[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 364 entitled Nedad Conic on crafting quirky e-commerce websites using WooCommerce. It was published on Thursday, the 7th of March, 2024.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we get into the conversation with Nenad, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? As I said at the top of the show, we've got Nenad Conic. He is from a Norwegian sea agency called Maksimer. They specialize in WooCommerce and building innovative WooCommerce online shops. We get into Nenad's insights into how it's possible to build out of the box WooCommerce websites, and how they integrate multiple platforms and different kind of facilities.
We highlight a few of the projects that the agency has built. We dig into user management, customer interactions. We examine some intriguing case studies of different things that they've built. And honestly, some of them are really fun, especially the campaign website, which I particularly enjoyed.
We also get into the ins and outs of WooCommerce is capability, the importance of backwards compatibility, and the vision for what will be possible for WooCommerce in the future. It's a really interesting episode that covers a lot of ground. And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast today by Nenad Conic. Hello, Nenad!
[00:03:39] Nenad Conic: Hello, Nathan, and thank you for having me.
[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really nice to have you on the podcast today. I can't exactly remember the way the stars aligned, but, you were introduced to me by a variety of different people. I know that there's been appearances from people on, from your agency on various other podcasts.
And yeah, nice to, have you on the show. This is very much going to be a WooCommerce related episode. It's not typically something that we get into specifically, but I'm glad to have you. On the show today to talk about this. We're gonna be talking about interesting novel, perhaps unthought of ways that you can use WooCommerce.
So WooCommerce, but not like you've seen it before. but Nanad is from, actually, let me just throw that over to you. Nanad, tell us who you are, where you're from. Tell us a little bit about the agency that you work for and all of that good stuff. So it's like a bio bit really.
[00:04:33] Nenad Conic: Thank you. Yes. hello again. Hello, everyone. My name is Nena TConic, and I work from, for, or a VU expert agency, Maximer. which is mainly Norwegian based, but we, we opened, Serbian office back in 2018. I am working with WordPress and WooCommerce for about eight or nine years now.
And now working in an agency that specializes in building e commerce solutions for the clients. And we are mainly, by far, using WooCommerce as our primary e commerce solution.
[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. let me just give you the, URL for that. So if you want to go and check the, agency out, it's maxima. com. So M A K S I M E R, maxima. com. Now, as I said to you before we began this call, WooCommerce particularly is not really an area that I delve into all that much. So not only am I really.
Kind of unfamiliar with all of the different UI choices in WooCommerce. And you're going to have to guide me through that if we get into the weeds there. But also I'm not that sure about the agency landscape. And so you're telling me about Maxima. are you one of the bigger players? Do you know, do you have a distributed team?
Is it just like a handful of you? How long have you as an agency been going and all of that?
[00:05:59] Nenad Conic: Yes. so Maxime started back in 2009, and started as a WordPress agency. and we started very early on with using WooCommerce as well. I think we launched our first eShop, using WooCommerce in 2012. and from the early days, we are one of the first. It's actually Wu Expert Agencies, that were branded as a Wu Expert Agency at that time.
we are about 70 people and we have different departments working on different aspects of running, e commerce shop. And basically the idea of Maximer is to increase sales of our clients or increase the conversion rate for the shops we build. And that's the meaning of the word Maximer in Norwegian means maximize. So basically maximize your profit out of your e commerce solution.
[00:06:59] Nathan Wrigley: I'm absolutely amazed at the size of some of the agencies that I come across through in this podcast. And 70 people, you said roughly 70, maybe it's a bit north or south of that, but roughly 70 people. That's really big, that's an awful lot of people. And if your, main endeavor is to create e commerce websites, particularly WooCommerce website, that tells me either you must be incredibly good at that, or there's just loads of work out there.
[00:07:24] Nenad Conic: There is loads of work out there. we just don't have a, we don't have just a development, department. We also have a different departments that work with our clients on, for example, marketing after we build the shop, or even recently we created a new department called e commerce managers for hire because we saw a need that our clients are maybe not.
As, or as knowledgeable about the running, e commerce solution as we would like them to be. So we also offer support in that part as well.
[00:08:00] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. Yeah. Okay. So you're a distributed team as well, though. You mentioned Norway, but I think, I don't, you're not in Norway and probably some of the other, all the staff are not as well.
[00:08:11] Nenad Conic: yes, main offices are in Norway. the company started from Bergen, Norway. but we also have an office in Oslo. We have our office in Belgrade. We can have an office in, Bross, a small town in Sweden. And we have also a couple of people working from home offices around Europe.
[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah. absolutely fascinating. Like I said, not a, not an agency that I had run across before, but always a pleasure to run into new faces and new people. So welcome to the podcast. We're going to talk today. about interesting ways that you can use WooCommerce. when we got into the idea that you would be coming on the podcast, we did a bit of tiny bit of back and forward about what the subject would be.
And you suggested that it would be nice to talk about, examples of, quirky ways, let's put it that way, ways that you might not typically. Think of using WooCommerce. most people using WooCommerce probably install it, upload a load of products and, maybe add some plugins, do some variations of those products and that's it, you've got your WooCommerce store and it's ready to go, but that's not the kind of thing that we're going to be talking about today, You've given us three different examples. We can focus on those or we could go off in any tangent that we like. But what, why is it that you wanted to talk about quirky, unusual, interesting, innovative ways to use WooCommerce?
[00:09:31] Nenad Conic: Yeah. Just to say upfront, I won't make this technical or hopefully not technical at all. So the idea would be to show people that, using WordPress and WooCommerce is not just how you said it, installing plugins and configuring a couple of options. It can be, basically your, yeah, your imagination is the limit.
and yes, I will give you some examples of how we. Solved some of the client needs in an interesting way, building on top of what WordPress and WooCommerce plugins already gave us as a good starting point.
[00:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask you a question? and it's about budgetary constraints, really, because. Obviously anybody coming to WooCommerce, if they do the typical WooCommerce install, add some plugins, you're good to go. Obviously that's a very affordable, cheap way of getting yourself off the ground. I'm imagining that some of the sites that we're going to talk about today, because of the fact that they're, there's obviously a lot of extra work going on in the background.
There's probably a lot of developer work and designer work going on and so on and so forth. I'm presuming that these are enterprise grade accounts that you've got.
[00:10:38] Nenad Conic: Yes, they are. depending on the client needs, we actually do from very little customization. There is usually involved at least some customization of the shop itself. So we do, yeah, from smaller to bigger, projects. and yes, one of the, one of the examples I will mention is, a very large WooCommerce shop that has about 1.
2 million products in the store.
[00:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, oh Wow, okay. Okay. So let's get into it. Let's start off with the first of the three now I'm not even gonna attempt to pronounce these because some of them I think there's too many pitfalls there, but it's a camping Website which on the face of it seems how on earth can you make?
camping. You're selling pictures, you're selling periods of time, you're selling, I don't know, a two man plot for three days in December, whatever it may be. It sounds like we're really pushing the boundaries already of what WooCommerce can do.
[00:11:41] Nenad Conic: Yeah, I must say that this is one of the more interesting projects I was involved in recently. And one of my personal kind of favorites. We were approached by a client that is renting out camping slots to people to have a short vacation or something. And such, and the client, the client actually owns a big piece of land, which he, broke out in different or smaller, parcels and then renting out, to people.
[00:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: It is a beautiful piece of land as well.
It's just glorious. Anyway, sorry.
[00:12:20] Nenad Conic: yes. So he came with a request that we need a booking system. So we immediately thought of WooCommerce bookings. We tried it out in a couple of different scenarios. How can we use it? And it mainly worked from the, booking perspective. We are able to create a booking product.
The booking product can have the date ranges you can book it for. it has. Some additional fees, if, if needed to be added to the final price. but what we stumbled upon is the user interface, which we weren't happy with. And the client wasn't very happy with because the idea would. be to present this lot, this nice lot that the client has in the best way.
And if we can allow people to not just look at the lot pictures, but also see where they are going to, to be for this time, on a map or something, if they can choose a lot, according to where it's positioned, that will be even better.
[00:13:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh boy. I've got to interrupt here because I book camping for my family. We love this, right? This is just the thing that we do and we love to go camping. I have never, ever experienced something as good as this. what you have achieved is exactly what I would hope every time I go to book a website.
So let me just explain the UI because what you want is you want to see. Exactly where your piece, where your tent will go. The exact piece of ground where you're going to end up. Because, is it near a road? Is it near the, toilet block or the shower block or whatever it may be? And that's exactly what you do.
You overlay onto the satellite view of Google Maps exactly where you're going to be. with the dimensions so I can see. the confines of my bit. here, I can see that I spend a bit more money. I can, spread out a little bit more, or I could possibly go near the water's edge or whatever it may be.
And then, you pick one, choose the date, select the spot. It's just fabulous UX. It's sublimely good. So bravo.
[00:14:38] Nenad Conic: Thank you very much.
[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anyway, sorry, interrupted. You carry on.
[00:14:42] Nenad Conic: no. It's okay. Thank you for the nice words. yes. So we were wondering how can we create this dynamic, map that you can actually see your lot. and since WooCommerce bookings gave us the opportunity to extract all the data we needed through API, we were able to create a React application.
And as you said, use also Google Maps API, create an overlay image. of the place the lots are so you can actually see how they look in real life from a satellite picture and be able to click on them, see additional information you need, you're able to book one or multiple places at once, and once you are happy with your selection, you just, in a click of a button, you're Push all those products to the cart and you're set.
[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really is fabulous. you mentioned there that this is it's like headless WooCommerce really, in a way, isn't it? You've got, you've got WooCommerce in the background doing all of the bits and pieces of, providing, the shopping experience ultimately, the payment and all of that goes through, but you've done a ton of work on the front end of React.
A React app, so that there is no, there's nothing like this that's available in WooCommerce. And it's, really, good. My guess is that the productivity for this campsite will have gone through the roof. I obviously have no idea, but have you had any feedback about that?
[00:16:13] Nenad Conic: The client is happy. That's the only feedback I have, but I guess, yeah, I guess it did well. and that's an interesting story how we ended up creating this React application because it's not a full headless solution. So at that time, WordPress Gutenberg, blocks were coming out and WooCommerce blocks are coming out.
So we wanted a way to utilize what they're doing and how they're connected to the WordPress and WooCommerce backend. we did something similar, but instead of using blocks at that time, We actually created shortcodes, WordPress shortcodes that spin up a React application that can talk to the back end using the same API as would a block do.
[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: Has the, just curiously, has the, implementation of this site, has it led to similar Because if I was a campsite owner, honestly, I'd be knocking on your door saying, Can I have that, please? I just want that thing.
[00:17:18] Nenad Conic: unfortunately not.
[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's got, oh, I was hoping you'd say yes. I'm sure it'll come, because it really is exactly What you want to see.
[00:17:29] Nenad Conic: It's a very interesting use of actually WooCommerce in a way that you wouldn't think usually
[00:17:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So in terms of, in terms of the UX and the UI, we've obviously got the endorsement from me, the typical camper. That's great. How difficult was this to pull off in all honesty? Was this one of the, what is this one of those implementations where it's fairly straightforward or was it a case of, the whole team was scratching their head for a long time, getting the react app together, all of that.
[00:17:56] Nenad Conic: pretty fast. I can't say that we had previous experience using, WooCommerce bookings like this. So we basically needed to measure how it will behave with the React application, how, data intensive it will be. It will slow down, will it slow down the site if multiple people are doing queries at the same time?
But it turned out fine, and I think we used about a month to create this store, if I'm not mistaking.
[00:18:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, honestly, it feels like there's a whole SASS app in here somewhere, get the, get the campsites coming in your direction and you could, you could certainly make hay out of it, I would have thought. Okay, let's move on to the next one, which is, which is called Simple Dose. I think I've got that right.
simpledose. com. au. Is the com. au? Is that Austria? Forgive
[00:18:44] Nenad Conic: That's Australia.
[00:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Australia. Oh, sorry, Australia. that's Australia. oh yeah, of course, it says, in fact, the UVP right at the top. Australia's trusted online pharmacy and medication management service. Okay, tell us about this one. obviously, it's a medication store.
We imagine we're going to go and buy medicine in some way. But why is this unique and different?
[00:19:05] Nenad Conic: Yeah, this is actually our first client from Australia, and it was brought to us by WooCommerce directly. And the client is, managing, as you said, an online medication, subscription service. So basically, if someone, is suffering from a chronical disease and you are taking medication on a regular basis all the time, he wanted to solve, a problem by not being, not having to go to a pharmacy every time you need new set of medication, but you can actually subscribe to it and you will get a 28 day dose for your, all of your medication you need in nicely packed sachets that you can use in everyday life.
[00:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: Good grief. I'm so interested in this just because I don't know what it's like in Australia But I imagine the packaging up and posting of let's use the word drug because that's what it is Obviously that has negative connotations, that's the word medication drug, whatever I can imagine in the UK at least anyway, the pitfalls around.
Okay, is this even allowed? Would be interesting. So presumably there's got to be lots of signing of documents and prescriptions and medications and doctors. I don't know. I don't know on what level this is even allowed.
[00:20:30] Nenad Conic: Yeah, correct. We needed to be very cautious together with the client on how this will work. So we don't breach any, any laws we, shouldn't. so yeah, the interesting thing about this is it is based on WooCommerce as a WooCommerce shop. But you don't have a product page, you don't have archive pages, basically it all revolves around a subscription form where you need to give your details, about, who you are, where you live, what's your, mid, yeah, pharmacy and
[00:21:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yep.
[00:21:08] Nenad Conic: yeah, assigned to you.
And then you give, you give through the site, you give our clients some information on what. What the prescriptions you are prescribed, what, yeah, what medication you are prescribed through prescriptions and you need to submit afterwards some kind of proof that, the, your selected doctor actually prescribed those medication.
So we needed to be very careful on how we implement this.
[00:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: there's lots of additional steps. So it's not a case of just buying a product and the per the, the confirmation coming back through the stripe. A p I says, yes, we're good to go. This is, you need to set up a subscription plus you need to bind that to some form of.
Paperwork or some form that you've signed online to say look this is real. This is legitimate So there's a whole extra step in there, isn't there?
[00:22:00] Nenad Conic: Exactly. But yes, our client does not sell only, medication, but also says Vitamins and creams, inhalers, and other helpers for, yeah, health helpers, if I can call it like that.
[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so if you've stripped out I always think this is curious when you start with something like WooCommerce Typically, I hear about people who build on top. It's not often you hear that's not the case, but you do hear about it, but I'm curious about You've stripped a load of stuff out of WooCommerce, so you've got rid of product pages, you've got rid of archives, and all of that kind of stuff, and you just have this subscription service.
I guess at some point, the question needs to be asked, when you're stripping all of this out, is it worth using WooCommerce? If the endeavor is right at the beginning, we don't need that, we don't need that, we don't need that, at what point do you say, actually, we don't need WooCommerce?
[00:22:54] Nenad Conic: it worked very well, for us, because yes, you get user management out of the box. You have some security measures out of the box. You have product, subscription products. In this case, we use WooCommerce subscription plugin, to provide, customers a way to being billed every, X period of days.
So everything is automated, automated, but also WooCommerce, provides a nice API that we were able to integrate with Zendesk, which the client uses to actually interact with their customers if they need any additional set of information to confirm, Any data that they have posted previously, they are actually getting Xandes tickets and then they can communicate afterwards with the clients as well.
And after you finish your subscription, you're also able to use my account page and then we build some custom functionalities on my account page where you can actually manage your subscription, change, remove, add products, change payment methods, which WooCommerce, of course, Provides out of the box. So we were able to use a lot of functionalities that we would otherwise need to create from scratch
[00:24:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, hadn't, really given that enough thought, I don't think, because you're right, there's so much in there that you mentioned that comes along for the ride and the mere stripping out things like archive pages and product, pages and all of that. That's actually not that much, is it? There's so much
[00:24:27] Nenad Conic: So much more behind the
[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Which comes along for the ride and, makes it worthwhile. So again, I have to ask, presumably as you, as one of the, only three that you've given me an insight into, presumably this has been. greatly received, very successful. It's working okay.
[00:24:43] Nenad Conic: It is. It's, still in the, startup phase, but it's catching on and more and more people are subscribing and we are still working with this client
[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Absolutely
[00:24:57] Nenad Conic: and I'm, yeah, what, one thing I would add is also using gravity forms, for
[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah.
[00:25:02] Nenad Conic: yeah, gave us a boost because if we created a custom form from the beginning, will take us a lot of time because it's a startup and the, our client deals also getting to, getting to know it's you, his users and how they use actually the site, we've done a lot of changes during the, implementation.
Using gravity forms, we will able to, remove, add additional fields, move them from one page to another, or even create, nested forms. So it gave us a lot of flexibility to do those changes very quickly.
[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: So the ability to bind gravity forms with the, product in this case, which is, a laundry list of different things that you need to add in and presumably a lots of, questions that you need to ask, which are above and beyond what size do you want?
[00:25:54] Nenad Conic: Yes,
[00:25:55] Nathan Wrigley: you need to be asking about, I can only imagine, what doctors might require.
Gravity Forms in that case stepped up and bridged that gap. So again, you didn't have to build that. It was a, an off the peg plugin, which enabled you to bind all of that necessary subscription data. Nice.
[00:26:12] Nenad Conic: exactly.
[00:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Okay, so let's come to the third one. Oh, by the way, I don't know if I did go through it.
I think I did. SimpleDose. com. au. That will be, embedded into the show notes. And then we'll look at the, last one, which is, Kellox. no. Kellox being K E L O X dot N O. Now I'm gonna guess this is Norway.
[00:26:34] Nenad Conic: it is Norway and people usually mistake it for a brand.
[00:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: right, yeah. Kellogg's, Yeah, too easy. so this is, the first thing I noticed as soon as I land on that page is there's a great big, there's a lot of motorised vehicles flashing around, there's a, there's guys on water skis and jet boats and all of that kind of stuff.
What's this one all about?
[00:26:57] Nenad Conic: Yeah, so it's a Norwegian based company. they are selling primarily motorcycles and, boat engines, but they're also selling a lot of spare parts for those products and a lot of additional equipment, if you're a motorcycler or, yeah, or like boats.
[00:27:15] Nathan Wrigley: So how, is this one stepping outside of the, normal WooCommerce experience? what's unique about this?
[00:27:21] Nenad Conic: Yes, it's a very custom built, which is heavily integrated with their ERP system. the client's needs
[00:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: Hang on, sorry, rewind. Just for benefit of those people who don't know what ERP systems are, what is that?
[00:27:38] Nenad Conic: yeah, ERP system is like a content management system that our clients use for their storage.
[00:27:44] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect, thank you. Sorry, carry on.
[00:27:47] Nenad Conic: and yes, so the client, came with, came with a request that we need to integrate this shop through the, through their ERP system. And the ERP system they had, has all the products they, they store. It has stock, it has prices for the products, it has all the customers they need, and they needed something that they, can use to, everything to a E solution.
So it was impossible for our client to actually make, remake everything in their e commerce solution. So we needed to create an integration where everything they do in their ERP system is actually mirrored back to WooCommerce.
[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: is this a case of Kellox, the company, selling all of these products? Is this a case that they were so embedded in their, whatever piece of third party software that they were using, it just didn't make sense to them... To go over to something which may have already had a tight integration with WooCommerce through a, an add on or a plugin or something.
This was a case of, look, we cannot divorce our business from this ERP system. if we're having a website, the ERP system comes first. The website has to fit in to that.
[00:29:02] Nenad Conic: Yeah, that's true.
That's true. And it's not an ordinary, solution as well. It's more kind of a business to business portal that they created, with us. So meaning that, yes, regular customers can. Go into the site, find a motorcycle they like, but you can't actually buy it through the site. You can actually find the dealer, that sells that, particular motorcycle.
So if you go to a product page, instead of a buy button, you would get a link to, the interactive map we create for them that holds all of their dealers, for products they sell. And you are able to actually find someone that can actually sell you this bike.
[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So these three sites then represent real atypical versions of WooCommerce. And you mentioned earlier that the, you feel that the landscape for WooCommerce is, good at the minute. What's your intuition going forwards? Do you, have... obviously your enter your business would love for it to be the case that WooCommerce is gonna continue to grow.
But broadly speaking, if you were to, to be really honest with yourself, is that the case or is it a bit like WordPress itself? It seems to be entering a bit of a stagnation phase where it's very, popular, but it's not getting any more popular.
[00:30:23] Nenad Conic: I think it will change for both WordPress and WooCommerce. they are putting a lot of effort in modernizing the whole platform. So what happened with Gutenberg blocks and the way you interact with creating posts and pages is slowly beginning to transition to WooCommerce as well. And they are straightening up their APIs so you can use them in all different ways.
they introduced. webhooks that can allow you to, attach actions. If something happens in the, in your e commerce solution, that message will be transferred somewhere else as well. So I think they're putting a lot of effort in making WooCommerce an e solution for the future.
[00:31:06] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of your clients. How easy is it to pitch them? On WooCommerce, because, open source software for anybody that actually makes the effort to understand what that means. you quickly get an understanding. that's, really great. You get a lot for, nothing, essentially, there's a lot of people's hard work that's gone into it, but I do wonder how your, how your clients react to, we're going to use this free software.
They're obviously in, in all the three cases that you've showed us, they're serious businesses, that they're not going to trifle around with. the budget, if, it's, if I need to spend this amount of money, that's what I'll spend. How easy is the pitch for WooCommerce? And do you ever get any pushback?
Look, no, we don't want to go anywhere near WordPress or WooCommerce.
[00:31:50] Nenad Conic: Yeah. So again, depending on the client, and I totally agree that there is some, if I can say fear from more, premium or yeah, bigger clients coming to us and we explaining why our main solution is WooCommerce. but there is so much you can get out of a open source solution. It's not just that it's free, for use and it's free for modification.
but. Using some kind of a managed system also lacks your data a lot. If you're using an open source solution where you can install it on whichever server you want and you have full control of that server, but not just that server, but the data that is in your e commerce solution, it's a big plus for big companies that care so much about client...
Client's personal information, and yeah,
[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, especially in the era of GDPR, knowing where that data is being held and all of that is, quite useful. Yeah. In terms of, in terms of WooCommerce, like you've been using it obviously as an agency for years and years and great experience there. How, does WooCommerce as a platform stand up to.
The test of time. And what I mean by that is, do you have to go back and retrofit when WooCommerce updates, that, that product doesn't stand still. There's an awful lot of development over there, but does it tend to be fairly backwards compatible? they don't ship changes, which break things because.
You don't really have any control about what's coming in WooCommerce and the way that it's built. But over the decade that it's been in use by your agency, have you, been able to say, yeah, it's reliable, it's rock solid, we don't really have any breaking changes in the past, or have there been moments where WooCommerce has pushed something and it's oh.
[00:33:44] Nenad Conic: Yeah, I think WordPress and WooCommerce are one of the top platforms when it comes to backwards compatibility and they pay a lot of attention to it. So the whole idea is if your site works today, it should work with, of course, some maintenance from the client side. It should work always. So I would say that's one of the pluses of using this open source solution is that you can count that it will work for years and years.
[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: Do you partner with other agencies? So obviously there's a lot of people listening to this who, they maybe do get into WooCommerce, but perhaps they don't have the expertise to push it in the ways that you've been describing. I don't know if that's something that your agency do. Do you partner with other agencies or do you only go direct to clients?
How does that all work for you?
[00:34:35] Nenad Conic: We usually go directly to clients and our, also something that we haven't talked about, we have another, another application, internal application we have built, especially for the clients that need integrations with their, managing systems. Most of our clients come, for, e commerce solution, come with the problem that if I want to create an e commerce shop, I don't want to manage it in my own system that holds all the information I already have, and then have another system that I need to manage.
so we internally created an integration system that integrates very easily, with a majority of Norwegian. ERP systems, if I can call them that again. Uh huh. so our clients come to us for the integration part, and then we are working on them together on building the whole platform as well. sorry, carry on. Apologies.
haven't got many examples where we were asked to collaborate with other agencies, but we are definitely open to it, I
[00:35:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Interesting. Obviously, in the show notes, you'll be able to find all of the links and so on. I'm just wondering, obviously, you've, you've got a great commitment to using WooCommerce, and I'm going to smuggle this question in, towards the end. Do you, have a great commitment to giving back to WordPress?
Obviously, as an agency, it... That software has been very good for you. But I don't know what your posture is in terms of, contributing time or, I don't know anything in terms of the community side to give back to WooCommerce, WordPress more generally.
[00:36:16] Nenad Conic: We do, we do some things we can always do better and we are pushing our company to do even better in that field. but we do have a lot of people that are involved in organizing a lot of work camps, where are, if they are locally or globally, global, work camps. So we have, some people, if I can mention.
yes, we have a colleague, Uroš Tasić, who works here from Belgrade as well, who is heavily involved in organizing Warcamp Europe for five years now, I think.
[00:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: nice.
[00:36:51] Nenad Conic: We are visiting, we are sponsoring a lot of Warcamps, Yeah, regarding the development part of it, we are a part of all vu, contributors day, contributor days.
but as I said, we want to be better at this.
[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose you could, give up your entire life to that enterprise, couldn't you? There's no, there's never a moment where you can say we've been as good as we can be. But the fact that you're attending events and helping out with those events is definitely good. so Nanad, it's been great having you on the podcast today.
The bit that I think probably I want to just throw in right at the end is you did say that you were potentially open to partnerships. maybe that's. Going to work out, maybe not, but if there's somebody listening to this podcast today who wants to reach out to, the agency, but also potentially you, where is the best point to, where's the best point to, sorry, where's the best place to point them to?
[00:37:53] Nenad Conic: Best place to point and do will definitely be a website. We have a contact form that you can fill in, and we have a team of people that are actually receiving those emails and responding.
[00:38:08] Nathan Wrigley: maximer. com, M A K S I M E R dot com, and you, on a more personal level, do you interact on Twitter, whatever that's called these days, X, Facebook, Instagram, who knows, do you have anywhere that people can reach out to you?
[00:38:21] Nenad Conic: To be honest, I use a bit of Instagram, but I tend to stay off social media.
[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: Very sensible you are too, yeah, yeah, Nenad, thank you so much for chatting to us today, all about the innovative, interesting ways that you can use WooCommerce, I really appreciate it.
[00:38:37] Nenad Conic: It was my pleasure.
[00:38:38] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very pleasant chatting today with Nenad, from Maksimar. If you've enjoyed that episode, or you've got any commentary about it, please head over to WP Builds dot com. Using the little search icon up the top right hand side, please search for episode number 364. And leave us a comment there. I keep banging on about this, but it's very nice to get comments inside of WordPress. It's always nicely supposed to get them shared on social media, but there's something particularly nice about getting a WordPress comment on the site itself. Once WP Builds dot com, search for episode number 364.
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