CheckoutWC joins Kestrel

Today I’m over the moon to share that CheckoutWC is joining the Kestrel flight (and to share that I learned a group of kestrels can be called a flight – you could say I’m soaring with the new knowledge).

And I’m not only excited because it gives me an excuse to use new bird puns – but because CheckoutWC is an amazing product with a fantastic developer behind it, and we’re so thrilled to welcome both.

See demos of the beautiful checkout templates

“We were only achieving around an average 2.3% conversion rate when checking our Analytics found most drop offs were at the checkout stage. A friend recommended CheckoutWC so we took the free trial and was hoping for maybe a few percentage increase in sales. Holy Cow!!! We only installed this plugin 2 weeks ago and we had a 17.2% conversion rate the first week and 20.8% the second week. This plugin has made such a huge difference to our website sales, it’s phenomenal!”

Read the enthusiastic testimonials

A partnership several years in the making

Clif Griffin has been working at the intersection of ecommerce and WordPress for over a decade (even before WooCommerce became the de facto choice for most stores on WordPress). He and my co-founders originally collaborated ~10 years ago on a content site Beka used to run (called Sell with WP), where Clif generously shared his knowledge of building stores with a (now retired) plugin called Shopp, as well as his experiences switching over to WooCommerce with his clients and plugins.

That collaboration made it clear Clif is a wonderful developer who sweats the details that make software great for clients and customers to use. When he launched CheckoutWC a few years later, I had just joined SkyVerge, and got the pleasure of working with the product as part of my role in support. The v1 was already a mature and useful product, and we were happy to collaborate on compatibility with a number of our plugins at SkyVerge.

Working together at that point was smooth and we always came away from conversations with Clif feeling like we’d both made our products much better for the Woo stores we worked with. We’ve been eager to do even more work together, especially as we formed Kestrel, and I was fortunate enough to have Beka, Max, and Justin’s history with Clif to kick off discussions about teaming up.

Finding the right fit

Any time you decide to hire or partner with someone, alignment in your values and goals is critical to make sure you’ll work well together and achieve those goals. Our team cares deeply about creating a ton of value for merchants, building software they like to use, and empowering other developers and builders to extend and customize the products we build. We also care about how we do it: we lean into every project with curiosity, a generous mindset on the value we want to create, and want to enjoy building products we’re proud to put our name on. 

One of the things we love about Clif joining Kestrel is the great alignment between our values and approaches: CheckoutWC is clearly a fantastic product built by someone who cares about his craft and helping online sellers grow their businesses. We know this alignment in what we value and what we want to build is going to help us take CheckoutWC even further together. 

What does this mean for customers?

If you already use CheckoutWC, not too much is going to change! Clif will still be the product and engineering lead for the plugin. Our existing team is so excited to learn from him and start to contribute to the product under his guidance. We’ll devote more people and energy to the product, and continue to earn your business and support.

If you use our other plugins, we want to make sure CheckoutWC will work seamlessly with them, too. We’d love for you to try them together, and we’re going to ensure that using Kestrel plugins on your site provides you with a really slick and seamless checkout experience for your customers.

We’re just four months into our journey with Kestrel, but with Clif joining the team, we bring over 66 years of combined WooCommerce experience. We’re ready to bring that experience to bear and help thousands of merchants sell their way with WooCommerce.