Iron hand and closed community, virtually no community support.

[gpowerhost]

First let’s get real. No cart works out of the box as intended. Carts take time and money to produce as needed. So, let’s be honest: you will need to buy plugins and therefore you will no longer be eligible to post a review here–just for the free core plugin, nor use the WordPress support forums–just for the free plugin!

There are all kinds of carts out there. Some are open sourced, some have open communities and others are decidedly closed. WooCommerce has made great strides towards becoming a closed community. Why do I say this?

1). They have no openly available bug tracker for any of their paid plugins. Since 99% of issues are related to plugins there is no place to see if the bug has been reported, read what others have said and see a status. Officially, there are no bigs and all is perfect. In reality, masses of people have to waste their time reporting the same issues over and over again. WC cares more about limiting any perception of negative view than it does about your time and supporting your efforts during the bug period.

2). There is no place to review and read others reviews of the paid plugins. You can’t post a review here as this is only for the core. There is no place to see what others think. This is a very iron handed approach.

3). There is no support for developers or users wanting to make their cart and plugins work well. They used to have a Community Support forum and that has been closed. So, if you are a seasoned developer and have a quick question or want to lend a hand to others you are out of luck. They don’t want anyone to get any kind of “Free Support” and even if you pay thousands per year for their paid plugins you still aren’t allowed to ask any development questions.

As a developer in the industry for more than a decade I can assure you that there isn’t any free approach. However, if you are a developer or a user wanting to do it on your own WooCommerce is not a warm and welcoming place. That said, it is a somewhat decent cart for certain kinds of customers. But, expect to spend thousands of dollars to get what other carts offer in functionality for free. And like all carts expect to do lots of work. Just don’t expect just because WooCommerce is owned by WordPress for there to be an official place to go to get community support. There isn’t one. They don’t make enough money if you can chat with others honestly.

So, how do I rate the core plugin? It is carefully crafted to NOT provide much much of the functionality you can get elsewhere and absolutely need. Expect to struggle with the extremely ugly, hard to use back-end. Don’t think you can run a shop for free or in minutes–that is so not true with any cart. Don’t expect to be able to print out, email or view a PDF invoice. Cough, cough, that isn’t a required function! That is a perk! Luckily you can get it for free, but not from WooCommerce! I’m all for making money but why the lack of community? Seems very against the grain of a company owned by the virtual inventor of community interaction.

Of course, I expect a heavy hand to swoop down on this review as well! So, to answer your confrontations in advance:

1). Please don’t tell me it isn’t fair to rate the free plugin based on lack of community for the paid plugins. I feel I get to hold WordPress accountable here as they own WooCommerce and could easily create an avenue to review the paid plugins as well.

2). Please don’t tell me that you run a cart without any paid plugins and they are completely optional. I find this ridiculous and so 1%.

3). Please don’t say that you don’t see any support requests using my username. I use a different username for WC support and fill out tickets all the time.

4). Please don’t tell me there are plenty of other places to ask community support questions. There are plenty of WordPress places and when you start to ask WooCommerce related questions the admins generally close the conversation and say to ask the developer.

[Claudio Sanches]

The review should be only for WooCommerce plugin and not paid extensions or community.
But thanks anyway.

[Mike Jolley]

The big problem with your review is that you’re combining core with extensions made by the core team. It’s easy to have a community around a free, openly available product. But paid products – not so much. We’ve tried it in the past. Community does not help each other – you just get questions and “me too” but the support needs to come from staff, as it does now. Would also encourage users downloading from those pirate sites.

On top of that, your notes on issue trackers are not great. We use GitHub issues which integrates with the addon repo. They are linked and both need to be private. This could be “opened up” to customers but would need development and a custom interface. Given we inform users of fix status in the support area it’s not necessarily needed right now. Would be nice I agree, but not essential.

Since when has reviewing paid plugins been the norm? It’s down to the plugin vendor. Talk to other users if your unsure and one. The Facebook community group is active for example.

> There is no support for developers or users wanting to make their cart and plugins

This forum perhaps? ?? I’ve been active here recently – dropped the the past week due to house moving. Bottom line, we do help developers and have relationships with many devs if you bother to approach us. After reading this, not sure you’ve bothered.

There are HUNDREDS of third party extension choices. No one forces you to buy from Woo or the dev community itself.