With much excitement, pride, and anxiety after such a long journey we can finally happily announce the release of WooCommerce.
For the last month, since the announcement of WooLabs/WooCommerce, Mike and Jay have been working like men possessed tinkering with every piece of code, adding valuable new core features, coding and collaborating on payment gateway, product and shipping extensions, and of course working on some beautiful themes.
A FREE E-Commerce Plugin
This is one of our biggest release to date and it’s absolutely free. WooCommerce is an all-new plugin application and library of integrated themes for WordPress that help individuals and businesses turn their sites into professional, e-commerce stores. Our aim for WooCommerce is to be an e-commerce toolkit that allows anyone to sell anything online. View the WooCommerce page to see all the powerful features packed into the plugin.
Since forking the previous Jigoshop codebase, we’ve made these notable additions / tweaks for the release of WooCommerce V1:
- A revamped admin interface, which is more native to the WordPress dashboard & thus more familiar to the average WordPress user.
- Improved reporting, with more stats, graphs and built-in support for Google Analytics e-commerce (goal) tracking.
- New front-end features, including catalog sorting and built-in up-sells / cross-sells.
- Revised coupon system complete with coupon expiry dates and usage limits.
- Built-in HTML email templates.
- Improved order management.
- Simplified product data entry plus better product sorting / duplication within the WP dashboard.
We also hired Mark Jaquith, WordPress core developer, who did a complete security audit of the core WooCommerce plugin, tightening up a few minor vulnerabilities in the meantime (similar to what we did for the WooFramework a while ago). This was a very important improvement for us, because we want WooCommerce users to feel safe in knowing that we’ve already addressed all of their security-related concerns with the plugin & e-commerce in general.
A FREE Store Theme
What better way to trial and test the WooCommerce plugin than with a theme built specifically for it?
Wootique is a beautifully, simple theme built to showcase your store’s products, with a user friendly, pixel perfect checkout process. Jay designed Wootique specifically for the launch of WooCommerce, as we’re big on freebies around here and we wanted to give you the most beautiful and fully-featured trial available.
We encourage you to view the theme listing for it’s full feature set and then register as a WooThemes user (it’s free!), if you aren’t already, to receive access to the theme documentation and to get on the WooCommerce product development email list. We’re building a community around WooCommerce and we want you part of this exciting new chapter in our storybook.
WooCommerce themes, WooCommerce child themes and extensions
We’ve decided to launch with 6 commercial themes and 9 commercial extensions to further extend your e-commerce store capabilities. We encourage you to view the WooCommerce themes and extensions galleries to discover all the juicy details.
Furthermore we’ve released child themes for Canvas – further adding to it’s diverse usage, and Statua – enabling photographers to sell their photos/prints.
Future plans include a lot of child theming of our theme catalog. Think of all the possibilities – Diner with a take-away ordering system, Diarise with event registration, Listings with paid listings…
Important information for club members
Club members get access to the new WooCommerce themes – WooStore, and Coquette, as well as of course the free theme Wootique. Our extensive, premium support is obviously included in these. Our WooCommerce child themes and extensions are not currently included with the club membership offering. We do however have plans to soon introduce a commerce add-on for a small additional monthly fee to gain access to the full catalog of commerce products. More on this soon.
Time to get excited about what the future holds for WooThemes.
About
Good job guys, will try it during the week ! 😉
WOW. Just wow…
Is that a good wow?
i thin it’s wowsers
Of course! Wasn’t expecting so many themes to go with it 😉
Just wanted to double check. I expect you have some ideas for them. 😉
None of the WooCommerce demo themes are loading though …. server overload?
@Rob – We’re on top of that now; trying to fix them up! Sorry about that, we should be back up shortly.
Looking forward to using these themes 🙂 looks like the demo page is struggling to display the themes right now – maybe to much excitement…
I think they have too much traffic, that shows the increased interest in a better to do eCommerce using WP … congrats
I thought the comments were off for a reason lol…. I’d be scared too. Plugin looks good, themes are great BUT (and yes there is always a but) I feel your extension pricing is a bit out of line and now wanting to charge club members extra for some of the themes is bad form in my opinion… Everything on this site says «access to all our themes» and it always has.. Going back on that isn’t a deal breaker but I do personally feel that it is a grab that reaches a bit too far.
Other than that, congrats on the release and best of luck with your new ventures.
Jesse,
I will elaborate on our decision with regards to pricing here:
* We felt that the WooCommerce themes (i.e. WooStore & Coquette) should be included, as they are parent themes and these have always been included in club subscriptions.
* The WC child themes (Canvas Commerce, Statua Commerce, Simplicity Commerce) are a new class of themes that requires specific & extended support. We felt it was justified that club subscribers should pay more for this.
* WC Extensions falls into the same decision as WC child themes.
This should also be seen in the context of the core WooCommerce plugin being free. We will be making all of these goodies available to club subscribers at a much reduced price via a «commerce add-on» to existing subscriptions at a small, additional monthly fee. For the club subscriptions as-is, we will also continue to underpromise & overdeliver.
Lastly, we feel that WooCommerce will power businesses and loads of people (club subscribers included) will be making money from this. As such, we don’t think it’s unfair to charge for these.
I take most of your points Adii, but not quite all of them. Plugins are a recent departure for Woo and have not been part of the Club Subscription deal.
But access to ALL the Woo themes has always been the reason I’ve kept my subs going.
Fair enough to move the goalposts for new Club members, but you can’t be surprised at there being disappointment from those of us who’d already bought in to the ALL themes offer. I like Max’s grandfathering suggestion.
Hi Adii,
Do you not think that for your existing loyal subscribers it should be included? 😉
If not, then i read your post as saying «We will be making all of these goodies available to club subscribers at a much reduced price via a “commerce add-on†to existing subscriptions at a small, additional monthly fee.»
Small additional monthly fee – how small? $5?
Thanks
Freddie
We’ll be publishing more details on this before the end of the week. I can however confirm that the small, additional monthly fee will indeed be small. 🙂
Fantastic Adii, I look forward to seeing the new structure 🙂
Adii,
I think you would have alleviated some of the negative feedback if you gave some notice and information to club members about the pricing structure (and say a discount at first).
You had to know that club subscribers were going to be shocked/disappointed in paying more and thus plan accordingly. We understand that you have business decisions to make, and I understand that charging for these features may be ‘justified’, but the communication and reasoning for this should have been better thought out.
I look forward to seeing the pricing details on this, but I can’t help but think that club subscribers have been left in the cold. After looking forward to this release for sometime, to say that I am shocked and disappointed is an understatement.
Always hoping for the best!
-Matt
I’d be happy to pay a bit more per month for full-access to everything. 🙂 Being able to try out themes is a big draw for me!
I agree with this completely. The reason we went «full boat» on the subscription model was so that we could experiment with ALL themes and plugins regardless of what nomenclature is used to make them «taste» different.
As a fellow premium plugin developer I fully understand the costs of support and producing a commercial WordPress product. We too are soon releasing paid add-ons and upgrades for our product line. However the main difference is that we charge a nominal 1x fee to «get in the door». $10-$25 for the product with no promises of free future updates. We are not putting out a subscription model to get «all our stuff now or in the future at no charge» specifically to prevent backlash like this if we find we need to generate more income to cover our higher overhead and R&D costs in the future.
Requiring a cannot-be-cancelled subscription service to guarantee free access to all future upgrades and product releases is a good idea. However, once you put that out there the service people paid for should should mean just that… free access to the cool new stuff. Your marketing of the Pro Dev Subscription comes across very strongly as «subscribe and NEVER CANCEL and you can get anything we do for free». Now WooThemes is playing the «we said you could get any THEME for free… this is a CHILD THEME… see… extra words there… CHILD… means not free». Ouch.
Hi Adii,
thanks for taking the time to reply. I do fully understand your motives and rationale for these decisions, I am just a stickler for details and I will be the first to admit that sometimes I take issue with things that really aren’t «that big of a deal» but I still tend to point them out even if they are purely an issue of principle.
In my view, a theme is a theme even if it is a child theme. Everything on this site currently and has always said that a club membership gets access to all your themes. Additionally you set the precedent by giving club members access to your enterprise themes so the rationale that these are somehow separate or different and thus require specific and extended support doesn’t really hold water.
Given that the plugin is free to all, there is no added value there for club members so that is a wash, the extensions would in my particular case make the final cost of how I would setup a woocommerce powered store to be $150 or more depending on the exact needs. I understand the «freemium» business model but there are more mature offerings presently available that are less costly. I think being highly competitive would be a core focus at this time but please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
I’m eager to see what the addon costs and I would say there is about a 98% chance that I will buy it BUT I like to make my opinions known, if for no other reason than to further the discussion and keep the lines of communication open. There still is nobody in the market that can hold a candle to woothemes in my opinion and I recommend you to anyone that will listen but I will also do my part to voice any concerns I have or hear from others during the course of my day.
PS.. people make money off everything you offer here, not just this plugin 🙂
I think it’s important to note that somewhere we needed to put a peg into the ground and differentiate our offerings going forward. Whilst we can continue to deliver 2-odd themes / month and make them available for $15 / $20 per month to club subscribers, this pricing model isn’t viable if we were to release everything we do for free to subscribers.
The development time (and associated cost) isn’t the issue here, but it is instead the support that becomes an issue. We’ve had to aggressively grow our support team in the last couple of months purely due to the more advanced themes (Enterprise), which has demanded more support. WooCommerce is probably bound to double this load on support.
I will be publishing more thoughts on this before the end of the week. For now, it’s important to note that we really value our club subscribers and we’re trying to make the decisions that is both fair to our subscribers and viable in the long term.
I agree plugins and their extensions are different Adii, but themes are not, no matter whether they are parent or child themes.
Woo does NOT want to become company whereby the members and the potential members have to read the fine print, you have not been that until now and you can see it has disappointed many Club Subscribers.
IMHO the correct course is to reverse the decision on themes and add additional monthly fees to subscriptions for plugins/extensions as well.
Just my two cents worth 🙂
I have to agree with Peter here. As a club member, and already getting the Parent themes of the child themes (I think I said that right…), to be told that we will have to pay more to be able to use a FREE plugin on a template that we have already paid for and developed are website on is not the best decision you can make for customers.
Just something doesn’t add up here.
I think most club subscribers would understand if the add-on functionality was behind a paywall. We also understand that at some point, you would have to make the difficult business decision to either 1. raise prices or 2. differentiate the club membership. I think the club subscribers are most shocked at having to pay for the child themes and the lack of communication.
You’d spend less on support if you documented your themes better. A lot of the questions are basic stuff which really should be included. I’ve also noticed recently that your support staff don’t read the questions properly so you end up wasting time explaining it and also I’ve had double postings from your staff – so your support needs sorting out. That would definitely cut your costs.
I am disappointed with this as well, I think you’ve upset a lot of your paying customers and have gauged this wrong.
Sarah, I hear you there. Which is something I think we’re addressing. We’re obviously hiring more support ninjas, and work on more quality responses instead of quantity of responses.
In regards to the documentation, do you say that more could be included or that our support needs to be more familiar with it?
While excited to see woocommerce finally released, I have to admit that I am also quite frustrated at the same time after reading this.
You guys know that I have been a very vocal supporter of woo and the $15/month that I spend here as the best investment I ever made when it comes to wordpress. Every time someone jumped in and complained about the fee I did my best to show just how much it was worth.
We have all waited over the past year for the woocommerce theme release and at NO POINT was it ever mentioned that our monthly fee would not include the extensions and child themes. In fact I would go as far as to say it was almost inferred that we were covered.
I’m so invested in woo with all of my customers now that I am sure I will end up purchasing the extras, but I guarantee that I am mumbling below my breath and more than a little disappointed with woo for the first time ever. It ain’t the money, and never has been.
While I understand your business decision, I sure hope you understand how many of us long term multi-year customers who have been waiting forever feel about this.
*Sad… this is the first negative comment I have ever left here. I can’t believe I’m actually going to click submit
Refer to my comment above: http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-has-arrived/#comment-74828
Ultimately, I can totally understand your disappointment, because this isn’t what you expected. That said, we’re trying to make decisions that are both fair to our subscribers and viable for us as a company. It’s a tough & thankless job; so we’re hoping that our subscribers will stick with us through this.
Adii,
If it’s a tough and thankless job, you considering handing over WooThemes to somebody else? Thought you enjoyed what you did. Your subscribers made you, your team and this awesome community. We don’t think we’re asking for a leg and an arm, but a reasonable adjustment to pricing for the community who has been with you through thick and thin and waited over a year for WooCommerce.
What is the rationale behind charging for the Authorize.net gateway, but not Paypal? Authorize.net is an incredibly common gateway that most of my customers use. As a club member, I second many of the comments here about disappointment and pricing, but aside from that I don’t understand your pricing approach on the add-ons.
I understand (while being disappointed and disagreeing with) charging for individual features like special shipping rules, but why select some gateways to be «premium» while others are free? Authorize.net isn’t a «value-add» to the client, they usually have a merchant account setup already or run through whoever their bank supports.
The child theme move is incredibly frustrating as a club member. The whole value of club membership was knowing (and being able to tell clients) we have access to everything on WooThemes.
I think you deliver a good product and am not mad enough to close my whole account, but my fanatical love is waning (much like Netflix after their recent decisions)
Only PayPal standard is included with the core WooCommerce; all other gateways need to be purchased.
I’m a capitalist & all for people making money. (I’m also a WooThemes fan!) However, Jesse’s argument is spot on.
In the spirit of open and honest discussion…
As a club member, what exactly is there for me to cheer about?! Support?
At the very least, I feel WooThemes could (and should) have issued a simple caveat early on – informing club members and others that WC child themes (etc) were going to be considered a ‘new class of themes’ – not included in club membership. Had this been the case, the release of WC wouldn’t smack of the ol’ bait-n-switch to so many of us.
Though disappointing, being charged more isn’t a deal breaker for me. Finding out about it in this way, however, has just been sort of a let down. In short, the highly anticipated release of WC has left me bewildered – sorta like getting kissed and slapped on the face at the same time.
First of all congrats! Looks really cool
I agree with Jesse, I honestly have kept my subscription going for over 12 months (I’ve been a member since forever) waiting on WooCommerce.
Hopefully you guys grandfather those of us that have had more than X months as club members.
I had not read your response to Jesse when I posted. Still feel that legacy club members could be treated differently.
Flipping awesome… ! FInally at last….
Will be testing all week.
Ciaos from Amsterdam
Super duper! I thought it was due for release tomorrow?
Nope, today is indeed the 27th! 🙂
Damn! You’re right. 🙂
I’m confused, do I have to purchase your gateway and extensions as well to make the eCommerce on these themes work? Or can I use another gateway or extensions?
I’m a subscriber and I really don’t want to purchase even more to get the themes to function correctly.
Aside from this, I am extremely happy Woothemes eCommerce has launched! I’ve been looking forward to this since I started using Woothemes. Thank you for your hard work.
The themes and extensions are independent of one another. You don’t need to be using a Woo Theme for the extensions to work. Likewise you don’t need to use the extensions for the themes to work.
Awesome. You guys never cease to amaze me! 🙂 Thanks again for the hard work and kick-ass themes.
Everything looks awesome but, like Jesse said, it’s almost the same be a club member than not be. The pricing is to hi and I think you should offer more to the club members instead of charging us more.
Anyway, congratulations, great job!
I’ve responded to Jesse’s comment above with regards to the club.
We’re planning some awesome new things for club subscribers in the next couple of months too. The value of the club will definitely continue to increase! 🙂
Very impressed to see so many themes and extensions released with woocommerce and the quality of the themes is very nice too.
Will wait for the full club plan to be released including all woocommerce child themes and then I think it is time I got myself a subscription 🙂
Thanks buddy 🙂
Hi all, the demo’s should be updated now. Have fun checking them out!
Awesome, thanks!!!!!
Outstanding work guys, I’m considering buying it right now just to be able to own it, even though I don’t have an e-commerce project currently on the horizon!
I wished her at times you’ll Magazine Themes give as much effort as your business and your sales-themes. I must say that since the beginning of this year, you have no theme releast what would stand out from the crowd. What is really sad.
and where’s the button I do not like?
one could even imagine that she does not respond to criticism
I had a little bit of a hard time making out your comment, but think I got the message. What kind of ideas did you have in mind for our magazine themes, or do you simply want more of them? 🙂
I would not say that I need more of Magazine themes. Only a good time would be appropriate. Somehow affect the Magazine Theme by Woo Themes but fairly uninspired. They usually come with a slider to large and therefore they will last under the posts. Individual classes are offered only rarely. It could incorporate so many extras in magazines themes. One runs along the outer edge of the Sharebar. A news ticker in the header. Similar news with pictures and not always this list. Like the button, Tweet button, Google Plus 1 button below the post. A small slider that sits right next to the sidebar and do not always go over the entire width. Also online, users will be displayed in the footer would be an idea or or or. Maybe you should take a longer time to worry about Magazine-themes and not only forever change the design only. Because the magazines themes look at you almost all the same. Wernn you need more ideas, I’m happy to help;)
Thank you! Woo is the best! I recently and foolishly tried a few other theme providers thinking they’d be similar and it only helped me realize beyond any doubt just how truly awesome this Woothemes is. Nothing I’ve uesed even comes close. So, I’ll be using Woo and no App, Yoo, or otherwise. Thanks guys. If ever in Tampa Fl. I’d be proud to buy you all a round.
Thanks so much, I’ll let you know if I get near Tampa, FL. I can have a round for all the WooTeam. 😉
I’m a club member. I paid the money up front and pay a bill monthly. I signed up because you did and still do advertise that club members have access to ALL the themes. This big release is finally here and now we’re told that the Canvas Child Theme, etc. won’t be available to club members, unless we pay extra? This is unacceptable. I defended Woothemes about the forking and everything, telling people that Woothemes is in the right because they only owe it to their business and to their paying customers to do what is necessary. A business doesn’t owe a «community» anything. And now Woothemes has me as a club member, based on my access to all of their themes, and they turn around and want to charge me for more content. Sad. It makes me want to change the statements in defense of them that I made previously.
I understand your disappointment, since you didn’t expect us to charge for WooCommerce child themes & extensions.
I have responded in detail about our decision here: http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-has-arrived/#comment-74702
I started a site with jigoshop, but haven’t been too excited about their support and have used purchased multiple woothemes in the past. Is there a way to migrate from the jigoshop plugin to the woothemes?
It will keep product posts + images, but you will need to re-enter product data (e.g. prices) and re-configure the store. There isn’t currently a dedicated importer script.
Perhaps you could test it out on a different install.
Please update your theme pages with correct info regarding the Statua child theme. It currently states one can buy the theme or join the club to access it. But as a club member, it is not available [i double checked].
Eg:
https://skitch.com/vjl323/fhkc6/statua-commerce-woothemes
This is seriously misleading, since it leads people to believe that one can either buy the theme directly or join the club but if they join the club, they are not allowed access to this theme.
Apologies about the confusion. We are working on a fix for the misleading buy buttons.
This site is really impressive. Glad I checked you guys out. Congrats on the new theme. Now, if you guys can make a quora-like or q&a, stack overflow theme that is really slick and scalable, I’ll be a member for life!
Pop the idea over to WooIdeas. 🙂 – http://ideas.woocommerce.com/
One more question: for example, if I don’t buy the paypal add-on, I can start selling? Sorry if this is a silly question, but I don’t have experience selling online.
PayPal standard is included. You can start selling without buying a thing!
I just read Adii’s post above after posting my other comment. What the heck? You feel it’s okay to charge more because people will be making money with the Commerce Themes? Do you think people weren’t making money with themes before that? You have «business» themes, right? I don’t even see the option for the commerce add-on yet, except to pay for a childtheme right now. Are you expecting people to pay for those now, and then profit more from a monthly add-on charge later? You have caused me to go from a very happy customer, who was patient with all the problems and hype with the release, and a defender of WooThemes decisions because of its smart business and dedication to its customers, to feeling cheated and trapped.
They’re offering an additional, entirely different product, that requires a different level and kind of support and is aimed at a different group of customers. I don’t think it’s in any way unfair of them to charge more for extra services that were never part of the WooThemes club package, and that go far beyond anything one could reasonably expect from the club membership.
To be honest, if the WooCommerce child themes and extensions were included in a normal membership, I don’t think WooCommerce would even be viable as a product – it seems unlikely that they’d be able to justify the vast amount of work that has gone into its development.
That said, you can be 100% certain that different developers will be creating free themes for the WooCommerce plugin – and that’s coming from one of those developers.
From the looks of it, WooCommerce might be a game-changer: the start of WordPress being a *true* contender as an ecommerce platform for small and medium business [1]. If anything, you should be happy that the basic plugin is entirely free.
[1] Because let’s face it: most of the existing options so far (e.g. getshopped/wp e-commerce) have been decidedly sub-par.
It seems like the PSD download links to WooStore and Coquette are not working. Could you take a look at it?
PSD’s are uploading right now.
Hey, now all you need to do with this integration is have a plugin that allows recurring payments such as for SaaS type companies. So, a company could use WooCommerce for the payment gateways and set 3 or 4 levels of recurring payments for SaaS solutions.
Just a thought.
I really like to surround myself with positive people, and that is why I use WordPress and Woo Themes. Thank you for all of the effort that went into this release. I really wasn’t expecting everything that you put in front of us today, but after I checked it out I am impressed. Very impressed!!!
The people that use your themes to make money, and then whine about having to pay a little extra, or you didn’t produce the theme they wanted I find that somewhat shameful. Here, they are provided with unsurpassed freedom to utilize an incredible system, and virtually re-brand it for a measly $20 a month max. Now that is an incredible deal; period, even if it were only the existing themes, not counting two new themes per month.
I for one am immensely grateful for everything Woo Themes helps my business do. Don’t change a thing, and do find new ways to add revenue to your stream IE (plugins) so you can increase the level of game you continually improve upon.
Will
There are a lot of positive people here, that’s for sure. I consider myself one of them and as I have stated before I am also a very satisfied, long time woothemes customer that finds great value in my monthly subscription. BUT details are details, a mans word is his word and when something is promised, even if it’s value is 1 cent I will point it out when that promise is not honored.
I am not whining, I will pay extra for the «addon» and be perfectly happy here as I have always been but I will always bring issues of concern to light in an open, friendly conversation about anything that I feel is not right, misleading or unfair. That is just how I live my life.
Jesse, I’m definitely glad to have people like you keeping us honest and being vocal enough to let us know if and where we misstep.
I take your criticism as a positive comment. 😀
Glad you see it that way because that is exactly how it was meant 🙂
I believe the only thing they ever promised me was two themes per month, but not a free ride on every endeavor they would undertake such as Woo Commerce. Every E-commerce vendor out there of any value charges for the enhancements that go beyond the free plugin functionality. I don’t see anything misleading about forking their business to include more than themes and getting paid for such efforts.
It’s not a matter of whining about extra charges, Will. WooThemes makes great themes and I have been pleased. But how do you run your business? Do you not forecast a cost of doing business. When you do, do you not care if that cost goes up unexpectedly?
The really concerning part of this is that it sets a precedent. The precedent will now be set that club members may be expected to pay more for whatever Woothemes decides on a whim to charge them for. How will Woothemes know what level they can do that to in the future? By testing. The test is NOW. As I see it, the test is to see how many frustrated club members are now purchasing those child themes anyways, and base future decisions about club members on that. It’s sad. The saddest part is that it wasn’t, and to some degree, still isn’t made very clear to current and potential club members, as someone pointed out above. Instead of listening to the few of us that are frustrated right now, we’re promised «more value in the future» for being a club member. I’m highly disappointed because I think most people were quite tolerant and understanding about the delays and problems in all this, and people like me even defended Woothemes highly for making its decisions based on its paying customers, not some fictional «community»..which is what it should continue to do.
I was delivered four new themes, and an E-commerce plugin this month. That is way over what my agreement is with Woo. The semantics of the Child Theme issue is a bit confusing I will grant you that, but nonetheless they delivered this month. I don’t see the issue with them expanding their business. That is what they must do to grow. They just increased their value today for my business, and I have the choice to expand with them or not.
Growing pains never feel 100% good.
Fantastic!! I just downloaded WooCommerce and Wootique, time to get started on some fun! 🙂
Great job guys, a lot of awesome additions from the current Jigoshop build. I have found a few bugs already regarding Variable products. How do you want us to report those?
Github please; https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce
Im happy for people to report them on github issues: https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce
Asking my self why i have the club membership when only one theme is good enough. The Canvas. And when the woocommerce is free… i don’t see any value to be a subscriber…
Sure the wooframework is quite good but the designs aren’t that wow and a few feels like they are tossed out just to keep the «2 themes per month»-promise…
Mattias, you’re always free to use the product that suits your need best from us.
If you count child themes we’ve put out 7 themes this month, not counting child is 4 themes. 😛
Exciting!
Is there or will there be a way to use WooCommerce as a catalog only?
How do you mean?
I know what hannah is talking about, think services like ejunkie, topspin. Also things like affiliate marketing or having a list of products that are one of a kind of customizable beyond the extent that is available.
Essentially, and correct me if im wrong Hannah(I’ve been doing this awhile) but she wants the ability to list products more or less as a nicely organized custom post type where she can put in her own code for buy now or add to cart buttons. For instance load up a sandbox virtual machine or local MAMP server and install wordpress and wp e-commerce. there is a option to disable checkouts, price listings, etc so that you can edit the code base to fit your own personal leeds
needs not leeds my bad 🙂
So using WooCommerce to sell affiliate products?
You go to create a product, put in the title, description, picture, then an affiliate link to where people can actually buy the product?
Is that right? 🙂
yes, like wp e-commerce’s off site product feature, except it would work correctly and not require lamb sacrifices
Yes! This would be great.
If we could add the affiliate link and instead of an «add to cart» button, it would be something like «get this product» or «download now» for software.
Thanks!
Actually I have a client that wants to have an online catalog of her products but without any functionality to buy them. I would however like to leave the option open for her to sell online down the road, so that’s why I’m interested in an eCommerce solution vs. just using custom post types.
There’s another free WP shopping cart plugin called «DukaPress,» Hannah, which explicitly allows for just the kind of funcationality you’re talking about. It’s nowhere near as impressive as WooCommerce, but it will definitely get the job done for now and, assuming nothing too complex down the road, even then, too!
Just as an FYI. =)
This is so awesome and thanks for the free theme to try it out on! I see a review in the very near future!
Keep us posted on the review. 😉
As a long term Woo themes developer club member, I do feel disappointed about the extra payment for extensions. Nothing in Woothemes build up to Woo Commerce lead us to expect extra fees for members. Woothemes seems to be mainly interested in bringing in new members rather than rewarding it’s loyal members. As others mentioned, an agreement is an agreement and to change it on a whim leads to bad feeling. And what happens to those club members who buy an extension at $50 and then later you bring in a membership price? Do they get their $50 back?
Agree, I think all club members would feel slighted here, over a year waiting, holding back projects and then a release that slaps them in the face.
Woo Commerce has been badly handled from its promotion over a year ago and now to its release, Adii comments on this seem also to be an afterthought and damage control.
Fair enough as far as extensions go but charging Club Members for these child themes is a ruse and I hope they rethink this. I have gone from a woo promoter to now very skeptical of the motives and business model
As a Club Member who has been waiting for months and months for a number of clients, I now have a choice, either spend the bucks and hope for some reimbursement when it is added tro club memberships.
For me Woo have treated club members as an after thought on this release and no explanations here make any sense – except for Woo!
Josse,
Your point about buying now and then buying again later is exactly what I was referring to as a «test.» We were told be be patient with all the problems, etc. and we were. When it was finally delivered, as a club member, we were excited to start out today. But instead, as a club member, we are now forced to either make a purchase or to wait for an increase in monthly costs….or BOTH. It’s hard to even make a business decision about it now. It would have been handled much better if they would have at least let us know about it in advance. As it is now, we don’t even know the future charge, and that’s why I believe it is a test to see what club members will put up with. If not, then they should be offering and telling us the monthly upcharge NOW, rather than cashing in on people’s frustrations with just wanting to get started. How about it Woo? What is the monthly upcharge going to be, and why isn’t it an option TODAY?
Totally agree with this, as a club member I am disappointed in Woo, why couldn’t you send club members a advanced email about the new pricing? Why don’t you know what the new price will be today?
If I want a listing theme:
I want to run a list of ***then click through to info much like simplicity does to give info and website of the owner.I want to be able to categorize these by State. And I want to charge advertising fees for the listing. Which new theme or older theme would you suggest? Simplicity has most of what I want but I cant categorize it the way I want to and there is no auto way to charge for it. Oh and I want to use video as well as photos on the click through.
thanks
Shoot us an email with some further detail, can help figure it out from there. 🙂 – info[at]woocommerce.com
Congradulations woothemes! But… I agree 100% with the other club subscribers that feel child themes and plugins should be included.
I too kept my monthly subscription going for a year in hope to finally see woocommerce, and now when it’s there you change the rules.
You say child themes are different, plugins too. Why, as Jesse mentionned, did you gave us access to your enterprise themes then? Why, if child themes are so different, do we have access to bookclub wich is a child theme of listings?
Sorry but I don’t see the value for us, long time subscribers, and this is really disappointing.
I absolutely see the value in all the themes. I don’t have problems paying for value, but at the current time, I believe the fact that we don’t have an OPTION to even be upcharged monthly today to have access and instead are required to pay more TODAY and possibly AGAIN is the reason for the loss in trust. Besides, there shouldn’t even be a trust issue with this stuff. But apparently there is now. Instead, hype has been built up in an attempt to have hyped up club members make multiple purchases today. It would have been easier to swallow if we were told about it and then had the option TODAY to be upcharged monthly and have a clear understanding about the future. It would have been frustrating, but acceptable. Currently, it’s not acceptable.
Nothing new in this comment. I am also a rather dissatisfied Developer Package Club Member. I understand wanting to make money and attract new clientele. However, I’ve felt a bit abandoned in the past few months.
Your argument makes no sense. You want to make money and attract new clientele, but want to make that tons of money marking up something free like woocommerce and not pay the extremely fair amount they’re proposing for extra functionality.
You’re critisizing them doing the same thing you wish you do.
Well done, Is this 100% customizable? If so, Which files should be edited to make this display one product on homepage like woot.com style?
Thanks.
Hi Buntu,
You can customize the plugin/themes to your heart’s content. Our codex might help you discover what functions/code control what – http://woocommerce.com/woocommerce-codex/
Thank you.
Please consider a plugin for multisite.. like:
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/supporter
For downloadable products, is there any way to do product key distribution?
I went to purchase the new Canvas child theme and I see you no longer use PayPal. Since that is not only my preferred method of payment but also my only method it has caused a bit of a stumbling block. Do you plan to use PayPal again as gateway and if so, when?
have you tried contacting woo themselves asking if you could pay by paypal for their product since you’re limited to using only paypal? I’ve been talking to the wooteam almost on a daily basis the past few days, sometimes more and they’ve been very responsive, I’m sure they’re willing to work out a method of payment for you if they’re willing to answer my developer questions without me offering any kind of payment ;p you should give them a try
Freddy,
As Joe Black has said definitely feel free to contact us. 🙂 – info[at]woocommerce.com
Adii,
Nice work on forking JigoShop to WooCommerce. The list of extensions you’ve created are all the more impressive.
It’s quite a shame though club members are left out on accessing child themes for WooComerce. Don’t understand how other child themes are different in terms of «specific and extended support». Aren’t child themes covered part of the club subscription? Aren’t they just extended templates of an existing theme? As you «don’t think its unfair to charge for child themes»; do you think it’s fair on the club members part to pay extra for a child theme, whereas nothing extra for WooCommerce parent theme? How is the child theme significantly different? What value add does, charging a WooCommerce child theme, provide to club members?
Yes, the extensions most definitely, need to be charged separately as they are in themselves dedicated functions/modules/plugins, that requires a little more TLC.
Not asking for a bag of goodies here, just stating my opinion and asking you guys to be reasonable. Belief is that your product pricing mix for the WooComerce package (child themes specifically) needs tweaking.
+1 Jesse on the child themes.
I have to admit I am feeling disappointed.
I’ve been waiting for WooCommerce for over a year (http://woocommerce.com/2010/10/the-good-and-the-bad/) and have been stalking the WooThemes blog for months watching for updates.
When WooCommerce was was announced last week I was hugely excited. I’ve had plans in place to build two WooCommerce sites on launch day.
So when I woke up this morning and checked the blog (before getting out of bed because I was so excited about this) I was surprised and disappointed to see that the plugins and themes an additional fee.
Not only that but it currently costs MORE as a Developer Club member because I have to buy them in addition to my monthly club membership.
I had expected that WooCommerce would be a $200 theme like listings, estate or supportpress and that it would all be included for free for club members. To my knowledge there hasn’t been any mention of additional costs in blog posts about Ecommerce in the last 15+ months?
I can understand the use of the freemium model – it makes good sense. With WooThemes reputation for exceptional quality and support you’re guaranteed to be flooded with people trying the base WooCommerce theme & plugin for free and then upgrading. It makes good business sense.
But yes, I’m disappointed to discover that WooCommerce is going to be an extra cost to club members when this has never been mentioned before today.
To build the two WooCommerce sites I have planned will currently cost an extra $160 in plugins – I’m assuming I can buy plugins once and reuse on both sites or it will cost even more.
In a perfect world it would be great to see the suggestion made above to grandfather in longer time club members to get all of WooCommerce included in their club membership.
Charging «a little extra» for WooCommerce on top of the club subscription is fine as long as it’s «a little extra» like $5. $10 or $20 extra. I know I’m going to feel let down and / or resentful to be paying 50% or 100% more on top of my Developer membership to get access to WooCommerce that I will use for 15% of the websites I build.
Do you know when you’ll have the Woo Club Members access to WooCommerce ready? I don’t want to pay out $160 for plugins today if it’s going to be available for $5 in a few days.
As always WooCommerce looks amazing – thank you for bringing it to us and I hope you can find a bit more of a win-win solution for club members who have been waiting on and supporting WooThemes with regard to WooCommerce.
Thanks!
When all is said and done. JigoShop looks like the better option if Im paying for it.
Bummer you guys are making Club Members feel like we’re being screwed here.
Emil, after reading this hope that this changes your mind. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
I think woocommerce looks great but I can see why people are getting upset about this.
One thing I did notice: On the woocommerce themes page there is a text heading / banner beneath the woocommerce themes that says ‘Join our club and get them all from only $125’.
The above statement definitely looks like the child themes are included so would advise that this be changed.
I think charging for the plugins is fair and I think charging for the child themes would have been fair but this should have been clarified from a much earlier stage.
Hi guys!
Congratulations for the launch!
Any plans for a plugin allowing to import categories, tags and products, along with all the related info ( SKU, price, weight, images, etc…) from, let’s say, a CSV file?
This remains the main blocker for anybody willing to use any commerce plugin with a serious catalog ( i.e. thousands of products, hundreds of categories ) .
There are a few import plugins for other e-commerce solutions on WordPress but they work poorly, and there are generic importers that are not easy to use with e-commerce plugins.
You could really make a difference out there with such an importer actually working as expected!
Just my two cents…
WooCommerce is built upon core WP architecture. Ergo you can export (and import) data to/from an XML file like any other WP powered site.
Add a few products, export the xml and open it up in your text editor of choice. Should be self explanatory from there 🙂
Yes, of course, we can generate a WXR file from the catalog. It’s just boring and it is something that anybody with a big catalog has to do.
That was just a suggestion for a premium plugin that could sell very well and get a lot of people to pick to your solution.
Great job guys. I’m amazed at the whinging from people. It shows an utter commercial naivety to think you should sell everything for a cheap subscription. I guess you will weigh up if there are enough whingers to have to reconsider your pricing policy but I for one think you’re doing the right thing.
Me too I wouldn’t budge, any developers you lose because of such a petty issue aren’t a fraction of the business you’re going to gain from such a substantial plugin and to sell yourself short in the beginning is to limit your resources you can put back into development in the long run. I’d happily pay more, the whining comes from people who aren’t developers/entrepreneurs because if they were they’d understand.
Joe, Steve,
There’s no ‘whining’ here. There are better things to whine about. Most long time club members feel we are shortchanged on the child themes, and most of us also agree that extensions to the plugin need to be charged extra since they are special functions and require dedicated support.
Child themes are what they are, ‘Child Themes’. Templates that derive the power from the Parent Theme, add more functionality and provides a good base to work from. If you look at the Free Theme provided with WooCommerce, an example: shortcodes are used to display recent product listings. It doesn’t really makes sense to pay extra for a Child Theme that does some of this basic functionality. Besides, there’s a club community that’s been with WooThemes for a fairly long time and they’ve never been told child themes are extra ontop of the monthly membership.
There’s no doubt here that WooCommerce has taken a commerce plugin to the next level, much to the amazement of the WordPress Community.
Having said that, no-one’s asking for cheap deal, but a fair one. Most of us are developer/entrepreneurs and we do understand how costs work, but not to the point where you backtrack on your word to a community that supports you.
i need to take the site im working on offline to non developers so i can install this real quick, i wasn’t really planning on buying themes because I’m a very do it yourself guy unless someone wants something done super cheap and is an ass of a client, then they get what they pay for hehehe.
im sure if you just look at the source file witht hte widgets you can cut and paste those widgets into any theme with little modification.
Update for club members can be read here. 🙂 – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Are you able to add variations and options that affect pricing using woocommerce?
For example – I am selling art prints at various sizes.
s – $100
m – $200
l – $300
I would als like the option to select framing according to size
s framed – $225
m framed – $350
l framed – $500
Is this possible within one product?
Yup, variations are definitely possible. Definitely have a play with it. 🙂
What is the rationale behind charging for the Authorize.net gateway, but not Paypal? Authorize.net is an incredibly common gateway that most of my customers use. As a club member, I second many of the comments here about disappointment and pricing, but aside from that I don’t understand your pricing approach on the add-ons.
I understand (while being disappointed and disagreeing with) charging for individual features like special shipping rules, but why select some gateways to be “premium†while others are free? Authorize.net isn’t a “value-add†to the client, they usually have a merchant account setup already or run through whoever their bank supports.
The child theme move is incredibly frustrating as a club member. The whole value of club membership was knowing (and being able to tell clients) we have access to everything on WooThemes.
I think you deliver a good product and am not mad enough to close my whole account, but my fanatical love is waning (much like Netflix after their recent decisions)
Consider this. Woocommerce is honestly worth $150-300 or more imo, the fact taht its free lets people get their small businesses off the ground and benefit non-profits. Authorize.net is a serious business e-commerce solution and I’ve worked with it myself before. If you don’t want to pay for a cheap plugin that will only be used mainly by big businesses and corporations then as a develope rwhy don’t you code one yourself? Use their API, read their code, I’m sure you can come up with a solution yourself. Nobody is shoving it down your throat
Is WooCommerce PCI compliant?
PCI compliance is not on the plugin end of things, its more to do with your server environment and setup, payment gateway and how you process and/or store your customers credit card information.
Hopefully you guys are still reading blog posts and can answer this one quickly.
I just need this for to «showcase» the client’s products and so far it seems to be working, except I don’t see how to get the product image to show:
http://www.amywilliamsdesign.com/clients/salemfoot/shop/aircast-walking-boot/
Also having trouble with the sidebar… woocommerce will definitely need more set-up documentation 😀
Looking good so far.
Now, about that Canada Post module so I can use it on real ecommerce sites….
Plenty of setup documentation over here; http://woocommerce.com/woocommerce-codex/ 🙂
The way it’s coded, the sidebars aren’t intuitive. I finally jury-rigged it to work but it was a bit of a PITA.
Documentation doesn’t say anything about needing to log out and back in to get «use as featured image» to show 😉 Just sayin’!
Hopefully the bug that I posted on the forums for the image sizes gets fixed soon.
that’s nice, but all I get is a «You gotta pay money for this» page.
So far I’ve spent a good portion of today playing with the plugin & like it, but the lack of documentation/help inside the plugin is off putting.
I cannot set this up with a friend/family member/client – who will hound me with questions about «what is a simple vs a grouped?» when I have no clue myself, or I have paid woo for a simple definition of what it is.
I do appreciate the plugin, if I can figure it out I can see setting several people up with it (purchasing extensions for many), but I’m looking at this thinking where is the most basic help in here?
luke, when in doubt use the «source» 😀
Woo Commerce for Club Members
1. When will this be available to your Premium Clients – Club Members?
2. If we purchase themes now, will we be reimbursed once subscription is ready?
3. How often can the Extensions be used once purchased?
1. I’ll try to get some more information for Club Members ASAP.
2. I’d recommend holding off on any purchases as a club member, at least until further news.
3. The extensions should be useable on an unlimited number of sites, Mike or Jay correct me if wrong. 🙂
I am 100% behind you guys except for this oversight, and think it should be on the top of the list. Once this is rectified, I think an email to subscribers should be issued so we know when we can get the whole package, the added cost, and any other things we should know about this release of products.
Thanks
Thanks Ryan
Peter & Will, hopefully you’ve seen this post clarifying club options. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Great job here guys –
Question: Can I use both my BuddyPress as well as WooCommerce Childthemes fro my Canvas site?
Do you plan to release a USPS shipping plugin for WooCommerce?
Good question. Haven’t seen an answer on this anywhere.
Is USPS shipping available for it?
Absolutely great!
But I miss the Air theme… I absolutely love it. But Wootique is fine, too. I use it, but not in a shop. 🙂
Awww, at least it’s totally free huh? 🙂
Both Air and Mercato are in the pipeline but we’re working on a responsive eCommerce theme next.
I like Wootique, perfect for one of my sites. The shop functions are easy to remove (but the plugin is necessary).
Great, Air is coming soon… I think it’s a design masterpiece!
thank you for prioritizing this.
The Air theme will definitely be coming very soon! As will another stunner from Chris Rowe.
Please add the «Product to Media Link» extension to the Woo Themes playground.
Thanks!
I’m checking into the possibility of this. 🙂
Lol. I like WooThemes and how I’m working with the Canvas theme but man, I’m pleased I stuck with JigoShop and its Canvas Child Theme (which is essentially what this is). Seems it worked out cheaper for me. I do feel bad for those who signed up anticipating they would enjoy the benefits of a free and good e-Commerce solution for WordPress. I also bought the Table Rate extension for JigoShop.
Don’t know what to say. It’d be awesome to have everything under the WooThemes roof, so if things change I still might make the transition. But, for now, JigoShop is essentially doing (I think) pretty much what this is doing.
I always would go with what works best for your needs, we always hope to persuade you though as time goes on. 😉
Look forward to hearing what you think as time goes on.
Any chance of recurring payment options anytime soon? 🙂
It’s on our radar. 😉
I purchased the club membership with the knowledge that A)it included everything and B) WooCommerce was coming down the pipe and now you tell me that my club membership isn’t everything.
Wish I would have known that before I signed up. WooThemes just lost a lot of future-proofing credibility with future subscribers, IMO and will lose some memberships.
Progress is part of the standard-operating-procedure of any design/application based company so it was expected that the membership included the progress. Why not just let current members grandfather in as a reward for loyalty?
I would agree that more pre-launch knowledge would have helped our subscribers, our apologies. We’ll be putting forward more information very soon regarding club subscribers and WooCommerce.
The only argument I can completely agree with was the argument that it wasn’t made clear how pricing would be handled. However nobody is holding a gun to these peoples heads saying they have to pay a monthly fee to get access to canvas either.
I can’t think of how many «$300 gets you lifetime access or updates» offers i’ve seen over the years only to be nulled and void once the company gets sold to a third party who only inherits their assets not liabilities.
And as a developer how many things have you had to learn by reading the source and comments(if those were even available?) This is their initial release people! Documentation will most lkely be a wiki effort. This is to get the product out there to the developers who can beta test and submit bug reports so they can provide a solid product, formal documenation, save the comments in the code itself is typically last priority for these products.
Your right no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to pay monthly to get access to Canvas or the other amazing Themes. So why hold a gun to those who are already paying monthly subscription?
The plugin is not a beta test. This is past beta, since it went GM from JigoShop, so saving documentation as last priority is probably not in the best interest of the developer community.
from what i understand the developers didn’t spend months sittng on their butt running regex’s to replace jigoshop with woocommerce in the source code. i could do that in 10 seconds. from what i can see there is alot of added functionality so in that respect as a new product, even if its a gm, there are goign to be bugs to stomp out, alot, and most of those will likely be found during regular daily use by the community, im sure they don’t have a bugtracker up for no reason. 😀
i really don’t know many companies that do web apps that dont save documentation until the last, if they do it at all, half the time they develop it, release it on sourceforge or git, and let the users create a wiki themselves, until then you can read source comments.
if you can’t deal with no documentation then ask for the cost of woocommerce back…..pretty sure thats $0.00
Here’s the update for anyone who’s not read it yet. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Hello WooTeams,
How to fixed this error I am experiencing right now, after I installed the WooCommerce plugin my WordPress dashboard wont open. Its a blank page.
Please help.
Thanks,
Julius
Delete the plugin via FTP then check the readme for min-requirements. If you still have problems, post on the forum.
Really can’t believe I walked in on a pity party here. I’ve had a subscription for 3+ years now and I don’t even remotely see the issue with WooThemes deciding to draw a line in the sand on this one.
WooCommerce has been a very well documented money drain for the company and I’m sure the two new developers didn’t come cheap. We only pay a measly $15 a month. For anyone to insinuate that they can not make a business decision because of the change in cost forecasting is asinine.
Here’s a little tidbit… If you can’t cover the cost of the subscription going up a few bucks than you aren’t charging enough. There’s zero chance you are implementing such a dynamic cart solution for a client and can’t afford a few extra bucks to help off set the cost and the great new child themes.
If you really can’t then just use the pre bundled one’s they have offered to subscribers. Not seeing the problem…
Today should be a day to celebrate along with WooThemes, one of the few standard raisers in the WordPress game. I’ve used this plugin for 4 hours and can already tell they’ve sent the competition back to the drawing board. wp-ecommerce, shopp, etc have all just ben one upped. Let’s all kick back and just be happy we finally have a legitimate shopping cart plugin we can use and it’s free for everybody!
Thanks WooThemes, you guys are the best…
Michael,
I can’t speak for everyone here but in my case, this has absolutely nothing to do with cost, profit, expense or any monetary concerns.
Knowing what I know today, I would sign up right now and pay $100 per month for what I get with my club subscription presently (don’t get any ideas) and have stated over and over again that this is not about money.
I fully understand the challenges any business can face, I also understand that a business can change the way they do business at any time. My only concern here is the way that the woocommerce child themes are being somehow separated from the «you pay this and you get every theme we ever make» line that was and still is all over woocommerce.com if you see that sentence as meaning «pay this and get every theme we ever make until we decide to change our mind» then I would recommend an eye exam 🙂
Michael, it’s not a pity party.
It’s customers expressing disappointment in the way this has been presented to Developer Club members.
As I said in my above post I don’t mind paying a little extra each month for WooCommerce access but I’m disappointed to find out only on the day it launches that there will be at an extra cost to Club members. This was never hinted at before today.
In fact, we were told that WooCommerce *would* be included in the subscription last November:
http://woocommerce.com/2010/11/woocommerce-update/#comment-52564
It’s also a little frustrating that as an Developer Club member I can’t fully build two WooCommerce websites I had scheduled for today / tomorrow because the availability and access of the paid themes / plugins hasn’t yet been established.
Yes, I know it will most likely be sorted out in the next few days.
So it’s not that people are upset about paying a little extra each month for WooCommerce. It’s that the extra cost pricing has been announced on launch day when every form of marketing for WooThemes has always indicated an «all inclusive» subscription for Woo products, including WooCommerce.
I do feel that the PR side of this launch could have been a whole lot better with a blog post and / or community discussion regarding additional costs for WooCommerce.
As always the Woo Team do an outstanding job and I’m very excited about making use of WooCommerce once the issue of access to the extensions / themes as a club member is sorted out.
See I guess that’s what I’m confused about. I downloaded WooCommerce and had it working in a few minutes without ANY additional money being spent. If you’re upset that you can have the extensions for free than what is different between WooCommerce and any other cart plugin for WP?
I agree that the PR side could have been handled better but I don’t doubt that this decision was still being discussed in the 11th hour.
As far as the WooThemes monthly «all you can eat plan» I was honestly surprised that SupportPress and FaultPress were included in our membership. You could tell that they were of a dramatically different level of development than the run of mill magazine theme.
I don’t think it’s fair to say «every product you make from here on out should be covered» as the WooCommerce plugin, extensions, and specialty themes required a significant undertaking to bring to market. Keep in mind half this stuff is F.R.E.E.
It’s all just a download away. I didn’t stop me from developing anything today…
I have downloaded WooCommerce but I can’t yet download extensions that I want to use on sites – Table Rate Shipping, 2Checkout, Pay Per Product Shipping etc.
Until access for Club members is determined my only options are to pay full price or wait.
Not much sense paying $160 now if I find out I can get them for $10 in a few days, right?
I 100% agree with you – the WooThemes club subscription is an amazing deal. As I said twice – I don’t mind paying a bit extra for WooCommerce each month.
My frustration (as shared by others) is that it was always implied both indirectly (by never mentioning otherwise) and directly (see the blog link I posted above) that WooCommerce was included in the club subscriptions and I was disappointed to discover this wasn’t the case.
It seems to me that the original intention was for WooCommerce to be included in the club subscriptions and rising support costs forced the Woo team to reexamine the pricing model.
Providing support is very expensive especially for complex themes like WooCommerce so that’s completely understandable.
However, announcing that WooCommerce costs extra on launch day wasn’t the best PR move 🙂 A heads up blog post or open discussion in advance would have been a better idea.
I think we’re pretty much in agreement on this. The only thing I would quibble with is the implication that WooCommerce isn’t free. WooCommerce is 100% free, there are extensions that you would like to use that are not free.
I definitely agree with you that we (subscribers) were put in a tough spot. Pay full price or wait until we figure out what’s fair.
Like I said though I really wouldn’t be surprised to find out this decision came down to the final hours.
The WooThemes team is so superb in so many areas including transparency that I’ll continue to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This entire episode will no doubt be covered in a «what I learned» post from Adii in a few days, I’m sure 🙂
So, not only do you ‘fork’ another free plugin and rebrand it as woo but you also renegade on your own deals and charge extra for it.
Good going on the ‘breaking the loyalty and trust’ there fellas.
Seriously, apart from the flash banner, renaming files as woo and some extra payment gateways – what’s the difference between jigoshop and woocommerce?
There are quite a few differences already – listed on the WooCommerce home page. Doing a quick compare to JigoShop there are some features included in WooCommerce that are paid extras for JigoShop – HTML emails, upsells & cross sells for example.
So I’m sure the Woo team will do us proud over the next few months with new features and improvements.
Here’s the list from the home page:
A revamped admin interface, which is more native to the WordPress dashboard & thus more familiar to the average WordPress user.
Improved reporting, with more stats, graphs and built-in support for Google Analytics e-commerce (goal) tracking.
New front-end features, including catalog sorting and built-in up-sells / cross-sells.
Revised coupon system complete with coupon expiry dates and usage limits.
Built-in HTML email templates.
Improved order management.
Simplified product data entry plus better product sorting / duplication within the WP dashboard.
Like Phill said we’ve already been working hard in differentiating the plugin. This work, I’m sure, will only continue as we grow it. 🙂
Here is a post clarifying club subscriptions & WooCommerce. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Thank you WooTeam!
WooCommerce looks so awesome I could kiss you all right now! 😉
I’m a little concerned about the price increase for Club Members, but if Adii says it will be small… fingers crossed it will be. I know that a LOT of extra work went into making this happen and there are costs involved in that. If it costs me an extra few bucks a month, I think it will be worth it because it will open some doors for us and for our clients.
I have spent many (otherwise billable) hours trying to find eCommerce plugins that do what I want, and many more trying to force them to do what I need, so if WooCommerce lives up to its promise (I’m just testing now…) it’s freeing up time I can charge for. It might actually put some coins in my pocket, in the long term.
To those Woo Members who are stressing about the increase in price, I hope you’ll consider that your situation might be similar, and that you’ll give the WooTeam some space to grow their business in the same way we’re all trying to. It depends on the final decision regarding the extra cost & usage, of course, but I’m sure the WooTeam will be fair.
Thank you again, Woo, I think you’ve outdone yourselves.
ditto on the uncountable unbillable hours trying to make polish a turd of a plugin which is every other plugin that does e-commerce in wordpress currently, making it not a viable and agile option to monetize products based on a blogs content.
Laura, just FYI read here. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/ 🙂
Hi Woothemes,
First off, congratulations on the launch of your new plugin. There has been much activity today about pricing etc. and I would not want to get into that discussion, as I am not a Club Member.
However, I would like to address a couple of other (marketing) things. I have been looking for a good, working eCommerce plugin to use with my WP themes and I have tried a great deal of them (Shopp, WP eStore, WPEC, Cart66, you name it), but I always run into support issues. Questions not answered, or arrogant answers. I then run into jigoshop and then into Woocommerce and I think these have great potential. The features important to me in a plugin are the variation control and shipping capabilities, especially to cater to European shipping companies who use complex weight shipping rules.
So I am happy when I see Woocommerce released and the mention that it is
«An e-commerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.
Transform your WordPress website into a thorough-bred online store. Delivering enterprise-level quality & features whilst backed by a name you can trust. Say hello to WooCommerce.»
As mentioned earlier, I do not use Woothemes, but themes bought at Themeforest. Simply because I had been there for a while before I came to know about Woothemes. Anyways, I downloaded the plugin and gave it a run with two themes I have, but out of the box, the plugin wouldn’t work very well at all.
I know it is not possible to make it work with each and every theme out there, but i was a bit surprised to see a lot of layout issues. So I was not able to «transform» my website into anything. Luckily I did not try this on my live server.
With the Twenty-Eleven theme and Wootique, it works fine. And as you’ve mentioned, it will also work with your other themes. I don’t know if this is meant to drive people to purchase your themes (nothing wrong with that), but then the messaging is not completely accurate.
I then tried to see if I could use the forum, but I can only do so if I purchase something. Where I understand that some tweaking might be needed to get the plugin to work with my themes (maybe due to all the different frameworks available), I do not know how to get basic help on this.
Going forward, what is your take on using this great plugin with themes not made by Woothemes? How would support be done for that?
cheers
tdako
Tdako,
The plugin itself should work fine on any WordPress install, your issue was most likely styling issues, and like you said we can’t test it on every theme.
If familiar with CSS you can fix those issues, I’m assuming they were only CSS issues though. May have been other issues too. It’s hard to tell, especially with themes from Themeforest who’s quality has been hard to assure even if they are getting better. 🙂
Very sorry for the misleading message.
Great Job WooTeam! WooCommerce really looks so awesome. I think WordPress > Magento lol 🙂
We’re working towards that. 😉
I Shared the common feel of feeling left alone as a club member. When the forth birthday came you give a great discount to every new user and told us a that in a month we’ll be compensated, but nothing happens!
And now you don’t give us too much preferences. I think you are think more in making more money than compensate the loyalty of your clients.
Hummm.. but at the same time I’m still happy about the WooComerce, strange mix of feelings. LOL.
Alejandro, this post should clarify with some good news. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Congrats on the new release. This is my take on what’s fair to existing club members.
If the biggest issue is simply the cost of supporting the new ecommerce themes then offer existing club members the option of either being able to download the new themes at no extra cost, with no support.
Or, to pay an additional monthly fee if they do want support on those themes.
This is fair because you don’t have to then provide support to people who don’t pay for it, and we don’t have to pay for support if we don’t want or need it.
can someone do an in depth technical analysis on how WooCommerce compares to Shopify? I’m about to decide which platform to use and want another perspective.
Love it, but as a paying club member for about 2 years, and being told that we get every theme you guys put out, I am little disappointed in the pricing structure and that loyal club members do not get the features.
A lot of my projects were waiting on the WooCommerce plugin to be released and I was expecting the features to be included. As club members, we not only pay for themes already released, but for future developments and releases as well. That is a perk of being a club member.
Some of those add-ons are essential for a store and it seems as if they are being withheld behind a paywall because you know that they are necessary features.
Also, the fact that there was no communication or notice until the end of the blog post (or even early opening) is quite confusing. I know that with this new release, you are hoping for a lot of new customers, but you can do that without turning a blind eye to your current customers.
You guys know that I am your biggest fan, and I love the work you guys put into this, but I can’t help but have a bad reaction to how some of your most loyal customers can be treated like this.
I will wait to have final judgement until I see the final details for club subscribers, but why this can’t be told now and we have to ‘wait for a new release of information’ is just frustrating.
Hopefully you’ve read this now Matt. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
This is ridiculous.
It would be like if Sports Illustrated was selling subscriptions and had hints at the Swim Suit edition and then all of a sudden the swim suit addition comes out and then they say «we separated it so you have to pay extra.»
Ethics are important to me so I will be dropping woothemes and will be encouraging clients to look elsewhere because trust is broken. Woothemes should have immediately grandfathered existing club members into everything.
Some kind of «club.»
good lucks on the elsewhere, if you have a few weeks of time to waste that you can never bill for by all means try the other options available on wordpress. Or get innovative yourself and use their base code to build your own package. They’re merely offering you a shortcut.
JD, please do read our latest blog post. Should help clarify club subscribers options now. 🙂 – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
I don’t have a problem paying an extra fee for this each month (on top of my club subscription). I don’t think people realize the magnitude of WooCommerce. It’s an entire e-commerce platform…not a theme.
I bet most people didn’t even look at all the features before they thought «What I gotta pay more!». You guys probably should have posted a video right in this post detailing every little thing about this beast.
In the end, you guys blew the pitch and positioning here (not necessarily the pricing…depending on what you decide to charge for the upgrade for existing members). You probably should have put this on its own domain (woocommerce(dot)com). And invited your current customers / club members to «grow» / «expand» their business with you by upgrading.
Just for further clarification, do read this post. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Haha I’m sure the Woo guys were fully prepared for the backlash to hit on this one. Personally I’d be a little annoyed if they were asking club members to pay full price on everything, but that’s not the case… unless you have to have it TODAY RIGHT THIS SECOND NOW NOW NOW 😉
They rolled everything out as soon as it was ready which means they still have some details to iron out. Everyone needs to chill out and wait to see how much of a price increase club members will actually be faced with.
I’m sure that everyone complaining wouldn’t be doing anything different if the shoe were on the other foot. Supporting this new type of theme, a free e-commerce plugin, and premium extensions is going to be a giant undertaking… would any of you do it for free? Doubtful.
WooCommerce is looking pretty great so far but I’m holding off judgement for a while. It’s brand new guys! Let them work things out!
Here’s our update if you’ve not seen it yet. 🙂 – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
WooCommerce looks great, and yeah, I am disappointed with how this has been presented to Club Members, and also all of the misleading sales copy on the site.
I wish Woo was better prepared to present their plans to their loyal club members at the time of release of WooCommerce, and this is definitely one area that Woo should consider hiring PR and Legal representation so they can do a better job of managing expectations of their customers.
Looking forward to the Club announcement.. and trying to be patient =)
Anyone launch a complete WooCommerce store yet?
Gerry, do read here for more info :). – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
I spent a good deal of time reading through all of the posts here and also the reaction on Twitter. I think I can come to a conclusion based in these responses.
1. Woo has certainly lost trust with many of their club members, as a Club member myself I was quite surprised at how this was positioned. You need to win this back, and sometimes this means eating some humble pie.
2. I think Club Members (for the most part) understand the additional costs with the Plugin and the extensions.
3. The Child Themes extra cost are a no winner for Woo, charging Club Members for this is bad for business and a departure from the great trust you have built up over the years.
You have thousands and thousands of Club Members and they not only give you a valuable bedrock of solid residual revenue, they also in the past have enthusiastically promoted you on Facebook and to a greater extent Twitter.
A problem you maybe facing is a deal you did with the guys on revenues from the acquisition to bring everything into woocommerce. I am sure if this is the case, you can sit down with them and work something out.
IMHO this is what should be done. Almost immediately add the themes to Club Members for free (now and ongoing), add another level of subscription for $5 – $10 per month for Club Members to also get Woo Commerce and Extensions.
Doing the math on this, is pretty easy. You guys are currently numero uno in this space and you should desperately went to keep it this way, you service to this date has been amazing, your themes second to none!
My father once said, that you only get one Oath, never break it, this does not count for little things in life, but it counts for a helluva lot for important things.
online business is not so cut and dry as business was a few years ago, let alone when your father told you that. I personally have gotten some of the best advice from my father and mother as far as business goes but guess who they come to now that their businesses are failing and they don’t understand why?
In short, there are many more dynamics involved now in the globalization of the market and social media alone. Expectation surely are different.
Values and Ethics do not change Joe Black. This is the same in business today, you stand by your Oath or you are nothing.
In the past you went to the corner store and you knew the owner. Today people hide behind false names 🙂
I’m not exactly familiar with the oath they took, you have a link to it? did you read the TOS? did it include a provision that the item in question could change in the future? I take business values and ethics seriously btw. So not to discount what you said, just perhaps i dont understand what you’re referring to.
Business ethics was drilled into me by my parents who were attorneys and not the ones you wish you could throw in a trunk and drop in the ocean, the kind of people that would give a bank back money if they counted it out wrong.
On the same subject, do you happen to use facebook or ever used myspace in the past? you notice how many times they change their policies? Do you use iTunes? How many times have you had to re-agree to their new terms of service when updating? I think I’ve agreed to that damn thing 20 fucking times at least this month, so much that you dont even bother reading it, it could say they have power of attorney over you and 99% of ppl wouldn’t notice it. ;p
I havn’t bought any themes for woocommerce myself, i develop my own stuff, but anyone that has, is there really that much that’s been added to the child themes? sounds like something people could make themselves pretty easily, just open up the child themes to see what’s been changed. if its a child theme it will all be in the css file and functions file mainly. is there alot of new code? is it different across themes except for the namespace itself?
I guess my point is, if woo made a huge fuckup by charging for something they shouldn’t have or isn’t justified, then surely people will notice and show their disappointment by releasing a a script that child themes any theme for woocommerce and open source it. that or cancelling memberships. That’s all within the right for anybody to do.
If however these child themes have taken an extensive amount of time to develop and they’re not charging that much more for them, i’d say give them a break. Woocommerce has the potential to be the first legit e-commerce plugin for wordpress that doesn’t suck, for the love of god support these guys for their hard word or do the hard work yourselves. I’d buy them a beer, personally.
If its only minor changes too, it would be in their best benefit to offer the upgrades for free, it will increase their userbase using woocommerce and give them a larger community to pitch new stuff to.
$.02
In the past you didn’t always know everything either, you might know his name but forensics was so bad he could be a serial killer who’s got his eye on your family. With all the problems in this country and the economy on the brim of a volcano I kinda find people complaining about this to be so much less relavent.
Thanks for clarifying, Joe. Since you’ve never bought WooThemes for yourself — and I take it not a potential customer — I can now put your comments in better context. For a minute there I thought you were a long-time Woo client, and therefore posing a position as a subscriber-advocate.
*whew*
A lot of the worries can be cleared up via this post. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Well, just when we were doing our analysis of which WP theme framework to buy into, along comes this interesting comment stream. Kudos to WooThemes for not censoring it.
I have found the language of the Club membership confusing, and not totally sure *what* is truly included in the developer club membership. Even more confused after reading these posts.
Not having a long history with WooThemes, I can still sympathize with long-term members who feel they have been kept in the dark. I’ve been down that path before with other providers, and it leaves a *very* bad taste in the mouth. In fact, the last one that pulled a switcharoo lost our business for good.
As a potential customer, I would strongly suggest that whatever route Woo takes with this whole program, that they STOP whatever they’re doing and work on clearly and completely explaining their programs and what is included. Make it as clear as air. Then get back to coding.
It’s obvious a good number of customers are dissatisfied – or in the least confused – about the pricing, availability, etc. I am, and I’m just trying to decide between Woo and other possible candidates. I know you’ll never please everyone all the time, but the length and impassioned clarity of most of the arguments in this thread do give one a reason to pause.
I’m not so excited about the e-commerce capability, personally, as we build pretty high-end e-commerce solutions that require multiple store fronts, configurable products, etc. I’m curious to take a close look at WooCommerce as a possible solution for our less-demanding configurations, but I’m troubled by all the «extras» that have to be purchased. We already pay for Authorize.Net as a gateway – but this would be the only platform we would use that charges us extra for the Authorize.net integration. We do use WP a lot for our other clients, and we’re interested in Woo for the «app» type themes, although I’m now concerned that these might be segregated at some point and charged a premium.
My vote would be to make the pricing simple – *very* simple – and raise it some to cover your needs. I expect price increases as needed. It’s when the rules change, I would be concerned.
Isn’t there *any* good Club out there that is all-inclusive? It’s not the price, it’s the convenience.
Just 2 cents from a potential customer.
Dear WooCommerce Team,
Congrats on a very speedy implementation.
One very BIG thing missing is multi-language support. Given the speed at which you get things done is there any chance at all that you can talk to the WPML language plugin guys and get both products talking (software wise)?
Would take 2-3 weeks according to what WPML have achieved in the past assuming WooCommerce is already set up for localization which I am sure you are.
WPML are also quick and dedicated to bringing value to those many thousands of multi-language sites out there. If you are serious about making money from business, this should be a no-brainer guys. Remove those US-centric glasses if you are wearing them. 🙂
Richard
Hong Kong
I fully agree, language support is important, im expecting that to be a community effort though, someone should organize a form to apply to help translate and merge these translations into the codebase. I’m sure you’ll be rewarded in one way or another, whether it be free products, or in the form of credit that ends up bringing massive traffic to your own site. 😀 There are many ways to capitalize on any given situation, you just have to think outside the box sometimes. 😀
http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/ works without problems.
Hi Thomas,
I will check out Qtranslate, thanks. Problems with shopping carts so far for me has been translation of dynamic pages.
Product pages to translate are not sitting in the WP Pages or Posts area. Are you sure QTranslate can do this without getting into writing code?
Have a problem with e-commerce plugin: can’t ad a product image. How to remove/uninstall the plugin?
Congrats on the launch and milestone.
1) Would had loved to see Woo-commerce «Canvas child theme» in Club Subscription.(Only Regret in Woo-commerce launch)
2) Can we move Free Themes below Available Themes in downloads section (For Club) ?
3) Can we also have separate section for WOO-commerce and also include the Woo-commerce plugin be available in download section (For Club).
4) The Extensions are priced too high. Consider re-pricing (at $50 – 1$ to 20$ higher than Jigoshop extensions)
5) No price showing for Child Themes (On click it goes to Form instead of showing Price first).
6) Awaiting details on «add-on for a small additional monthly fee to gain access to the full catalog of commerce products.» Hope it comes out soon.
7) «Future plans child theming : Diner with a take-away ordering system, Diarise with event registration, Listings with paid listings.» – Hope this comes under club subscription and not with e-commerce addon fee. Also when do we see this coming, next month ?
looking forward to WOO
Hi. This looks interesting. Are this extension prices one-time fees, or do I need to pay for the extension for every site I want to install on?
Thanks. Ab
One time fees. 🙂
Hello and congratulations for this 🙂
I’ve translated the WooTique theme un french today. Feel free to download this translation here : http://www.wptrads.fr/theme/wootique/
Best Regards 😉
see, this guy has the right idea, he’s provided something of value for free and in return gains the exposure to his blog, well done
Awesome work, thanks for doing so. 🙂
I have thought about this a little more and I think expectations need to be realistic.
The amount of support WooThemes will have to provide for this new venture will be massive and so there has to be an increase in cost somewhere to pay for this.
I think the main problem is that non club members have got such a great deal and club members feel that they have lost out in comparison for having been loyal paying customers on a monthly basis.
The advertising around the website which says all themes included with club memberships is certainly not helping. An announcement a few months back about there being some sort of cost would also of help to prepare people as I think many club members rushed here unsure of the costs and then felt a bit confused about the child themes extra costs.
The extensions have to be paid for so that new developments / extensions can be funded and the price for them seems fair as WooThemes will also have to offer support on these too.
The truth is though that even with the extra cost the club members get a fantastic deal. The level of support provided is worth the money alone.
The obvious way to settle this would be to offer club members all the themes including child themes. I do not see how extensions could be included though in this cost.
Perhaps if everybody had to pay for WooCommerce then everybody would have been happy 🙂
We’ve updated and clarified the options for club subscribers. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Hello there,
I’d like to ask you if there is the possibilty to sell products (tangible and digital) using for example «send inquiry button» instead of buy now / add to cart. Visitors thus, can send an inquiry on the products they like.
Thank You!
Awesome !!! Will use it for sure!
And here it is WOO COMMERCE has landed and with a whole new set of extra costs, fees and bulls**t from the founders.
Justifying the charging its loyal subscribers.
The designs over the past 12 months have been pretty average and overall rolled from the same baked in functionality.
So what WOO COMM arrives so you get all excited and up yourselves about a product that HAS NOT been in the wild yet!
Lets hike up the prices and charge the subscribers for themes!
«The club is perfect for multi-site owners, freelancers, and web agencies needing access to ALL our themes.»
I have been a member for over two years and have not used a them in about 12 months because I get better value and choice elsewhere.
If I need a commerce platform I will go with one that is tried and tested like Shopify who actually offer PCI compliance, more gateways, phone support, free hosting, SSL and more.
btw you are about to lose 4 subscribers here over this!
Good luck
Please do read over our latest post, should ease your frustration. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Just downloaded the plugin looking through it now to check out it’s features. Thanks for making this plugin.
I tend to agree with firebubble – there will be a substantial increase in support requirements, so the slight additional pricing for club members is not unreasonable.
It’s tough when everyone’s accustomed to getting everything for free.
On the other hand – we premium club members do bankroll the Woo organization by paying automatically every month, and we’d like to feel that our belief in and support of Woo entitle us to additional considerations…
This is awesome and thanks guys for making it FREE – the only comparable plug-in that I know of is ECommerce (there are probably others) and that one is close to $100 I think.
Great job on the new subscription prices – makes sense, $5 more a month is still a great value for a great product.
One question, anytime soon, could you add the functionality to SET UP AFFILIATES in the WooCommerce system – in other words to have others promote your products and then get paid commissions for it? Maybe WooCommerce has this already and I haven’t seen it.
Thanks!
With demand it’ll be in future versions. 🙂
How about the affiliates? Will be this a part of future version?
See the comment right above. 😉
Great job guys, just downloaded it and can’t wait to try it out!
This sounds great. I am currently building a site based on the Canvas theme. The site will sell downloadable and physical goods. How does WooCommerce handle downloadable goods? Do I still need a system like ejunkie or payloadz to deliver the unique download link to the customer’s email once they order?
Any chance you’ll include the option to have a custom input field so that someone can include, say, the name they want inscribed on their item? 🙂
You can vote on the feature here. 🙂 – http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce/suggestions/2287164-new-woocommerce-extension-custom-product-form-fi?ref=title
Can it do digital products?
As for pricing. If the quality is there then to get a client in the e-comm game for a couple hundred dollars is amazing and impressive.
If in order to deliver a better more robust end product you have to charge more then please do so. There are already a sufficient number of half-assed low/no budget WP e-comm solutions. We don’t need more of those.
Less isn’t a savings if the (lacking) functionality cuts the legs out from under ROI. Give us value that’s worth investing in. $50 here or $100 there is minor if that extra can generate more revenue.
I’m just sayin’ 😉
And please let me know about digital products or not. If you can email that would be great. I don’t want to subscribe to this tread. It’s going to mean too many emails coming in. Dig? Thanks.
Mark, it handles digital products out of the box. 🙂
Read here for further clarification for club subscribers. – http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Liked what I read in that post, my only questions remaining are 1. Where is the 30% off coupon? 2. How long (and why so long) until a subscription option is available as an addon for club members?
Hard to get excited over a release when I’m still held up on using it because of these two questions.
thanks 🙂
we certainly don’t need any more half ass low budget no support, can’t see the forums are abandoned and questions asked repeatedly andnever answered/closed off on top of that, trying out different alternatives before i heard woo was working on this was hell.
and i hope you charge more than 500 bucks for an ecommerce site, i ask a 3500 minimum for any blog/cms and ecommerce solution
Thanks WooThemes!
I am very excited to try out the new E-commerce themes. I currently have Canvas on one site that I am building and this comes out just in time to help me on a new site for my jewelry!!!
I think the prices are very fair and reasonable. No complaints from me.
You should know that in the past I spent $7000.00 on a site (with a different web-site design company-just want to make that clear!)that I was never able to get to work past the very basic set-up. I «abandoned it» and now use WP and Canvas and couldn’t be happier with the beauty, flexibility and ease of use. Also much more affordable!
I am going to play this week then I will be getting the Canvas child theme with a PayPal extension, and maybe even one of the packing/shipping plug-ins.
Thanks for all your hard work on developing this great project. I am going to a live event next week and will be spreading the word to people who are looking for an e-commerce solution.
Thanks,
Karen K
Karen,
We feel your pain on the money spent and lost/wasted. Definitely believe what WordPress and WooThemes offers is great value. 🙂
Hi. I posted this earlier but have had no response.
About the add-ons, are these a one-time purchase fee or do I need to purchase them for every site I install on?
Thanks…Ab
The add-ons are a one-time purchase, which you can use on multiple websites, just like with our themes.
Thanks Marcus. In that case, I think this pricing structure is absolutely fair. I speak not as an existing member, so I can understand the frustration of people, but looking at it from a pure value perspective (and assuming the Plugin is as good as it looks) I’m very happy. Thanks!
btw my name is Magnus, but it’s not the first time I hear Marcus 😉
Wow! I look forward to giving it a go!
Here’s a few things you might want to sort out – like, quickly:
WARNING: Found ini_set in the file woocommerce/woocommerce_actions.php. Themes should not change server PHP settings.
Line 780: @ini_set(‘zlib.output_compression’, ‘Off’);
WARNING: fread was found in the file woocommerce/woocommerce.php possible file operations.
Line 536: $buffer = fread($handle, $chunksize);
WARNING: fopen was found in the file woocommerce/woocommerce.php possible file operations.
Line 532: $handle = fopen($file, ‘r’);
WARNING: fclose was found in the file woocommerce/woocommerce.php possible file operations.
Line 544: $status = fclose($handle);
I got plenty more if you want them.
😉
Not sure which program you are using, but these are normal operations in PHP, and not errors. If you want to report any bugs, you can do that here: https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce
Will the woocommerce plugin work on any wp themes, not just woothemes?
Yes it will work with any theme 🙂
Hi
WooCommerce looks great but on your payment gateways section you mentions that Sage Pay (UK) is available now but I can’t see it built in and it isn’t in the extensions area?
I am currently deciding on going with WooCommerce or MarketPress for a large UK project (potential showcase quality) but we need either Sage Pay or Secure Trading set up as the payment gateway.
Feel free to email me if you want more details / need a test case 🙂
I am trying to compare the two as well, as a WPMU Dev Member. You haven’t come across any direct feature comparisons have you (I know, it’s early days).
No I haven’t come across a direct comparison yet but both don’t seem to link to Sage Pay or Secure Trader so far although MarketPress is meant to have an easy to ease API so developers can add new merchant gateways easily.
Have you seen any negative feedback regarding MarketPress seeing as you are allowed into the WPMU Dev forums?
There is obviously ongoing development as users find bugs in development – as is the nature of all developing software. It is just about to get an Upgrade to 2.2 which adds the following:
– Added Cubepoints gateway – Requires the CubePoints plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cubepoints/
– Add Tax inclusive pricing option
– Add tracking number field to shipping section of Order management
– Add notes field to Order management page
– Add special instructions field option for orders that require personalization
– Skip shipping checkout page for digital only orders
WPMU Dev guys are excellent in their responses, and there really is a great community in there. I think we look fortunate to have some great options available now, with this and this.
Nice to know the community is active and good over there too.
I prefer the visual style / functionality of WooCommerce (Jigoshop) but the out of the box multisite thinking with MarketPress is pulling me more in that direction.
Hi! I’ve installed the Cubepoint plugin. But I didn’t find where to say «use Cubepoint gateway» for payment… Coul you help? Thanks
We should have a SagePay extension done soon, you can always give us ideas for payment gateways or develop one yourself. We’d be happy to work with you. 🙂
Suggest ideas here. – http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce
Thanks Ryan
Good news regarding SagePay as it’s a must have for us over here in the UK 🙂
I have been in email contact with Mark and believe I am now speaking to you via email?
I am hopefully going to be able to speak to Mike regarding my multisite ideas and look forward to working with you to move the plugin on.
I am very excited and interested in your launch of Woo Commerce. I’ve been researching better ways to sell my products, so I’m going to delve deep into researching your plug-ins/themes to see if this may be the answer for me.
I have a few questions that weren’t answered in my perusal of the woocommerce overviews. (I may have missed it – or can find if I dig deeper.)
1. How do affiliate sales work with the plug-in? I suppose that is handled by the payment gateway? I use e-junkie which is not currently a gateway that you cover – although e-Junkie uses Paypal so I wonder if there is a work-around? Perhaps just using the e-Junkie button code instead of the paypal?
2. You mention that Statua enables photographers to sell. I didn’t see this in the theme documentation. Any demos of this? Anything specific to Statua that aides photographers?
3. What about being able to add a member subscription option?
4. Would there be a way to offer discounts if a person bought a certain amount? Say they buy 40 digital downloads – could there automatically be a way to offer a discount?
Thank you!
I’m always impressed to see your hard work and continuing ingenuity.
Further research… So looks like most of what I asked about is covered under the chosen payment gateway – not the plug-in. I am still curious about what makes Statua specific to photographers. Thanks!
Is there a built-in way to have a gallery of images (eg. Lightbox type) supporting the product or is this a 3rd party plug-in? For instance, I have packages of textures – so I want people to be able to see all the textures in the package plus some examples in use.
You can associate many images with a product, or even insert a gallery into the products description. There are a few options here for you. 🙂
I cannot tell you how excited I am about this. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!
Hello, Do you have to have the theme to use the WooCommerce plugin? Thanks
Nope, can use with any theme. We’ve already done some of the dirty work though, integrating the plugin for you into some beautiful themes. 😉
if you havn’t noticed its designed to look pretty great with the 2011 theme as well, which is a good theme to strip down and base your own on. 😀
of course you don’t get the excellent wooframework, which is def worth the peace of mind even if you override most of its styling functionality by child theming it. im just anal with inline css tho
Maybe it’s me, but after reading the page that explains all the features of WooCommerce I’m left scratching my head wondering what all of the CORE plugins are. For example, the description for Shipping & Tax says you can specify per product shipping. But then if you look at the commercial plugins, there’s a plugin for Per Product Shipping for $30. I can (and will) sort out what’s core & what’s premium, but I bet your customers would like it laid out for them a bit more simply.
Do you guys have digital product download functionality? Would seriously consider getting club then. Thanks for the feature.
Yes, it does support digital products, as noted under «Products & Inventory» here http://woocommerce.com/woocommerce/
Can anyone please tell me how to get the size and color dropdowns to show, thanks in advance. Jeff
Would be under product attributes. 🙂
I need to find out if woocommerce is going to work for me, but I can’t get into the forums to check without buying something???
I’ve sent in an email to support (I think).
I believe we’ve been in conversation via email, if this is the same Marcy. 😀
I’ve try it, but little problem is my country currency is not supported. Is this just support currency that supported by Paypal only ?. I think for manual payment it’s not must using currency based on country that just supported by Paypal. Hopefully the next version will be more currency that supported 🙂
It’s easy to add your own currency with some custom code, and we can help you with that in the forum 🙂 The only currencies available by default are those that are supported by PayPal.
hi I install new WP ( 3.2.1 ) version and new downloaded woocommerce.
however when I add media or image, i can’t add or the popup wont show up
I notice on my firebug that there is an error, the «datepicker» is not called or instantiate.
I check the code, and found some script on the «admin-init.php» the datepicker is only installed when the «report page» is displayed.
want to know if this problem exists or is this just fix already?
nonetheless, good job in the woocommerce, beautifull design and so far documentation is quite readable.
more power and God Bless
Great News !!
Woo Commerce will surely hit WordPress world as it has great features and functionalists included.
Is anyone having problems with the «shop» navigation button? when I click it the «home» tab lights up? in «shop» resides «all products» with a slug of «products»
Is there anyway around this? everything I just explained is the same in the demo
http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/wootique/
Please tell me I’m not the first to run into this.
Thanks,
Jeff
I believe since your shop page is the home page, then the home link shows as the active page. Maybe Jay or Mike could offer further advice?
Hello,
I am having the exact same problem. My shop base page is «shop» but when I click it, although it goes to the shop page, it shows in the tab «home».
Help?
Yipee, Xmas has come early for me – really delighted to hear this has been released – have a client lined up as my first to use this on – very much look forward to getting this working and all the improvements I’m sure you will continue to do to it with everyone’s ‘user’ testing. Thanks Guys xxx
Let us know how the site go Sharon, and what you think can be improved. 🙂
I develop real estate marketing sites with woothemes, I do love the product and community, but with all the recent complaints, I just feel Woothemes needs to listen, learn and listen to the community. Look at what happened to netflix, don’t make those same mistakes. Just keeping it real!
I think we listened here 🙂
http://woocommerce.com/2011/09/woocommerce-club-subscription-changes/
Sounds awesome.
Here’s a really important question. Will it continue to be free? 🙂 and will development on this continues?
Yes it will always be free 🙂
Congratulations for this new plugin!
Can I ask who is creating/editing your video seen the WordPress repository for the WooCommerce plugin ?
This person made a great work and I’d like to know more about him/her!
Thanks!
Maxime
Maxime,
I’m the resident Woo video guy, thanks for the kind words glad you liked the little video. 🙂
Is there an option to export orders or customers into a CSV? It would be awesome to be able to do this for use with accounting software like Quicken.
Since it uses WordPress own post types, it exports it’s content to an XML. Perhaps can convert that into a CSV?
for the short term anyone that uses sequel pro on mac(great app) can easily output a resultset with a simple sql query highlight it and hit export to csv. same kind of query can be generated for orders, just browse the posts table and you’ll get the idea.
im tempted to just write the function myself its so easy but i think it’d be better implemented as a web service over ssl so its constantly in sync. just my $.02
it is very beath wey the dovnland button 🙂
My site is a Woo theme. I want to add the ecommerce function, but I do not see Authorize.net as an option and I need recurring billing. Can you tell me are those available? Also is there an api that I can push or pull to my private crm autoreponder (not mailchimp or one of those).
Here are the functions that I need/want:
Authorize.net
Recurring billing
Api to crm
Thank you
Babe Mooney
Does the new woocommerce plugin integrate into mail chimp at checkout?
If it does, it just became my favourite e-commerence plugin for WP 🙂
It will do this week 😉
this pleases me as even mailchimp can’t come out with a working jquery ajax submitted form that responds appropriately to the received json, i got it working in 2/3 cases and settled on that cuz i didn’t have time to do their job for them, you think a company as big as mailchimp would be legit but even reading their javascript hurts.
Ooh, very nice! I have always been impressed by WooThemes’ stuff so this plugin gets high expectations from me. Nice to see another e-commerce plugin for WordPress rise up, competition is a good thing! I hope iDeal will be implemented as a payment gateway soon so I can try it out 🙂 I tried to follow the link to ideas.woocommerce.com so I could suggest it but it seems to be down for now.
Hi, does WooCommerce offer have an API that can be integrated with a physical shop? I have a customer looking at a Point Of Sale solution and need to integrate the two. Do you have any ideas on linking stock from a physical shop to the online shop? Hope this makes sense!
try a virtual product or have your point of sale software wrap the database tables/or reverse
Is WooCommerce a better solution for selling products than volusion.com?
wootique theme have a bug in the feautered product slider in internet explorer 9. The image of product desappear!
i replaced it with nivo-slider, downloaded it for free and wrote my own function and added it to the stylesheet, it was pretty elementary, this was at the request of a client too
and the bug is probably internet explorer not woocommerce, ie9 is better than ever but thats’s like saying gas prices ain’t so bad these days.
what is your function? where is? …ok but to make a theme crossbrowser compatible it is also a bug in my opinionion or not?
In jigoshop, Skrill(Moneybookers) was available. Please add that in woocommerce. There are too many countries where Skrill(Moneybookers) is only one gateway.
We took it out because it wasn’t coded well enough. It will be re-done when Skrill get back to me 😉
Waiting eagerly for that 😀
This is freakin’ awesome!
One question tho’. Let’s say I want to use this in Sweden only. Is there a language option for WooCommerce or do I have to «translate code» for this like menus and everything. Keep it up!
Payson <- Wicked!
Jonas
You need to translate the plugin and theme with Codestyling plugin 🙂
Fair enough! 😉
If I want woocommerce to work with w3 super cache plugin, what should I do?
Any idea?
In W3 cache settings, got to «Never Cache The Following Pages:» and add the following entries:
shop/*
cart/*
checkout/*
If you’ve used different stubs, change to whatever URL you’re using. Hope this helps.
I keep coming back to look over your specifications and themes, but what’s stopping me is the limited payment gateways. I know – give you time to develop more. 🙂 Will this work with Standard Paypal as well as the pro?
Paypal included in the plugins, and Paypal pro is a paid extension 🙂 More on the way!
Just a thought – since this is a free plug-in – perhaps an open, user to user forum to discuss how to use it? In addition to your subscriber forum, which is more like a problem ticket area. Another theme I use has a forum that is more «open» users talking to and commenting as well as the administrators and I really like it.
I keep coming back to poke around and kick the tires. 😉 and don’t want to bombard you with questions.
google github woocommerce and read the commits and issues 😀 read the source itself too, then any other questions? grep -r wp_action woocommerce/* etc
Hey,
I purchased the WooStore today. Now I wonder:
Can I deactivate the shopping cart while I build my store but of course have the other parts of the theme online (slider, pages and menus).
Thanks
Hey,
I’m afraid not. There is an option to display a message at the top of every page notifying users that your store is not live and that orders shall not be fulfilled.
Hey Jay,
well, looking forward to an update and a tick option to have the shop offline while you manage items and everything!
Keep it up!
on pages displaying your product
use css #form_id {display:none}
use jquery $(#form_id).hide();
that is if you can’t read the nice warning you can enable and also set the payment gateway to sandbox mode lol 😀
Great theme. I would love to have one of those, but right now my portfolio doesn’t permit to. I am still working to make enough money from websites to be able to take advantages of such great themes.
Ok, first of all, I should confess that I am a wordpress newb, and not a developer in any sense of the word. I’m really comfy with html and basic css, so I can muddle through most of what I need, but when it comes to having to script anything else by myself, I tend to get panicky. That said, I also tend to be over confident about my not so mad skillz, and I bite off more than I can chew all the time, a habit that leads to a lot of rage, frustration and begging for help from non-idiot-like people.
So I downloaded Woocommerce last night, and the free theme Wootique to go with it. The first time, it didn’t work out so well, as I had a previously installed and uninstalled wp ecommerce thingie which mucked things up, so I uninstalled everything and installed it on a fresh wp install.
Out of the box, I had it working in under an hour, delivering my nicely encrypted download links flawlessly in paypal’s sandbox environs. I’ve been happily customizing graphics and colour schemes, everything works beautifully, and I must say, this is absolutely perfectly what I needed, I’ve been searching for something just exactly like it forever, it’s fantastic, and I love you.
All I need to know is this: How can I get it to deliver three download links together from one product purchase? Or is that possible?
And thankyou thankyou thankyou for the awesome.
I’m afraid that’s not possible at the moment unless you include three files in a single zip.
Thanks for the awesome testimonial btw 🙂
Ok So i installed wooecommerce. I added some products. Was fiddling with the product variations and clicked on Link Variations and now I can’t see to get it to unlink I guess? I can add any new variations….help!! Anyone? Also, because I downloaded this for free I don’t get access to the forum…so if anyone can help..! Please!
Has anyone figured out how to get all three «Like»(which displays whatever it wants) twitter and +1 to work? if so please tell me how, I installed numerous open protocols, where does the code for the buttons need to go?
please help
cokergeoff@gmail.com
It seems that the plugin «Sharethis» and WooCommerce are interfering with eachother. Only on the Shop front page is the Sharethis plugin displayed even when sharethis is DISABLED to display on pages. When i turn Woocommerce off then the page will not display the sharethis icons.
The ShareThis social icons still show up on product pages, inside the product details box….
I found out that SI Captcha Anti Spam plugin also is interfering with WooCommerce (or the other way around). The Captcha field is not shown on the checkout screen (when creating an account) And you get an error «The captcha is not correct» when you try to complete the sale.
Guest purchases will work fine.
it would make sense this conflict would happen, i can think of a dozen programs this would interfere with including other ecommerce plugins and perhaps some commentnig or custom post type plugins or residiul database clutter from crap plugins like wp e-commerce.
I don’t see why your social sharing icons dont work, mine work fine in fact i’ve tricked them out by overriding 2 functions added to my child themes functions.php file. they look great, the way i wanted them to begin with complete witha nice css3 opacity hover effect 😀 have you checked your php logs and firebug? console? are the div placeholders there?
I didnt look further into the issue at the moment. And it does make sense plugins interfere since Woo is a new plug and other plugs can be crap. I was thinking to let Woo know that there are issues to begin with so they can figure out whats happening.
I wanted to decrease my plugins and move more to the functions.php. especially the facebook like and google + buttons. Although the Sharethis plug works nicely, i dont need a lot of its functionality.
Too bad i cannot find any good post on the net howto insert a facebook like & share + google+, twitter and other social buttons using the functions.php so that all the social buttons are displayed on 1!!!! line exactly where i like them.
its not a problem with woo its a problem with plugins period. It would be like installing a plugin that blocked people from reating a post with a swear word in it and then trying to make a plugin work that posts alot of swear words. They’re mutually exclusive. Kind of like running jquery and prototype with the $(»); shorthand.
Plugins aren’t bad, they’re actually if done correctly alot more agile, portable, and the packaging everthing up in its own class is great. functions.php can get hairy if you dont keep it well organized.
I use the functions.php on my child theme to override functions that are conditionally tested for, for unhooking actions, hooking actions, and filtering actions. Mainly small tweaks with very little code necessary.
i’ll tell you my favorite time saver when trying to find a hook. at the unix comand prompt type grep -nr name_of_hook * while in the woocommerce plugin directory, it will search the inside of every file in woocommerce recursively and spit out the filename,line number and the contents of the line for every line it occours in the entire woocommerce plugin.
for instance you want to customize the sharing icons, it reallly involves alot of groundwork from the actions file and all the hooks that triggers and the hooks they trigger but for this you will want to look for the hooks woocommerce_template_single_sharing and if you’re extra ambitious woocommere_sharethis_script as well.
its all very cleanly written I was impressed, very nice to work with, but if you’re not used to that style of working it can present a real bitch of a challenge to you especially if you don’t do alot of programming.
I guess social share buttons DO NOT work on product pages, three days spent on this issue, why is there no documentation if in fact what I’m requesting is possible.
Why offer shortcodes if they don’t work?
The Sharethis social buttons do work on WooCommerce, but they behave a little strange.
Hello, I just installed the wooCommerce plugin everything looks great except one thing. When I «Add New Product» there’s is no featured image tab / button, therefore I am unable to upload images for my products. The featured image button does show up if I want to add a new page or post. Please help.
Thanks,
Rey
When i add a new product then you can add product images in the normal image upload screen. There you can set the featured image as the main product image. You can add extra images by simple uploading the images.
I tried that but there’s still not a «Featured Image» button to select. When I select «upload image» icon it adds it to the product description.
This is a WP thing and not a Woo thang. If you add a new product then you can find the featured image box in the right side menu AND in the image upload box.
If you cant find it, then update your WP. Still cant find it? Then go RTM.
How about a wooForum next? 🙂
Do you plan on eventually adding other plug-ins such as affiliate management, membership sites, etc.?
Is the Shop Manager «user» still broken? Has anybody figured out how to allow a no-techie to log in to WooCommerce and process orders without giving them Admin privileges?
We don’t want the guys in the shipping department to have total control of our WordPress Dashboard / so we can’t launch our great new website unless we force our webmaster to do all the shipping.
Also, is there a way to print a «Shipping Invoice» for placing in the shipping box with the products?
it really doesn’t seem mikes style to add a function that doesnt even work when he’s already quite busy. I would imagine those roles were either lefover from the jigga somethng cart code or it was put in as a placeholder. you should be able to use role scoping plugins to achieve what you are aiming for or hack it together yourself in functions.php
Can you post some sample functions code, searched google, found nothing
I’m trying to add image zoom to the single product page…does anyone know of any plugins or a way to do it? I installed a plugin but didn’t work. Or does anyone know how or what code to edit to add a class for the zoom…I’m a newbie about this…thanks for any help!
when i used to do serious commerce i’d always choose intersperse shopping cart, im not sure what they use but its what you’re talking about, im sure you can google it, its a jquery deal with the hover zoom. its in jquery but cant recall the name.
and if you’re a newbie i wish you seriously good luck on getting that integrated with woocommerce. i wrote my own nivoslider plugin that cycles slides for products last week. its not like magento where its been out there and written about and used forever, irc channels, lots of forum answers. its pretty new, the documentation is pretty incomplete esp if you want to do something relatively advanced. it reminds me of when i started using rails back when it first came out. use the source luke.
if you’re still seriously stumped in a few days and its causing serious developemtn problems for a client of yours then after im done being busy as hell you can probably get alot of clarification by booking a half hour consult with me, i’d do it for $30 but you’d need to arrange it with my assistant, her email is crystal@spektrumtheory.com. just tell her you what you need and she’lll find a time that works best for both of us. I’d do it free if it were simple but im afraid its not im just too busy as it is and i already get about only 5 hours of sleep a night. development never sleeps around here. 😀
https://gist.github.com/1324140 – copy and paste of the code im running to modify the share this widget for woocommerce.
I copied the functions from woocommerce to my child theme and defining them there first overrides their conditional inclusion. I did minimal editing, when I go to optimize things soon i’ll def be replacing and doing it proper instead of modifying really quick and dirt the default.
Looks great on the products im using off a hacked up wootiqe original.
let me know if you guys have any questions about the code i think its self explanatory
how to get the category id of any product using wootique theme n woocommerce plugin… pls help me out
Hello. Is «cash on delivery» payment method included? I can’t see it. Thanks.
It’s not a method by default but you could add it yourself easily enough 🙂 See our codex for a guide.
The Wootique theme just isn’t working for me 🙁 I mean, I can install and activate it, but as soon as I customise any settings (e.g. background color, custom logo or text title), then hit save, the changes aren’t made. I get the «options saved» notice, but as soon as I reload the settings page, none of the changes have actually been made.
I’ve scratched my head about this all day. I’ve done a fresh install of WP, downloaded the latest WooCommerce from Github and updated the Woo Framework. Still no luck!
This was a dry run with the Wootique/WooCommerce, to see if this is this solution works for us. The premium themes look great but not If I can’t get them work correctly :/
Sorry about the problems you’re having. We can’t really offer support for free themes as you can probably understand, but contact us directly with details on how we can login to your site to test, and maybe we can figure it out. Usually if you can’t save settings it is down to your server not being up to scratch.