You use WooCommerce, because you need an eCommerce platform and you like WordPress. It’s kind of the default isn’t it? WordPress + eCommerce = WooCommerce.
Well, on the show today we have Kelley Muro, who want you to rewrite that equation so that it reads like this:
WordPress + eCommerce = North Commerce!
But, I’m guessing that you’ve not heard of North Commerce. Well, neither had I until a few weeks ago when it came across my radar, and so I thought that I’d put it on your radar too. You can thank me later!
So North Commerce is intended to be a full replacement for WooCommerce, with all the basic bells and whistles covered, but that kind of platform does not get built overnight, and so, as of right now, North Commerce is still in alpha / beta testing, so it might be a great time to hop on board and get your voice heard. You never know, you might even be able to influence the way that the platform is built out?
At the heart of North Commerce is the idea that you want to be able to build the parts of an eCommerce store in much the same way that you can build WordPress pages with a page builder; you drag in the components that you need, style them up, and you’re done. Same idea here.
North Commerce has a ‘micro builder’, which is a stand alone component builder, offering you the point-click-drag-save builder features for all the parts which an eCommerce store might need.
Right now they have the following builder components:
So you can build all of this on the frontend with ease, but what about the backend? Well, I’m glad that you asked because they’ve got a rather nice looking dashboard with all the usual features such as latest / total sales, customer data (including return rate), trending products, checkout templates and order bumps.
Like I said it’s a work in progress and Kelley is on the podcast today to tell you where they’re at, and where they’re headed.
We started off by talking about the fact that North Commerce in in a really competitive space. Taking on WooCommerce is a very, very tall order, so I wanted to know why on earth he is bothering to do this in the first place.
We then get into the subject of the features which are in North Commerce. They are all listed on the homepage, and on that page you’ll also find out how you can become an early adopter of the plugin.
We talked about the out of the box components, which are listed above, and what they all do; what’s going to be included when the plugin is ready for primetime.
We also got into a discussion about the speed that he’s hoping to achieve for sites using North Commerce. They’re using custom tables instead of using post meta data, which, in theory ought to have some speed implications.
I know that you’re going to want to know about integrations, so we chatted about that as well. There’s already quite a few of them including Stripe, PayPal, Active Campaign, Mailchimp, Zapier, Twilio and more.
We rounded off the podcast with questions related to the longevity of the plugin. The last thing that you want to do is build out an eCommerce store on a platform which is new, works for a little while and then fails. So what can the early adopters expect from North Commerce? Will you get grandfathered pricing? Are there any guarantees that this is going to be around in the long term? How do you get in touch with them?
It’s a interesting chat, about a (possibly) disruptive product, and certainly worth a listen…
What would happen if it all went wrong and what early adopters would get back as a result. In other words, maybe they’ll get some grandfathered in pricing, which it seems he will do. I should probably reach out to Kelley. After this podcast has been at, because I want to do a webinar with him.
The WordPress news from the last week which began Monday 6th February 2023.
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