cs2336

Thank you for your reply and I apologise for the length of my response.

WooCommerce may be open-source but it is owned by Automatic isn’t it? And isn’t Automatic a global company that is worth approximately $7.5 billion with an estimated annual income of $891.9m per year, some of which is due to them creating WooCommerce and then selling their extensions and plugins. So they have not created WooCommerce out of the goodness of their heart or as charity, they have done it to make money.

They intentionally keep features out of WooCommerce so realistically people will need some additional extensions / plugins to use WooCommerce, many of which will be purchased from them.

Now I don’t have an issue with this business model, it can be a win-win situation where Automatic makes money and people can use WooCommerce for free and pay for extra features if they need them.

However, given that approximately 3.9 million sites use WooCommerce, I personally believe that Automatic has a responsibility to maintain and offer basic support for WooCommerce. I’m not saying this is a legal responsibility but a moral one and I’m not saying they should have 24/7 support but basic maintenance support.

I could understand them not offering any support if it was a single developer or a small company with limited resources but that’s not the case. In fact, in my experience most single developers and small companies offer better support than Automatic.

I work at a company that sells licences to use our software but people can also use our software for free. If someone who was using our software for free contacted us to say they thought there was a bug or issue in the software we would look into it for them. We would find out whether they were just not understanding how to use the software or what it can do or whether there was a genuine bug which would be fixed. We would do that because we believe in being fair with people.

On several occasions when I have contacted WooCommerce, sometimes even just to ask a question about a feature or to report something which I believe has gone wrong with a recent update. The replies I have received from their “happiness engineers” have been dismissive, condescending and bordering on rude. Their main objective always seems to be to blame one of the plugins they sell, and then to try and make you purchase a new licence so they will then answer the question. On one occasion we had to purchase a new licence only to then find out that the issue was not related to this plugin but was an intentional change made to the core WooCommerce plugin. Furthermore, if their paid services were reasonably priced I think people would be more understanding but I think corporate greed has settled in which has led to lots of negative reviews on sites like TrustPilot.

With regards to the issues with the new updates, yes people have a responsibility to take precautions when updating. I don’t process any updates until I’ve seen reports from other users, even / especially when dealing with massive companies like Microsoft. However, because of the reasons I have already mentioned I don’t believe you can just say “No warranty, no guarantee and use at your own risk” and let your update cause critical damage to a micro business that has just started up.

The title of my review is “I wish we’d never started using WooCommerce” and lots of times that is true but unfortunately there are limited options out there but that doesn’t mean Automatic should get a free pass. A company that size, with those profits that claims it is “Passionate about making the web a better place.” should try harder, in my opinion.

Once again, I apologise for the length of my response but I wanted to explain the full reason behind my initial review.