[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 428, entitled Bulk editing WooCommerce products faster with Setary: Katie Keith shares insights and benefits. It was published on Thursday the 10th of July, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley and before I am joined by Katie, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okie dokie. What have we got for you today? Well, I'm chatting with Katie Keith. She's one of the co-founders of Barn2, a suite of plugins which will enable you to do all sorts of magnificent things with your WooCommerce and Shopify sites.
However, today we're talking about something new. It's something that they have, well, not quite acquired, but partnered up with. The platform is called Setary, it's a SaaS app, and it enables you in a spreadsheet like interface to bulk edit your WooCommerce, and in the future, Shopify stores.
The idea being that really at the moment, if you've gotta click into each product page to amend it, wouldn't it be easier if all of the data contained about every single product was held in a spreadsheet? You could change the spreadsheet and then click publish if you like, and all of those amendments would be made in a bulk way. So thousands and thousands all at the same time. This could be really good if you wanted to do something like a Black Friday sale, for example.
Well, Katie's here to talk about it. Why they partnered with the platform, and how it all works, and what the future plans on the roadmap are.
I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast again by Katie Keith. Hello Katie.
[00:04:58] Katie Keith: Hey.
[00:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us. Katie's been on the podcast a number of times.
She's also been on this week in WordPress. And uh, if you don't know Katie, it's gonna be a WooCommerce related episode and we're gonna be talking about Barn2 plugins and something new, which has come under the, uh, under the Barn2, oh, I'm gonna say under the roof of the barn. How's that? I like it. Oh yeah.
Getting a nod there. Um, it's a new thing, but we'll get into that in a moment. I know it's banal and I know that nobody wants. To say this at the beginning, end of in, of an interview. But trust me, we have new listeners who genuinely don't know who you are. So I'm gonna ask the bio question. Sorry. Um, tell us who you are, just very briefly, if you don't mind.
[00:05:40] Katie Keith: Yep. So I'm Katie Keith. I am the founder and CEO at Barn2 plugins, and we sell WordPress and mostly WooCommerce plugins.
[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. That was nice and brief. That's perfect. Thank you very much. You can, uh, just drop us the URL Go on.
[00:05:56] Katie Keith: It is ban two.com and that's the number two.
[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: Great. Okay. So barn with the digit two.com. Go and check it out. So there's a whole suite of different things that you can do, uh, with WooCommerce. We've explored those in the past, but we're not here to talk about that today. This is a new acquisition, something called Ery, which I confess I'd never heard of, but the minute I saw it, I totally grasp why you bought it.
Give us the background. How did you come across this company? How did you acquire it? What was going on there?
[00:06:27] Katie Keith: So I've known about RI for years because it was originally created by my friend James Kemp, who's in my mastermind group. So when he created RI as a side project while he was. Still running iconic wp he was often consulting the members of the mastermind group about business decisions, design, everything relating to ry.
So it's been on my radar for years as the best way to bulk edit products in WooCommerce. Um, but then eventually, uh, James. Stops owning it because he got a job at Woo and they didn't want him to have that as a side project. And so he sold it to his friend. So basically, um, about, I think I was in the Philippines at the time on holiday, so I wasn't really concentrating, uh, but I was flicking through Twitter and um, somebody did a post about if you had some money, what would you build for Shopify?
'cause it was a Shopify person. And this guy who I know is. James Kemp's friend said I would build Tary bulk edit for Shopify, because currently it's only WooCommerce. Uh, but I haven't done it because I need a partner. I don't want to do it alone, so my ears pricked up because we are a WooCommerce company.
Bulk editing would be a good fit. I know Tary, but also we're starting to expand into Shopify, so I just did a. Think emoji in response. And I was on holiday, so I forgot about it. And then a few weeks later, I actually sent him a direct message and said, I've been pondering this. Do you want to talk? Because I didn't even know if it was a hint at me individually or whether he was just saying generally he wanted a partner.
No, because I'd been in on that thread. Um. Anyway, he, we talks and so we then became 50 50 partners in ri, so Tu basically owns half of RI and he owns the other half.
[00:08:23] Nathan Wrigley: Uh, okay, so not an acquisition in the strictest sense of the word. A partnership actually. So the, the original owner. Is 50% and you have become the other 50% presumably, so that you can, you know, reap the rewards if it's popular, but also so that you can steer the direction of it in the direction of, well, I guess Shopify and WooCommerce have both of those things happening at the same time.
I.
[00:08:47] Katie Keith: Yeah, exactly. And I've acquired one plugin before and it's doing really well. I've, we've grown the sales, but it was a lot of work to incorporate it into Barn2 technologically, because we have set ways of doing things. Our existing development team doesn't have unlimited capacity, so I liked the idea of partnering with a.
Product where the original developer would remain as the other partner so that we can take care of growing it. The marketing, which is where we are particularly strong at Bond to, um, but we don't necessarily need to be responsible for the development so that it frees up my development team to work on our existing products
[00:09:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Um, thank you for that. So, Set is a, is a project, which honestly, the minute you delve into it, it's a real time saver. That that seems to be basically the thing that it's gonna do for you. It's gonna make a whole bunch of really t really tedious jobs, um, be encapsulated in just a few clicks, hopefully.
And so I guess you should probably explain what it does. What, what is tery? What does it do? Just, yeah, just lay it out for us. The, the elevator pitch.
[00:09:57] Katie Keith: So Ari is a bulk editor for WooCommerce. It basically lists all of your products and variations in a spreadsheet interface. It is not part of your WordPress site. It's a. SaaS app that sits outside of that, so there's no performance load on your site. It just takes your products via the WordPress, API, and displays them in a spreadsheet.
So you can just, you can sort, you can filter, you can show and hide columns. You can quickly type into the spreadsheet to change any type of product data. Or data about your variations. You can add new products and variations and you can also select products and use a bulk edit form to make mass changes, such as increasing all prices by 10% or de decreasing them when you want to run a sale or whatever you want, basically, or from this spreadsheet, rather than having to go into many, many product pages.
[00:10:51] Nathan Wrigley: So on the face of it, it sounds like, okay, it's a spreadsheets, you know? Okay, great. But just dear listener, give that a bit of thought. So imagine that you've got a shop with, I don't know, let's say a thousand products, and it is your job. You are the person given the task. It's coming up to Black Friday or something like that.
You've gotta knock 10% of every single. Product with a certain category. You know the, so that's 800 products. The way that we do it at the moment, we would have to go in 800 products. Oh, go in, change the pricing, calculate what the difference would be. What you are basically saying is in this spreadsheet interface, you can just go in, open up the spreadsheet, tell. All of those 800 products, right? Reduce your price across the board by 10%. Hit Go. And your dom. So that's a matter of seconds as opposed to, well, like what I just suggested could be like a whole day. Is that basically it?
[00:11:51] Katie Keith: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so you might want to do that, say if your supplier has increased all your costs by 10%, you might want to pass that onto the customer. You can also bulk set sale prices and things like that. So, um, that displays slightly differently in WooCommerce, so you don't have to go into every product and do that.
And in fact, I had a need for this. On our own store a few years ago. Um, we, we only have 19 plugins, but we have over a thousand prices because of all the different currencies, which are all set manually and variants and things like that. Annual lifetime number of sites. So we went and work it out. We've got over a thousand prices.
And for a Black Friday sale, you can just give people a coupon code, but you may just want to discount all your prices by changing the actual price. There's two schools of thought on that, and if you want to be bulk updating prices, it takes so
[00:12:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:45] Katie Keith: manually and I would make mistakes.
Stakes and my support team were always saying, oh, why is this price more than this price when it's actually for fewer numbers of sites and things like that, because I just made copying and pasting errors or whatever. So yeah, something like ary makes that, uh, idiot proof and also quicker.
[00:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: So if, if we imagine a spreadsheet, we've obviously got columns and we've got rows. Does it work? As I'm anticipating that each product occupies a row and you know, the data contained about that product would spread further along the road. So we might have the name of the product, we might have the price of the product, we might have the variation.
So I don't know, blue, black, gray, if it's a T-shirt or something like that. They will all just be spread about so we, we can identify the one product. Presumably there's some sort of search capacity so that we can drill down into the bits and pieces again. Is that right? Are we working on one row per product?
[00:13:39] Katie Keith: Yeah, one row per product with many columns. One for each piece of product data, plus any custom data you might have added, like custom fields or taxonomies. Um, and yeah, you can search and filter to narrow that list. Down. So you're just viewing certain products. The only thing that's different from what you said is that each variation has its own row as well.
And I know that's a big pain point in WooCommerce. Um, in fact, at Barn2 we already have a plugin called WooCommerce Bulk Variations, which as well as. To improving the display of variations on the front end, which Ceter does not do. Our bulk variations, plugin adds bulk variation functionality to the backend on the edit product screen so that you can, for example, select all the variations for that product that are blue and add the same picture of the blue T-shirt to all of them, which otherwise you'd have to do manually in WooCommerce.
So we already had a plugin that makes it easier to. Edit variations. But to be fair, ary does this better because it's does it for multiple variations or from that one spreadsheet, you do not have to visit the single product page. So each variation appears as a row, as does each product.
[00:14:52] Nathan Wrigley: If I've got a giant spreadsheet, I mean, spreadsheets are just a fabulous way of encapsulating data and, and holding it for your attention. But once a spreadsheet becomes really big, it does tend to become like it's overwhelming. You know, there's loads of scrolling and what have you. I'm wondering if in ary there are ways that I could, I.
I don't know, set it up in such a way that, I dunno, all my bikes are on one tab, all my helmets are on another tab. Or I could sort of filter down and say, okay, now just show me helmets. Just show me, um, bikes or whatever it may be, and then keep it that way so that the next time I log back in the display that I prefer, you know, the hot selling items, whatever it might be, are sort of held so that I can see them in a tab interface or in a filtered interface, what have you.
[00:15:38] Katie Keith: Yeah. The way to do this is using the views feature, which basically lets you pres save different views. So you might have a bike helmets view, which only has columns of the relevant data about the bike helmets. It will be pre-filtered to show the bike helmets category and things like that, and then you might have another.
Category. Uh, another view with the, a different category, it doesn't have to be categories. It can be any combination of filters. So it might be all your blue bikes or all your kids' bikes saved in a view. So when you log in, you just go to the views feature and select that, and then it will instantly update the spreadsheet.
[00:16:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. That makes sense. So I've, I think I've got what it is and how it works and what have you. And you say it's working with the, the WordPress API. So it, so I guess what I'm asking next is where is it? Where, where's the data stored? Are we still, it's still the WordPress database, right? If I make a change in Setary and click I, I'm gonna use the word publish.
Maybe that's not what you use, but let's go for publish. Um, does it then one row at a time kind of go in and overwrite that product? So if I'm changing the price of a. Thousand products, does it do those and sort of ripple down and you know, how long does it take? How does it write the data? Where is the data kept?
Those kind of things.
[00:16:53] Katie Keith: Um, well, it's kind of instant. So the data is not stored on Setary and because it's using the API, it's not going through PHP or whatever, it's pretty much instant, even for lots and lots of products. So you make your changes in the spreadsheet and then you can preview them before you hit save. So there, and there's like a blue dot against each cell you've edited, so you can check that you've not made any mistakes or anything, and then you hit save and it just.
Saves everything, and I can't tell you technically that is not my remit exactly how that does it, but it just pushes it all through to the API and updates.
[00:17:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm imagining it's a sequel query or something like that, where it's just saying, okay, everything that that is, that filters down to this. Just, you know, here's the tables that you need to adapt, just. Go and do those. So yeah, that could be done in a heartbeat. Yeah, I was wondering if it was more of a sort of push pull kind of thing, but it sounds like that's not the case and that would obviously, yeah.
'cause you know, if you wanna change the prices across the board and you had to wait for half an hour for that to happen, that could get a little bit messy. But if it happens basically in a heartbeat, then yeah, that would be, that would be really useful. Now the, the. The reason that I think this is so interesting is because it feels like you are leaning into real, non-technical users.
And what I'm meaning by that is, let's say that I'm the owner of a shop and, and I've built the WooCommerce shop. I'm really happy. I know the interface. I can, I can do it. I, I understand how WooCommerce works. I've, I figured it out, but suddenly I get a, I don't know, a junior member of staff on my team and I want them to be updating prices for me.
Teaching them WooCommerce feels like, Hmm, yeah, maybe that's not the best use of their time. It really feels like you can give this work over to non-technical people, and I don't know if that's kind of part of the deal, but non-technical people being able to adapt things without really having to understand how WordPress works at all.
[00:18:49] Katie Keith: Yeah, absolutely be, because it's a web app, they don't even need logins for the WordPress admin, and so it is completely separate in that sense. So you can give ary logins to team members who don't need to edit your pages or posts or anything else on your site so you're not messing around with custom user roles, which then give them admin access to certain types.
Certain areas of the admin, there's none of that, that you just give them a login for ary and then they can add your products. And that's particularly popular with people that are running multiple stores at once. So for example, uh, you can have like WordPress, multisites, and you can just quickly click between one spreadsheet for one site and then another, or unrelated.
Stores. So let's say it's a web agency or something like that, that is updating their client's product data. They can have all their clients in ary and easily switch between them. So there's a lot of ways in which it's better than logging into the WordPress admin.
[00:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: So if I've got a site and it's just me and a handful of other people, you know, maybe it's got some utility, but especially if I'm on a big WordPress, sorry, big WooCommerce site, I can imagine that this starts to become more useful because, you know, I've got 50 employees, they're all working on the, the pricing.
They're figuring out how much storage we've got in the warehouse and how many units of this are available and what have you. So. I've got 50 members of staff. Can I assign them with sort of different permissions? Like for example, you can update the quantity available. That, that's, that's the bit that you can access.
But you who are working on pricing, you can access the, the column, let's say that of the pricing. In other words, can you be more granular just inside of Ry with what people can actually adapt and alter and, uh, you know, save the changes of,
[00:20:40] Katie Keith: No, it doesn't have that. It is just you get access to the whole
[00:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so basically if you give somebody access Cavi and Tour,
[00:20:48] Katie Keith: Yeah. They can do anything to your products. Yeah. It needs to be somebody you trust. Uh, as with anything.
[00:20:54] Nathan Wrigley: And can you assign the, and it sounds like you can, can you assign this to multiple, so if I've got an account on Setary, can I assign this to my Empire of WooCommerce websites, or do I need a separate account for each WooCommerce website, or can I have, I don't know, 10 stores, 10 shops inside the same account and then flick between them?
I think you said a minute ago that that was possible.
[00:21:18] Katie Keith: Yeah, that's right. So in one of the corners there's basically a dropdown where you can switch between different stores and you can also do things like copy products between stores as well. So that's a good time saver if say you're running a chain of related stores where they need to share products or something like that.
[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: So give us, give us some real insight then into how this works. So you, you mentioned that you've got a thousand. You've got a thousand data points basically, that you've got to modify. And I imagine at one point, even before your bulk, uh, update plugin existed, I imagine you've got some insight into how long it would've taken to, let's say 10% off the, the price of everything with Setary.
Just C, can you, can you encapsulate roughly speaking what the time difference is, how long it might have taken to do it by logging into each product saving and what have you, and then how long it actually does with Ri 'cause that feels like the UVP of this. Basically. It's a time saver.
[00:22:13] Katie Keith: Yeah, well when I had to do that for our Black Friday prices. It was over half a day. And I am really quick as well. I work a lot quicker than most people. Um, and I know my site back to front and things as well, so other people would've taken longer than that. Um, whereas to do it with ceri, if you did just want to increase all your prices by 10%, then you could do that in like a couple of minutes and including logging in and.
Finding the products you want in the first place. Um, realistically, would you ever do that for Black Friday? You probably would, wouldn't you? 25% off, you would do like a 25% discount.
[00:22:53] Nathan Wrigley: that's an interesting point. So it suddenly makes things that you would never have done because you're just staring at this wall of work. Suddenly it's like, yeah, I could just try that. Why not just knock 25% off of this for like six hours on a particular day? 'cause I can always just undo it.
Whereas in the previous scenario that, okay, I've gotta spend half an half a day updating all the prices, then once the sale's over another half a day. So it enables you to just be sort of more agile with everything, in fact,
[00:23:22] Katie Keith: Yeah, otherwise you get the, the tail wagging, the dog scenario where you do something like, say, use coupon codes for your Black Friday sale because you don't want to update a thousand prices manually. So you're not making it as a business decision. You are making it as an ease of. Um, actually implementing it decision.
So it allows you to be more strategic in that sense. And you can also do other things that you wouldn't do otherwise, like say, automatically append some extra text to your short descriptions for all of your products to say. 25% discount or something. Or you can append it to the title of everything. So let's say you've just updated the prices for one particular category.
You might go dash 10% off or something on all your T-shirt product titles. So it just allows you to do things that would just be a pain to do otherwise. So if you think creatively, it might open the door to more things that you wouldn't
[00:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also the opportunity to go wrong, like you said, if you've got a, I dunno, let's say a hundred, a hundred prices that you've got to modify by 10%, honestly. Knowing myself, I'm gonna get at least five of those wrong. I'm just gonna get the calculate. I dunno, I'll get distracted. Something will happen.
I'll get this one price completely wrong. I'll, you know, I'll overcharge or i'll undercharge, whatever it may be. Whereas with this you hand you just say to Setary 10% and it just does the heavy lifting. It figures out what that amendment is and then just goes out and does it so you don't have to go and figure them out as well.
So that's really nice. Um, does it have. The capacity to roll back. Let's say that I make some catastrophic error, it's my fault, and I suddenly decide that I want to offer 5% off, but I act accidentally say, I dunno, I type in 50%. Is it a case of just redoing, you know, going back and saying, oh, actually, okay, I, I'll just wanna redo those so they go back to where they were?
Or is there like an, an unwind feature, like a, like a history where I can see what I did and roll back to the things that I accidentally messed up.
[00:25:25] Katie Keith: It doesn't have that because that would require, say, storing data in
[00:25:29] Nathan Wrigley: good point. Yeah.
[00:25:30] Katie Keith: which would be a whole different ball game. Um, what it has is the preview option. So before you hit save, you can roll back and just cancel all your changes. If you've already canceled then, then one option would be to go back into Tary and quickly.
Redo the bulk changes. So if you've changed the price to the wrong thing, you just bulk edit the prices again. Uh, problem solved. Or if it's something more complex like, um, that you can't easily fix with bulk editing, I don't know why 'cause you just broke it with bulk editing. But if it was, you've got your website backups presumably via or host or a backup plugin.
So it is all in the previous, uh, versions will be in WooCommerce rather than sat.
[00:26:11] Nathan Wrigley: Mm. And um, and how, how has it been received? How's the news gone down? Have you acquiring it? So sometimes this works out tremendously, doesn't it? You know, you've got this brand new partnership. Hopefully you are tremendous friends with the person that you are now collaborating with out in the wider world, how has it been received?
'cause I know that you're a fairly key figure. In WooCommerce, your opinion matters, the kind of things that you do get noticed. How has it been? How's it gone down?
[00:26:37] Katie Keith: It's been about five weeks so far since we announced this, so it's pretty new and it's gone really well so far. Um, uh, the free trial signups have increased by 600%,
[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: whoa.
[00:26:50] Katie Keith: and for example, so that's really good. Uh, we are talking quite small numbers
[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: but still, still. That's a good metric.
[00:26:57] Katie Keith: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, and all the numbers are good.
Um, so I was in Stripe the other day looking at the, um, what do you call it, Mr. MRR, numbers and things, and everything is up since we announced it. And I'm sure some of that was the initial buzz around the launch. But hopefully that will continue. Um, it's a particularly good fit for us because we have a lot of WordPress.
Well, WooCommerce plugins, which, um, attract larger stores. For example, our WooCommerce Wholesale Pro Bulk Variations that I mentioned earlier. WooCommerce product Table is about listing large numbers of products in a table on the front end of your site. So. It would make sense that those customers of our existing plugins would need bulk editing.
So we emailed customers like targeted emails, um, so a specific email for product table customers, for example, to tell them about Tari and recommend it and so on. So we were, we are able to kind of use our existing customer base as well as putting kind of, um, Barn2 marketing machine, as
[00:28:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:03] Katie Keith: it, onto Setary, even though it's.
Still its own website. We are publishing lots of blog posts, for example, on the Barn2 site because, uh, that has much better say domain authority. We can rank more easily for WooCommerce bulk edit keywords than ary can, although we're trying to grow that too. So it is a really interesting experiment actually, because I haven't done this before.
So. Um, if it's successful and we can, um, successfully grow it, even though it's not branded as a Barn2 plugin, then maybe I will partner with other developers who just need that marketing help.
[00:28:39] Nathan Wrigley: Is there a danger that some of the bits and pieces that you've already built inside of Barn2, are you. When you, when you, uh, got into the partnership with Setary, were there bits where you thought, hang on a minute, this is, this is weird. We've got two things now which seem to be doing very similar things, that's gonna be confusing.
One's gonna eat the other. Was there any of that? You know, are you having to look at your product suite and think, okay, should we be like moss balling that particular thing and pushing them towards, or, you know, you, you, you get where I'm going with that. Is there any kind of overlap that in an ideal world, wouldn't exist?
[00:29:15] Katie Keith: Yeah, the overlap is with the bulk edit features of WooCommerce, bulk variations, and I decided that I wasn't worried about that because nearly all of the sales of our bulk variations plugin are from people that want its front end feature, which is to create a sort of quick variations. Order form or at a table of all your variations on the product page so that people can quickly choose a quantity for each variation and then click add to cart once instead of having to select from dropdowns over and over again.
So that's why people buy that plugin. And the bulk editing feature that we also added is largely a kind of nice. To have, it doesn't tend to drive the sales. So, um, that worked really well because we already had loads of articles on our website, on our blog about things like bulk editing. But because I wasn't worried about that very real conflicts, I updated all of those articles to recommend Tary first and then bulk variations as a kind of an alternate option.
If you want bulk editing on the edit product screen, which is a less universal solution than Tary, so hopefully we'll kind of win both by presenting two options. But I'm comfortable in recommending Tary over bulk variations for bulk editing.
[00:30:34] Nathan Wrigley: That's interesting. Um, you've got this, you must by now have a fairly large email list of people who are into WooCommerce. You know, people that have bought your plugins in the past and what have you, and I was wondering if there was any kind of. O upside that you present to your existing customers if they want to get into Tary.
Do you, do you offer sort of, I don't know, a different package, you know, you've bought one of our plugins in the past, or you are a current subscriber to one of our plugins. Do you offer like any kind of discount or any preferential treatment to those people, or is it Everybody's equal when they come to ri, no matter whether you've dealt with us in the past.
[00:31:08] Katie Keith: Yes, we offered 10% discount to all of our existing customers, and that's a permanent discount for them. Uh, and in addition to that, we've offered 20% to people that have our all access pass. Uh, 'cause they've spent a lot. For our plugins, we didn't include ary in the all access pass because it's still, it is an independent company.
It's not actually a Barn2 plugin. Uh, so what we did was we offered 20% discount as a kind of sweetener that it's not available in the all access
[00:31:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Um, I suppose we should get into the thorny stuff of pricing. So ary, so put, let's put ban two to one side for a minute. We're just talking about ary now. What are the, uh, the, well, I, I'm on the website. Um, I can see at the moment Caviar mTOR, uh, Katie has the right to send this price up or down. Um, at the moment it is $12 per month.
You're calling that the professional plan, but I dunno if there are other plans that I can't see. I'm, I'm on the, um, Setary, S-E-T-A-R-Y. Dot com homepage. Um, there's just that one. Um, but it also, but that seems to be bound to a site license. So you've got this professional plan. One site is $12, five sites 22, and then you go up to, gosh, wow, um, 10 sites is $33.
That's pretty generous. So it's not like you're taking the price up in a, in a linear line. You really are offering a lot more. Is that the only things, or I can see here, there's a. There's a contact us for pricing of other options, so just talk us around the pricing, basically.
[00:32:40] Katie Keith: Yeah. Um, well this is what I inherited. Um, so yeah, I suppose the idea is that professional is for kind of individual website owners or freelancers or something, and they choose, just choose the number of sites. Whereas agency would be more about the bulk sales, like if you
[00:32:56] Nathan Wrigley: Hmm.
[00:32:57] Katie Keith: Um, for a hundred sites or something like that.
Um, I've no idea if anybody's ever actually done that, but the option is there. Um, I did, we, we have a marketing agency ellipsis, who do, um, a big pricing analysis for us every six months and I had them include ary in our most recent pricing analysis, which just happened. And, um, and they thought that the pricing structure was fine, um, and worked quite well.
So we are keeping that. Uh, for now, and they thought that the proportions were right and everything, but this is not my work. It has, that page hasn't changed since I took over the marketing.
[00:33:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so caveat mTOR at the moment, if you've got one site is $12 and it goes up from there. As I said, five sites currently $22 per month, but there's, uh, yeah, it says build yearly. And then up to 10 sites is $33 a month. So we talked largely about WooCommerce, but I noticed that you have pivoted, I dunno what proportion of your work now tends to be in Shopify.
But let's get into that. This works in exactly the same way if you're a Shopify customer, does it or are there any things which you can't do with Shopify that you could do with WooCommerce? So just tell us about the Shopify side of things.
[00:34:10] Katie Keith: Well that doesn't exist yet, but it will.
[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: misunderstood. Sorry.
[00:34:14] Katie Keith: one of the reasons I was so interested in ary was because of the previous owners. Um, well still half owners, their plans to expand into Shopify because that's exactly what we are doing at Barn2. We are just. We haven't launched our first app yet, but we are building our first apps, so it fit really well strategically for us as another sort of opportunity to get into the Shopify market.
So yes, the kind of current project is to create a Shopify version of Setary where it will be exactly the same bulk edit interface, but if it's a. Shopify store that is connected, then it will link with Shopify data instead, which might be slightly different data fields, of course, and it will link with the Shopify API rather than the WooCommerce one.
But ultimately it's the same spreadsheet with the same filters and saveable views and editable columns and all of
[00:35:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that's coming. Wait and see essentially. Um, just a quick question. Obviously, you know, you've got your suite of, um, plugins ban to many, many, many plugins that you can bind onto WooCommerce to increase the functionality and make things easier for you and easier for your customers and what have you.
Um. I'm presuming that every, every point of data that you add in as Barn2 will map into tary. So if you, if, if ingenious plugin that you've got adds some data point, presumably that can be consumed by tary and altered firstly, let's deal with that. Ca if, do any of your plugins do, do all of the different fields that they may or may not add?
Can I alter all of those in set? Let's do that bit first.
[00:35:54] Katie Keith: I would say where applicable, and so the times it would be relevant is where we, one of our plugins, has added an extra custom field or taxonomy or something to a product. So we have a WooCommerce lead time plugin, which displays the waiting time for a product on the product page. If you add it globally, that's not going to integrate with Setary because it's a global setting if you add it to a product.
So you want to have a. Different lead time for each product that actually automatically integrates with Tary because it's just a custom field and Tary supports custom fields and taxonomies. So you actually don't really need to do custom integration for anything which is added to the WooCommerce product.
[00:36:38] Nathan Wrigley: So it, it basically, if it adds custom field data, then it will appear as a new column that you can look at in ary. Okay. Okay. That's great. So I presume then, um, where I was going with that then is obviously Barn2 are not the only horse in the race. There's a bunch of other people. Same would be true there if you are already wedded to a plugin that, uh, oh, I don't know.
Does some aspect of WooCommerce for you. It handles something, creates a new data point for you that will also be consumable by RI as well, I presume from what you've just said.
[00:37:09] Katie Keith: Yeah. Um, typically there, I'm sure there's some exceptions, but for example, uh, if you're using advanced custom fields, which many, many sites are using to add extra fields to their products, then what you do is you go into the ary settings and just say, I want the custom field from this plugin to a pip. So you can basically just select all the plugins that add custom fields to products, and then it appears as a column in ary.
[00:37:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess also if you, if you've got a site which has got loads of legacy data points that you just don't want to delete, just in case, I don't know there a reason not to delete it. It'd be nice to know that you can sort of remove those columns 'cause they're not sort of doing anything there of no use to you.
So that's, that's the state of play where recording this in May, 2025. Let's talk about the roadmap quickly. I presume that you've, you've had some thoughts about some things that you may like to add. Again, caveat, mTOR, whatever comes out of Katie's mouth is not a guarantee. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but have you got some ideas of the things that you would like to see drop into this?
Should time and finances allow.
[00:38:16] Katie Keith: Definitely. Um, in fact, um, as you might expect, in order to decide whether to become partners in Setary, I did a lot of analysis. So I analyzed what Setary can do now, what competitors can do in both WooCommerce and Shopify and what you can do in core. And looked at what Shopify Ari was adding that the other core plugins aren't.
So, um, that was a good way. So I, I, based on that, I wrote a kind of. Wishlist of things. And in my opinion, apart from the whole existence of a Shopify app, um, the most useful feature that we should be adding is scheduling. So let's say you are doing a Black Friday sale, you may want to schedule it to start at midnight on a certain day, and currently you press save and it goes live instantly.
So that's the highest priority feature that I would like to see added.
[00:39:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's neat. So you, you run, so you basically go through ri, make the changes, you know, you go through the wizard if you like to decide what you're gonna do, I'm gonna take 10% off or what have you. And then instead of saying, go. You'd have a sort of schedule option and you would say, okay, midnight before Black Friday, or what have you.
And then whilst you are asleep in your bed at midnight, Tery will get to work, do the changes, and you'll wake up and it'll all be done. So you can just, you know, get all of the holiday set up on January the first instead of having to worry about them one at a time. That's neat. I like that. That's really
[00:39:50] Katie Keith: Yeah, and I got the idea by analyzing some of the Shopify bulk edit apps. Um, so I, I'm, one of my favorite things about getting into Shopify is the ideas it's giving me to put back into the WooCommerce ecosystem. Actually, this has happened with some of our plugins as well, so I saw that some Shopify apps have scheduling, and I thought we should have that for Setary.
And if ary has it, that means it will naturally feed back into the WooCommerce as well. Um, and apart from that, the main features that I would like is, um, more kind of minor usability things. For example, instead of displaying the file name of the featured image, I'd like to display a little thumbnail that, you know, little things like that to just make it a bit more user friendly, although it's very professional already.
[00:40:36] Nathan Wrigley: Mm. Okay. I think we've done a good job there, Katie. I think we've encapsulated pretty much everything that you would have wished to have said, but I could be wrong. Is there anything, any dramatic thing that we missed out that you wanted to mention specifically? If not, then we'll, uh, we'll knock it on the head, as we say in the uk.
[00:40:54] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think we've been pretty
[00:40:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So just before we end one more time, you can find it at Setary S-E-T-A-R-Y .com. And do remember that there are options available if you are already an existing bond to customer. Um, just repeat those back to us again. What are you offering? Was it 10% and 20%
[00:41:14] Katie Keith: Yeah, it is 10%. If you, um, have any of Bantu plugins or 20% if you hold our all access pass.
[00:41:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So definitely make use of those if you're already an existing customer. But, uh, yeah, once more, ary.com go check it out. It may very well speed up the, the amount of time you or your clients or brothers, sisters relations have to spend messing about in WooCommerce. And then you can go out and have a barbecue or do something much more fun instead.
So Katie, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.
[00:41:46] Katie Keith: Yeah, thanks very much for having me.
[00:41:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, just a couple of quick things. Don't forget that we'll be back next Thursday for a podcast episode. We'll also have our This Week in WordPress, I mentioned it at the top Live every Monday, 2:00 PM UK time. Join us for that as well.
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Okay, that truly is almost it. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music, say thank you for listening. If you want to find the show notes for this, head to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 426, leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate it.
Here comes that cheesy music. You stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
