Productivity Apps & SureCart Vs. Woo

Not gonna lie… I thought last night’s Super Bowl was a little underwhelming. Not sure if you agree.

The halftime show was something I could appreciate the talent for, no doubt. But, I think it went over a lot of people’s heads. You could barely even understand the words. Talented people, though.

And the game itself was so unbalanced. I like to watch close games. But, Philly whopped the Chiefs so hard the outcome was a forgone conclusion fairly early on. Congrats to the Eagles, though. They deserved that win. Incredible team.

Even the commercials were rather underwhelming, if you ask me.

What did you think? If you watched it, of course.

Anyway, back to real world….

This week, I wanted to talk about some of my recent escapades into productivity software. Maybe you can share what you use.

And I also wanted to address the primary difference between SureCart and WooCommerce that apparently even some people who WORK in the WordPress space weren’t aware of. And it’s super important.

So, let’s get into it…

Your Productivity System?

Over the years, I’ve used a lot of different productivity software. But, this last week, I began using a new one. Well, new to me.

This is one of those things where you have to strike a balance between “don’t fix what isn’t broken”…. and “woah, that’s really cool!”. Because, there is no perfect productivity software. You kind of have to know when it isn’t worth the time to learn something else.

I used Dynalist for awhile. More recently I was using Workflowy. Both of these are basically outlining tools on steroids and both quite capable. While Dynalist is great, it is stalled software now because the developers shifted their focus to a tool which is more popular now – Obsidian.

I also was using Todoist. And I would sync it with Basecamp via a tool called Pleexy. Basecamp is what I use with all of my Concierge clients and I like it because it is so user-friendly for everybody. Todoist… well, it is a task manager. A really nice one.

But, it was one of those things where I found myself not using Todoist as much as I thought I would.

Well, I recently was reminded of Notion.

Notion is like an everything tool. You can create all kinds of custom pages and combine it with databases and build all kinds of things custom to yourself. I’ve had an account with Notion for a little while, but barely ever used it.

But, I am now using Notion in earnest. This last week, I spent some of my spare time learning the ropes and building a system that works for me. That remains a work in progress.

I am building my own custom productivity system and… basically a life dashboard. Combining both personal and business. The stuff I was using Workflowy for is now going to go into Notion. Some of the things I was using separate spreadsheets for will now go into notion.

The inner nerd in me likes the power and flexibility of Notion. There is indeed a learning curve to it… especially when you get into databases and formulas. But, you get the hang of it.

When you look on Youtube, you find lots and lots of people talking about their own Notion setups. You can get an idea how flexible the tool really is. I will say, though, that I think some people fall into the trap of trying to use Notion for everything. It simply isn’t the right tool for everything. So, you need to resist that urge to try to find that unicorn of the one, perfect app that does it all. Frankly, it doesn’t exist. I know…. I’ve hunted for it.

In the end, it comes down to what works for YOU.

What systems do you use for productivity? What apps do you use?

This Week In Concierge

Lots of things going on for clients in Concierge. Lots of things I’m helping get done on their sites. Sometimes it is nice to hear the direct impact…

Recently, I helped a client get Deadline Funnel OUT of his site. Great tool, but it has gotten pretty pricey. And this client is currently on mission in Africa so he’s trying to be efficient with his spending. Makes perfect sense.

While I was in there, though, I found and fixed a bunch of broken links in his email funnels (powered by FluentCRM). And, of course, made those fresh new timers (built using Kadence) appear front and center to help increase his sales conversions. He sent me this…

“Quick report: After your work on closing deadline funnels and putting in Kadence timers we weren’t sure what to expect…but you mentioned you found some broken  links that you fixed and potentially there may be more sales. Sales for Jan 1-31, 2025 were $1,060.85. Last year monthly average: $814.00 and last year’s January 2024 month was: $352.36.  So it was a strong month…up 30% over last year’s monthly average of $814.00. So indications are that the Kadence timers are working and perhaps the repaired link is helping. I did get two orders for Conquer Vibrato which I haven’t seen for a long time. Thanks Dave. You are the man!“

Always good when we can manage to increase sales while reducing expenses. But, his funnels also had massive leaks. Glad I was able to plug them. Will be interesting to see the results as the year goes on.

WordPress Quick Bits

WordPress 6.7.2 Due Out This Week. The release candidate was made available, with the public final release coming out this week. 6.7.2 is pretty much a maintenance release, fixing a number of bugs in WP core and the block editor. An update to the 2025 theme will be coming out at the same time to fix a bug. But, let’s be real, barely anybody uses those default themes anyway.

WooCommerce is just…. Woo. Last week, a rebranding of WooCommerce was introduced. Now, just call it Woo. Not just a name change, but a design change as well. Lots of purple. Actually, it is a nice re-brand. Looks more professional.

WooCommerce Getting New Email Editor. Coming up in the Woocommerce 9.7 release, there will be a new experimental email editor. The ability to customize emails sent by WooCommerce has sucked for awhile. The new editor is going to provide more customization options, but also show a full preview of the email so you can see exactly what your customers will get. Some details and a screenshot here.

WooCommerce Is Improving. These changes with Woo are part of a larger effort underway. As Beau Lebens, Woo Artistic Director, says… “we’ve shifted from building a
collection of plugins and services toward creating a more comprehensive, integrated platform… we’re integrating more essential tools into the core platform and improving our functionality.” This means that, over time, you’re going to see more and more functionality that currently requires an add-on plugin be integrated into the core of WooCommerce.

Mullenweg Has More Problems. Last week, he freaked out (post on X) over something and banned Joost DeValk from WordPress.org or from speaking at WordCamp Asia. And the Repository reports that Matt was accused of retaliation. More internal drama in the world of WordPress nerddom, I guess.

SureMails Launches. It is an interesting thing to watch so many companies in the WordPress space come out with their own SMTP email plugin. Well, the “Sure” folks got in on it, too… with the launch of SureMails. It is totally free, too. Personally, I use FluentSMTP and I don’t plan to switch, however one interesting feature of SureMails worthy of note is the ability to set up multiple email connections without the need to change the FROM address. That’s actually really cool.

Shortcode Analyzer. A new free plugin looks handy called Shortcodes Analyzer. This will search all of your content to find all shortcodes being used and where they are being used. Useful for doing an audit to get rid of old shortcodes that no longer work. You know, when you uninstall a plugin and you had shortcodes sprinkled around the site for it?

FluentCommunity Upgrade. This alternative to BuddyBoss has been upgraded to 1.1.22, providing new reporting analytics, Paymattic integration, option for users to leave group chats, and more. FYI, FluentCommunity is available with lifetime license options for a limited time. Concierge clients…. I got you covered already via the Concierge Toolkit if you want to use it. Just let me know. Full details about this update here.

Surecart Versus WooCommerce

I’m probably going to make a video about this shortly. But, I wanted to address what I see as the main difference between SureCart and WooCommerce.

… because, last week, I came across a guy who works in the WordPress space that didn’t seem to know this important fact about SureCart.

WooCommerce is, of course, the ever-popular (the most popular, in fact) ecommerce platform for WordPress. It is insanely flexible since it can power everything from small sites selling one or two digital products… to full ecommerce catalogs.

Now, WooCommerce has been around for awhile. And that means there are some things about that that feel a little… weird. The interface isn’t so great. They’re in the midst of modifying some things, but it is like a cruise ship. It takes awhile to change course. You get used to the platform and I work with Woocommerce all the time, but there’s no doubt that it has some wonkiness to it.

SureCart is a much more modern solution. Nothing about it feels like an afterthought. The user interface is far better. It does a lot of things built into it that Woocommerce currently requires add-on plugins for.

There is a LOT to like about SureCart.

Yet, it isn’t what I use. And here’s why…

It comes down to digital sovereignty.

There are several different factors to what I call “digital sovereignty”, but two big ones are:

• Own and control your own data rather than have it somewhere else.
• Don’t get ingrained into services which are hard to get out of and, if you cancel, shuts down part of your business.

What that WordPress developer didn’t know is that SureCart is a SaaS app. It is software as a service. And that the order processing, products, orders, customers… all of it is stored on SureCart servers. The SureCart plugin is just a gateway that allows you to work with SureCart within the WordPress environment.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, is fully open source and GPL licensed. You can see all of the code. And, most importantly, the data resides right on your own site. Nobody can shut it down except for you.

Even if you are paying for support licenses with WooCommerce extensions, you could stop paying for them and your store keeps working. Because everything is GPL.

Now, does this make WooCommerce better? Is SureCart being sneaky about any of this?

Of course not.

While I would say that I think SureCart should make this fact more obvious for people (because it is important), this is a strategic design decision on their part that has a lot of advantages. Not having that core structure inside of WordPress itself provides product flexibility. Also, it alleviates server load issues since the store is operated separately from your WordPress database. So, there is nothing wrong with how SureCart is designed and how it works. It works very nicely!

But, you should know about this fundamental difference.

You either care about digital sovereignty on this matter or you don’t. Frankly, I know a lot of people won’t care and I get that. Most just want a store that is easy to use, does what you want, and won’t slow your site down. SureCart does all of that very well.

But, I stick with Woocommerce anyway. Because it is insanely flexible. You can modify it any way you please. It has mountains of add-on plugins for almost any functionality you’d ever want. Almost everything integrates with it. It just works.

And despite knowing SureCart would be a great solution, to me it IS important that I keep all the data in-house. And I’m not forced to pay any recurring charges to keep my store operational.

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