Free users beware one morning a feature you rely on will be locked behind paywal

Hi soulwaretech,

As a general rule, we do not remove features from our products. “Skip posts if their data in your file has not changed” has always been a paid feature and was never available in the free version.

It sounds like you may be encountering a bug. Please head over to wpallimport.com/support and we will see if we can figure out what’s going on.

We checked into this a little further. A while back we developed a new paid feature, ‘Skip posts if their data in your file has not changed’. When we develop new features like this, we add them to the free version with the notice that you saw.

In this case, we accidentally had this feature enabled by default in the free version. This was obviously a mistake, which makes it look like ‘Update existing posts with changed data in your file’ is also a paid feature. This is not the case.

‘Update existing posts with changed data in your file’ and everything else works the same as it always has.

We’re going back in now to make sure ‘Skip posts if their data in your file has not changed’ is disabled by default which should clear up the confusion. Sorry about the confusion!

Please just stop lying. You’re digging a deeper hole you can’t get out of.

We’ve been using the free plugin for over 5 years and we’ve always had skip unchanged data available in the free version until you decided to make it a paid feature.

If this wasn’t the case we would never have been able to use your plugin in our shared server. Because overwriting unchanged data maxes out server resources. Our friends also use this plugin on their site also on a shared server and they have noticed it too.

Next you will be saying image support or name any feature was also accidentally enabled in the free version.

This is not cool. I’m looking into an alternative the free version is now basically useless for very tiny ecommerce stores wishing to update their pricing.

Don’t trust your livelihood on the free version of this plugin rather use woocommerce’s own imported because there is no benefit over this free plugin anymore.

Hi soulwaretech,

I’m Louis, the CEO.

The two previous responses are from my support team.

I’m pretty sure that their responses are correct.

However, we could be wrong. So I’m going to look into it more and get back to you.

If we did remove a feature that was previously available in the free version, it was a mistake. We’ll put it back immediately. And we’ll apologize.

-Louis

Thank you Louis, we greatly appreciate it.

We really need that functionality back to be able to grow our small e-commerce site. At the moment we have a fine balance on server resources and trying the new update all imports are freezing up CPU cycles which it didn’t do for every record in the past.

I really want to grow into a successful business but all the elements of the future seems to be working against us.

Our brand is about above excellent customer service and at the moment your amazing “free” plugin is helping us achieve that, but the current revision is a step back.

I don’t see why any site who can afford to buy pro would see this as a benefit, then they already have decent servers capable of updating all record in not time.

This change only forces those who are struggling with server resources to buy or stop importing. They probably can’t afford better hosting.

Think about a Lite package which includes that feature, but I am 100% sure at one point it was free because its been selected in my saved template since I started using it, and have made new profiles in 2020/21 that included this option.

Peace out,

Hi soulwaretech,

This is Louis again.

After investigation, I stand by our original response: this was always a paid feature. We did not remove it from the free version.

“Update existing posts with changed data” has always been present in the free version for a long time, and this hasn’t changed recently.

“Skip posts if their data in your file has not changed” has never been available in the free version.

We added that checkbox and an upgrade notice to the UI. The box was checked by default (a UI bug), and we’re fixing that.

However, the code that handles skipping posts when that box was checked was never present in the free version.

Here’s video proof from Joe, our team lead, walking through the codebase and explaining this in more detail: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g17tsvl2ffodky5/Skip%20Posts.mp4?dl=0

I know this isn’t the response you were hoping for. But it is the truth.

Louis

———-

> At the moment we have a fine balance on server resources and trying the new update all imports are freezing up CPU cycles which it didn’t do for every record in the past.

Maybe something else on your website or web host has changed.

This is Joe jumping back in…

> At the moment we have a fine balance on server resources and trying the new update all imports are freezing up CPU cycles which it didn’t do for every record in the past.

This could be any number of things, and we would be more than happy to help you figure out what is going on. Please submit a support request to wpallimport.com/support and we’ll take care of you.

Thanks for looking into this, but I am pretty sure “Update existing products with changed data in your file” means only updating only products where there are changes. Basically its the same thing as what the skip feature is suppose to be. “Skip products if their data in your file has not changed.”

I do appreciate again for looking into this, earned stars for great response time.

I am pretty sure “Update existing products with changed data in your file” means only updating only products where there are changes. Basically its the same thing as what the skip feature is suppose to be. “Skip products if their data in your file has not changed.”

Yea I can understand how folks might come to that conclusion, that the functionality was always there in “Update existing products with changed data in your file” and that we pulled it out into a separate checkbox. But no, WP All Import always overwrote all of the fields selected in the “Choose which fields to update” section below, even if the data hadn’t changed at all. It wastes a lot of time and resources and we had a ton of complaints.

To get “Skip posts if their data in your file has not changed” to work we actually had to do a ton of work under the hood, where we essentially maintain a copy of the imported posts in a separate custom db table and then compare that to the data in the file to see if it’s changed.

Anyway, thanks for your understanding on this, and sorry for the confusion.

Well, I am also sorry for confusing this. Server resources have been increased and there is no issue updating every record anymore. Thanks for a wonderful plugin.