Come hear how a small community of small businesses joined forces to combat the big box stores with their own eCommerce Marketplace shop.

AJ Morris will teach you how they handle aspects like shipping, orders, inventory, all while running their own retail store fronts – and you get to apply this to your own business!

AJ Morris has been helping small businesses work on getting their eCommerce side of the business up and running for the last 2 years.

Whether it was building the first managed WooCommerce hosting, or working with local small businesses, I have found that this is the client base I love working with. I continue to find success and build success with these clients as we get them up and running.

AJ Morris got started building with WordPress back in 2004 for his local school district.

We were in need of a website tool that would allow us to have weblogs (yes, I’m that old!) setup for our teachers. I fell in love with the ease of use WordPress brought to an older generation and found that for myself, it was incredibly powerful and easy to use.

AJ Morris has continued to use WordPress to build plugins, themes and websites for small businesses. Fast-forward to today, he’s working with WordPress and in the business for the last 8 years.

I’m putting every ounce of my work life into the WordPress ecosystem.

AJ Morris worked with one of the first drag-and-drop themes, Headway Themes, as his first true step into the WordPress community. That him me down the road of meeting some of the most influential people in WordPress. Today, he leads product and marketing efforts for one of the longest running WordPress plugin businesses, iThemes.

DFW was one of the first WordCamps AJ Morris attended as a sponsor.

 I loved seeing the community of DFW come together. It’s been one of my favorite teams camps for the last 5 years and one that I try extremely hard to attend every year. I have been able to speak at the last couple and have enjoyed the community of speakers selected.

AJ Morris says he has always found the WordPress community to be welcoming.

When I started attending WordCamps as a sponsor (I first started working at Liquid Web and was going to every WordCamp possible), I was glad to have friends already in the space. But even when they weren’t at the same WordCamps, I have always managed to meet new people and form new friendships.

During his talk at WordCamp DFW this year, Growing the Small Business Local Economy with Marketplace eCommerce, AJ Morris hopes attendees will see that retail shopping is declining and more and more purchases are happening online.

If you run a small business, now is the time to invest in building your eCommerce presence. If you are a freelancer or agency, he will help you understand how you can build affordable solutions for small businesses by pooling business resources together and working towards a common end goal.

Recently a group of downtown businesses of a small Michigan town came to me asking what they could do if they put their resources together to build an eCommerce store. They wanted a way to highlight each of the store’s uniquenesses while allowing them to manage all parts of the eCommerce shop individually among the store owners.

Together we came up with a set of requirements that each store needed to have and set out to develop this solution for them. We ended up with a WooCommerce and Dokan, a marketplace plugin that gave us a number of the features we needed to create the best shopping experience for customers as well as all the management tools for each individual business.

Don’t miss AJ Morris’ session so your can learn how to replicate this success story.

Tweet @ajmorris during AJ’s talk using #WCDFW and ask him about that time rode in a limo with Michael Bublé

Make sure you get your WordCamp DFW tickets – we’re only a few days away from the big event!