In a podcast with Kenn Kelly from Never Settle, a WooCommerce agency, he was asked with all of the changes happening in the e-commerce industry, the different platforms, headless becoming a thing now, where does he envision the future of e-commerce going? And how does Woo fit into that?
Kenn shared that subscription based businesses stood out to him. which we’ve been seeing happen for a long time. Amazon pressed that quite a few years ago. And a lot of people started realizing, it was like, “My toilet paper’s going to be on delivery.” And now everyone’s like, “Oh, this makes a lot of sense.” And people also see, “Oh, it’s a recurring revenue stream.” He thinks when it’s forced it doesn’t work. But he absolutely thinks that that segment of e-commerce is going to continue to really expand. And WooCommerce can do that out of the box, really powerful engine, there.
One of the things that his agency sees where they get called into bigger projects are people wanting some sort of advanced subscriptions. So a client that Never Settle is launching right now, Bixbi Pet, they have all these incredible dog foods, and all organic, and all this stuff, and they’re in most PetSmarts across the country, and pretty large business. But their customers are on subscriptions for their dog food, and their dog treats, and cat food, and cat treats.
But they wanted a really cool checkout engine for people to build their subscription. So his agency had a lot of customization in that, but where they found the most customization, where he thinks it’d be fun to see us as a community invest more into WooCommerce is my account experience. That’s the thing that he feels like has the most potential, not just in design and user interface.
As an example, for these guys, they want their customers to come in and be able to just swap out what flavors they’re in. So they’re going to order three bags a month and they want to be able to go in and change those without changing the subscription. And that’s highly custom. That’s not something that you can do out of the box, or to set up an auto-rotation where they’re just surprised. They can just say, “Hey, of these six flavors, just rotate them for me.”
And so they built that for them. And Kenn thinks not only are you going to see subscription businesses increase, but you’re going to see people really pressing into the customer experience of the subscription business. That’s the ones that they’ve seen really grow, is they really nurture those people. Clients see them as the goal behind their business and so they invest a lot into that experience.
So it’s more and more personalization. It’s going to be leveraging AI, it’s going to be leveraging market automation tools, but less blanket offerings. They have something that’s written that says, “Hey, this person’s ordered 10 bags of cherry dog food,” which isn’t a real flavor, “and we’re releasing cherry treats. so we’re automatically going to present this offer to them to try it free for one month or something.” So I think personalization is one of the big things.
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