WooCommerce 4.1 Beta 2

12 responses to “WooCommerce 4.1 Beta 2”

1. 

   isotonik2015

   April 14, 2020

   There doesn’t seem to be any advantage of using Payments over a standard Stripe account an monitoring things in their detailed dashboard which offers a far higher level of reporting? I imagine this is only level one but why doesn’t the detail of an order get shared with stripe as it does with PayPal so that you can see what the customer actually purchased with a line by line breakdown?

   Reply
   1. 

      Brent

      April 29, 2020

      Hi @isotonik2015, you’re right, this is v1.0 of WooCommerce Payments. We have many others features coming in future. The key advantage we see for Payments now and in the future is to offer merchants features of the Stripe Dashboard within the WooCommerce / WordPress Dashboard. That provides one location, and one account, to manage both orders and the payments behind them. Both for merchants and the agencies working with them to build their WC site.

      why doesn’t the detail of an order get shared with stripe as it does with PayPal so that you can see what the customer actually purchased with a line by line breakdown?

      Last I checked, Stripe’s Payment APIs, (namely, PaymentIntent endpoints) do not have fields for product / line item meta data, like PayPal’s APIs. They need to be sent as generic metadata instead, which doesn’t help with things like aggregated reporting.

      While Stripe do offer APIs for syncing the product catalog between WooCommerce and Stripe, I believe those Products are only available for purchases via Stripe Checkout, not purchases done via direct checkout on the WooCommerce site (which is a preferred method for many merchants).

      We may support Stripe Checkout in future. We may also look at syncing the product catalog between WooCommerce and Stripe, but neither of those things are on the roadmap for now.

      Reply
2. 

   digitalchild

   April 15, 2020

   Why does WooCommerce dev team think it’s ok to keep adding more and more top-level pages to the WordPress Admin?

   I think including the marketing tab is completely inappropriate for WooCommerce. What about the thousands of 3rd party developers that aren’t on your marketplace? Are you going to continue to throw up walls to make it hard for us to work with WooCommerce? Are you going to continue to push 3rd party developers out of your ecosystem until we have to pay to play?

   This is completely unacceptable. You want to democratise e-commerce and then you force everyone into your marketplace options only?

   Not cool team.

   Reply
   1. 

      Gary Murray

      April 16, 2020

      What about the thousands of 3rd party developers that aren’t on your marketplace? Are you going to continue to throw up walls to make it hard for us to work with WooCommerce? Are you going to continue to push 3rd party developers out of your ecosystem until we have to pay to play?

      I’d be interested to know what your main reasons are for not wanting to include your products in the WooCommerce marketplace? Our marketplace exists to help merchants so I would be interested to hear why you feel being a part of it is not beneficial to you or other 3rd party developers?

      Reply
      1. 

         A concerned developer

         April 18, 2020

         Lately, your arguments to very concerned developers are very ignorant. A few reasons for not being on WooCommerce Marketplace:

         You don’t allow real competition with your own extensions.
         You take a big cut out of every sale.
         You own the customers and the whole payment process.
         You dictate the pricing structure (no more multi-site options).
         If you don’t like something about the extension, you can take it down.

         There are probably a lot more downsides to being on your marketplace as there are benefits. The main benefit is obviously getting access to your customer base, but growing customer base organically is better for a lot of companies as well.

         I hope you listen to the feedback and also see WooCommerce as opensource platform as it was from the beginning. From my perspective, you are currently viewing customers that use WooCommerce as if they are all your own, which is against the principle of opensource. There are really a lot of customers that use WooCommerce and were introduced to the platform by developers or agencies and I’m sure they also add a lot of value to the platform even if you don’t profit of them directly.

         At least pay attention to the ratings on WP.org reviews section and do something about it. I really miss the days when Mike Jolley was the WC developer lead and there weren’t like 300 open tickets :/

         Reply
         1. 

            Mary Hubbard

            April 20, 2020

            Thank you for your feedback and as recommended I have taken a look at the reviews on WP.org.

            You’d be pleased to know that a lot of what you are outlining we are currently working on, to add more value to the marketplace, and encourage more developers to bring their products to the platform. The team realized that it wasn’t fair for the majority of our users to have a closed Marketplace, so we opened it up to bring more extensions and services for the growing merchant base.

            We recognize we are a platform, to aid in the connection between buyers and sellers, which means promoting the right extension, regardless of whether its WooCommerce owned or not.

            We are working to improve the navigation and search, as we definitely want to see competition with WooCommerce products and allow the market to decide which product is best.

            We are also building out functionality to allow 3PDs to interact directly with the customers that purchase from our marketplace, including subscribing to products or a vendor. This will allow a 3pd to have a customer relationship, and communicate directly with those subscribed.

            At WooCommerce we believe in connecting the community to democratize commerce and I hope that as we continue to ship new features, the community recognizes the work we are doing to ensure mutual benefit and growth.

            Reply
            1. 

               A concerned developer

               April 21, 2020

               At the moment, I don’t sense any clear project leadership and accountability for WooCommerce (there are lots of great developers here, but everyone is doing their thing and everyone is simply saying yes to all the marketplace stuff and solo UI/UX decisions with WC Admin). It was created open source with a promise for democratizing eCommerce and staying open to everyone, which brought us developers on board. Lots of us are making a living from it. It’s amazing, but have to say we’re losing our trust that it will stay this way. I just hope somebody takes the responsibility for half-baked decisions and you start prioritizing usability instead of short-term profits. I’m sure there will be a lot more profit if end users feel WooCommerce works great for them and they’re not bombarded with ads on every step. If there needs to be a filter for turning down every new feature you introduce, there is perhaps something missing.

               Thank you for taking our concerns into consideration and hopefully we’ll see WooCommerce grow as it did so far.
            2. 

               Mofsy

               April 24, 2020

               If this continues, we will move away from WooCommerce towards developing a new democratic platform.
               This also applies to prohibitions on using logos and names in paid related plugins.
               You also consider a derivative work to be your own authorship.
      2. 

         digitalchild

         April 27, 2020

         It’s not about 3rd party developers wanting to include our products on your marketplace. It’s that we can’t. Why don’t you want our extensions on your marketplace?

         The fact that you’re asking why 3rd party developers aren’t submitting products shows how disconnected your team is from the actual 3rd party ecosystem. Your submission process is tedious, with little to no documentation. The repeated questions on slack related to how to get on the marketplace show the documentation is lacking. Even after going through that process, there’s no guarantee that you would accept our products.

         I attempted to submit an extension but wasn’t accepted. The reason given was ‘ We feel its too specific, and we are looking for more general-purpose extensions at this time.’ The product I submitted was a software update and license server. That would enable developers to sell their plugins and themes from WooCommerce. Most developers I have spoken to don’t even use WooCommerce to sell their WooCommerce extensions. They use EDD. You already have a software license server on your marketplace, so I guess there is no room for a second one?

         I asked your team to remove my rejected product, and all traces of my source code and my requests have gone completely ignored.

         Two areas that have always concerned me regarding the marketplace, which I was willing to accept due to exposure.

         1, Your developer agreement seems to imply if we want to break away from the marketplace, you have first chance to purchase or fork the product and keep selling it. So in reality, once an extension is on your marketplace, we really don’t own that product anymore.

         The pricing and commission structures are another concern. I understand that the exposure the marketplace provides should be worth it, but as you don’t publish any details about income or earnings potentials its a roll of the dice.

         The marketplace isn’t open to everyone. I want to know, what are you going to do for all the developers that don’t meet the unpublished, black-box requirements to get onto the marketplace? What about those that dont want to give up ownership of their customers and products, drastically reducing earnings potentials?

         WordPress and WooCommerce are how I make a living, but you’re making it really hard for us little devs to compete. You build features that only advertise your products and services. How can we compete when we can’t even get into the search results?

         Reply
3. 

   fishingwithdex

   April 15, 2020

   Wow, i wish I didn’t hit update and stuff my site. The latest release not working with slate admin theme, inbox and orders, and bread crumbs are munted and are a complete waste of space for me and my clients. How do we turn that stuff off? Why is there something called inbox? are you checking people’s emails?? joe bloggs users aint gona understand this. Yours sincerely, #confused:|

   Reply
   1. 

      Peter Fabian

      April 24, 2020

      Hi fishingwithdex,

      Thanks for your opinion. Most of these features have been introduced with 4.0 version and they come with the WooCommerce Admin experience. Further information about the changes is available in the 4.0 announcement post and in our extensive documentation covering the new analytics and activity panel settings.

      While we understand that change is difficult for everyone, we hope this one will be a positive one for most customers, even for Joe Bloggs! 🙂

      Reply
4. 

   webwavesca

   May 6, 2020

   I’m not a dev – I own a marketing agency – so I’ll give you a different angle on the changes.

   The Marketing top level tab is ABSOLUTELY NOT WANTED, NOT NEEDED and NOT APPRECIATED! There’s plenty there already – you don’t get to forcefully take that real estate.

   If you want to put it under the Woocommerce tab – fine (although it’s still not 100% fine, it’s better than what you’ve done).

   You seriously need to remove that immediately.

   Reply