The Launch Your Store Task is a new task enabling merchants to launch their store with participating hosting providers.
Timeframe
- Still in the planning phase, no work has begun, but we are committing to the project. This is a chance to communicate early on about forthcoming efforts that could benefit from community feedback.
Summary
The Launch Your Store Task is an upcoming task enabling new merchants to confirm their intent to launch. This will be enabled by participating hosting providers via extensibility points that allow for integrations with their in-built site publishing tools.
Additionally, the task will provide pre-requisite checks to ensure the store is healthy, such as surfacing missing information or pending tasks. This would act as a warning; merchants would still be able to choose to launch their store anyway.
Background
Our research has found new merchants don’t have a clear understanding whether their store is public or private when starting out. For WooCommerce sites, this state is typically set at the hosting provider level through password protection or staging sites. WordPress itself doesn’t provide such a feature beyond search engine visibility settings. As a result, this requires new merchants to navigate between the WooCommerce / WordPress Admin and their hosting provider dashboards when it comes to publishing their site.
What is changing?
We plan to add a task for merchants to launch their store with participating hosting providers. This would be done through extensibility points in the task itself that enable the hosting provider integrate with their own publishing tools — such as password protection, or staging site transfers.
The task would also perform a number of pre-checks and provide a warning to merchants before continuing, such as listing incomplete payment gateways or invalid social media links.
Why are we doing this now?
We’ve identified site publishing tools are a key feature missing for merchants setting up their store.
Resources
Example hosting provider site publishing tools: