Shopify For Everyone!How Brands Use AI: Real-World Examples and Strategies Reference

 

Shopify is good. It is not universal. What follows is for everyone the pitch keeps missing.

Shopify is perfect for you

You can't go to a commerce event in 2026 and avoid the pitch. No, not a Commerce event. The other one. The category, not the company. Stay with me. You can't open LinkedIn. You can't watch a Shopify demo without it landing in the first three slides.

Shopify is perfect for you.

It doesn't matter who "you" are. B2B distributor with company hierarchies and negotiated pricing? Shopify. European DTC brand running B2C and wholesale on the same SKUs? Shopify. Headless team trying to build the agent-native commerce stack? Shopify Hydrogen. Bootstrapped developer with $40 a month to spend? Shopify. A creator selling services, products, and bookings out of one cart? Shopify. Heineken? Apparently not. They picked Medusa.

The pitch never adjusts to the merchant. It adjusts to whoever is sponsoring the lunch.

So let's adjust it.

The pitch is bigger than Shopify

I went looking for a Shopify exec saying "Shopify is for everyone." I didn't find one. Shopify itself is more careful than the pitch its industry creates. Shopify Plus marketing segments by use case (B2B, omnichannel, DTC). Tobi Lütke at Editions 2025 talked about helping the merchants on Shopify do well, not about being right for every merchant on the planet.

The universal pitch comes from somewhere else. It comes from agency partners with quotas. It comes from SEO posts like "Why Shopify Will Dominate eCommerce Growth in 2026," positioning Shopify as the "go-to choice for both global enterprise brands and direct-to-consumer creators" in one breath (Ayatas Infotech, 2026). It comes from posts like "The Future of Shopify: How the Platform Will Transform Online Selling in 2026," framing Shopify as a "Complete Business Operating System" for any merchant alive (Fourfoldtech, 2026).

That's the pitch I'm taking apart. Not Shopify the platform. The industry-default reflex that recommends Shopify before anyone has asked who the merchant is.

The Six Platforms Shopify Forgot To Mention

Shopify is real. $378.4 billion in GMV across 5.6 million active stores (DigitalApplied 2026). Excellent at what it was built for. Nothing here is a hit piece.

But "everyone" is doing a lot of work in the universal pitch.

Stop asking "is Shopify good?" Start asking: who is this merchant, and what does the platform cost them in flexibility, ownership, and fit?

I asked that question across six platforms. Each one wins for a different merchant. Each one has been told Shopify is perfect for them. Each one has a better answer.

I write this for the merchant in the audience who got told Shopify is perfect for them at NRF, ShopTalk, eTail, or some podcast last week and hasn't asked the question since. The merchant deserves a real comparison. The merchant deserves to know there are six other names in this conversation. The platforms deserve to be in it.

I have written about my own paradox before. I built a Shopify app even after years of explaining the platform's limitations, because that is where the customers are (My Shopify Paradox, ACG, July 2025). The paradox is real. The pitch is the problem.

Six because of time and space. The list could go longer (commercetools, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Spryker, Saleor, Vendure, OroCommerce, PrestaShop, Centra). Each has its merchant. These six are where to start.

Let's start with the one that just changed its name.

1. Commerce (formerly BigCommerce)

The merchant: SaaS without the walled garden, with agentic commerce baked in.

BigCommerce has a great product. Let me say that twice. BigCommerce has a great product. The platform ships an enterprise-grade SaaS that you can extend with Catalyst, Makeswift for visual editing, and Feedonomics for product feeds across Google, Meta, TikTok, and Amazon. Mountain Warehouse just launched a composable storefront on Catalyst with Vercel, Contentful, and Algolia (Commerce press, April 2026). That's a real merchant doing real composable work without leaving the platform.

Catalyst sidesteps a problem I wrote about before (The Headless Trap, ACG, August 2025). The framework is opinionated. The platform is opinionated. The merchant doesn't have to assemble both from scratch.

The rebrand is the problem. In July 2025, BigCommerce announced it was becoming "Commerce" (Wikipedia). The ticker changed from BIGC to CMRC around August 1, 2025. Three product lines (BigCommerce, Feedonomics, Makeswift) now sit under one parent brand. CEO Travis Hess called it "a clear declaration" focused on "agentic commerce" (EcommerceNews EU, 2025). The agentic commerce read is right. The naming is muddled. Calling the company "Commerce" and the product "BigCommerce" might work in the long run. Maybe.

Let's call BigCommerce BigCommerce.

The product earned the rebrand. The rebrand hasn't earned the product yet.

Pro: Open SaaS with real composable hosting and a feed manager (Feedonomics) that the rest of the category copies. Con: The strategic message got diluted in the rename, and merchants are still figuring out what to call what. Real merchant: Mountain Warehouse on Catalyst (April 2026). Agentic readiness: Commerce Companion AI in admin, Feedonomics with Google Cloud Gemini for product enrichment, agent-enabled checkout work in the roadmap. Best for: Mid-market merchants who want SaaS stability and composable flexibility without writing a headless storefront from scratch. Catalyst gives them the framework. Makeswift gives them visual editing on top, so non-developers can ship storefront changes. Feedonomics handles cross-channel feeds across Google, Meta, TikTok, and Amazon. They run multi-channel selling, they want headless without a full engineering team, and they are done with Shopify Plus telling them which composable extensions are allowed.

2. Shopware

The merchant: complex B2B. Companies with hierarchies, sales reps, custom catalogs per customer, quoted pricing, and approval workflows. Shopware wins 54% of the deals it competes for in this category (per Shopware). DTC merchants run on it too, but B2B is the headline.

The time is now for Shopware. You own your data. You don't rent it back from a SaaS company that decides one day to change your fees, your checkout, or your app permissions. You make any change you want, any customization you need, because the license lets you. You get support from a team that picks up the phone.

Then there is the pricing. Shopify charges by volume. Transaction fees on every sale. App store fees that compound. Plus tiers that scale with revenue. The bigger the merchant, the bigger the bill. Shopware caps the platform cost through licensing. The busier the merchant, the better the unit economics. That is not a small thing for a brand doing $20M, $50M, or $200M GMV. When the merchant grows, the merchant keeps the upside.

Then there's the funding story. PayPal first invested in Shopware in February 2022 as part of a $100 million round with Carlyle Group (Shopware press release, 2022). In October 2025, PayPal increased its stake from 11% to roughly 41% by buying Carlyle's shares (EcommerceNews EU, 2025). PayPal is now Shopware's largest external shareholder. That isn't a partnership announcement. That's a payments company putting real ownership behind a platform built for merchants who want B2B, DTC, and ownership in one stack.

The US momentum is the new story. Shopware North America reported 300% year-over-year growth in the first half of 2025 (Shopware press, 2025). Named US client wins included UPPAbaby, Good360, Eagle Crusher, BlueAlly, Noble, and Dynamic Team Sports. New US partnerships landed with Klaviyo, BlueSnap, PayTrace, Webscale, and Liquid Web. Shopware hosted Shoptoberfest in NYC in September 2025 to celebrate the company's 25th anniversary on US soil (PR Newswire, 2025-09-16). Store Leads data showed Shopware net-gained 2,995 merchants from competitive platforms over the prior 90 days (Store Leads, Q1 2026).

Shopware is closing deals and making waves in the US market. The agencies told you Shopify Plus could do B2B. Shopify Plus does company logins. Shopware does company hierarchies, native quoting, sales rep tools, and custom catalogs per customer. That's B2B. The other thing is a feature flag.

Pro: Native B2B depth (54% win rate per Shopware), licensing model that doesn't tax growth, US momentum backed by 41% PayPal ownership. Con: The brand is still earning US recognition, which means agencies still default to Shopify Plus on first reference. Real merchant: Eagle Crusher (heavy equipment B2B) and UPPAbaby (premium DTC), both US. Agentic readiness: Shopware AI Copilot for product data, content, and customer service. Best for: Mid-market and enterprise merchants running complex B2B. Company hierarchies, sales rep accounts, custom catalogs per customer, quoted pricing, approval workflows. Shopware closes 54% of the deals it competes for in this category (per Shopware). DTC merchants run on it too, but B2B is the headline. They want ownership over rent, customization their lawyer can approve, a team that picks up the phone, and a pricing model that doesn't punish them for growing. Increasingly US-based: 300% YoY North American growth, named wins like Eagle Crusher and UPPAbaby.

3. Wix

The merchant: the creator whose storefront IS the brand presence.

Wix is the new up-and-comer, and the AI tools they are adding are fantastic. You get world-class content and commerce in one easy-to-use package.

We underestimate Wix because it sells to people we don't talk to at conferences. The creator running services, products, and bookings doesn't need Plus, doesn't want headless, and has been told for a decade that Shopify is the answer to a question they never asked. Wix shipped one of the most credible AI site builders in the category. The Wix AI Site Generator writes product descriptions, generates images, designs layouts, fills in SEO and meta tags, and runs your ad copy (EasyApps comparison, 2026). Inside the same dashboard. Without an app store tax.

The thing Wix gets right is the merchant nobody else builds for: the brand whose content and commerce are the same business. Bookings, services, products, blog, email, all in one cart, all in one editor. Shopify will sell you Plus to bolt that together. Wix ships it as the default. 1,000 product variants per item versus Shopify's 100. 6+ option sets versus Shopify's 3. 900-plus templates with full drag-and-drop (EasyApps 2026). Built-in Semrush integration and ad management without paying for a higher tier.

For the merchant whose audience IS the storefront, that isn't a feature gap. That's a category.

I made this case before (Don't Underestimate Wix Commerce, ACG, October 2025). The case has only gotten stronger.

Pro: Native bookings, services, and products in one cart with AI tooling baked into the editor. Con: Less credible the higher you go in catalog complexity and headless ambition. Real merchant: Wix's strength is in the long tail of creator and service brands rather than headline DTC names, which is itself part of the story. Agentic readiness: Wix AI Site Generator handles content, layout, SEO, and ad creative end-to-end. Best for: Creators, service-led brands, and small businesses where the storefront IS the brand presence. Yoga studios. Photographers. Coaches. Boutique consultancies selling services, products, and bookings in one cart. They want AI to write product descriptions, design layouts, and run their ad copy without paying $2,500 a month for Shopify Plus. They are not building headless. They want one editor and one tool.

4. Hyvä Commerce on Mage-OS

The merchant: done renting their stack.

Magento. Adobe. Let's face it. Adobe does not care about Magento. They see it as a threat. Hello, Magento IS Adobe. They should be gaining sites TO Adobe FROM Magento. It's the perfect funnel. Instead, Adobe sees Magento as competition.

The lack of focus on commerce shows up in poor support, poor performance, and no real roadmap. When I say no real roadmap, I challenge anyone from Adobe to show me their commerce roadmap. No feature ever. No feature planning. Nothing new. Did I mention nothing new?

I got to a lot of Magento conferences. Same slides. No new commerce features. No new commerce features. No new commerce features.

I will not pull punches on Adobe.

One warning before we leave Adobe. The European Magento community sees Hyvä shipping, sees Mage-OS shipping, and assumes the US Magento ecosystem looks the same. It does not. Adobe stopped marketing Magento in the US. Are they signing new US agencies? I doubt it. The US Magento community has been left to fend for itself while Adobe's attention went to AEM and AEP. That's not a Hyvä problem. That's not a Mage-OS problem. That's an Adobe problem. And the US merchant pays for it.

Hyvä is going gangbusters. New products coming out all the time, pushing performance, building everything Adobe Commerce could be but isn't. Hyvä Themes replaced Magento's Knockout.js with Alpine.js and Tailwind, and agencies report 30 to 50% faster builds (Hyvä 2025 product update). 6,400 live stores already run Hyvä (Hyvä 2025 product update). On November 10, 2025, Hyvä Themes went open source under OSL3 and AFL3, announced at Meet Magento Netherlands (iOvista, 2025-11-10). Hyvä Commerce launched the same year as a separate product built to extend Magento Open Source for ops, scalability, and merchant experience (Fluid Commerce, 2025).

Mage-OS is the foundation. A community-governed, upstream-compatible fork of Magento Open Source, run by the independent Mage-OS Association rather than the Adobe-controlled Magento Association (Mage-OS, ongoing). The fork exists because Adobe stopped investing. Adobe Commerce starts at roughly $22,000 per year (Web-vision, 2025). Mage-OS is free.

The merchant who picks Hyvä on Mage-OS is done renting. They want code ownership, performance, and a community that ships. They got tired of waiting for Adobe to come back. So they built without Adobe.

Pro: Open-source ownership, fastest frontend in the category, governed by a community that ships in the open. Con: Requires a development team. This isn't a "set it up in 30 minutes" platform. Real merchant: 6,400+ live Hyvä-powered stores across the Magento ecosystem. Agentic readiness: Open architecture means any agentic layer can be wired in. Nothing is gated by a vendor. Best for: Merchants who picked Magento years ago, watched Adobe stop shipping commerce features, and decided to keep their stack instead of starting over. They want code ownership, not a SaaS subscription. They want the fastest frontend in the category. They want a community-governed platform where the roadmap is in the open. They have a development team or a partner agency who can run it.

5. MedusaJS

The merchant: a team building commerce around the agent, not bolting an agent onto commerce.

I really like what Medusa is doing. The homepage tagline tells you the whole story: "A Commerce Platform for Developers and Agents" (medusajs.com). Not a marketing line bolted onto a SaaS product. The architecture itself was rebuilt around how developers and AI agents work.

Bloom lets you chat to build. Agent Skills are baked into the development experience. One Medusa case study reports 80% cost savings on an AI-powered email-to-order workflow (medusajs.com). That isn't an integration. That's the product.

The proof is on the homepage. Heineken. EightSleep. Mitsubishi Motors. None of those brands picked Medusa because it's free or easy. They picked it because their teams wanted commerce built around how their teams already work. With $29 entry pricing and no GMV tax, the economics aren't the story either. The story is the architecture and the team behind it.

I went deeper on Medusa in (A Look at Medusa Commerce, ACG, December 2025). What stood out then was the architecture. What stands out now is the merchant proof.

Every European platform trying to enter the US market, including Medusa, hits the same wall. Shopify is the gorilla in the room. Shopware is climbing. 300% year-over-year growth, named US wins, real partnerships. Medusa is earlier in that climb. They need boots on the ground in the US. They need US advocates willing to talk about what they're doing well in the markets where Shopify is the default answer. The platforms are good. The marketing fight against Shopify in the US is the harder problem.

The merchant who picks Medusa is a developer-led team that read "agentic commerce" and asked what commerce could look like if you started from the agent, instead of asking how you bolt an agent onto Shopify.

Pro: Architecture built around developers and agents, with named brand proof on the homepage. Con: The US market presence is still building. The community is smaller than Shopify's app ecosystem. Real merchant: Heineken, EightSleep, Mitsubishi Motors (medusajs.com). Agentic readiness: This is the platform where "agentic" isn't a marketing layer. It's the design center. Best for: Developer-led DTC brands who read "agentic commerce" as an architecture decision, not a marketing slide. They have a TypeScript team. They want an open-source platform that ships fast and has Heineken on the homepage. They want commerce APIs an agent can call directly, not a proprietary checkout SDK. They want $29-a-month entry pricing with no GMV tax. They are building the next-generation stack and they want a platform doing the same.

6. WooCommerce

The merchant: the audience-first brand where content built the demand.

WooCommerce is the most-deployed commerce platform on the open web. 4.7 million active stores. 18 to 21% global share by share-of-websites (DigitalApplied 2026). And it's the platform Shopify ignores hardest. Why? Three reasons that matter.

First, the migration goes both ways. 9,195 stores moved from WooCommerce to Shopify in the last measurement period. 7,566 went the other direction, Shopify to WooCommerce (DigitalApplied 2026). That's not a funnel into Shopify. That's a swap. Shopify doesn't draw attention to a flow that runs both ways.

Second, the WooCommerce merchant isn't the Shopify merchant. Shopify sells "store first, content later." The Woo merchant built the audience first and added the cart when the audience was ready to buy. The sales motion doesn't translate. The pitch doesn't land. Shopify's marketing budget can't reach a merchant whose store is a checkout button on a blog they've been writing for ten years.

Third, the plugin moat is unbeatable. 60,000-plus WordPress plugins, any niche use case has a Woo extension that someone built and maintains (Salesforce 2026, generally accepted WordPress.org plugin directory size). Shopify's app store can't match that breadth, and the breadth IS the lock-in. Once a Woo store has fifteen plugins solving fifteen specific problems, it isn't migrating anywhere.

WooCommerce is open source. Free. Bolts onto WordPress. You can run it on WordPress.com, on any managed WordPress host (Pressable, Kinsta, WP Engine, Hostinger, Bluehost, Cloudways), or on your own infrastructure. The optionality is the point. Shopify charges by the seat. WooCommerce charges by the choice you already made when you picked WordPress.

The merchant who picks WooCommerce is the audience-first brand. The publisher, the creator, the ten-year blogger, the membership site, the community. Their content built the demand. The cart just collects on it.

Pro: Open-source, biggest plugin ecosystem on the web, owned by Automattic (not running out of runway). Con: You own the hosting, security, and maintenance choices. That's freedom and that's responsibility. Real merchant: 4.7 million stores running it, including the bidirectional migration crowd. Agentic readiness: WordPress's plugin model means any AI agent layer can plug in. The ecosystem is moving on this faster than the headlines suggest. Best for: Audience-first brands. The publisher who built ten years of newsletter readers and wants to sell them something. The blogger whose audience is bigger than their store. The membership site adding paid courses. The community building a product around their already-loyal followers. They are not picking commerce-first. They are picking content-first, and the cart is the natural extension.

So what?

The pitch is broken. The platforms aren't.

Shopify is good. Shopify is not universal. Anyone selling you "Shopify is perfect for you" is selling Shopify. They are not solving for you. The right question for any merchant is simple. Who is this merchant? What does the platform cost them in flexibility, ownership, and fit?

If you're a B2B distributor with company hierarchies, the answer is Shopware or Adobe Commerce or Hyvä on Mage-OS, depending on whether you want SaaS, enterprise rental, or ownership.

If you're a creator running services and products in one cart, the answer is Wix.

If you're a developer-led DTC brand building the agent-native commerce stack, the answer is Medusa.

If you're a publisher whose audience built the demand, the answer is WooCommerce.

If you're a mid-market merchant who wants SaaS without the walled garden, the answer is BigCommerce. Sorry. Commerce. The product is BigCommerce. The company is Commerce. We'll figure that one out.

If you're done renting your stack, the answer is Hyvä on Mage-OS.

The platform is downstream of the merchant. Pick the merchant first. Pick the platform second.

The next time you hear "Shopify is perfect for you" at a panel, ask the speaker who they're selling to. If they can't answer that without saying "everyone," they're not selling you. They're selling the sponsor.

Question for you

Which of the six would you build on next, and what told you Shopify wasn't the right pick?

I read every comment.

One more question to sit with.

Is the world really better with only one commerce platform?

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More businesses are discovering that AI’s value truly emerges when it augments human creativity and capability rather than completely replacing it.
Reference: https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-brands-use-ai?Artificial intelligence has moved from promise to practice in record time—and business leaders are racing to harness it. McKinsey reports that 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments over the next three years. At the same time, early adopters are already seeing meaningful improvements: Among small businesses currently using AI, 80% report increased efficiency, and nearly half say that AI has improved their data-driven decision-making, according to Goldman Sachs.

Yet, AI isn’t a magic bullet. It takes careful scoping and thoughtful implementation to deliver value. AI isn’t a replacement for the creativity, judgment, or intuition that small businesses rely on. Instead, it’s expanding what small teams can accomplish: According to a 2025 Shopify survey, 69% of business owners who use AI tools do so to generate content. Other popular use cases include helping with data analysis and insights (32%), improving customer service quality (29%), and assisting with product development (23%).

More businesses are discovering that AI’s value truly emerges when it augments human creativity and capability rather than completely replacing it. These are the ways savvy businesses are putting AI to work—and where they’re finding the most success.
Reference: https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-brands-use-ai?Democratizing data science for smarter campaigns

What once required focus groups, surveys, and weeks of analysis can now happen in a matter of minutes with AI. Small businesses are increasingly using AI for market research tasks like analyzing customer reviews, social conversations, and search behavior, uncovering emerging needs before competitors can respond.

Jones Road Beauty uses tools like OpenAI’s Deep Research to analyze thousands of product reviews, Reddit threads, and YouTube comments. From that analysis, the clean-beauty brand’s team identified five real-world personas—such as busy parents and frequent travelers. Those insights informed its Just Enough tinted moisturizer campaign, helping the team refine messaging, select appropriate models, and shape the overall creative direction.

AI-powered analysis isn’t just speeding up data analysis—it’s making it available to anyone at the company. Wallet and accessories brand Ridge is using AI to remove internal bottlenecks that used to slow data-driven decision-making. “We have a data warehouse and all these Shopify reports,” says Ridge CEO Sean Frank. “Instead of doing anything manually, I can take a screenshot, drop it into ChatGPT, and it runs the analysis for me. My entire team can operate like data scientists.” Rather than waiting hours or days for a specialist to crunch numbers, anyone on the team can pull their own insights instantly.

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These examples illustrate a broader shift: AI is giving small teams the analytical horsepower of larger organizations. By lowering the barrier to data analysis, brands can move faster, experiment more often, and build campaigns rooted in what customers actually think and do.
Building personalized products

For small businesses with limited engineering resources, launching a new product can be costly and time-consuming. AI is shifting that calculus. By accelerating research, content generation, and user-testing cycles, AI enables teams to bring new digital offerings to market with unprecedented speed. In many cases, it isn’t just accelerating development, but making entirely new categories of personalized, adaptive products possible.

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Loftie, a wellness company that designs sleep products, used AI to develop and launch the Loftie Rest app, a digital companion to its signature alarm clock. The app broadened Loftie’s reach and unlocked a new revenue stream, creating a subscription business from the ground up that now has roughly 15,000 members. “We wouldn’t have released this product without AI,” founder and CEO Matthew Hassett says. “It was the initial seed of what our subscription app became.”

Personalized content is the backbone of the Rest app, beginning with Storymaker, which generates tailored bedtime stories using a brief survey and adjustable voice profiles powered by OpenAI and Eleven Labs. Extending personalization even further, Loftie’s Night School feature analyzes correlations between users’ Apple Health data, screen time habits, alarm settings, and self-reported sleep quality. When patterns emerge—like midnight scrolling leading to poor sleep—the tool recommends habit changes or prompts users to block distracting apps. “We use AI to look at patterns and make proactive suggestions to help you ditch your phone at night,” Matthew says.

At every stage, Loftie pairs AI insights with human-created content, from educational modules to meditation flows. AI determines what a user needs, while humans help craft what is delivered. The result is a digital product that continuously adapts while maintaining a distinctly human tone, something that would have been prohibitively complex to build without AI.
Scaling ad creation and testing

Scaling creative output is becoming an essential part of a strong paid advertising strategy. For success, brands need an increasing number of ad variations—often more than a creative team can realistically produce on its own.

Ridge is using AI to close that gap. It created a custom GPT trained on its best-performing ads, then connected it to automation tools that generate hundreds of new static assets each day. “We’ve built a static ad factory,” says Sean. “I can get 500 ads a day—no hands on keyboards.” 

These assets flow into a shared drive for review, but most won’t make it into rotation. And that’s OK; the point is volume. “Out of those 500, 450 are horrible,” Sean notes. “But the top 10% are between five out of 10 and seven out of 10. They’ll get spend behind them.” The brand plans to extend this process to video next, generating more hooks and variations for testing.

AI is not replacing Ridge’s creative team. The company’s highest-performing ads still come from the human design team, which consistently produces 10-out-of-10 winners. AI just enables more concepts, more iterations, and more opportunities for platforms like Facebook to match the right ad to the right person at the right time.

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“The future of advertising is just shots on goal,” explains Sean. “What you see and like is going to be totally different from what I see and like.” By pairing human-crafted assets with high-volume AI-generated variations, Ridge can scale experimentation far beyond what manual efforts would allow—turning its paid strategy into a continuous, data-driven loop of testing and refinement. 
Improving customer service

Early AI tools like chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) were a natural fit for repetitive use cases (like “Where’s my order?” and “What are your hours?”). This makes customer service one of the most mature applications of AI in small businesses. However, the stakes of balancing human and machine intervention remain high. A 2024 study from Acquire Intelligence found that just one bad AI-assisted support experience would make 70% of consumers consider taking their business elsewhere.

At Loftie, AI agents now answer over half of incoming support emails. “It’s difficult to standardize responses across human agents—AI can be much more reliable,” Matthew says. “It’s answered the same question 1,000 times before.” The team also uses AI to surface trends from what Matthew calls a “graveyard of data,” turning thousands of customer interactions into insights that inform product and experience improvements. “I’m honestly surprised when brands are reticent to adopt AI for customer service,” he notes.

Ridge has seen similar benefits. “Customer service is a super easy use case,” Sean explains. “Around 60% of our tickets are being answered by AI.” The company has also seen a 10% to 20% lift in customer satisfaction scores over human-only workflows. “Customers love talking to the AI,” he adds. “It’s faster, quicker, more accurate.”

These improvements are driven by a shift from rule-based chatbots to agentic AI—tools that can understand intent, reference past interactions, access customer data, and take simple actions like processing refunds or replacing items. Once limited to large enterprises, agentic AI is accessible today via tools like Zendesk and HubSpot.

When implemented thoughtfully—and understanding when to escalate emotional issues and complex problems to a human agent—AI expands what teams can handle without sacrificing quality. Routine questions are resolved quickly and consistently, and human agents can spend more time on the conversations that matter most.

As AI continues to evolve, the opportunity for small businesses will come from this kind of selective adoption: using AI where it elevates human capabilities and keeping people at the center of the work that defines the brand.

The Challenges And Rewards Of Teaching Web Design

Just over four years ago, I decided to take a part-time position teaching website design and front-end development at a local university. My time in the classroom has been one of the most challenging as well as one of the most rewarding experiences in my career, and I believe that other Web professionals would greatly benefit from spending some time in an educational setting teaching others their craft.
In this article, we will look at some of the challenges to prepare for if you are considering taking on a teaching position. I will also present some of my personal experiences and insights, including the benefits and rewards I’ve enjoyed as a teacher, to help you consider such a move for your own career.

Challenges

Let’s start by looking at some of those aforementioned challenges as well as the solutions I’ve used to meet them over the years.

Not Everyone Learns The Same Way

Where you teach, as well as the variety of students in your classroom, will have a dramatic impact on your overall experience. Over the years, students from all walks of life, age groups and experience levels have taken my course. The only constant is that every one of them is completely different — which poses quite a challenge when preparing materials and exercises for the class.
Ultimately, your job is to do what you feel would help the students understand the concepts best. Yet, no matter how well you prepare, the reality is that your materials will work great for some students and not so well for others. You will not be able to reach all students equally because everyone learns differently.

Everyone learns differently, and your responsibility as the teacher is to respond to those different needs. (Image credit: opensourceway)
As you receive feedback from students and realize which ones get it and which ones are lost, you will need to adjust your lesson plans to make sure that you reach all students, not just best and brightest who understood the concepts right away. Of course, part of the challenge is that you must strike a balance here. You’ve spent time carefully considering and building your lesson plans, and you don’t want to blow it up and redo everything because a particular student did not respond well to them. Instead, find ways to get those slower-paced learners up to speed.
I had one student a few years ago who found it difficult to keep up. He was always falling behind, and he felt bad about asking too many questions and holding up the rest of the class — but by asking fewer questions, he fell further behind, and the problem just worsened. Eventually, I suggested that he bring in a digital camera to record the lessons so that he could go over them again later at his own pace. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of being recorded, but I felt it would help him, so I was open to the idea.
The change was immediate. Watching the recordings at home and going through the lab exercises for a second time at his own pace, he found that the lessons began to make sense and that he was able to keep up in class. His final project ended up being one of the best of the group — a dramatic turnaround from where he started in the course.

Not Everyone Is Cut Out To Be A Web Designer

That being said, the reality is that some students, no matter how much extra attention you give them or how responsive you are to their learning needs, will just never get the material. Unfortunately, I’ve had to drop a number of students from my class over the years. Despite my best efforts, including extra materials developed specifically for these students and extra class time to answer their questions and tutor them, they simply didn’t understand the concepts being taught.
In most cases, these students tried incredibly hard. They put in the effort required, but the results weren’t there and the rest of the class was held up because of their struggle. Having to sit down with those students and explain that I didn’t think they were right for the class is easily the most uncomfortable thing I have had to do as a teacher.

Failing to get through to a student does not necessarily mean that your material or teaching approach is bad. In many cases, it’s not you, it’s the student. (Image credit: D Sharon Pruitt)
If you are going to take on a teaching role, be prepared to make difficult decisions. As uncomfortable as these conversations are, they are sometimes necessary for the good of the class.

Rewriting Lesson Plans

The Web is constantly changing. Lesson plans and exercises that were relevant one semester may be woefully outdated the next. As the Web evolves, so too must your lesson plans.
When I began teaching over four years ago, responsive design hadn’t yet become the best practice it is today. Now, it is one of the most important aspects of my course. Despite all of the work I had put into the class materials, I had to pretty much start from scratch when I decided to introduce responsive Web design into the lessons.
Make sure to teach skills that are relevant to the industry today, revisiting your lessons after each semester and making changes as needed. Most of the time, I need to make only minor changes to course materials; I rarely have to start from scratch. Either way, though, prepare to revise your lesson plans regularly if you hope to keep the course relevant and up to date. Furthermore, understand that your time in the classroom is just a fraction of the time you will have to spend preparing for the class.

The Constraints Of Time

Speaking of time, another challenge is that you have only so much time with the students. So, you need to pick and choose exactly what to present according to what you feel will serve them best. If your classes are like mine and many of your students have no previous experience with Web design, HTML or CSS, then you’ll need to start with the basics. Giving students an understanding of basic design principles and introducing HTML and CSS all the way up to the most current best practices is a tall order. In the end, you have to leave some things out and accept that you can’t teach students everything.
Take support for Internet Explorer (IE) 6. Finding ways to support that old browser has consumed countless hours for those of us who have been in the industry for years, but we don’t struggle with it much these days because use of IE 6 is now so low. Among most of the websites I have worked on lately, IE 6 does not even factor in the user base. Because of this, I have decided not to discuss the challenges of IE 6 because I do not feel it is relevant to the work the students will do once they leave the classroom. If we covered IE 6 support, it would mean we have that much less time to cover something else. The challenge is to decide what is more (and most) important and to make the best use of the time available to present those concepts.
As a side note, websites like Smashing Magazine and other online sources that have built an archive of articles about Web design topics over the years are an invaluable resource for those of us who are teaching the next generation of designers and developers. So much of what we do today is built on the practices of the past. The history of our industry is important, but finding time to present all of that history in the classroom is hard. So, referring students to topics and articles to read is an important strategy for teachers. This is why these archives of articles, which might not seem relevant to today’s best practices, are so important and why decisions to drop thousands of old articles when it resigned its website is such a problem.
As Andy Clarke states in his article “Preserving the History of Web Design,” we need to ensure that new professionals in our industry learn this history, “to learn about the progress we made so they don’t undo it.” Unfortunately, we cannot cover all of that history in the classroom, so the challenge is to figure out how much of it to present and how much to refer them to for review outside of the classroom.

You Represent The Industry

You will be the first Web professional who most of your students have ever met or been able to speak with at length. To them, you represent the industry. The stories you tell and the opinions you share will shape their own understanding and opinions of the industry. That is a pretty big responsibility.

Always keep in mind that you play a major role in shaping your students’ understanding and opinions of the Web industry. (Image credit: Dell Inc.)
We all have bad days, but taking negativity from the office into the classroom will absolutely affect how your students see the industry. You don’t have to present the job as being all rainbows and gumdrops, but be mindful of what you say to students and avoid using the classroom as a place to blow off steam, regardless of how bad your day is or how frustrating an exchange with a client has been. Complaining about clients is never productive or appropriate, and too many in our industry relish the opportunity to share bad stories. Doing this with students gives them the wrong impression and trains them not to respect clients.
You have an opportunity to set these new Web professionals off on the right path. By maintaining a positive outlook and by exposing the students to the best parts of our industry, you can help to cultivate designers and developers who will help our industry continue to grow, instead of hold it back.

You Are Responsible For What You Put Into This World

Building on this theme of responsibility, you are absolutely responsible for what you put into the world. I have heard many Web designers echo this sentiment as they look to do work that has meaning and that makes a difference. The projects and clients we take on and the websites we launch into the world are our responsibility — and that responsibility is multiplied many times over when you decide to become a teacher.
As a teacher, you are at least partially responsible for the work your students will do. When your students go on to do great things, it is awesome. One of my students a few years ago took a position with an important non-profit organization in our area. Seeing her work make a difference for that organization and the people it helps was extremely gratifying.
Unfortunately, not all interactions with former students end as positively as this one did. Other former students of mine have done really bad work as freelancers. I remember one former student contacting me and asking me to look at the most recent website he had designed and developed for a client. There is no way to sugarcoat it — the website was bad. The design was unattractive, the user experience confusing, and the code sloppy and poorly written. This put me in an uncomfortable position.
He was obviously very excited about his work and was asking for feedback, but any feedback I could give would be negative. In the end, I told him that I was happy to see him working on the skills we had covered in class, and I suggested a few improvements to the website. The student thanked me for my input and made a few changes to the website. Since that time, I have followed his work and seen other mediocre websites that he has designed for clients, but he never again asked for my feedback, nor have I offered it.
This experience was not confined to this one student. Over the years, other former students have taken on freelance work and subsequently launched poor websites into the world. I would be lying if I told you I didn’t feel some responsibility for these poorly done websites, but in the end, you cannot police every student once they leave the class. All you can do is give them the best information and show them the right way to design and develop a website. What they do with that information, for better or for worse, is something you have no real control over.

Rewards And Benefits

So far, we’ve looked only at the challenges of teaching in this industry. Those challenges are real and substantial, but if you can meet them, then you’ll also find a number of rewards and benefits from taking on this responsibility. Let’s now turn to some of those rewards.

Helping Others

Helping others can be a powerful experience. Spending time in the classroom to teach others your craft is one way to use the knowledge you have gained to improve the lives of others.
Many of the students I teach are unemployed or underemployed. Their tuition for my class is paid for by a grant set up to give them skills relevant to today’s workforce. Helping these unemployed individuals to better themselves and learn new skills is important work, and seeing students go on to find good entry-level jobs in the industry is incredibly rewarding. Hearing from those students later on that the lessons and conversations in the class helped to prepare them for success really makes all of my hard work worthwhile.
I have always loved the giving, collaborative nature of the Web industry. Teaching students is one way to contribute to the Web community while having a real impact on the lives of others.

Learning By Teaching

One of the best ways to truly understand something is by teaching it to others. While my time in the classroom is dedicated to teaching website design, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t learn quite a bit from the experience as well.
Try to explain the CSS box model or the difference between relative and absolute positioning to a new student, and I guarantee you will understand the concept better than before. This greater understanding and the experience of explaining these technical concepts to students will also help you speak with clients.

Teaching forces you to find ways to explain concepts in a way that others who do not have the benefit of your experience will grasp. (Image credit: opensourceway)
Being able to communicate with clients without being too technical or intimidating, and in a way that helps them to grasp the concepts enough to be able to make informed decisions about their business and their website, is an important skill. The lessons you prepare and your conversations with students can and will equip you for these client interactions and make you better at what you do.

Generating Business

Speaking of clients, I wouldn’t have expected this when I began teaching, but my time in the classroom has led to a number of projects outside of the classroom. Multiple students have passed along solid leads to me because they could not handle the projects themselves with their level of experience. Former students have also invited the agency I work for to bid on projects initiated by the organizations they’ve joined.
Over the years, a number of people have asked me whether I realize that, by being a teacher, I am training professionals who will one day replace me or, at the very least, take work away from me. I’ve honestly never felt that way. I’ve always felt that there is more than enough work to go around. And, as my experience shows, being a teacher and making a positive impression on your students will not only not lose you clients, but could actually generate business for you and your agency.

How Do I Get Started?

Hopefully, this article has given you some points to think about as you consider whether a teaching position is right for you at this point in your career. If you’d like to explore this possibility, how should you begin?
My opportunity came when I began telling others of my desire to speak more about our industry and the work that I do. A fellow Web developer who had taught at the university for many years heard me one day and, knowing of an opening at the school, referred me. Within a few weeks, I was in front of my first group of students.
While my experience might not be typical, there is a lesson in it. Spreading the word about your interest in a teaching position could open doors. Do not be shy to let others know that you’d like to explore this move.
Other strategies are to contact your local universities, colleges, and business centers to see whether they have any openings. Sometimes, a little outreach turns up an amazing opportunity.
If you can’t find an opening at an institution of higher education or you feel you are not yet ready for that level and would like to start smaller, consider giving small workshops or classes at a local library or even as a private tutor.
Whatever path you choose to get started, consider what you can offer to students who are interested in learning more about our industry. I assure you that the students will not be the only ones who get something positive from the experience.

Why Should Web Design Be A Profession?

When one goes to the professional, one expects to invest in his expertise. This investment requires no great leap of faith, as it is supported by a trust acknowledged among the general populace and duly warranted by the traditions of the profession. The standards and practices of an individual professional in the fields of, say, law, medicine, or aviation seldom present any great challenge to their clients’ preconceptions. Strict standards and regimented practices are the baseline assumption for all involved. Moreover, the results of those relationships generally support the ideal.
Unless we’re referring to the design profession. In which case, you can discount all of that.
Design, by comparison to other professions, is an odd and disappointing institution. While design exists as a profession in name at one end of the institutional spectrum, it also exists as a commoditized technical service industry at the other. And this is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s a construct of the market. It’s appropriate only within a very narrow context and far narrower than is generally assumed. But as I’ll argue in detail later, both designers and the public benefit from this commodity service aspect to the industry.
The problem with this situation is that there is no definitive guide for potential clients, detailing the differences between the commodity designers/agencies and the professional designers/agencies. To make matters worse, many who claim to be design professionals lack any understanding of the term and, therefore, erroneously claim it. As a result, those paying for a designer’s expertise often don’t know whether they’re working with a professional or a nonprofessional until some matter of vital import in the midst of a project makes it abundantly clear. At that point, the entire community of designers either triumphs or fails in the eyes of some very important people: those who need our responsible expertise and have gone to the trouble to pay for it.
You see, the uncompromising standards of design professionalism are highly constraining, expensive, and sometimes even off putting. Yet for the sake of our reputations and our clients’ fortunes they are our industry’s most essential traits. Therefore, the constraints of professionalism must be embraced and the costs paid. I submit to you that the design profession is an imperative.

The lack of transparency regarding professional standards in the industry means that the entire Web design community is held responsible for the mistakes of individuals. Image source: Andrew Mager.
Many would disagree. I understand that for any of this to make sense or even matter to you, you’ve got to believe that design should be a profession. Moreover, you’ve got to know why it should so that you can substantiate your belief. But why hold with this belief? It begs the question: why can’t design simply be a technical service industry, free from the fussy standards and constraints peculiar to a profession? It so often does fine as just that! Why is it important that design be a profession?
My effort here will be to answer that important question in a compelling and convincing way. I believe that in order to understand the profession’s imperative and place, we must fully understand how nonprofessional services fit into our industry and, by the same token, understand the voids created by the inadequacies of that approach. I also believe that this examination must take into account the motivations behind factors that promote unprofessional ideas and practices. So to start, let’s look at the most familiar and most commonly encountered facet of the design industry: the nonprofessional world of technicians.

Design as Commodity Service Industry

The opposite of professional is not unprofessional, but rather technician.
– David Maister, True Professionalism

Designers and just about everyone who employs them are familiar with the concept of designer as technician or service provider. Need a graphic? Tell the designer what it should look like and he can bang it out for you. Need an image gallery on a web page that wasn’t made to accommodate it? Show the designer how it should work and she can make it happen. Need a newsletter head mast font that communicates authority? Call the designer and he’ll send you 5 new authoritative candidates from which you can pick your favorite.
Multitudes of bosses, supervisors, and would-be clients already know what they want; they just don’t have the technical ability to make it. Call the designer!
Employing designers as technical service providers is an attractive prospect because it’s relatively easy, quick, and inexpensive. It’s easy for the designers too. Nonprofessional production service is light on obligation, plentiful, and often profitable. Design as a technical service industry addresses a market need and in this respect it’s necessary and beneficial. One could build a business doing this sort of work exclusively, and many freelancers and even agencies do just that. So long as the project’s scope and process aren’t too complex and the object of the work not significantly critical to anyone’s success, nonprofessional technical service may just fit the bill.
Keep in mind, though, that one feature of technical service employment, in contrast to professional employment, is that the designer gets managed. Working in a technical service capacity means the designer is there to provide little more than technical service, according to the standards, instructions, or whims of the one employing him. Design technicians need to be kept on task, on time, and their work moderated to reflect fluctuating supervisor preferences or customer preferences—whichever carries more weight. As in, “WAIT, lemme see… Well, the circle needs to be a darker blue. And can we make it more of an oval? Great. That page is going live in 30 minutes. Just send the graphic off to Jan when you’re done and she’ll put it up.”

The non-professional designer can provide quick, cheap fixes necessary to fast-paced businesses. As a design technician they aren’t constrained by artistic integrity. Image source: Jason Hickey.
This plentiful, light-on-obligation technical-service work brings with it certain tradeoffs. Costs, to use professional parlance. These costs are paid almost entirely by the customers, as they get results that are fractional to what could be realized in a professional relationship. The designers in these instances function merely as enablers to those costs and maybe even get paid well in the exchange. But there are some costs for the designers, too. They must suffer the potential indignity of having much of their expertise ignored and discounted, for instance.
For many, the benefits outweigh these costs. One of the more popular benefits is liberation from professional standards and constraints. For example, as technical service workers, designers and agencies have the luxury of taking on customers rather than clients. One does not discriminate among customers; all are welcome. In the commodity-design service realm, designers are engaged for their technical skill rather than for their uncompromising standards, depth of understanding, or ethical scruples. Therefore, one need not have years of experience or a rock-hard backbone to meet the minimal project requirements, which seldom include more than technical expertise. Technical skills are comparatively easy to project and maintain. Uncompromising moral and ethical standards, not so much. Those professional traits tend to chafe against the customer’s authority and strong will anyway (the customer is always right) and could jeopardize customer satisfaction and designer income opportunities. By contrast, the “I can do whatever you want me to do” approach is often more attractive.
Perhaps the most common articulation of nonprofessional design is subcontracting. Many designers and even agencies devote the majority of their project work to employing or being employed as subcontractors. Sadly, most subcontracting arrangements are not just nonprofessional but highly unprofessional, as they are set up to circumvent designer authority and critical communication in a fog of dishonesty. However, as long as the project context accommodates expediency and requires no significant investment or obligation, nonprofessional subcontracting (and no, there’s no such thing as professional subcontracting) can bring relative ease and speed to a simple project.
Subcontracting also extends the liberation of commodity service to larger projects and can thus expand profit opportunities. The results are inevitably mediocre, but there can be no denying that economy and expediency often outweigh quality concerns. There is a large and thriving market for “good enough,” especially when it preserves a strong-willed customer as the decision maker or obviates uncomfortable complexity in a project.
This arrangement can work so long as the results need be no better than what the customer or subscontractee can conceive of and allow. In these instances the designers are not expert decision makers, but rather the idea presenters and technical tool operators. Many designers are quite happy in this limited and comparatively safe capacity. Sometimes (most times?), however, clients need or are looking for something more dependable and more substantial than commodity design service. Professionalism is hard and many of its constraints present hurdles too great for designers to consider. But while designers typically balk at its constraints and obligations, the idea of professionalism is certainly attractive.

The Idea of Professionalism in Design

Without question, designers of all stripes love the idea of professionalism. It’s just that most prefer that idea remain as vague as possible in practical definition and application. The result is that the concept gets relegated to a station of subjectivity and cited merely for its halo effect.
I find that the vast majority of designers, when asked to define it, associate professional design practice almost exclusively with technical quality or “seriousness,” ignoring the uncompromising ethical, process, discrimination, and accountability factors. This is an unfortunate and disappointing sentiment, as professionalism has absolutely nothing to do with technical quality; which should merely be one positive result of projects involving professionals.
The reason for this preference is not so deep or difficult to understand: professionalism is expensive for designers. Proper preparation takes years and requires institutional guidance from senior professional peers. Professional standards impose grave responsibilities on the designer and are difficult to uncompromisingly maintain. They also tend to challenge the preconceptions of just about everyone who encounters them; designers included. According to the character of those brushing up against them, requirements for the professional conduct of design projects can be refreshingly positive or intensely off-putting.

Design is craft, but no matter how skilled you are as a designer, unless you are equally prepared in professional matters, your prospects will be limited and your circumstances compromised. Image source.
The refreshingly positive part is easy enough to understand. The off-putting part is due to the fact that few people inside or outside the industry expect designers to employ discrimination or to eliminate compromise with regard to moral, ethical, business, or process standards. Most potential clients and most designers believe that designers should simply behave as merchants; eagerly following whichever path the profit opportunity leads. Because unprofessional and nonprofessional employment has ever dominated our industry, most potential clients believe they should run their own project and make the design decisions after being presented with options. Most designers believe they should simply be told how high to jump and which hoops to jump through. Note: there exists no profession within those ideas.
As to expense, one unpopular result of maintaining professional standards is that a freelancer’s or agency’s viable client pool gets significantly reduced…which is nuts in the minds of most folks. Prevailing wisdom finds fault with any practice that deliberately limits opportunity for profit by applying what cultural convention perceives or defines as obtuse discrimination. Going along to get along makes far more sense. Why would anyone invite the difficulty of uncompromising standards into their life or their design practice? How does it even make sense that design should be a profession?

The Professional Imperative

When you think beyond the apparently easy money, cultivated expediency, and low-obligation assumed for some design projects, a couple of things beg for consideration:

1. these qualities can ethically describe only the most insignificant of projects, and
2. design results and the processes required for realizing them impact the experience and fortunes of real people.

People’s household incomes, staff payrolls, and economic futures often hinge upon how competent, how ethical, and how uncompromising their designers are.
These facts place a grave obligation on designers and on the industry itself. Every employment of a designer is an investment that demands a positive and profitable return. Designers have an obligation to meet that demand in prepared fashion. The fact is many projects—most, I’d argue—require understanding, skills, standards, and obligations beyond what is typically assumed. The commodity design service industry ignores this fact.
Uncompromising standards are the rule where quality and ethics matter, because these things are not bargaining chips. A designer’s comfort with or allowance for compromise has no place in a consequential design project. Since the commodity service approach is built on compromise and expediency, consequential projects can in no way be served by that segment of our industry. What’s more, common customer assumptions brought to commodity services are inappropriate in professionally run projects.
The ethical constraints for such projects do not allow for clients to compromise or circumvent the professional’s standards and prescriptions. This logical standard reflects the extension of the profession’s obligations into society and allows a design professional to demonstrate responsibility by not allowing the client to harm himself or others by deliberate choice and yet remain as a client. Despite how design organizations typically choose to define social obligation, it is established not on emotional or preferential grounds, but on moral and ethical grounds.
These moral and ethical grounds reflect practical mechanisms. For instance, clients need some acknowledged institutional assurance that their designer or agency will not abuse their relationship for financial advantage; that the fees paid and the work delivered amount to a mutually profitable exchange and not simple opportunism. They need the same reasonable assurance that their designer’s or agency’s work or process is not tainted by any conflict of interest. Moreover, clients need some acknowledge institutional assurance that their designer is worthy of the authority they’ve invested in him and that he is qualified to make the many crucial decisions in the project.
These qualities should be widely understood to be as associated with a specific segment of our industry; gathered up as the acknowledged professional qualities of members of the profession rather than happy exceptions that clients find by hit or miss. The term “design professional” should have an objective definition acknowledged by the public. Therefore, this segment of our industry must be devoted to a codified set of uncompromising standards. Design professionals should be identifiable to their client pool not because of how they lay claim subjectively to the term, professional, but by how they approach their dealings according to vital moral ideals and how they publicly proclaim adherence to an objective, ethical, social contract.

Ethical responsibility is not a now-you-use-it now-you-don’t proposition. To secure the long-term trust of clients professionalism requires that standards be rigorously kept. Image source: Jason Tester.
To survive, these qualities must be cultivated in institutional fashion. Otherwise they reside only in individuals, locked up rather than compounded among peers over time. The profession and its culture are created in agencies and studios run by design professionals. It is not created in schools or universities, organizations, or magazines; despite what those merchants would otherwise proclaim.
As professionals, designers then have obligations to society, to their clients, to their peers, and to the profession itself. These obligations are imperative and they require a culture that respects, upholds, and reinforces them with a frequency and pattern not dependent on individual-member whim. Ultimately, professionals are defined by how they meet and uphold the fullness of these obligations in the conduct of their work, and by no other measure (as great design quality must be one’s baseline assumption).
Though this is not the primary thrust of my article, I’m compelled to suggest here that few are well served and a great many ill served by the existence of a design profession in name only. With the character and concept of “professional” so greatly varied throughout our industry, designers’ self-described professional efforts often undermine the ideal. Far too many potential clients have rightly developed a cynical view of the design profession. Designers of all sorts fight this view and sadly have to shape their approach and process to mitigate it. This is a failure, as our practices should not be shaped by cynicism.
This is what you get when truly professional practice is represented and perpetuated not by thriving, consistent culture inside agencies and studios as a rule, but by disparate examples that are often refuted by the most common case. So while an actual design profession exists, it doesn’t in any cultural sense in the industry. This must change if our profession is to have any articulate and objective meaning in society.
As I referenced at the start of this article, it requires no great leap of faith or perceived gamble for a client of a legal, surgical, or aviation professional to invest requisite trust and confer full contextual authority in their dealings. These investments are assumed and required if a professional is to cultivate a positive or successful outcome for his clients. The cultures and traditions of those professions facilitate that permission. The cultural tradition of design is inconsistent on this point and that must change if designers are to be widely allowed to deliver the fullness of their expertise.
Technical service in a commodity market can work and can produce positive results. Designers can find profit and many customers can find satisfaction there. I submit to you, though, that the design profession as a distinct and conspicuous segment of the design industry is not just a commercial imperative, but a cultural and moral imperative. Professional should be not some vague, inarticulate idea or an exclusive and elite qualification beyond the reach of the average designer. It should be an expected compulsory station for most designers, fueled and perpetuated by the mainstream culture of our industry.
Image source of picture on front page.

A Reason for Why I No Longer Recommend Gravity Forms

PPC Ace recommended Gravity Forms to dozens of users, but not anymore.

18 months ago, when I discovered Gravity Forms, I was delighted. I had previously used Contact Form 7, an extremely popular, free plugin for creating contact forms on WordPress sites. Where Contact Form 7 was code-y and slow, Gravity Forms made creating forms almost fun. It has a visual, slick interface that relies on drag-and-drop to build forms.
I instantly bought a developer license ($199) and began using it on every site I owned, as well as recommending to clients and other WordPress people at meetups and online.

The Main Problem

At some point, I noticed an issue with the file uploader function. One of my sites relies heavily on visitors being able to quickly send a PDF or JPG file to the staff, and we started getting a File Error–the rest of the form information would come through but the file wouldn’t upload to our server.
We tried to replicate the issue internally but were not successful, and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the size of the file–sometimes the files that were rejected were large, sometimes small. (I suspect, but was never able to verify, that the user’s internet connection speed was a part of the problem–still, an unacceptable bug.)
When I posted the issue in the support forums, the support team told me they didn’t know why it was happening, and closed the issue. Internally, we tried everything we could to fix it, even changing web hosts, but we kept having the problem.  I ended up struggling with it for over a year, sticking with Gravity Forms because I believed in the product, even though I wasn’t able to get any help from the staff. Keep in mind that they charge $100-200 per year to renew the license.
When this File Upload error occurred on our company site, it required a staff person to call the customer and ask them to share the file again via email–really professional, right?
In the last few weeks the problem had been getting worse (or maybe I was finally losing patience) and I finally threw in the towel and started using Jotform.com forms–just as easy to build but hosted on secure Amazon’s s3 servers. Forms created on Jotform are then quickly embedded on to any WordPress page or post and your work is done. Their free plan covers up to 100 submissions per month and that is more than most people really need, so it’s a good option for most sites.

A Costly Error

Normally, that would be the end of the story, since it immediately cleared up file upload issues on my sites. But the punchline is that we notice an immediate uptick in conversions, that is just potential customers submitting the form.
This isn’t a statistically significant data set, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that there was something in Gravity Forms that somehow discouraged/inhibited visitors from successfully completing the form and submitting it. This probably was costing us money every single day. On this site, an average conversion is worth $50+ and conversions doubled when we switched to JotForm–instantly.
Thinking about the dollars and hours we’ve lost because of this kind of makes me sick. Gravity Forms has an extremely successful affiliate program, meaning that most “reviews” you’ll find about the plugin are actually trying to con you into clicking through to purchase it.  The “reviewer” can then earn their kickback. Gravity Forms, without a doubt, cost me business (cash) and time, well over the cost of purchasing the plugin.

Misleading Advertising

There are other issues that ticked me off about Gravity Forms–they advertise that they track conversions, but in reality it just tracks the number of people who see the form vs the people who fill it out. Calling it “conversion tracking” implies that it integrates a tool like Google Analytics to show us which keyword a visitor used to end up filling out the form, which it doesn’t. (note: it looks like they are considering that for the future.) Since this site is for a company that is mostly an off-line business, a conversion happens often by phone or email anyway, so this feature would be helpful in focusing our advertising efforts (because we could manually track sales that come in by phone).

One Final Weird Issue

Also, a few times (this was a minor issue but still bad) the plugin never sent out the notification email to us after it processed the form, and we couldn’t tell until a peeved customer would call us and say, “Hey I sent my file in through your website, why didn’t anyone contact me?” –not a great feeling.

Conclusion

I’m now recommending JotForm.com –I don’t know if they have an affiliate program but I am not a part of it. WuFoo.com does the same thing and offers a similar free program.

It might be only me who faces this issue, Gravity Forms might be useful for other one. But it was just an opinion on my part what I face there.
Share your experience and reviews here.

Gravity Forms vs. Wufoo (Which is a better form management solution?)

Recently one of our users asked us which is a better form plugin between Gravity Forms and Wufoo. In the past we have done a lot of posts about Gravity forms but none about Wufoo. We have used both form management softwares personally, so we can give you a fairly un-biased comparison of these two platforms. In this article, we will compare Gravity Forms vs. Wufoo to determine which is the better form management solution for WordPress. One thing that is important to note is that we will be using our frugal blogger / developer mentality to cast the winner.

Pricing

Yes we know that pricing is one of the most important factor for bloggers when choosing a platform. It is even more important in this comparison because it shows you a key difference between these two platforms. Gravity Forms is a plugin whereas Wufoo is a hosted service. Having that said, to utilize the full set of features Gravity Forms has to offer, you must get the developer option which costs $199 with a coupon it can get as low as $149. This gets you all what Gravity Forms has to offer with 1 year of support and updates, so it is sort of like an annual subscription except for the renewal price you can get a 50% discount. To utilize all what Wufoo has to offer, you must get their Bona Fide plan which goes for $29.95 / month. This makes it roughly $359 / year.
Winner: Gravity Forms

Usage Restrictions

Because Wufoo is a hosted platform there are usage restrictions. With the Bona Fide plan you are only allowed 5 users which is something most can deal with. You get unlimited forms / reports. However, you are limited to 3,000 Entries / month. If you have file attachment option in your form, then you have a total of 1GB storage. Ofcourse you can upgrade to one of their higher plans which goes as high as $199.95 / month for 100,000 entries. So this really depends on how large your site is. Note: If you go over your allocated amount of entries then you pay $0.05 USD per entry.
Gravity forms allows you to have unlimited forms, unlimited users (you can have as many in your WordPress install), and there is as much storage available as your web hosting plan allows. Last but certainly not the least, you have unlimited entries.
Winner: Gravity Forms

Ease of Use

Both platforms are fairly easy to use. Both Gravity forms and Wufoo has a drag drop form editor. You can select the type of field and create it with one click. The process of creating forms on both are fairly intuitive and easy to learn. When it comes to managing entries, the interface is far superior in Wufoo probably because they are not restricted by the WordPress backend UI. Gravity forms tries to adhere to the WordPress user-interface therefore cannot provide a superior UI with icons and such like Wufoo. While Gravity forms have all the similar features, we personally like the Wufoo interface better. You can see it for yourself how Wufoo makes it so much easier to browse between the entries with the navigation. You can also edit, delete, email, or print the entry all from one spot.

While gravity forms have these options, its just not as clear. P.S. There is no option navigate between the entries from the entry page in Gravity forms.
Winner: Slight edge to Wufoo

Security

Security can be crucial when you are collecting important information through your forms. While gravity forms is a secure plugin, it is not a service. So the security responsibility of the data collected falls on you. Wufoo comes with SSL encryption, so all of your data is transmitted securely. Getting a SSL certificate can cost as much as $79 bucks, but if you install it on your server then Gravity Forms is hundred percent compatible with it.
Winner: If you are paying for SSL with Gravity Forms and handling your server security then there is tie. Otherwise Wufoo wins.

Multi-Page Forms

Often when doing lead generation, you may find a need to collect some extra information to provide superior service. Multi-page forms help a ton in order to increase your submission rate. Thankfully both of these platforms have the option that allows you to easily create multi-page forms. In the layout, you have the option to show the progress bar which helps the user see how long the form really is. However, one thing that gives Wufoo a huge edge in our eyes is the partial form submission. A lot of times users tend to leave the survey / form half way through if they feel that it is way too long. Wufoo allows you to save that partial entry everytime a user goes on to then next page of the form. If you are only showing like 2-3 questions / page, then you will get as much information from the user as possible. Gravity forms on the other hand has no way to store a partial submission.
If you are a consultant and you have a client survey, you might as well have as much information possible rather than losing the whole lead entirely.
Winner: Wufoo

Third Party Integrations

Gravity Forms offer integrations with Aweber, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Freshbooks, PayPal, and Twilio. This allows you to collect emails from your forms and collect payments as well. Wufoo which has been in the market since 2006 with a fairly recent acquisition of $35 million boasts a lot of third party integrations. To list some popular ones: PayPal, Authorize.Net, Google Checkout, Freshbooks, HighRise, Salesforce, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and more.
Wufoo has a lot of third party integrations, but they have a much larger team and funding. Not to mention they have been around for longer.
Winner: Wufoo

Ability to take Guest Posts

Gravity forms has an option that allows you to accept guest post submission using Gravity forms and save them as drafts. This has made our life so much easier in managing a WordPress Gallery. You can have the option for attachments, categories, tags etc. While Wufoo is a great form management solution, it does not have this feature available for WordPRess.
Winner: Gravity Forms

User Registration

Gravity Forms have a powerful user-registration add-on that works seamlessly with Multi-site and BuddyPress installs. Wufoo lacks such integration with WordPress. You can use this add-on to create custom user meta so much easier than before.
Winner: Gravity Forms

Cool Examples

Wufoo has a page dedicated to examples of how users are using their service.
Gravity Forms should have something like that, but they do not. The two cool uses that we have found are:
Custom Post Type Generator
As you can see that both of these platforms have something unique to offer. It is very hard to say that one is completely superior to other. We still use Gravity Forms on our sites. We are also using Wufoo on some of our other projects. It really depends on what you really need.