Never asked it to be installed

Howdy @calebweb,

Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. I can only imagine how disconcerting this must have been for you.

Rest assured that WooCommerce Payments will not be installed without the express permission of an administrator since doing so wouldn’t align with our goal of democratizing commerce. Even though WooCommerce Payments is developed and supported by the same folks that handle the core WooCommerce plugin, we know that WooCommerce Payments won’t be the right fit for all stores for a number of reasons, and we want to give merchants the opportunity to choose a gateway that aligns with their goals.

With all of that said, we do recommend that merchants install and activate WooCommerce Payments from within the core WooCommerce plugin—and you can read about that change on our public GitHub repositories here and here. We received some feedback that this change can cause some confusion: if you attempted to dismiss the suggestion to use WooCommerce Payments, you may have seen a modal asking if you wanted to remove WooCommerce Payments—even though WooCommerce Payments was never actually installed:

We’ve since updated the verbiage in this modal to properly reflect that WooCommerce Payments is not installed automatically. You can read about that change on our public GitHub repository here.

Same happened to me. I remember wondering “did I really install this?”. The verbiage was in such a way that it HAD to be clearly intended to trick people into thinking they did. What a sick move to play with the power that you have being automattic, completely against the open source philosophy that you guys pretend to be all about. Shame on you.

Hi @texofant,

We understand the confusion the modal must have created even after you dismissed the suggestion to remove the plugin.

After receiving feedback about this change and the confusion it created, we’ve updated the verbiage in this modal to properly reflect that WooCommerce Payments is?not?installed automatically. You can read about that change on our public GitHub repository?here.

The last response from Sandip is rather dismissive and to be honest, telling. The attitude should have NEVER been taken in the first place that a user can just “remove the plugin”. The fact is people trusted Woo and they broke that trust by installing something they did not approve or even realize Woo would try to sneak something in. We are currently looking for alternatives now. Have already switched one site to something different.

Hi @calebweb,

Apologies if my above reply caught you off guard at all. I completely understand how surprising it must be to see a modal where it says to remove the plugin when you never installed it in the first place.

Please allow me to clarify the issue and what I was conveying:

WooCommerce Payments is never installed without the express permission of an administrator since doing that does not align with our goal of democratizing commerce.

There are merchants who benefit from using WooCommerce Payments that’s why we recommend installing and activating WooCommerce Payments from within the core WooCommerce plugin using a modal.

I understand how confusing it must be to see that even though you dismissed the suggestion of not installing WooCommerce Payments, the wording in the modal was as such — “Click here if you want to?remove?WooCommerce Payments” — when WooCommerce Payments was never actually?installed.

We received feedback about this and how it was creating confusion among users. So we rolled out a change by updating the wording within the modal and making it clearer for the merchants that WooCommerce Payments is not installed automatically but it is recommended and they may learn more about it.

I hope this clarifies and provides a more clear history of this issue.