Why I’m Breaking Up With WooCommerce
Sorry Woo it’s me not you, we just cannot be with each other any more, this is why I’m breaking up with WooCommerce.
It started out as a great thing, we made excellent e-commerce sites together and you still do that for other people, but there are some issues…
Fragile
When ever there is a major update to your software you break on me.
It’s generally not you but your mates, the extensions that cause the crash, they are not sufficiently tested with the new you and major updates to yourself will inevitably cause a crash.
I’ll have to restore to an earlier version of you and wait a couple of weeks for your mates development to catch up before I can apply that update.
Cost
Let’s face it you are not costly but your entourage costs a bomb, and we cannot do any real e-commerce without all your friends hanging around.
Once I have a payment gateway, a subscriptions, bookable products, integration with my accounting software and mailchimp costs are mounting up.
For open source software you are very expensive.
Complex
Sorry to have to tell you this but you are very high maintenance.
It started out that your deep complexity was something I loved about you, but once you have more than a handful of products the difficulty of variable prices, complicated shipping fees, issues with pending payments and email not being delivered, it just too much.
Too Hard To Change
If I want to make even small changes to the way you are it’s a nightmare.
They say you cannot change the people around you, but you can change the people around you – hat tip theminimalists.com
Take that time we talked about your checkout and how I wanted to move some of the items around the page, you lost it on me, you started telling me I couldn’t simply edit the template files, nooo! I had to write scripts that interfaced with your hooks and actions.
Anyone else would have some simple code but that’s not good enough for you.
I Hate Your Friends
I’ve touched on the extensions already but I’ve begun to hate some of your friends, they are dragging you down.
They make money sitting on your coat tails but they have no personal development. They said they would work with you but when you made that change they dumped on you and stopped working bringing the whole relationship to a crash.
Some of the other are untested and of questionable quality, they tagged along from weird locations rather than the extension store (I’m looking at you Code Canyon) they worked for the you, several versions back, but didn’t change and are still on sale, what’s that all about.
Is There Someone Else?
No you are still the main player in my life, some of my friends are saying Shopify is a nice girl, and that Gumroad is sweet if you are selling virtual stuff but I have a lot of friends still living at WordPress and I need to stay there.
Wrap Up – Why I’m Breaking Up With WooCommerce
I hope we can remain friends after this break up, if you could just sort out your friends with perhaps a certification process where an extension is tested and proven to work with you I would be happy. If you had an upfront costs and a simpler on-going support charge that was lower, again I would be happy.
All joking aside Woocommerce is good but these are real bug-bears I have with using and working with Woocommerce what has your experience been?
Photo Credit: cogdogblog Flickr via Compfight cc
