Scaling WooCommerce Operations With Automation ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/A_137Hk18aU/maxresdefault.jpg) 🔗 **Source:** [Scaling WooCommerce Operations With Automation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_137Hk18aU) Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Thanks to our sponsors, Omnisend and Woo. If you're thinking about switching email platforms but dreading the migration, Omnisend makes it easy. They'll move your automations, templates, and contacts for you so you're ready from day one. Plus, you get support whenever you need it. Visit them at omnisend.com/open channels. If you build stores for clients, Woo Commerce gives you the flexibility to create exactly what merchants need. Customize workflows, extend with thousands of integrations, and scale without switching platforms. You stay in control as every store grows and evolves. Check them out at woocommerce.com. Welcome to Do the Woo, the podcast where we talk all things Woo Commerce. I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn 2 plugins. >> And I'm James Kemp, the core products manager for Woo Commerce. Uh today we're going to talk about how to scale your Woo Commerce operations with automations. So, hey, uh, other James, James Collins, thanks so much for coming on. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your work with Woo Commerce? >> Yeah, thanks Katie. My name is James Collins. I'm managing partner at Techtalic. Uh, we've been working with merchants, getting them online and helping them manage their stores for uh, coming up on two decades now. And um, start we started using Woo Commerce in about 2012, shortly after it was released. and um yeah had a lot of fun doing that. And then in early in 2013 we were looking for ways to get Woo Commerce integrated into Woo Commerce or yeah looking for ways to get uh different systems integrated into Woo Commerce and we came across Zapia the automation platform. So we um worked with Wu and Zapier and launched the Zapia integration for Woo Commerce back then and um yeah so it's still running today. lots of people using it and it helps them connect 9,000 different apps into Woo Commerce and helps them with all their automations and a lot of their uh needs to keep their store running efficiently. That's awesome. Uh I use Zapia quite a lot. Um it's very very cool tool. Uh thanks to everyone who's already submitted a question. I'm not sure um how many questions we have, Katie. I'm sure you're >> Oh, there was one that I said I'd read out. I will look it up for later. >> Amazing. Uh if you're watching live, feel free to submit any questions as they come to mind. Um you can use whatever chat tool uh you're watching the live stream on. Um definitely interested to hear loads about automation uh particularly with Zapia and hopefully kind of outside that space as well. I think there's there's tons of automated automation opportunities with um WooCommerce and e-commerce in general. So yeah, please leave your questions as comments. >> Yeah. And before we get into the conversation, let um I'd like to invite you to subscribe. Do the Woo is part of the existing Open Channels network, but it's a new podcast that we just started in January and you need to subscribe to it individually. So if you don't already, then go to dothewoo.com. We've got a new website that was just launched and updated today actually. So go on dothew.com and subscribe in all the places that you watch podcasts. Yeah. So shall we dive in? Um James, I think to start with uh I'd like to know a bit more about the the Zapia plugin that you have actually, but um what what are some sort of real examples of automated workflows? uh that maybe you see a lot of your customers using um specifically with Zapia, but also outside of that that maybe uh Zapia doesn't quite enable. I'm sure there's plenty of like feature requests that you've seen um for this this type of thing. Yeah. Um there's a lot of different possibilities I think and there's many different ways to do automations around an e-commerce or WCommerce store. I think some of the really practical examples and good place to start are repetitive predictable tasks that the merchant might find themselves doing regularly. Um yeah, the more often they need to do those tasks, the the better return on investment they're going to get for setting up an automation. So um simple things like uh sending your all of your orders across to your accounting software, Zero, QuickBooks, those kind of platforms. Um, so you've got your orders flowing across as invoices. That's a real time saver. It's something that no one really wants to do when they're getting into business. It's never the reason they're running a store, but it's often something they have to do to make um, all the books work. So, uh, that's a really common example. Um, and I'd say sim in a similar kind of vein, um, there's a surprising number of people these days that are often uh, needing to make sure their Woo Commerce product stock levels are kept up to date from a different system. So, in the reverse direction in this case, people might might have their their inventory levels in zero or somewhere else where they're managing all their inventory and they want need to make sure Woo Commerce is uh, kept up to date with that. So, that's another really common example, too. whenever your inventory levels are changing in one system, then getting your products in Woo Commerce updated accordingly. So, you're avoiding that bad customer experience of, oh, I ordered a thing, but it's not in stock and it's going to take two months. I'm really sorry about that kind of scenario. So, they're probably just the two main ones off the top of my head that we see quite regularly. Um, and a lot of others as well. There's there's plenty of opportunities on once you start looking around automations. There's yeah, plenty of opportunities there. But I think good place to start those repetitive predictable tasks that you tend to do more often. The um the other tasks that uh require a bit more manual thought and those kind of things, they're not often the best place to start. Starting simple and then working your way up from there as you get a feel for it is generally how we recommend people approach it. Sorry. >> So, do you find um that it's mainly like merchant side automations that that people are primarily automating or are there customer side like um you know my customers added XYZ products to the cart maybe 3 days later we send them an offer for something like that. that kind of automation I guess um might be deemed as like marketing automation to some level. >> Yeah, there's a whole spectrum really, isn't there? You touched on marketing automation. You've got the order ful order fulfillment automation. You've got the whole customer service flow when people are got questions about their orders and um and refunds and exchanges and all those kind of things. So, there's yeah, a lot of different areas there that there's possibilities to introduce some automation into. Um, so yeah, there there's some really good solutions beyond Zapier as well. Really good solutions for those abandoned cart scenarios, that kind of thing. That that's a use case that we haven't focused on much with the Zapier integration. So far, there's some really other, you know, great solutions out there that do a great job of that. So, we're more focused on the on on the the order management, the product management, the customer management, that side of things instead. And yeah, so yeah, there's a lot of a lot of good possibilities in there. Um, automate Woo and and other solutions like that do a really good job already with the um with the marketing automation and the abandoned cut scenarios I think as well. >> Yeah, I know. Um, mail poets are a good example as well of sort of abandoned cart um functionality. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So are you kind of saying that for the sort of merchant logic and integrations and so on then using something like Zappy is a good bet whereas for something uh specialized like sending emails then maybe go for a dedicated platform for that. >> Yeah, it it depends. I think if if you if you're not already using Zapia, I think as soon as you have a look at it, you you'll probably be quite surprised at how many of your existing apps that you're using already day-to-day in your business are already Zapier enabled as well. Obviously, Woo Commerce is one of those, but the Mailchimps and those other a lot of those other software solutions that you're already using there, a lot of them are Zapier enabled. Now, I think when we launched the integration in 2013, off the top of my head, I think Zappy had about 200 apps that it supported. Now, it's more than 9,000 as well. So, yeah, there's a there's a lot on there. Um, we were pretty early days being the 220 something I think it was early on, but yeah, there's just there's a lot on there. And I think on once you get the hang of how it works, then it's easier to find more and more opportunities to use it in Woo Commerce and e-commerce and even beyond that, just in other parts of your business as well. >> Yeah, it is quite incredible. I use Zapia a lot. I'm using it less than I used to, which we'll get to, but I love the way they've integrated with AI because you don't even need to now look through their database of Zaps or um triggers or whatever. You can just type in what you want and it will literally set up the entire automation for you. And it does that pretty well now. A year or so ago it didn't do a lot, but now it really is doing a good job. So I think in many ways the limit is your imagination because you can do such a lot. You just need to have the idea to do it in the first place. >> Yeah. I think something something cool that you can do now in Zapia as well uh with AI is not just create the thing but you can have an AI step within you know whatever your automation is. Um, so I use it a lot for uh communication because I I get a lot of pings and uh messages from people and I kind of feed it all into um an AI and summarize uh what action is required from me and like feed that into my to-do list. Um so there's like a a single location for multiple sources of notifications. Um, so yeah, I can imagine maybe there's some automations that utilize AI in some way. Um, James, I don't know if you've seen anyone doing that using like Zappia's built-in AI. Yeah, I have. I think probably one of the examples that first comes to mind would be uh a Zap that's responding to every paid order that comes through Woo Commerce. Um, most most WC commerce users are probably familiar with the order notes field that's on the checkout. And uh, when you've been running a store for a while, it's quite surprising the the variety of comments that come through as part of an order where someone where a customer has typed something in the order notes field. So, I've seen examples there where people are using a an AI step in their Zap to sort of interpret and understand more about the sentiment of what the person's asking for and then doing different things accordingly there. So if it tends to be more of a request amount around um a shipment delaying it for a week or two or leaving a parcel on a porch th those sorts of comments are quite different to um the other kind of notes that might flow through there. So yeah having an AI step in the zap you're getting that you're getting the repeatable reliable part of adding your order into something like zero and then you're getting using AI for just little parts of the automation as well. So you're kind of getting best best of both worlds there. I'd say there's the yeah the the robust nature of a a zap where fields are mapped directly across in a predictable way and then you're using AI for little parts of it that can benefit from a little bit less of a structured thing and a bit more of an intelligent um interpretation of what something might mean and then doing a different action accordingly because of that. So yeah, that's probably the first example that comes to mind there. Yeah, I do that with quite a lot of my zaps where there'll be a chat GPT step as part of the zap where the AI is processing the data that the previous steps have got and then we'll take actions accordingly. But that brings us to the question of why do we need Zapia at all or something similar like NAT or whatever? Why do we need a structured automation that you build step by step when you can automate so much with pure AI now? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. Um I think really one of the benefits of Zapia is um the sheer number of apps that are connected in there. Uh a lot a lot of the AI integrations in chat GBT or claw that the number of apps in there is growing slowly over time or growing quickly depending on how you measure it. But um they yeah they don't have the they don't have the breadth of apps in there yet that something like Zapia supports. Um and if if you're an organization that's already been using Zapia, you've you've probably already got your Slack workspace and a whole lot of different things already connected to your Zapia account. So the simple act of sort of integrating your Zapier account into your your cla your chat GPT session and all of a sudden it's got access to the different apps and connections on Zapia that you've already been using in the past and then from there so it's sort of like you're managing one kind of connection into your AI via Zapia and then from there opting in your um your existing Zappia connections to your different apps as well from there. So that sort of simplifies it. Rather than having to to mess with a whole lot of different MCPs or or more complex ways of getting other apps talking to AI, you can sort of just manage the one connection and and um can get you up and running a lot quicker that way as well. And it's all managed from a central kind of place at Zapier's end as well. So um yeah, that's one reason why you might do that I think. Um, and yet some depending on what you're doing. For example, like I mentioned earlier, the getting your orders into an accounting system that needs to be done in a predictable, reliable way with no u margin for error in a sense. Otherwise, that's when um you end up needing to apologize a lot to your bookkeeper when >> yeah, sometimes you don't want AI to be putting it stamp on things. >> You want a specific number going from here to here in two different systems. you don't always want that number to be potentially translated or misinterpreted by a uh an AI model and and changing a number from one to another. So yeah, it's best of both worlds. I think there's sort of not two very different looking solutions, but when you mesh them together in a way where you're using the repeatable benefit of a a zap that's set up um and then specific AI steps in there, that's that's kind of the best of both worlds. And I think Katie, you mentioned the how easy you found it in the last few months to set up a Zap as well. Um, I've really noticed that too. We used to spend a lot of our time explaining to customers over the last decade how to set up a Zap and how to map a field from here to here. It used it used to feel quite um overwhelming for for many users. And then we get a lot less questions around configuring zaps and things these days because I think a lot of that's to do with that AI prompt you get from Zap year at the start when you go to configure your first automation. You can just tell it what kind of automation you want. I want to go from Woo Commerce to zero whenever I receive an order need an invoice in Zero and it it's going to get do a really good job of of preconfiguring that zap for you. So it's much easier to set those up now than it was before too. So that's a big benefit I think these days. Yeah, I think you you touched on the sort of deterministic uh nature of Zapia where you maybe don't get that with an AI tool. Uh or I imagine you probably could get some level of uh determinism from an AI tool. Um but it's a lot more work to set something like that up. uh like it's it's a lot more of a technical um job to set up an agent that performs a specific task the same way every single time. Um whereas I think with something like Zapia you uh you don't even need AI involved like in that process and and it can be truly deterministic based on the data coming in uh the expected data that it processes and then puts out again. Um, so it could be much more reliable, but I expect that we'll start to see uh maybe AI make more of an appear appearance in in Zaps uh rather than it just being a step. Um maybe some of the the steps that you can create in Zapia uh have new ways to kind of process the data that's coming in. Um, so you don't, so if you have like multiple sources with slightly different variations of, you know, the name of a price field, for example, um, maybe the AI can determine that, uh, rather than having to hardcode like a fixed parameter for that. >> Definitely, >> we'll see it change over time. Yeah, a deterministic process is really good until something varies outside of the expectation and then the whole thing can fall over. So, yeah, there's a definitely a lot of benefit to be had by using AI cleverly in in in the process too. Um can be a lot more flexible and and uh adaptive when when things are changing slightly with the data that's flowing through. >> Yeah. And another thing with using pure AI is that it's scheduling pretty generally isn't very good at the moment. For example, the scheduling in claude co-work is really not very advanced. I think it's still research preview stage. It kind of works, but you have to be at your computer. Then it takes over your whole computer and distracts you while you're trying to work. And I believe that Claude Code added routines last week, but I haven't found or used that yet. So probably in a few months it will be better at automations in that sense but at the moment it's not quite there yet. And I really like the point you made about how these integrations are already there in Zapia because it is a real pain to go researching from MCP and then figuring out how to host it and as a non-technical person I get really stuck on that. So, it is nice to use a platform that just has everything pre-integrated. >> Yep, for sure. There's also um Claude I don't know what the official name is, but I'm going to say Claude Cloud Agents um which are similar to the agents that can run on a schedule on your computer, but they can now run like in the cloud. Um so you you don't have to be, you know, your computer doesn't have to be on. They're just spun up. Uh, and I believe you can schedule them as well. Um, so like you say, I think they're definitely moving in in that sort of direction, like more kind of autonomous scheduled tasks versus, you know, me as a merchant going and asking for it to uh send my last 10, you know, orders over to zero or something like that. Um, yeah. So yeah, >> yeah, there's a lot of things that are happening. >> Sorry, there's a lot of things that are h that happen in on a Wcommerce store where you might not want to be doing a scheduledbased approach that Katie was mentioning. You're more likely wanting things to happen automatically as soon as something happens in your store. So, as soon as a product goes out of stock, for example, um if it if it's above a particular amount, then you might want to notify certain members of your team pretty quickly so they can um act accordingly, that kind of thing. Or for for orders going through. Um getting orders added into a CRM automatically and your customers updated in the CRM, those kind of things. You want them happening even if you're on the road with your laptop closed. Um you don't want them running on a schedule. You want them happening in real time behind the scenes. So just when the next time you open up those other systems, the data is already there. The magic's happening already. Um as well, I think the other thing is um Zapia, as far as I'm aware, doesn't unless you tell it to, it doesn't store any of the data that it's processing. Um whereas AI could be unless you turn it off, like could be, you know, training their models based on the data you're passing through it or it's not potentially as secure. um you know it has to it has to be sent and processed by something that understands it whereas um Zapia like I was saying is is more deterministic. It's just basing it on on the input it receives in the in the structured input. Um so something to consider. Yeah. And I mean we we've talked a lot about Zapia already. Um there's obviously and we mentioned other ones like automate Woo as well. Other things in there direct integrations are often a pretty good way of going too. There's a lot of extensions in the Woo marketplace for a direct connection from um Woo Commerce to zero for example and it's designed to do that that automation for you. But a lot of the time um as soon as you want to vary that automation a little bit a lot of the time you end up just find end up in a place where it's not quite as configurable as you want or there's a certain nuance that you want to handle there and the configurability isn't there and I think that's real one of the key benefits of something like Zapia where you're in control of what the automation looks like from end to end um and more and more you can use AI to help you um adapt and configure that in the first place and and evolve it over time as well. So that the I'd say that the level of technical expertise needed to set up an automation on Zapia now compared to a year or two ago. Um it's really it's a lot more accessible to a lot more people now I think because of that natural language input to help you get the automation set up in the first place. And that's yeah that's that's realistically it's only it's only a good thing. You don't want to spend hours and hours banging your head against a wall configuring an automation. you want to be able to um talk about it at a high level, get and get the whole automation um set up and turn it on and then just hopefully never have to think about it again because it just keeps working behind the scenes. So um and yeah, the the Zapia platform continues to evolve over time. I remember a few years back the their homepage was talking all about Zaps and workflows and automations and now um it's a lot more focused on AI and agents and MCP and all of those different tools. So even though the it's still got the automations there, they're still a really critical part of it. But over time the platform's evolving at Zapier's end and really yeah we're focused on making sure Wcommerce works well with Zapia. Zapier's focused on making sure their whole platform works well and they've got a lot of other partners too. Making sure all the other integrations on there just continue to evolve and work and try and support as many of the new features on Zapier as possible and in our case as many of the new features in Woo Commerce as possible too. So things like over the years we've added support for Wcommerce subscriptions into the Zapia um connector as well and bookings and memberships. Um so it's not just core Woo Commerce constructs, it's not just orders and products and customers that you can manage, it's membership records, subscription records, all of those other parts too. So, we sort of we keep a pretty close eye on what extensions seem to be quite popular in the in the Woo Commerce marketplace and what our users are asking for if there's gaps there. And we try and we we're we're trying to make it a one-sizefits-all kind of solution for Woo Commerce merchants, not just the ones using plain Woo Commerce without a whole lot of other add-ons. And really, the benefit of Woo Commerce is you've got a lot of other extensions to choose from. And if you can use a an automation tool like Zapia, which is now also an AI automation tool as well, um then yeah, our hope is that saves merchants a lot of time. And uh we we do a fair bit of work with agencies or developers as well. That's the other part of it too. There's a lot of a lot of those users that are setting up Woo Commerce for their clients too. And for them, they could learn a lot of different direct connection solutions out there, or they could just master one tool like Zapier, and then they can reuse that again and again and again for a lot of the clients that they're working with as well. So, that's probably another bene benefit in there as well, I would say. Yeah, I think one of the nice things about Zapier as well, um, like I I realize we've talked a lot about Zapier, but one of the cool things that it does is uh it has a a step that you can use um where you can process with code like uh the the input data that you've got um which is quite nice. So you can essentially run like any script against the input data that you've you're getting. Uh which which is very useful um I found for capturing even data from like a HTML document or um you know reformatting or reprocessing the data that you're getting in to to turn it into a consistent format. Um which is quite nice. But um have you used uh other tools like N8N much? Um I assume your primary focus is Zapia because that's your your extension, but uh how do tools like uh N compare? >> Yeah, we've I I'll admit we spent a lot of focus on Zapier over the last um 11 12 13 years since we launched it. um don't have direct experience with N8N apart from I've been I've been hearing it mentioned quite a lot over the last few years as well. So clearly there's a compelling use case there for merchants as well. Um, but I think for the people out there that haven't done any automation for their Woo Commerce store yet, regardless of whether you end up going with something like Zappy or NAN or some some other automation thing, I think the key first step is to just find something small and repeatable that you can automate. Save yourself some time. It's not just the time saving, it's the reducing the human error factor, I think, too. So, um, setting something up with whatever your automation tool of choice is, experiment with it, learn learn from it. Um, and, um, I'm pretty confident you're going to end up seeing benefits very quickly. Um, and I I guess I suggested also focusing on the things that you have to do most often as a good starting point. >> Yeah. >> Um, having said that, the reverse is also true. I think the the tasks that you only have to do fairly rarely or or regularly, they're the ones that are the hardest to remember how to actually do them, too. So, um they can be also a good place to start, too. Um if you need if it's hard to remember how to do something because you only have to do it once a month, it often feels like maybe it's not worth automating, but actually >> set it up once. Yeah, fast forward a month, you're probably not going to feel like it's >> giving you too much benefit. But over the the months after that, and as the years go through, it just keeps happening. you're getting your monthly report on the first of the month automatically, that kind of thing. It's a yeah, you can save a lot of time and and spend time in your business doing what you're actually there to be doing. Um, providing value in in whatever way that is, often it's not the value isn't you moving data from one place to another and compiling reports. If you can automate some of those flows, so you can just really provide value, then that that's a big win for you and the business that you're working in or the business that you own. I think Katie can probably talk a lot to that too. Anything that can save her time in her business by automating, then she can focus on a lot of different areas instead. So, um, yeah. >> Yeah. All I do these days is set up automations, which probably is a bad thing. Taken over my entire role, but think how much time it will save me in the future. Uh, we will see. Um, yeah, I've tested N8 and also I think it's called make the other one. um when I wanted to set up a particular automation, it was really complex. And they're all kind of the same thing to be honest. They all allow you to do that structured flow exactly like Zapia where you'll pull in different integrations, process the data from previous steps, and maybe add an AI step as we've discussed. So, they're kind of much of a muchness really. I haven't done a direct comparison on which has the most integrations, for example, because surely it would take a long time for something newer like N8 to get 9,000 integrations. Uh, but N8 seems to have a lot of buzz around it, particularly in the developer community. And I've noticed that it seems to be the go-to for YouTubers who are making videos about this stuff. So maybe they're just really good at influencer marketing or something like that. Yeah, it' be interesting to see uh what what the main differences are. It it definitely seems um the main difference from my memory is that NA10 kind of goes sideways and Zapia goes down. I don't know if that's a key selling point. >> Yeah, it's a different UI, but they're essentially the same thing. >> Yeah, they're kind of nodebased uh automations. >> Um interested to talk about MCPs. I know Zapia has an MCP uh available and James I'm wondering if if you have uh or know of like the use cases for that. I assume it's more for setting up and managing existing uh or creating new zaps rather than actually processing any any data. >> Um yeah, the Zapier's MCP solutions really evolved over the last few months as well. So the good news is basically any app on Zapia and any action that's on Zapia you can now point um connect into an MCP setup. So in the case of the Woo Commerce integration on Zapia we've got different actions for for example for finding finding an order in your store updating an order changing an order status to something those those all those actions that you might be using in your actual Zap workflows you can now utilize as many of those as you want inside Zapier's MCP solution as well. So um we find a lot of one one simple example uh we have a lot of merchants that we've worked with over the years they actually a lot of them don't regularly or they don't regularly log into their Woo Commerce dashboard at all. Often they're they're receiving an email when they get a new order the standard new order received email from Woo Commerce and they're they're doing their fulfillment for their a lot of the smaller merchants that they're actually not even taking that step to go into their store and mark the order as completed. So the customer gets told that the the the order is on their way. So that's something that ideally they should be doing from a customer experience point of view, communicating with your customer that their order is on their way. Um but a lot of them forget to do that. They're focused on getting the products out the door and they leave it at that. So one use case is um that I was experimenting with the other day connecting up Zapia's MCP to something like a clawed chat session. I did that the other day um in the Zap year MCP I configured it to uh to allow some of the Woo Commerce actions that we want to use. So in this case uh the use case is basically the merchant's going to they know about the three orders that have come through from yesterday. They're packing and shipping them today and then they can literally in a a clawed chat window say mark yesterday's orders as completed and clawed and via the zap your MCP can look at all your orders that have come through from yesterday and change their status to completed or slightly more advanced example of you could say add tracking number XY Z to the last order from James that we received yesterday that kind of um use case and Zapier MCP and claw board together will usually figure out a way of just doing that for you automatically. So the merchant doesn't even necessarily need to log into their Woo Commerce store to do some of those order management tasks. They can do that in natural language with Claude or or Chat GPT or others as well. So um that's interesting. I guess um the I assume it's like that you install one MCP and then it has access to any of these uh like tasks or tools they usually call them. >> Um so it's essentially another input mechanism. So it's taking it's taking your uh language your natural you know chat and processing that then through a zap. Um because I was wondering like comparatively you know WooCommerce has an MTP as well. So you could you could do the same thing through the Woo Commerce MTP but what you can do differently with Zapia is take the input and you know process it in multiple different ways like maybe you run it through some other tool first and then it goes over there and then you know connects two other tools together. Um, so I guess you could do more more advanced uh things just by a natural language, which is interesting. >> Yeah. And those kind of use cases really there's a lot of it it's a it's a space that's changing at a pretty rapid pace, too. So, um, there's a lot of shiny interesting looking use cases that seem good, but then the key question is, are they actually useful for a merchant or someone managing a store? That's the key question. and is it something they they will reliably do again and again and again because it feels easy enough and does it work well enough for them. So um that combination of yeah just automated workflows that are more deterministic maybe with a few AI steps in there to inject a little bit of extra logic and then the other approach of using something like Zapia's MCP or WooCommerce's MCP and being able to do basic store management tasks by just talking to your favorite chat um provider. They're they can be used for different things, get the best of both worlds. I think they're the deterministic use cases and and the the other ones too. So yeah, there's a lot of possibilities there I think. And I guess there's you mentioned the WooCommerce MCP. There's yeah a lot been happening in that space as you would well know more than we would probably but um yeah there's uh me as a user of AI been using it quite a bit in the last year or two probably like you two both have as well and having to configure a dozen different MCPs to talk to your different apps and making that work in a in a chat GPT session on a phone and on your computer that kind of thing it can be quite frustrating having to configure all those MCPS different um independently and authenticate them. Whereas using something like Zapia's MCP, you're adding in one MCP into your chat um session chat setup and then from there the rest is configured at the Zap year end. You're just you're just saying which apps am I already using on Zapier? Do you want to make them available via that specific MCP? And then which actions out of those apps do you want to enable on there? And then with something like Claude, it's all these actions I'm happy for them to run without approval. things like finding orders or products, those kind of things, or other ones where they're actually changing data in your store. You might you might set them up to require your approval each time for a little while until you've got more confidence that it all works well. And then at that point, just always allowing them as well. But yeah, I think the simplicity of managing one MCP connection and having Woo Commerce as part of that, Slack, any of the other apps that you're already using that you probably already got connected up to Zapia. Um, having them all via the one MCP connection can be a real time saver for people, I think. >> Yeah. >> Well, let's think about the cost side of things. Like I've had a Zapia subscription for years. I know that they have got a free plan for simpler like single steps apps or whatever. Um, and suddenly it got really expensive when I started adding AI steps because of the extra processing um, and so on. Um, no, it wasn't. it was the number of what do you call them tasks the number of little jobs that Zappia does it charges you by and when I got to the AI side of things it somehow got really complicated and um so how would somebody decide on the most cost effective way to set something up whether that's Zapia directly doing something in AI um something that's self-hosted versus a SAS like Zapia how do people juggle all those costs and make a decision Yeah, great question. It's an important one. Obviously, doing something in a business only makes sense if it's going to be viable. The return on investment needs to be there. Uh I think I can see one point that Ian has touched on in the chat. He's suggesting that um Zapia is typically a lot cheaper for common tasks compared to something like Claude. Um because yeah, obviously if you're doing your basic automations in Zapier, it's task based sort of pricing with your from memory. It might be your first 100 tasks a month included in that free plan and then needing the $20 a month plan after that um as well. But that kind of pricing is often cheaper than um eating away at your um your Claude or Chat GPT plan. The usage limits on those seem to be coming anecdotally seem to be coming down over time at the moment. especially something like Claude where they've got so many new users in they're they're really struggling and they seem you seem to run out of your uh usage limit in a in a chat window a lot quicker now than you were a few months back. That seems to be my personal experience at the moment too. So yeah, doing something like Zapia with the task based sort of pricing tiers there um is more often than not going to be uh cheaper I would say more often than not as well. Um, but yeah, you you do need to run those calculations a little bit, I think, to make sure. You don't want to you don't want to automate just for the sake of it and then get a nasty surprise at the end of a month. Um, but yeah, I think looking at it through that lens of being able to reduce human errors and saving time so you can spend your time elsewhere. It's that opportunity cost trying to somehow quantify what that opportunity cost of all those hours that you would have spent in the month doing something manually. What's that benefit to the business compared to the the 20 30 $40 a month you might need to spend on setting up an automation for it? That's really that's the kind of equation you've got to do in your own head. I think really isn't it? >> Yeah. And I guess the the true benefit of something like Zapia is connecting your one app to multiple apps. So like if if your goal is to just have one integration that okay I want to send all my orders to uh my accounting software of choice um then maybe the direct integration to do that is better than using Zapia. whereas Zapia would be more appropriate if you want to do that and you also want to do these you know 10 other automations that um you want to manage in one place um so I think that's a consideration as well is like what do you want to automate >> um and what's the most cost effective way to to do that uh and at what point you know does at what point is it better to just do the thing manually ually versus actually automate it. Um, and I think that comes through experimentation and and doing the thing, seeing what the automation looks like. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'm getting more experience with it as well because initially it's not too bad to set something up now because of the AI, but it when you're less familiar, it can take a lot of time to set up an automation and then you think it would it will be two years worth of doing the job manually before I've made this time back. But then when you've done lots of automations, you're getting pretty quick and you know what the gotchas are that you can avoid next time. So it then becomes more efficient. >> Yeah. And I think in addition to that, for a long time, Zapia has had Zap templates available too. So often the best place to start searching something like Zapia Woo Commerce to whatever your other app is that you want to integrate with doing doing a search online for that you can Zapia's got thousands and thousands of templates. They they're trying to they're creating pre pre-populated automations there that are a starting point for you and you can um confi reconfigure them or or tweak them from there as well. So you've got the natural language based approach of just prompting on how to set up a zap, but you've also got those app templates as well. Both of those are a lot easier than trying to start from scratch and trying to manually click and and drag and drop steps and configure the field mappings like um like you needed to do. that was really the only way of doing it a long time ago, but these days it's yeah, it's a lot easier than that, I'd say. And um yeah, costwise overall, um I think the It's funny, isn't it? You probably struggle to find someone these days to talk to that they're not spending 20 or $30 a month on an AI subscription. That's such a really common starting point for someone there as well. um spending a similar amount on on an automation tool that's going to help you with your um your deterministic sort of uh workflows and automations, but also your your AI agent. They've got Zap's got an AI agent solution as well that's um still fairly early days, but has come a long way as well. Yeah, there's a lot of different possibilities out there, but take that first step. Give it a try, I think, is a a good way of approaching it and start small and build up from there. And in our experience, I think we the reason we spotted the Zapia tool all those years ago was we in our own business, we were looking for ways to do some automations and we came across Zapia and started using it internally for a few different workflows. And then then we realized, you know what, Woo Commerce back then wasn't wasn't one of the apps that it supported. And we thought, well, seems like a no-brainer. WooCommerce is growing in popularity. Let's make sure that that's supported by Zapier on there as well. And um yeah, probably every few months we're finding a different thing we can automate in our business using Zapier as well, even just separate to the Woo Commerce connection in there. So yeah, it's a it's a pretty big tool these days with a lot of different possibilities. So it's it's a great place to start for people, I would say. How many zaps are you running? Good question. Uh I don't know off the top of my head. I'd say we'd have at least a hundred zaps turned on to help us automate things inside Techtellic, I would say. Um, I mean, and in terms of the Woo Commerce specifics, uh, from memory, I think there's about 30,000 active Woo Commerce stores that are using the Zapier integration, and we see, um, a couple of million tasks flowing through that solution every week on Zapier as well. So, um, yeah, people out there are using it and, um, finding it useful and we're trying to find ways to improve it, too. We've always tried to, we get feature requests from the Zap year end because they help Woo Commerce merchants trying to use the Zapia tool and then and we get feature requests and support requests from the Woo Commerce end as well. So meshing all those together, figuring out what things are are worth building next and um trying to keep it simple for people to use by not adding too many options, but also supporting quite a few use cases. That's the sort of the line we've been trying to to walk over the years and um yeah, in the meantime, Zappy has improved itself as well and really embraced the AI age as well. So yeah, it's a pretty good great place to start for people. Um, even if there's people listening that haven't got a WooCommerce store of their own or not, they're not involved in store management, just have a look at it using it for automations in your own business and I'm I'm sure you'll find ways in there to to save you time. That's for sure. >> Yeah, absolutely. Like, we don't run Woo Commerce because we use Easy Digital Downloads and I've got probably 20 zaps. So, I I don't win the race on that, but we've got a lot set up that automate various things from marketing to um what happens when an affiliate signs up and stuff with the customers. >> Yeah. Yeah. Is Ed connected up to Zapia then? I'm not sure if that one off the top of my head, but >> yeah, there is one. It's so many years. this automations, they run themselves. So, it's years since I looked, but I think there is an EP Zapier thing which we've got set up. Um, but sometimes I've used hacky solutions like some of my zaps, you know, their email passer where it reads an email that comes to you and you run it through their mailbox and then based on the contents of the email something happens. So, for example, when I get a new sale notification email that goes through Zapia, which picks out what their license tier is and sends them an email if they got a priority support license. So, it will say, "Congratulations, you get priority support. Here's how to request the priority support." That goes through a Zapia email parser, which is a really hacky way to do it, but it's been working for years. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. that their their email passer option or even their web hook option as well. A lot of apps out there, even if they don't work with Zapier, they might have an option to send data to a web hook address when a certain event happens. So, you can often get data into Zapier that way as well. Um, that's another another way of doing it. But yeah, we're definitely using the email passer or auto forwarding emails in from from a Gmail, mailbox, that kind of thing. or just using the the Google mail connector in Zap here as well. That of course that's been there for quite a while too. But yeah, there's a lot of information that flows through your inbox um that that needs a predictable reliable um thing done to it in certain cases. So starting with those those emails too like you just mentioned Katie. Yep. >> Great place to start with automations too. Yeah, help scout's a good example of one where you need to use the web hook and then you can bring your help scout data in which helps to automate support. >> Yeah, for sure. >> Um, well, James, it's been awesome having you uh on the show. I I think uh there's so much you can do with automation now and I think you know as this new era of technology evolves there's going to be so much more that we can do as well. Um so definitely appreciate you coming on and talking about how Zapia can help and how your extension helps as well. >> Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks very much for your time. Um, our next episode will be a special checkout summit wrap-up panel which will be on Wednesday the 29th of April with Rulfo the organizer plus attendees Patrick R Patrick Rland and Remus Dice. I should learn how to say his surname. Um, so yeah, um, hopefully we will see you before then at Checkout Summit, but if not then check out the wrapout panel and discover what you missed. >> No pun intended. Um, please subscribe to uh Dothe Woo. We're on dothe.com. Uh, we're on YouTube as dothe podcast and we're on X as at dothe. Thank you for watching and see you next time., Scaling WooCommerce Operations With Automation, YouTube, 01kptxnfg14pevsnyfczjgx30c.