News about pro version

Hello @legentlemanfr ,
Thank you for your feedback and opinions. This is constructive, and I understand all that you have brought to our attention.

First off, It has not escaped our attention that we need more engagement with our valued users.

Our lead developer and I are, indeed, working right now on a more streamlined and clean site design, and are laying out our plans for regular newsletters and blog articles detailing our plans and updates for WC Vendors, WC Vendors Pro and our extensions. We are actually quite excited about these updates that we are working on!

As far as the forums– yes, we did decide to close the forums. We are entertaining opening community only forums in the future, so that our users and at times WE can discuss our products in a forum settings, but we will not be using this format for support for our products. It is too difficult to provide the attention to each user, and also to keep the support requests organized. The support tickets are working much better for one-on-one support. We have heard from several users that they do miss the forums and the engagement with us and other users, so we are considering how we may be able to implement some community discussion on the site with our redesign.

For WC Vendors & WC Vendors Pro developments: We are currently working on several updates. First and foremost right now is updating ad changing the payments gateways. PayPal has depreciated Adaptive Payments, and since this is the most widely used gateway by our users, we MUST create a solution for the future. This is the primary focus of our work at the present moment. We will also be updating and extending the capabilities of our Stripe Commission & Gateway plugin.
Next is a re-write for several areas of the core WC Vendors plugin, so that we may modernize a bit and further expand both plugins; until we do so, we are limited in how far we can continue to grow and expand WC Vendors and WC Vendors Pro. After that, we will look into the requested extensions and features form our users, of which we have quite a few.. so we will create a priority list and get to work on those. Of course, in the meantime, we have to continue to update and maintain WC Vendors and WC Vendors Pro.

I hope this gives you a good synopsis of what is happening with WC Vendors and WC Vendors Pro. We have had a few setbacks, required restructuring and changes that have been difficult, but now we are progressing again looking forward to our new site and updates.

Thank you again- we sincerely hope you will decide to continue to use WC Vendors & WC Vendors Pro for your marketplace.

Let me know if I can assist you with anything else.
Cheers,
Anna – WC Vendors

Hi!

Jamie here, I agree with everything you’ve said and what Anna has also updated you with. Apologies for being silent, there are a few products I have to look after and with the significant changes to WooCommerce 3 earlier this year, it moved my development time line a bit. This has also made me realise that free needs some serious love to bring it out of the dark ages in terms of extensibility for me building extensions and our community building extensions and themes. I’m currently working on version 2 of free which will include a new admin interface and a cleaned up code base. A lot of the front facing stuff will look exactly the same for users but for marketplace admins you will see a nicer setup.

As Anna mentioned, our number one payment gateway is about to be disabled by PayPal so I’m scrambling to replace that as well as make the changes required to free to support this better.

We are also working on a new site, updating our documentation and working on a new monthly blog series to better engage our community.

Thanks for your support and poke, we’re working on it!

Jamie
Lead Developer and Founder.

Hey Jamie and Anna, thanks for addressing the Paypal situation! Jamie, I’m sure you’ve looked into this already, but Paypal is offering Paypal for Marketplaces: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/marketplaces/pp4mp/ – seems like a new(er) thing? Maybe this could be used in place of Adaptive Payments?

Hi @aand,

Paypal for marketplaces is only available in limited markets and you have to apply and make a case (pretty much an interview with PayPal) to even be considered for the new service. I spoke to PayPal at WordCamp in Singapore last month and they were willing to give me early access to develop and integration but still not really available for everyone. When its that hard to get access to it, I wouldn’t want to have our users go through that pain. I already know how hard it was for adaptive payments. Braintree marketplace application is also painful. So moving forward I will focus on scheduled commission payment options with Stripe being our only easily accessible instant commission option for the new year.

I’ve started working on v2 of free and this will include making it easier to create commission payment systems using external systems. I want to provide a lot more options beyond the PayPal and Stripe integrations we currently have.

cheers,

Jamie.

Ok, fingers crossed they’ll be making it easier to apply for Paypal for Marketplaces down the road. Is it complex to integrate into WC?

And oh, please retain adaptive payments too, for those of us who are already approved and running (as I understand it, it’ll keep working just fine for existing users).

Thanks,
– Asbjoern