to unlock it when I get to a $150. So let's see if it live reloads. Yep. So I increase the quantity. So now I have two sweaters in my cart. So I'm up to a $100. I'm $50 away. If I add one more sweater, I should unlock my free gift. Now here's the trick. Will it add it directly to the cart for me? Let's find out. But first, let's take a look at the cart page. So you can see here, this is a different page. You know, some sites just use the mini cart. Some use the regular cart. It was able to actually hook into the block for the cart right here and inject it in there, and it shows that same UI. So I'm gonna add the free gift, and we're gonna see. Yep. It puts it in my cart. It gives me a sale price of $0. So that's pretty awesome. So and I think here, it's a max quantity. It's already filtered, so it's not gonna let me add more. I mean, it definitely went through and sort of tested all the different things, and I can also remove it and remove it from my cart. So this is just a really good example of a client had a very specific need. I was able to, you know, get some data from the store through Commerce MCP. I was able to use an agent, to just build locally with my studio local WordPress environment. And now the next step is probably I'm gonna wanna push this live. If you're an agency, you probably have your own Git based workflow. So maybe I'd go back to my agent and say, put this in a branch on a PR and deploy it that way or something like that. I'm not generally gonna push my ecommerce site directly through. But what I can do is I can go back to my agent, and I can say, with the Pressable MCP, make an on demand backup of the store. So before I deploy it, just make one extra backup just to be safe. These sort of workflows are really great. And so what's really nice about this agent is he stops me and asks me, do I approve it? Yes. We will approve. So it's gonna go and make a backup of the live store, then maybe I'm gonna deploy this code change after I've, you know, reviewed it and checked out, make sure it's good. And so this is just sort of a way that all these tools really come together. And I think the big open source advantage of this is that all of these tools are things that I've been able to reach for and get WP CLI, the studio local development environment, its deep integration with Pressable, the MCP to pull stuff from my live WooCommerce store, and the Pressable MCP to be able to tell it to do Pressable things. So I'm not logging into a bunch of dashboards. I'm not doing any of that. And I can start to see how I'm gonna automate a lot of this stuff by maybe even getting some recurring prompts and scripts so that these sorts of things can happen even more autonomously, and they can just be waiting there in a pull request or a local environment for me to review and just really speed up my workflows. We really just scratched the surface what you can do with these tools, but I really urge you to start exploring them, explore the MCPs, explore CLI, and definitely explore the studio local development environment and see how you can make your agency really leverage that open source advantage. Thanks, Brian, for the awesome demo. So it looks like making some of these changes in WU with AI now might take hours instead of weeks, but everything is still under your control, and a person is still there to be able to approve everything before everything ships. It's a great example of just the power and the control that you still have with AI, and with WU. Okay. We will finish up this, last section, with a live q and a session. We're gonna start with, some questions up on the screen. It looks like the first question is from Venus. One major challenge I see for agencies is that once a client moves it becomes increasingly difficult to migrate them to another platform. In most cases, they will stay within the Shopify ecosystem. And as they grow, simply explore the additional capabilities offered by Shopify Plus. As Shopify adoption continues to increase, this could significantly reduce traditional after sales opportunities for agencies. When it comes to custom development, many clients also seem increasingly willing to sacrifice custom features and flexibility in exchange for the stability, scalability, and lower maintenance requirements that Shopify provides. I believe this is something agencies will need to seriously consider when shaping their future service and revenue models. Yeah. Any any comments? I'll jump. I'll jump in on this one because this is actually, a really good question, which is how do we deal with something like platform lock in? How do we deal with, you know, the migration costs? And that's true of something like Shopify, but that's honestly true of everything. That's true of me using an iPhone and the fact that I'll probably never switch away from an iPhone because the, the lock in is too good there. Earlier, I was talking about automatic for agencies and how it provides a lot of these tools for you to monetize on top. I do wanna, like, clarify. Some of the opportunities we have are specifically around our offerings. Right? So we offer an a chance to white label pressable hosting specifically. We have a chance for you to help monetize if you're putting customers on Woo payments specifically. And these are, you know, not proprietary, but they are our tools that we build. And so those are specifics that we, you know, offer. And so you are gonna have a bit of a migration cost if you move somebody off of it. But with WooCommerce, that migration cost is so much lower because there are tons of competing options in the marketplace and in, like, the wider ecosystem. There's tons of, pieces that you can move out. It's very modular. You can swap one thing and not the other. You can swap hosting if you feel like you need to and not the other. You can do it piece by piece over time. It's not, I'm gonna rip my store off a proprietary platform and do everything at once all from scratch. And so having that sort of more composable approach to how you build things is good, as long as you know that they all work together and as long as you, you know, vet those vendors. Obviously, I I'm preferable, you know, to our tools specifically for this sort of stuff. But, yeah, that is something to consider, and it's just the way that tech companies work to mitigate, you know, churn on the Internet. And it's also something that AI is probably threatening a lot of these companies because AI can do a lot of those migrations faster. It can, you know, what do they call it? Like, slop fork things from one platform to another pretty easily. And so in the sense that that's probably harder for tech companies, that's a really great opportunity for you. And we've seen some really cool AI based migration tools that do, like, 80% of the work of moving somebody from Shopify to WooCommerce just to get them started. And so I think those opportunities are gonna become easier as time goes on and as AI gets more powerful. Yeah. I'd like to add to this. Our team has a memberships platform on both Shopify and on WooCommerce, and so we've actually seen migrations in both directions, actually. It's something that we've helped with. That being said, like, that's part of what I mean, one of the first questions that we answered at the start of this was about that, you know, educating the customer about the what you might get into later at that very front end is a big part of it. WooCommerce being open source, the data is just easier to access. It is easier to between stores. Now I I don't wanna take away from Brian's question, like, Brian's answer. With, like, Shopify Plus, you can get almost all the data out. You just have to try a lot harder. And the reality is in the situation where somebody needs to do that or, you know, they're they're not doing it just because they want a prettier or more custom site, the the cost to them for you to race to drop everything to get them from Shopify to WooCommerce, that's gonna be pretty hefty regardless how nice you are. So, you know, making sure that they know about that risk at the very start of the engagement is how I would aim to address that. If they're already there, just charge them. You know? Okay. Our next question is from Fabio. As AI increasingly becomes the interface through which small businesses create and manage their online presence, do you see WooCommerce becoming the underlying commerce infrastructure for AI generated and AI managed stores? And what layer of that experience do you still think is is missing today? I can speak to this a little bit. I think that I don't know if it's gonna become the underlying commerce infrastructure for everything I may I had, you know, generated. But specifically for, you know, how we are how we are building, kind of up out of what we have right now to meet AI, like I was saying, absolutely. And so in terms of the second part of the question, what layer of that experience do you think is still missing today? So, you know, I think what's in our plans is to work on some of that middle layer for trust and safety and to make sure that that is absolutely, you know, unassailable for your, stores that are being built. And I think that's where we're really gonna be able to, shine and provide something, that, you know, again, other stores or other platforms might not have the ability to do because you're gonna be able to so specifically customize on how you want your resolutions to go, how you want to be able to, you know, even manage errors on your side of the store. So that's kind of essentially where who AI is right now. We want to be able to kind of be your want it to be you while you're not working. So, essentially, what can we really put into that automation, and give both, you know, end end users, so clients or customers, you know, on for the merchant to be able to pipe through their issues, and then the merchants to be able to resolve it without it getting to you even. So there's a lot of layers, I think, that we're seeing emerging, and that's not even considering, again, like, what I had talked about before, which is, the real agentic buyer. So once we're really meeting the platform system systems when we're, dealing with ACP and UCP within the context of, payments. And so, again, I would also highly suggest that you look into where you know, what opportunities there are to test payment gateways with the context of AI. So, just reach out to Stripe, reach out to PayPal, Molly, see what they're doing, with their experimental side of, of the agentic buying because you're you right now have the ability to influence that. So, again, if there's a layer that you're like, hey. I would love for this layer to exist, That's something that we're we really need to build together. So, yeah, honestly, I I think sky's kind of the limit right now. So if you can, you know like, we just have to we just have to be, I think, a little bit, we just gotta get nerdy and, like, try things. And we have to also be okay with failing a little bit, and learning from it and then talking about what those failure points are. So not everything's gonna be perfect. Not everything's gonna be a 100% what you expected the usability to be. But there's, yeah, there's a lot of layers that I think you're gonna be able to to build upon, and WooCommerce is already moving in that direction. One of the things we talked a lot about, when we talked to Stripe and these partners about this idea of, am I gonna have an AI generated store? I think was what the question mentioned. Right? Like, an AI spun up store. As AI starts to shop, you're gonna see a similar pattern to what it's like if you're if you're having your store distribute to Amazon or the Walmart marketplace or some of these other places where they've aggregated a bunch of customers, and they just want you to pipe product data to them, and they're gonna bring those customers to you. And that's gonna be a great opportunity, but we also at WooCommerce, we're built on WordPress, and we really care about brand, and we care about storytelling, and we care about content, and we care about loyalty with your customers. And so you will have to balance those two things, which is, do I wanna just funnel my products into a pipeline where they're just fighting against a a bunch of other products and somebody asked their chat for socks and they see 10 different socks, and your store doesn't matter, I don't think that's gonna be the future for a lot of people. I think a lot of people are still gonna wanna build brand loyalty with loyalty programs and recurring customers and subscriptions and memberships and still represent themselves on their own store in something that they truly own. And that AI agentic approach can definitely be another discovery mechanism for the merchant, but it's not gonna be in place of, owning your own store and owning your own data. It's probably just gonna be another channel much like pushing ads to TikTok or pushing products to Walmart's marketplace or something like that. And so we do really value, like, the brand and the loyalty and the customer relationship and the content side of things, and we don't wanna just be a an a piece of infrastructure. We wanna we wanna build relationships. Yeah. And I just the shopping's an activity, not just a task. Right? Like, people go do it. The brand experience is part of it. I will say as far as the representing the, like, online presence as a business, something that I'm experiencing and I'm sure a lot of the agencies, paint watching do as well, People are coming in. They've already talked with ChatGPT or Claude and decided the answer, and that is sort of that reversion to the mean thing of, like, you you gotta double down further on educating the customer even more than you ever had to before, I think. Because, you know, if you ask a plain incognito chat GPT where to host your ecommerce store, it probably does say Shopify right now. Right? It's the you know, that's what the default assumption is going to be. The thing is that, like, centralization is the risk here. And, you know, as an agency, you should definitely be doing what you can to give them the message Brian, the same sharing. Okay. This will be the last question. This is from Alexander. Now that the agents can and will build more and more features, will WooCommerce offer a test suit that can be wired into agents? Or test. suite. I can, I test suite. Yeah. yeah, I can start with this one. So, in terms of extension building, we do have a test suite for extensions in our marketplace. It's called QIT quality insights toolkit, and it does sort of and then testing, it does things like, load up, you know, like, ephemeral instances where it tests against a lot of the major plugins and major versions of WordPress, WooCommerce. I mean, work WooCommerce is a platform on top of a platform, on top of languages, and, there's a lot of open stuff. Right now, I think QIT is is for specifically submitting your plugins to the marketplace. But this is a question that comes up a lot, and it is something that we are starting to look at. We're you know, broadly, WordPress is already looking at things like benchmarking for different models and helping people understand the best models and the best skills that work specifically with WordPress. But in terms of, like, testing, we are there are some options in the marketplace that you or in the open source repository that you can leverage, and we can post links to that. But this is something that we're trying to find ways to offer this for everybody. So that's a really good question and something, we hope people are And those QIT tests benefit. from adoption for more developers, actually. So, definitely, start selling on the marketplace and start using them, pending whatever Brian's saying that they'll do instead. Yeah. Great. Yeah. I would I just wanna tag onto that real quick too that, also, you know, because it's such a wide gamut, I think the more that you give us feedback in terms of what your testing experience is, the better we can understand what we need to hone on hone on hone into, excuse me, and specifically how to, you know, help influence and create those benchmarks. So I would say hop into the community Slack or get ahold of your, partner manager and say, hey. I really would love to give my current testing info, to you guys to help develop it in this direction. We need it. We want it. Ian already knows. We harass him for it all the time. So if you want to be involved in helping to influence that, we would really appreciate that. Great. Thank you. That concludes our webinar for today. Please also remember to fill out the webinar survey, at the end of the, the webinar, and, we look forward to hearing your feedback on the event. Thank you, everyone, for all of your questions that you submitted. I know we didn't get to all of them, but we will definitely respond to as many of them as we can, after the webinar concludes, as follow-up. Thank you to, Shani, Ian, and Brian, for sharing all of your insights and expertise. And finally, thank you to all of you for attending and helping to make this productive webinar. We'll see you next time.