WooCommerce.com now requires a WordPress.com account

Some of you might have spotted a change to WooCommerce.com made last week, on Thursday to be precise. WooCommerce.com now requires a WordPress.com account to manage your purchases, tickets and subscriptions.

tl;dr: We believe this change brings many benefits, and are dedicated to improving the account management experience for developers. If you need help merging a WooCommerce.com account reach out for help!

WordPress.com logins already have many of the characteristics that we were planning to add. In short, security and convenience. 

We’re always looking for ways of improving the security and protection of WooCommerce.com accounts because eCommerce has to be rock solid on that front (2FA authentication, for example).

We found that a lot of customers were using two accounts to access services from one company. To simplify that, we are centralizing on the WordPress.com login. Automattic has done this with previous acquisitions, like Polldaddy, for the same reasons. Now you can use only one login to access all Automattic services, including WooCommerce.com, Jetpack, and more.

What’s the response been like?

So far, mostly good. We’ve had over 10,000 successful logins in the new system so far, and are tracking a total of ~150 conversations, pings and feedback from customers across Facebook, Twitter, and tickets. Over half of the 1% of users who opened tickets were confused between having a WordPress.com login vs. the login they use for their self-hosted WordPress install (the old .com vs. .org confusion that crops up sometimes).

We haven’t had a chance to talk to everyone so far, but a common theme was questions from people managing sites for several clients.

This change has emphasized that the current WooCommerce.com system is not friendly to those needing multi-client management.

People have found workarounds for this, but none of these strategies are really ideal. Long-term, any changes we made to the login flow were always going to cause issues.

We had already re-prioritized a number of features on our roadmap to make life for developers managing dozens of client accounts much smoother, and hope to have something to be able to announce there soon.

If you’ve been particularly affected here, the specific tactics you should take will depend entirely on your approach to date. We encourage you to open a ticket for advice. And we encourage you to point out all of the advantages of WordPress.com accounts to your clients.

Have you made the switch over to WordPress.com log in? Here’s what Brad had to say.

If you’re having any trouble, we encourage you to open a ticket so one of our Happiness Engineers can lend a hand. Thanks for listening.

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Todd Wilkens