One step forward, three steps back – Keep it simple or get burned.

  • Wudman

    (@wudman)


    9 months, 3 weeks ago

    Where do I start? I have been creating websites for businesses and personal use with WordPress since about 2008. It has been my main income and some of my clients have been with me for over 23 years back when Notepad, Dreamweaver and other web builders vied for dominance.

    What brings me here today is how WordPress can lead you down into places that will be expensive to back out of. “Expensive” in money, time and potential business set backs.

    Specifically, thing very hard how you use WordPress as an ecommerce platform. Right now WooCommerce appears to have left the building and taken promises of premium support with it.

    Here is where your business can take a massive hit IF it depends on Automattic’s WordPress and WooCommerce. One plugin fail can kill your ability to do business without completely wrecking your business.

    In this case, Automattic, parent company of WordPress and WooCommerce, sells a lot of plugins to make WooCommerce functional. With WooCommerce, expect to buy into subscriptions that allow you to build functionality. Do not expect “free” WooCommerce to do what you are imagining without Subscriptions. Active Subscriptions sold and managed by WooCommerce come with Premium Tech Support.

    For example, a recent update of a plugin that allows custom configuring of shipping, broke the plugin function, and that has killed the site’s ability to add shipping to sales. So all sales fail in the cart due to this inability to properly add shipping.

    Reaching out to WooCommerce via their chat bot fails beyond the automated response because it is not forwarding messages to alert a human. Basically no humans appear to be “home”. This is also confirmed by no email response either.

    In this case a client has an active, paid subscription, the version of the plugin is up to date, but it is not working after an update. In the tech support email I also asked for a link to the previous version of the WooCommerce plugin that is not working after the update. That would be a simple, temporary fix, but WooCommerce/WordPress would have to answer the email.

    Still waiting WooCommerce. We’d settle for some support, but have paid for Premium Support on three plugins that cost about $350 a year to make “free” WooCommerce functional.

    It gets much worse if I delve into the history of having to focus a lot of energy on securing the website from bad actors. WooCommerce (and WordPress) demand basically expert, detailed attention to security. You better think about a premium security plugin and cut no corners with hosting. We suffered a carding attack in 2021, where a bad actor was able to manipulate WooCommerce and generate orders that only added one item on one line that had 12 items. So the hacker was able to buy 12 items for the price of one. At the same time, the bad actor threw over 5600 credit carts at the 12 or so invoices that were generated. Of course all the credit cards were stolen.

    How did WooCommerce respond? They replied the issue was not with the cart and a few days later, an update came across that throttled the behavior.

    If you do have a WordPress site and want to do any kind of eCommerce, avoid WooCommerce. Instead check out options to embed a third-part cart into your WordPress website. Otherwise you will spend way more money than “free”.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter Wudman

    (@wudman)

    9 months, 3 weeks ago

    Follow up. After five hours of chat, WooCommerce Tech Support laid the issue on a plugin conflict. While in chat, with WooCommerce tech support watching and enabled with Admin privileges, I performed actions that suggested it was a Table Rate Shipping issue. Yet I was dismissed.

    The chat agent left the chat open which was more to keep it from posting the transcript. In the meantime, I disabled every plugin except for Table Rate Shipping and WooCommerce (both by Automatic/WooCommerce), flushed all the caches, and the problem was still present. Then I uploaded the older version of the plugin that was sent to me and that made the problem worse.

    Then and only then did WooCommerce admitted that their plugin, Table Rate Shipping, which pushed an update on 10/3/2023 was broken.

    Furthermore, they have no ETA on when it will be resolved. Apparently even rolling back the site will not resolve this. We don’t see any option but to try rolling back this weekend.

    Think about the real costs of rebuilding a mature ecommerce site with just 25 skus. Think about years worth of SEO including specific efforts in product SEO. The site in question has over 200 skus with thousands of ours and tens of thousands of dollars vested in development, marketing, content and product SEO.

    Yet six hours of chat support gets you nowhere except an apology for our “frustration”.

    Run from WordPress and WooCommerce. Something is going on in the house that Matt M. built and it is not transparency. The only other time I never need WooCommerce Premium Support ended with the same, “It must be a plugin conflict”. Then a few days later, a WooCommerce update and the problem went away.

    PS, WooCommerce never answered the original or follow up tech support email either.

    We have spent thousands of dollars on extensions for the “free” WooCommerce plugin. I can’t see any serious business relying on Automattic at this point.

    Plugin Support Job a11n

    (@jobthomas)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    9 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hi @wudman – thanks for this detailed review. You’re right that this is not the support (or product quality) you should expect from us. And you’re also right that by the time we say it’s a conflict, we should’ve ruled out that it is indeed not a plugin/extensions problem.

    I can see on our system that we’ve followed up eventually. I can also see that the bug you’ve experienced with Table Rate Shipping is fixed and will be shipped in the next version of the extension.

    Thread Starter Wudman

    (@wudman)

    9 months, 3 weeks ago

    Thanks for the validation. A fair follow up for the client would be to extend his Table Rate Shipping subscription until 2028, (5 years from the original expire which would have been tomorrow). His costs associated with only the hours dedicated to engaging WooCommerce. That wouldn’t cover work lost or time spent at WooCommerce’s direction, looking for issues such as plugin conflicts…

    If just one of the “Happiness Engineers”, didn’t not focused on punting the issue to that “plugin conflict”, it would have saved about ten hours. Instead, the gross failure in transparency and honest tech support ends up costing the client hours it should not have.

    My first email, was one of two that was never responded to beyond an receipt. In that email, I requested a copy of the previous version of the plugin, 3.1.4. I also alerted WooCommerce to an issue with the 3.1.5 update.

    Yet twenty-three hours later I am in a six-hour circular argument later with “Happiness Engineers” who kept on focusing on the plugin conflict.

    There are three chats involved with this issue. Conveniently the six hour chat was heavily truncated. If someone at WooCommerce needs to read it, I will gladly send my full copy in support of a fair response to the client involved. What was forwarded after that long chat, left off the first six hours!

    I can’t imagine WooCommerce trains tech support to stall customers for six hours in chat?

    A Happiness Engineer suggested in chat and email, even if we rolled the site back, the issue might not be resolved. My comments that highlighted the process I used to assure as clean an install as possible, was used as a reference to suggest rolling back would not fix the issue, but 3.1.4 fixed it for everyone else.

    Again, confirmation the issue was known. Without any solutions coming from WooCommerce, I ended up rolling back to 3.1.3, which resolved the issue. That is where the site will be until this evening’s day of business ends across all time zones.

    Again, to begin to make this right for the client/owner, WooCommerce should extend the license for TRS running on the site in question, for a full five years (2028). That will at least cover the costs incurred by the client for the tech support runaround. I will eat the hours restoring the new attributes and variations once 3.1.6 updates and operates as expected.

    Plugin Support Sandip Mondal – a11n

    (@sandipmondal)

    9 months ago

    Hi there,

    We appreciate your feedback, and we acknowledge that there were opportunities for improvement in how we addressed your concerns. The focus on the plugin conflict was not an ideal resolution to your specific situation.

    We understand your frustration and the time you invested in trying to resolve the issue. We take your feedback seriously and your experience does not reflect the level of service we provide, and for that, we apologize. Please be assured that we are committed to enhancing our support quality to ensure a smoother experience for our customers.

    The new version of Table Rate Shipping was released. Should you have any questions or encounter any issues with this new version, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for assistance.

    Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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