135 Beka Rice of SkyVerge talks eCommerce

What can I say about Beka apart from "cool". She is the lead WooCommerce developer at SkyVerge, who have built a great reputation not only for their work with WooCommerce, but the way they do business. In this interview we cover quite a large landscape of topics however we mostly talk about eCommerce and what Beka has learned about this subject over the past 5 years!

SkyVerge
https://www.skyverge.com/

Sell With WP
https://www.sellwithwp.com/

Episode 135 Table of Contents:

0:00 Intros

1:48 How did Beka first get into web development?

3:17 What were the early days of SkyVerge like? How does it compare to where SkyVerge is now?

4:35 More about how the Jilt app solves cart abandonment and increases revenue.

6:25 How does third-party development factor into the growth of a platform or ecosystem?

8:30 How important is to experience ecommerce as a merchant before you approach it as a developer?

9:47 How did the acquisition of WooCommerce by Automattic affect the WooCommerce development ecosystem?

11:05 Do you see WooCommerce becoming part of WordPress.com at some point?

12:10 Is there a methodology to setting a price for plugins at SkyVerge?

13:39 What is new in WooCommerce Memberships?

17:23 Beka's Real-Life Oregon Trail

19:23 How are the web development cultures different between Shopify and WooCommerce?

25:34 Where do you see ecommerce going overall?

28:27 Does WooCommerce do a disservice by marketing the base-plugin as free?

30:57 How does WooCommerce handle enterprise level traffic? What are the upper limits of continuous orders WooCommerce can actually handle?

34:34 How is the REST API transforming WooCommerce? What things are possible now that were not possible before?

38:24 Podcast Outros

 

Find bonus content for this episode on the WP-Tonic website:

https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/135-beka-rice-skyverge/

 

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Links mentioned during the show:

WooCommerce
https://woocommerce.com/

Shopify
https://www.shopify.com/

Jilt: Abandoned cart recovery for Shopify and WooCommerce
https://jilt.com/

Spreedly
https://www.spreedly.com/

Automattic
https://automattic.com/

WooCommerce Memberships
https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-memberships/

The Oregon Trail
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game)

WP REST API
http://v2.wp-api.org/

Magento
https://magento.com/

WooCommerce Holiday Selling Tips 2016
https://woocommerce.com/holiday-tips-2016/

MailChimp Holiday Tips
http://mailchimp.com/holiday-tips/