Hi everyone! We’ve been a bit quiet lately since we’ve been busy updating all of our plugins to be compatible with WooCommerce 2.1. However, we wanted to share some of the big changes we’ve made with you to some of the WooCommerce extensions we offer, so we’ll take a look at the WooCommerce Customer / Order CSV Export Suite first.
Re-written to Maximize Performance
We’ve rebuilt the extension from the ground up to vastly improve stability and performance. In the process, we were able to simplify the menu systems, settings, and functionality that the plugin offers. The WooCommerce CSV Export Suite can now export customers and orders from multiple screens and in multiple formats. There’s a bulk csv export tool for both customers and orders from the plugin’s menu under WooCommerce > CSV Export:
Built-in Export Tool
This tool was available previously, but was a bit difficult to use. We’ve simplified the tool by requiring a CSV format to be selected under “Settings”, then you simply select the order statuses you wish to export, and the date range for customer or order exports, and that’s it.
Exporting Options
We’re really excited to share the new features we’ve added to the export settings, and think you’ll love them. We’ve added the ability to monitor exports from the “Orders” page to quickly view which orders have already been exported and which are still waiting for export.
We’ve also added automatic exports to the plugin so that you don’t have to manually export orders each day (or multiple times a day!). You can automatically export orders via FTP or HTTP POST in a custom interval (default is 30 minutes) so that you no longer have to manually export orders. You can also automatically upload orders to a remove server via FTP to streamline data transfer between your WooCommerce store and external services, saving time every single day.
NEW: Automatic Timed Exports!
Other Export Methods
We’ve also given you more tools for exports. Previously, you could only bulk-export orders as needed (and you can still bulk export from the “Orders” page or using the export tool). However, we’ve added individual export capabilities to the plugin so that you can export orders from the “Orders” page, or while editing orders:
Export Individual Orders
Exporting from “Edit Order” Screen
Basically, we’ve tried to take a plugin that was previously a machete and turn it into an export Swiss Army Knife. That can even cut stuff for you automatically.
WooCommerce CSV Export Format for Orders and Customers
We’ve added a new default export format to the plugin that includes more fields, and simplifies some of the export output. However, we’ve also kept the previous export formats in the plugin (labeled as Legacy formats). You can check out some sample export files if you want to see the changes we’ve made.
You can view more information from the WooCommerce Customer / Order CSV Export Suite sales page at WooThemes, or the full plugin documentation. Go forth and automatically export!
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Hi all! We’re excited to share that we have three new extensions for WooCommerce that were just released yesterday. Quick, grab them for 35% off within the next couple days!
First, Admin Custom Order Fields has deployed, which takes you one step closer towards using WordPress and WooCommerce as a CRM rather than just an eCommerce platform. Admin Custom Order Fields (ACOF) will allow you to create text field, drop-downs, checkboxes, and more within orders so that you can keep track of relevant customer information directly in WooCommerce. For example, let’s say you sell tours – now you can assign guides, dates, times, and other info to orders and view these fields from the order admin. You can also optionally display selected fields to customers from the “My Orders” page. Never again worry about using WooCommerce, Excel, and multiple other platforms to keep track of customer details! Keep that information where it belongs — directly with the relevant WooCommerce orders.
Next up, we have two more payment gateway integrations released. We know many of you have been waiting for Intuit QBMS (QuickBooks Merchant Services), and it’s finally come to WooCommerce. It’s being joined by a payment gateway integration for NETbilling as well. Not only do both of these integrations allow for maximum customizability and integration with your site by keeping the customer on site for the checkout process, but each fully supports WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooCommerce Pre-Orders to ensure viability for multiple businesses and billing needs. Want this to get even better? The WooCommerce NETbilling extension also supports eChecks so that you can get paid by virtually any means the customer wants; take away every excuse for the customer to say no!
Want some more info or purchase information? Check out each new extension at WooThemes.com!
The post New WooCommerce Extensions! appeared first on SkyVerge.
UPDATE 2013-08-05: Since we published this, WooThemes has decided to offer the choice to existing customers whether they want to grandfather their unlimited licenses in or not. Read the update post
Full Disclosure: Our company derives the majority of its income from sales of WooCommerce plugins we’ve written, and by performing WooCommerce-related client projects. Still, we think we can be fairly impartial as it’s not like we have someone ordering us around to build WooCommerce plugins, we chose and continue to choose to focus the majority of our time on WooCommerce plugins and projects rather than pursuing some other opportunity.
Today WooThemes announced totally new pricing / licensing for their premium WordPress themes/plugins and WooCommerce extensions. With over 270 comments (and growing) on the announcement post, there is a clearly a lot of positive and negative opinions on the change. Let’s try and break it down and share our perspective as developers. We’re going to focus on extensions since that’s what we know.
All extensions have been raised by $20 (with a few exceptions) and a select few have been raised by $99 (most notably WooCommerce Subscriptions and Product CSV Import Suite). Since price increases fund development for new features and stability/performance fixes, let’s look at one of the most popular, and most complex WooCommerce extensions, WooCommerce Subscriptions, to give us a way of thinking about the pricing/licensing changes.
The Lifecycle of an Extension
Released in June 2012, the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension has been around for just over a year. In that time, it’s seen 21 minor updates and 3 major updates. That’s an update about once every two weeks. These updates have ranged from simple bug fixes to massive feature additions. Since we have some experience in estimating the time required to build and update WooCommerce extensions, let’s do some guessing at the time the developer spent (note we’ll be using the subscriptions changelog for reference, so feel free to follow along if you’d like):
Minor Updates — minor features and simple bug fixes typically require 1-3 hours, unless you’re including the time it takes to find and reproduce the bug. We’ll be conservative and say 2 hours per item. A quick glance at the changelog shows about 3 features/bug fixes per update. So, let’s guess each minor update required about 6 hours.
Note that we’re excluding testing, QA, communication with customers affected by the bugs, deploying the update, etc. These extra tasks are non-trivial and can easily double the total amount of time spent.
So overall, minor updates total 126 hours (21 minor updates x 3 features/bug fixes per update x 2 hours per feature/bug fix)
Major Updates — now were getting to the big stuff. Major updates typically involve rewrites to pieces of the extension in order to add features requested by customers that are complex to implement, as well as a long list of tiny features and bug fixes. As an example, the latest major release of the Subscriptions plugin included 25 items on the changelog, ranging from WooCommerce 2.0 support (not a simple task) to improving shipping strings.
Remember that the changelog doesn’t detail all of the actual changes, only the ones that are worth writing about, so the actual list of changes is much, much longer. Now let’s try to take a guess at the amount of time spent developing these updates.
Based on our experiencing writing major updates for our own extensions, a conservative guess is 50 hours of development time per update. So these 3 updates represent about 150 hours total.
So, with just updates alone, we’re estimating that the developer spent 276 hours. But wait, we’re forgetting the time invested to actually build the extension in the first place! Let’s make a rough estimate of 150 hours, based again on our own experience building an extension of similar complexity. Now comes the fun part. How much would it cost you to have a developer build and maintain an extension like this for you?
UPDATE: Brent Shepherd, the developer of WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, has confirmed the actual time spent for updating the extension is over 1,000 hours. See his comment below.
We’ve seen hourly rates for experienced WordPress developers in the $65 to $125 range, so let’s pick a nice even $95/hour. So we take the amount of time spent to develop the extension (150 hours), add in the time spent to maintain and improve the plugin over a year (276 hours), and come up with our total hours spent.
426 hours. Wow, that sounds like a lot. Like, working every day for almost 18 days without food or sleep (which we know we can’t do, even with Mountain Dew). Yikes. Ok, now let’s multiply that by our $95 per hour rate, for a grand total of $40,470.
Is the New Pricing Still a Good Value?
Clearly the new $199 price is still quite a bargain compared to paying a developer to build it (or even simply maintain it). When you factor in a year of support and automatic upgrades, it becomes even more compelling. But what about the renewal cost after the first year?
Let’s assume the next year follows the first year. The extension will see another 20 or so minor updates and 3 major updates representing about 275 hours of development time. The extension will work with the latest version of WooCommerce and it’ll have new features and fixes that have significantly improved it over last year’s version.
Now, in order to get access to the updates (and support), you’ll need to renew your license. The cost will be roughly 50% of the original cost, or $100. The cost of development time to maintain and improve the extension over time was roughly $26,125 (275 hours x $95 per hour), so you continue to get a significant bargain over what it would cost to build this yourself.
Obviously this is an extreme example of a very complex extension (many extensions are somewhat simpler to build and maintain, though not always support ;)), but the principle remains the same. The value that these extension provide far exceeds their cost, even when factoring in an annual cost.
Future with WooCommerce?
In spite of (and in some ways because of) the recent pricing and licensing changes we still believe WooCommerce is the best eCommerce solution out there in terms of functionality, ease of use, and yes — cost. The reality is that WooTheme’s policy of unlimited support and updates for a one-time price was unsustainable (see this comment), something we’ve been witness to first hand as a de-facto tier 2-3 support team for our roughly 40 extensions. Since each sale previously resulted in a one-time revenue for WooThemes, with a potentially unlimited support liability, it simply became an untenable situation.
Running a business is difficult, you start out with one idea or plan and before you know it you’re doing something else entirely, and you almost always have to make corrections along the way, sometimes even large ones. It’s going to be far better for shop owners that WooThemes charge a higher premium and still be around 5, 10, 15 years from now to continue to support merchants, than it would be for WooThemes to find themselves in an unsustainable position and have to shut the whole program down or take other drastic measures.
We realize how unfortunate and unexpected this is for people who previously purchased and expected unlimited usage or support, and there’s not a whole lot that can be said, besides that we truly believe WooThemes is doing what they feel they must in order to create a lasting business.
This can be seen in their honest disclosure that they don’t know how much of a discount they’re going to be able to provide for early renewals at this point, they want to base that on the level of support and maintenance costs actually incurred by a plugin, rather than saying that all plugins renew at say a flat rate of 80% of price.
In the end these changes will discourage some would-be and even previously loyal customers who will seek out other alternatives, and there’s nothing wrong with that; no single solution can or should serve everyone. The bottom line is we believe these changes will make WooThemes as a company, and WooCommerce as an ecosystem, stronger than it was before. Those who find sufficient value in the work that the 30-odd WooThemes employees, and roughly 50 third-party developers perform day-in and day-out, will continue to choose WooCommerce.
We won’t be going anywhere, and hope neither will the majority of WooThemes customers when all is said and done.
— Max & Justin
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