Let’s introduce one of our English speaking guests – Rodolfo Melogli, who is a WooCommerce expert and Internet marketer. Karolína Vyskočilová took the interview for you.
Hi Rodolfo, you are well known to WooCommerce developers as the guy with cool snippets on the website. But that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. What do you actually do?
Well, that’s solely and exactly what I do. My business has changed a lot in the last 7 years, but now I focus almost exclusively on Business Bloomer’s WooCommerce snippets.
Creating good, frequent, consistent content gives me valuable Google traffic, and some of these readers become clients. Basically, my snippets are “lead magnets”, and when someone needs something more advanced they hire me.
I work with freelance clients all over the world to help them with custom WooCommerce functionalities and troubleshooting. I work by the hour and tend to stick to smaller projects rather than long-term ones. It’s a lot of fun.
Apart from my freelancing activity, I have other revenue streams such as affiliate marketing revenue, guest blog sponsorships, online course sales, and also a few book sales.
Other than that, I just moved to the South of Italy after 11 years in Ireland so I’m pretty excited about my new adventure 🙂
When did you start to use WooCommerce and how did you become a specialist?
When I started “doing websites” for local businesses in 2011, one of my first clients wanted to sell products online. I had no idea about ecommerce and ecommerce software at the time, so I did some research and picked WooCommerce out of the box…
7 years later I can fairly say I’m quite a WooCommerce specialist. However, if I picked Magento or OpenCart, who knows who and where I’d be today!
I loved WooCommerce from the very beginning thanks to its flexibility and the possibility to edit its default functionalities via simple PHP. I didn’t even know PHP, so I managed to learn it by coding every day. I joined Fiverr as a WooCommerce freelancer to find more work and in one year I became a best-seller there. Yet, money wasn’t really flowing in 🙂
So I decided to share all my snippets, once a week, on Business Bloomer. From that moment on, my career changed and I started to get website traffic, enquiries and clients. I never turned back. In the last 3-4 years, I exclusively worked with WooCommerce clients and the more I do, the better and faster I get (if you’re reading this, it’s not too late! WooCommerce is constantly growing and there is a need for more specialists. I know nothing about JS, Ajax, database optimization, advanced performance work… yes, you can specialize in a WooCommerce sub-niche and be successful too!)
If I were an owner who needs to decide for an e-commerce platform, why should I choose WooCommerce? What makes it different from other platforms?
I never tried other platforms, so my opinion is not 100% reliable 🙂
For sure, I can say the main reason why I love WooCommerce is “open source” and the second one is “flexibility”. You can do whatever you want with a little coding, and build your custom functionalities once you get the hang of it. Besides, it’s open source and you’re not tied to a private agency or annoying SaaS.
I think “being free” is vital. But sometimes business owners have “too much freedom” and break their WooCommerce site with a dodgy update or a totally wrong PHP snippet… so the best is when client and developer communicate very well and clearly define who does what and when (you should hide the “Update Now” and all update notifications for all users but the developer, and here’s a snippet for that).
Since mid-2017, WooCommerce is undergoing progressive changes. What do you think about them as a developer? Sometimes these seem to be quite breaking changes even if labeled as a minor update.
This is a tough question, and I’d agree with it. Unfortunately, this has also coincided with the Gutenberg saga, so additional pressure have been put on us developers.
However, I never update WooCommerce or WordPress or any plugin or theme as soon as un update is made available. I usually wait at least 7-14 days (unless it’s a security fix of course) and even longer (hello, Classic Editor). If you notice, a few days after a minor/major update is released (e.g. version 3.7.0), a new version comes out as the first bugs are reported (e.g. version 3.7.1, 3.7.2, etc.). Waiting a little longer is gold.
Also, I never update anything on my live site (apart from some small exceptions – I have daily automated backups). Instead, I do everything on staging, which I believe should be a requirement for WooCommerce installs. Updating WooCommerce or other WooCommerce plugins is never easy and never guaranteed to work – hence doing this on staging gives you that piece of mind.
Have you already tried the upcoming updates for WooCommerce – database tables, the very new WooCommerce dashboard driven by React.js?
Unfortunately not, as I said I’m a slow adapter and never tend to try beta versions or new functionalities unless they’re put into core. And even then, I wait another while before updating 🙂
I only got a smartphone because I was “forced” to get one. You get the picture 😀
How is WooCommerce adopting Gutenberg? Are the sites and users ready?
I believe nobody is ready. These major things require a lot of time and thinking, mostly for established websites that have been running smoothly for years.
However, for new installs, Gutenberg is a great thing to embrace and try. I’m looking forward to migrating Business Bloomer to Gutenberg, but editing thousands of blog posts or redoing dozens of landing pages is not something I have time for at the moment. I’ll stick to Classic Editor for another while.
In regard to WooCommerce + Gutenberg I think it’s too early and – possibly – not a great thing to have. I’d rather take information off the single product page rather than adding it, but that’s my personal opinion 🙂
At WordCamp Prague you plan to talk about increasing WooCommerce Sales, could you give us an outline? Who can benefit from your talk, is it suitable as well for advanced users?
First of all, thanks so much for having me! It’s my first time in Prague and plan to make the most of this opportunity.
In regard to my talk, there will be something for WooCommerce store owners but also for more advanced WordPress developers. In the first section we will analyze what the best sales boosting strategies might be, while in the second part we’ll use some of those examples to get into PHP coding and learn a thing or two about WooCommerce core and “hooks”.
Sometimes a few lines of coding can be quite rewarding, as well as making you save time and money (as opposed to investing valuable resources in bloated plugins). On the other end, there are actually great plugins out there worth mentioning, but this time we’ll just code our own functionalities.
I’m also looking forward to learning a few words in Czech… I’m sure it’s gonna be fun 😀
Yep, after few beers you’d speak Czech like a native 🙂 Thanks for the interview and see you soon in Prague.