In episode 162 of our podcast, I chat with Aaron Campbell and Adam Warner from GoDaddy. Aaron is the head of the WordPress core and ecosytem at GoDaddy and Adam is field marketing manager for their GoDaddy Pro team.

Occasionally I like to bring in hosting companies for perspectives and advice on navigating the WordPress/eCommerce space.

eCommerce and WordPress From a Hosting Perspective

I asked them what they feel is one of the bigger advancements in the space during the last year. Each of them playing a different role at GoDaddy, they shared what are some of the bigger challenges for someone who wants to start selling online.

We hear what they consider some of the first steps to getting started and how hosting plays a role in that. We also learn about the new partnership with  WooCommerce and what GoDaddy is now offering specifically to WooCommerce store owners.

I ended with asking for their predictions for the coming year and, since we are in the holiday season, what they would never buy online this time of the year.

Advancements in the past year

One of the biggest things I see is the trend toward making it so much easier to run your own store on WordPress—a place where you can own your own data.

I think the difficulty level took a drop over the last couple of years. That’s exciting because it brings a whole new group of people that want to have an online presence, but don’t want to be a web experts.

People don’t even need to know that it’s WooCommerce. They just need to know that this solution offers me the ability to add and sell products easily rather than going to someplace like eBay or Etsy. The idea being that you are not bound to a platform that you are in control of your hosting, you in control of your store, you’re in control of your products. I think that has a huge benefit, especially for new users.

New users wanting to sell online

It’s one thing to spin up a store and add products: images, descriptions, whatever. Anybody can do that. But then you start adding things like payment processors. Do I choose PayPal? Do I choose Stripe, do I choose something else? And then email marketing. And things like Google analytics and Facebook. You can put up a bunch of products but no one will come unless they know about it.

I think that as we’ve seen those whole solutions come to WordPress, we’re seeing some of that difficulty solved, but we’re not quite there yet. And I think that’s still one of the biggest struggles that people face.

Adding to that, the whole back-office part of running an eCommerce store. Do you use QuickBooks? Do you hire a bookkeeper? All of those things are hurdles for someone spinning up an online store.

Hosting for your eCommerce store

My first question would be more on a personal level. What are your goals? What are you selling? Are you selling one product? Are you selling 10,000 products via some kind of a product feed? So try to whittle down to what the goal is, what you’re trying to accomplish, and then talk about the different solutions for hosting an eCommerce store.

Choose a host that has a WooCommerce-focused hosting product because that means that they’re familiar with WooCommerce. They are familiar with any hurdles that might arise in a hosting environment. They’re familiar with how to optimize that hosting environment for eCommerce.

One of the biggest things you want to look for in the technical solution you’re buying into for hosting is this: does it cover all the parts I don’t want to do myself? You’ve got to know what those parts are that you want to do yourself.

It can be frustrating to not want to do a thing but need to do it. And it’s just as frustrating to want to do a thing and it’s not in your control because the host controls all that. So what are the things that you do want to control? Then find the host and the hos