WooCommerce Meetup @ Infobip Zagreb – venturing into omni-channel subscriptions and high performance

First off was Lauren Smith – senior director of engineering from Automattic. He’s working on the WooCommerce core platform so he was able to elaborate on a detailed Woo roadmap. 

Larger part of his talk was reserved for the upcoming HPOS (High Performance Order Storage) which will establish WooCommerce as a fast performing and highly-scalable eCommerce solution. To be honest, managing orders and product meta has always been a bottleneck at the back-end WooCommerce side and we’re glad that the A8C team is doing massive work to improve Woo scalability. Couple of benchmarking notes from his talk:

• Searching through orders by metadata will be 12 times faster
• Processing checkout flow will be 52% faster
• Creating an order on the back-end level will be 5,14 times faster
• Filtering orders by customer will be 37 times faster
• You can read all the bench-marking reports on the official Woo posting

Lauren also talked about the new “Shopify competitor” Woo Express, but also mentioned a couple of cool gotchas such as Quality Insights Toolkit that empowers developers in battle testing their plugins; and Woo Pay which will enable extremely fast checkout for anybody using this “ApplePay-like” feature.

Second to take the floor was Blagica Ampova, our senior product manager with vast experience managing all sorts of eCommerce projects. Blagica spoke about the benefits of offering subscription products on your WooCommerce store with a special nack about the domestic (Croatian) market.

Blagica’s point was that you can expect at least 20% of the yearly revenue increase if you shift from offering simple one-off products towards subscription based business models. The importance of the topic was seen as most of the audience questions and later discussion was geared towards various subscription options.

And the last speaker came from Infobip (also a host of this meetup). Toni Gerovac talked about utilizing various omni-channel tactics in super-charging eCommerce User eXperiences. Most of the points that Toni talked about are well known good practices, but that few merchants “read by heart”.

This is unfortunately a shame as Toni spoke at great length that there now tools that can make your omni-channel effort make truly seamless (People, Moments, Conversations and Answers IB products all fall under the same line). What’s staggering is that omni-channel UX approach is ever present and will continue to rise – up to 300 billion USD till 2025 (by Toni’s prediction)

And that fortune telling wrapped up the latest Woo Meetup – that was whole heartedly continued over beers and sun setting gazing at the rooftop of the infobip campus.