I couldn’t possibly recommend this less. Just use Stripe instead.

  • Woo Payments is a great way to lose a ton of control in how you manage your store. Since it uses Stripe Express instead of Stripe, you give WooCommerce (the company, Automattic) complete control over your business’s finances. They can see all of your transactions and even cancel or refund them. I don’t want to hand over access to all of my business’s transactions to a third-party company. Do you? Who knows what they use that data for after we give it to them for free.

    On top of that, Woo Payments is a horrible choice if you do any subscriptions or payment plans. We tried to switch away from it due to the lack of access to our own financials, but it kept charging subscriptions even after it was disabled and deleted. On top of that, it kept charging payment plans that had already been paid in full and should have hit their “expire after” point.

    Even worse, we had NO IDEA it was charging our customers until we got a mysterious Stripe payout. It didn’t create any Orders or evidence that it had done anything within the site, and there’s no way to access that information via Stripe Express. Our customers didn’t get any notification that they’d been charged either. We couldn’t track down the payments until we re-enabled Woo Payments on the site, and even after that we couldn’t refund them and had to ask Woo support to refund them for us.

    I’ve built over 100 eCommerce sites and I can’t think of a single instance where I’d recommend Woo Payments as your store’s payment processor.

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by a.a.martines.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Support Chris M. – a11n

    (@csmcneill)

    Howdy @aamartines,

    Thank you so much for providing your feedback!

    WooCommerce Payments isn’t the right solution for everyone, which is why we still develop and support tons of other gateways, including Stripe, PayPal Payments, WooCommerce Square, and more.

    Some merchants prefer having complete access to the Stripe dashboard. WooCommerce Payments is designed to streamline that process while also offering additional features, like built-in multi-currency, but we are always looking for ways to make our gateway even better. If there is anything specific that is missing from the Payments section of wp-admin, please let me know so that I can provide your feedback to our product and engineering teams.

    Plugin Support Chris M. – a11n

    (@csmcneill)

    I also wanted to ensure that I provided some clarifying information on some of the points you raised.

    I don’t want to hand over access to all of my business’s transactions to a third-party company. Do you? Who knows what they use that data for after we give it to them for free.

    WooCommerce Payments is developed by the folks at WooCommerce, which is owned by the same company that handles WordPress. The open-source philosophy that has made WordPress a household name for over 18 years drives everything that we do, including sharing openly how we handle sensitive data.

    • If you’d like to read more about how data via official WooCommerce payment gateways is handled, I’d recommend checking out this link.
    • Using WooCommerce Payments requires a WordPress.com account; if you’d like to know more about how we handle information for WordPress.com accounts, you can find out more at this link.
    • Since WooCommerce Payments is built in partnership with our friends at Stripe, you can also read Stripe’s own privacy policy at this link.

    […] it kept charging subscriptions even after it was disabled and deleted.

    I’m sure that you covered this in your conversations with WooCommerce support, but I’m going to share this information in case others come across your review.

    When a merchant utilizes the built-in subscription functionality of WooCommerce Payments, deactivating the WooCommerce Payments extension will show a warning with more information:

    Because subscription renewals processed in this way are all handled off-site (much like WooCommerce Subscriptions + PayPal Standard), deactivating the WooCommerce Payments gateway alone won’t cancel the subscriptions.

    You can read more about this here.

    Thread Starter a.a.martines

    (@aamartines)

    Thank you for your response, Chris.

    That message you shared did not appear when we disabled Woo Payments. It would have been great if it did! I’m not sure if it’s something you all added recently or just didn’t work on our site. It was back in December that we first disabled it. I’m glad that there’s a warning and hope other people don’t run into the same issue as me.

    It’s also great that there’s documentation about it. Honestly, I didn’t even think to look into it because the idea that subscriptions could continue even after it was removed to the site didn’t cross my mind. Everyone in my network I’ve spoken to about this issue is absolutely floored that this is how Woo Payments works by default, so I don’t think I’m alone in being taken by surprise.

    To address my concerns about sharing data with Woo and Automattic, I know that you all have an open source philosophy and try to be good stewards of WP in general. And I think that overall you do a very good job of it. But I’m also well aware that, to compete in our industry, you often have to be ruthlessly capitalistic, and over time I’ve seen some of the business decisions Automattic has to make and how harmful they can be.

    The privacy document you shared doesn’t really reassure me here. It says things like “This documentation outlines what data is stored and shared with a payment provider when a WooCommerce site uses?payment gateways offered on WooCommerce.com. When using a payment gateway, you are not sharing this information with WooCommerce.com.” That’s an interesting statement, since the support person I worked with could see and affect every transaction that’s happened on my site. With that level of access, what’s to stop a rogue support person from affecting every site they can reach? That policy is super sparse, and doesn’t really disclose the level of access Woo has to any store that uses Woo Payments. It’s a level of access I’m not comfortable giving to a third party company as a business owner, and my clients wouldn’t be either.

    Again, thank you for taking the time to respond. I do really appreciate it.

    Plugin Support dougaitken

    (@dougaitken)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hey @aamartines! I handle Payment Operations for WooCommerce Payments. We really appreciate the time you’ve taken to leave feedback about WooCommerce Payments. We’d love to chat more about all this, so are you able to reach out via our WooCommerce.com Support team?

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by dougaitken. Reason: mention role as WPORG role is incorrect
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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