I'm supporting WooCommerce & the Ninjas!

I’ve been working with WooCommerce for about a year now. I have experience creating my own html websites (although no formal training), and that’s been good enough until I decided to move over to WordPress and WooCommerce.

I’ve had some issues (mostly related to my lack of experience with both of these platforms), but also because I want to customize my website so it doesn’t look like theme-out-of-the-box or my competitors’ websites. I’m really picky, and have looked at a lot of shopping cart solutions as well as WP themes.

I have purchased several WooThemes, so have had some support available through their online documentation. And I’ve had some great support from several Woo Ninjas for several issues over the past year, through support tickets at WooThemes. When I tried to ask them to solve additional issues, I was told, in fairness, that the customizations I was trying to do were beyond the scope of their support mandate, and that I should find someone professional to help with customizing. That’s understandable.

Sometimes I do come here to see if someone else has the same issue.

When WooThemes changed their fee structure recently to help ensure their long-term survival, even though I could have grandfathered myself in for free support for the themes and extensions I had purchased, I decided not to, because I believe in supporting them for the work they do. I get paid for work, they should get paid.

Just because it’s a free plug-in doesn’t mean support should be instant and free. I think they are doing a great job, considering the number of support requests they must get from people like me : )

Recently I found an issue with an 3rd party extension that they sell that affected the mobile version – to my surprise, they actually contacted me back and offered me a beta version right from the plugin developer to make sure I was satisfied with the fix before they released it. I was completely surprised!

So despite my grumblings about one version upgrade (2.0.15) that gave me a day of grief (my own fault – no backups – I have learned my lesson, thank you!), I am a strong supporter of WooThemes, WooCommerce, and their hardworking Woo Ninjas.

Thank you, James, Coen, Mike, Andrew, Stuart, Daniel, Gerhard, Magnus, and everyone else who has helped me over the past year.