When Did Woocommerce Stop Offering Support

I am sharing this Woocommerce support thread because it is troubling.

 

Spoiler alert – I paraphrase “this as expected but there is no documentation”

 

Obviously, I question “how would one know what to expect – when there are no instructions, knowledgebase articles or documentation on the subject?

 

Woocommerce support  is so out of touch, I’m sent a WORDPRESS document and told to figure it out

 

When I click the View link on my test site, I am redirected to the Shop page on the front end of my site. (This is as expected.)

 

When I click the Edit link, I am redirected to the user’s profile in the admin area. That’s where I would change a customer’s address or any other information.

 

We do not have documentation on this. It piggy-backs on the WordPress User system. Here is more information on that:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Users_Screen

 

I’m building my first Woocommerce store possibly migrating my 17-year-old ecomm store that does mid 6-figures

Looking at the new Bigcommerce WordPress plugin offering stores as SaaS – has given me is given me a lot of food for thought

 

I’ve discovered there is no single comprehensive document about user roles in Woocommerce

 

From this 4000 word thread not any of the six “Happiness Engineers” at Woocommerce ever indicated they understood a very simple question about a single link in a WooCommerce store

 

This blog post is the first unofficial document defining all 16 user roles (that I know of) for Woocommerce

 

SEO Editor – SEO Manager – Agent Participant – Moderator – Blocked – Spectator – Keymaster – Shop Manager – Customer – Clasifieds Moderator – Subscriber – Contributor – Author – Author – – Editor – Administrator

 

Here’s a very brief video showing the link issue and illustrating user roles

 

 

It took three days to find a “Happiness Engineer” who acknowledged that there is, in fact, the customer role but then spent their time trying to convince me that they knew how to write code to keep changing how link functions when it had nothing at all to do, again, with my original question.

woo link resolves to the wrong page (I reposted the question

#1750947 – Opened on January 26, 2019

 

I have a technical issue I hope you can help – when you click user/customer-> view you should resolve to their account instead I’m getting redirected to home here’s what it looks like https://www.screencast.com/t/JpxNGNSIeI

 

Hi Mitch,

 

DAY3

 

Thanks for contacting WooCommerce!

 

My name is Ines, and I’m happy to help out.

 

when you click user/customer-> view you should resolve to their account instead I’m getting redirected to home here’s what it looks like https://www.screencast.com/t/JpxNGNSIeI

 

What you see happening is correct.

 

What the ‘View’ link under customer is supposed to do is show you the author page of that specific user, showing the posts they have made.

The user you’ve selected hasn’t made any posts, and so the author page does not exist. Be aware that this is a WordPress specific feature, and not something WooCommerce has implemented.

 

I think you might have expected to be able to look at a customer’s account this way.

 

You will not be able to use the ‘View’ link in this way, but I may be able to help out further.

 

Can you let me know what you’re trying to do?

 

I’m happy to help think of other ways to achieve what you’re trying to do.

 

Best,

Ines van Essen – Happiness Engineer

Get the WooCommerce mobile app and manage orders, receive sales notifications, and view key metrics — wherever you are.

 

Ines van Essen

Agent7 days ago

 

Mitch Rezman says

Your answer is unclear because clicking user/customer view resolving to the HOME PAGE on birdandparrot.info

 

screen \shot -> Here is another screenshot of the view link resolving to the HOME PAGE https://www.screencast.com/t/wJhuArm9uj

 

When did anyone at woocommerce log in with the credentials that I sent as I received no notification the site was ever logged into and the view link is resolving to the home page for NOT ANY author 10 days now –

Could you please send a screen capture of this activity – where on gods green earth did the “author page” enter this discussion?

 

Does this look like an author page to you? https://www.birdandparrot.info/shop/

 

Mitch Rezman

 

Hey there Mitch,

 

That is odd, as clicking this should go to the /author/[user] page for whichever user you clicked on.

 

For example, I have a test site, https://beta.doug.press, and when I click on View button on https://beta.doug.press/wp-admin/users.php page for the user woosupport, it will open https://beta.doug.press/author/woosupport/.

 

That is the correct behavior, and this is not WooCommerce related, that is WordPress default behavior.

 

Mitch Rezman says

 

where on gods green earth did the “author page” enter this discussion?

 

Woo says

 

That is what that link directs to, a page which lists all posts made by that user.

 

If this isn’t working on your own site, this isn’t something that WooCommerce is controlling.

 

If it redirects to the homepage of the site, then something else is controlling this behavior.

 

If you hover over the button, you should see that /author/ link, and this is what Ines means by author page:

 

Editors note: This is sad.

 

I’m asking a question about user role = customer

 

Do you see ANY CUSTOMERS in this Woocommerce test store used by Woocommerce support in an attempt to answer my question about behavior with the CUSTOMER ROLE?

 

 

SCREENSHOT woocommerce store

 

 

As this isn’t core behavior of the WooCommerce plugin and something related to WordPress as a whole, I’d recommend posting for support in the WordPress Support Forums.

Thanks,

Doug

Happiness Engineer at Automattic

Supporting you from his home in Scotland

https://dougaitken.co.uk

 

Please do tell me how you feel our interaction has been – We would all love your input on your experience with WooCommerce.com support

Get the WooCommerce mobile app and manage orders, receive sales notifications, and view key metrics — wherever you are

 

Email Comment

 

Doug Aitken

Agent6 days ago

 

Mitch Rezman says

 

I need to speak to an adult as no one from support has demonstrated an inkling of the problem or how woocommerce even works

 

FYI Woocommerce is an e-commerce platform meaning CUSTOMERS BUY STUFF.

 

But woocommerce support insists this is an author issue and is trying to solve my E-COMMERCE question about customers on a WORDPRESS SITE WITH NO CUSTOMERS!

 

So let me dumb it down with a screenshot and a simple question – what is the difference between the admin you are using and the admin I am using in an attempt at solving this issue?

 

https://www.screencast.com/t/LcCnV7VpO25i

 

 

 

 

Hi Mitch,

I’m one of the senior support engineers at Woo and I’d like to clear up some confusion that’s likely adding to the frustration.

 

Looking at the support history, I noticed that there are two tickets open for the same issue:

Ticket #1750947 (This one); and

Ticket #1732321

 

I can see that multiple support staff members have already been troubleshooting this from various angles across multiple tickets. Moving forward, I’m going to close this one to ensure a consolidated approach and I’ll make sure that internal notes are added to #1732321.

Regards,

Riaan K. – Technical Support Engineer

WordPress | Automattic | WooCommerce

 

redirection to home page

#1732321 – Opened on January 19, 2019

 

This action is new – I’ve been in customer accounts many times.

 

This morning when I click “view” on multiple accounts the all resolve to my home page – the only plugin currently activated is woocommerce – thank you

 

 

Hi there,

Thank you for contacting WooCommerce – I’m happy to help.

 

This action is new – I’ve been in customer accounts many times. This morning when I click “view” on multiple accounts the all resolve to my home page – the only plugin currently activated is woocommerce – thank you

 

Seeing as you’ve already ruled out a plugin conflict, the number of other items to check are fairly small:

 

Resaving your permalinks as found under Settings > Permalinks or setting them to “Default”

 

Temporarily switching to the default Twenty Seventeen theme to see if that resolves the issue for you

 

Making sure a “Shop” page is configured under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > General > Shop page

 

If you’ve done all of those checks but are still seeing the same thing, then we’ll need to investigate in more detail.

 

In that case, please create a temporary administrator login account using [email protected] as the email address (you can delete this login once the support request is finished).

 

This will allow us to take a closer look at the WordPress Admin side of things.

Thanks!

Regards,

Riaan K. – Technical Support Engineer

WordPress | Automattic | WooCommerce

Email Comment

 

Riaan K

Agent14 days ago

Thank you

 

Mitch Rezman says

 

I have performed the actions mentioned above and more including creating a new staging by migrating birdandparrot.info to a different host to rule out server issues

 

Achieving the same results I added woocommerce to my personal blog superezsystems.com again with the same results

 

Anecdotally – a member of a Facebook woo group mentioned the link “woo extensions” was resolving to “all posts”

 

Mitch Rezman

CMO/SEO

 

 

Hi,

 

Unless I am missing something the “my account” section on your site is accessible:

Screenshot direct link: https://d.pr/ERuPY7

Is that the section you couldn’t access?

Cheers,

Remi Corson | remicorson.com

Woo Happiness Engineer

 

 

Yes you are missing EVERYTHING

 

I have 22,000 customers in the database – where would I get 22,000 passwords?

 

I need to access customer accounts from my dashboard – how would I do that?

 

“Hello – my computer is broken – what did I order last time??

 

How would YOU answer that?

 

Mitch Rezman

CMO/SEO

 

You 6 days ago

Hey there,

 

From Woocommerce

 

Alright, but for my defense, the initial request wasn’t that clear.

 

the unclear initial request – when you click user/customer-> view you should resolve to their account instead I’m getting redirected to home here’s what it looks like https://www.screencast.com/t/JpxNGNSIeI

 

Mitch Rezman says

 

I need to access customer accounts from my dashboard – how would I do that?

Woocommerce says

 

By default, you can’t. Only a logged-in customer is supposed to get access to his account, which sounds fairly normal.

But there’s a third party addon that might help you here:

 

https://codecanyon.net/item/shop-as-customer-for-woocommerce/7043722

 

“Hello – my computer is broken – what did I order last time??

 

How would YOU answer that?

 

You can see what a customer order by filtering the orders list by customers (type the email, the firstname or lastname, or even the nickname)

Cheers,

Remi Corson | remicorson.com

Woo Happiness Engineer

Email Comment

 

Mitch Rezman says 

 

Not ONE question has been understood let alone answered.

 

Remi is worthless – I’ve been doing this 17 years and he’s telling me how e-commerce works

 

So can someone PLEASE tell me why when I click the view link under CUSTOMER it resolves to the home on my 3 woocommerce sites?

 

thank you

Mitch Rezman

CMO/SEO

 

I can tell you as Woocommerce support was unaware that Woocommerce uses customers for commerce, who did not look at my video screen capture and did not log into my site that over 17 years using Miva Merchant – GoEcart – 3DCart – Shopify – Big Commerce – ZenCart – GoDaddy and Actinic – and having 3 Woocomerce stores not only have I been able to log in to customer accounts on every platform it’s essential for conducting business on the internet

 

here is a screenshot of me logged into a customer account on ZenCart->https://www.screencast.com/t/dwKmADciA

 

I do not need your help in finding applications and being told what should or should not be

 

I need to know why when clicking view under customers, not admins not authors but the view button under customer – why does it resolve to the home page (on all 3 of my woo sites)? I asked this question 2 days ago

from October 2018 until January 17th 2019 I was able to see customer accounts when clicking view under customers – until that time we were testing companies like https://www.aftership.com/ who we were working with to install a tracking system for customer accounts – Aftership was able to access customer accounts and we were able to access customer accounts to ensure we could manually add tracking from drop shippers

 

Here is an email from 1/19 stating I had looked in customer accounts while working with Aftership https://www.screencast.com/t/yhjw3h1hk

 

Mitch Rezman

CMO/SEO

 

Howdy Mitch,

 

I need to know why when clicking view under customers, not admins not authors but the view button under customer – why does it resolve to the home page (on all 3 of my woo sites)?

 

I asked that question 2 days ago

 

WooCommerce says

 

That link is intended to be linked to an author post archive, i.e. if the particular user had created posts on the site, the link would take you to a post archive with posts authored by that user. This is a feature of WordPress and has nothing to do with WooCommerce.

That link is output by WordPress in wp-includes/author-template.php on line 348 (current version) https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/5.0.3/src/wp-includes/author-template.php#L348

 

Mitch Rezman

 

from October 2018 until January 17th 2019 I was able to see customer accounts when clicking view under customers

 

As can be seen in the same file, the link can be filtered. The filter is implemented on line 361, i.e. $link = apply_filters( ‘author_link’, $link, $author_id, $author_nicename );

WooCommerce has never implemented that filter: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/search?q=author_link&unscoped_q=author_link

 

So if that link was linking directly to a user’s WooCommerce “My Account” page or anywhere else for that matter, it would have been done either by directly editing the code that outputs the link or by another plugin that had implemented that filter.

 

Here are a couple of plugins that may help you with what you are trying to do as I understand it: Shop as Client for WooCommerce and User Switching

Kind regards,

Tip: Reference our WooCommerce self service guide for common solutions!

Email Comment

Will B

Agent 4 days ago

 

Mitch Rezman

 

You are looking at the WRONG LINK AGAIN (96 hours now) and it has EVERYTHING to do with Woocommerce as you can’t have any CUSTOMERS without having Woocommerce installed

I need you to look at the view link under a CUSTOMER

Not Administrator

Not Editor

Not Author

Not Contributor

Not Subscriber

CUSTOMER as that is where I am having the issue

 

Just put ONE CUSTOMER in your sample woocommerce store then click view and you will see the answer above has no relationship to my question

or log into my store and navigate to “users->customers” click view and you will see exactly what I’m talking about (the issue is in all my woo stores)

 

▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇

CUSTOMER.png

You4 days ago

Mitch

…or log into my store and navigate to “users->customers” click view and you will see exactly what I’m talking about (the issue is in all my woo stores)

So, this link, correct?

 

http://cld.wthms.co/ydm7uN

 

That link is absolutely, 100% output by the code referenced earlier. Allow me to demonstrate. If one were to add a code snippet similar to this:

add_filter( ‘author_link’, ‘__return_false’ );

The result is that there is no link output:

 

http://cld.wthms.co/Aod99m

Alternatively, something like this:

add_filter( ‘author_link’, ‘modify_author_link’ );

function modify_author_link( $link ) {
return ‘https://www.google.com’;;
}

 

Results in:

 

http://cld.wthms.co/ZOax2h

 

To the best of my understanding, the link I have referenced is the view link under a CUSTOMER.

 

Woocommerce Support

 

If I have misunderstood, please do provide further information about how the link you are referencing can be identified.

 

Kind regards,

Tip: Reference our WooCommerce self service guide for common solutions!

Email Comment

Will B

Agent4 days ago

 

Mitch Rezman

 

Yes that is the correct link but I don’t know why you are talking about coding?

 

I don’t and can’t code nor do I allow coding on the site because things change and developers vanish

 

To the point, this is not a birdandparrot.info site issue – this is a woocommerce systemic issue

 

superezsystems.com (https://superezsystems.com/) is a secondary blog of mine – I activated the woocomm plugin – created one sale/customer and as you can see from the screenshot from superezsystems.com (https://superezsystems.com/) showing the same behavior on a different domain – https://www.screencast.com/t/gUl5tWSk

 

here’s https://mywordpresstest.center

 

(https://mywordpresstest.center/wordpress/wp-login.php) indicating the same activity https://www.screencast.com/t/tnIRiprD

 

I asked the question on a large woocom Facebook group and received confirmation that clicking view under customer would redirect to the shop page shown in this screenshot on another site

 

https://content.screencast.com/users/WindyCityParrot/folders/Jing/media/f33b37fa-b98e-49c2-8282-a650c7430339/2019-01-31_1248.png

 

I promise – you log into ANY of your Woo test stores and you will see the same activity when clicking view under customer it will resolve to the shop page

 

This behavior began between 1/17 and 1/19 until then clicking view brought up customer accounts from the back end, an essential feature now lost –

 

I have an email from Aftership.com talking about this we were working through how to manually add tracking from dropshippers and found we could not ergo the conversation with Aftership but then we lost access to customer data

 

For the record – this is not a rookie observation – I’ve been running ecomm stores for 17 years

 

Before 2008 I had 60 affiliate sites when you could make money with them using spammy SEO – today I take SEO seriously https://www.screencast.com/t/2uESb5Xd but Zencart is having issues and must go

 

I’m trying to move my live site https://windycityparrot.com to Woo – it does mid six-figures in annual revenue and gets almost 135,000 monthly page views because of my WordPresss blog (Yep – worse integration ever which is why I no longer use developers)

 

It was launched in 2002 and hosted on 5 other platforms (with each new redesign) now trying to push live woocomm but I’m beginning to rethink this.

Just look at the original thread with woo support – If this was a serious problem I could be losing thousands of dollars in revenue

Thank you for being the first person from Automattic/Woocommerce to take me seriously

best

mitchr

Mitch Rezman

 

 

Hi Mitch,

 

Happy to hear you felt more like your issues were being taken seriously with Will’s response. We certainly do encourage feedback, and appreciate the time you have put into conveying your message clearly here.

 

I don’t know why you are talking about coding?

 

You are able to use the code Will suggested if you want to edit the final destination of that View link.

 

Definitely, understand that is not your goal here.

 

You would prefer this to be built in, as you remember it functioning previously, and your goal is to clearly convey this.

 

We appreciate the feedback, and it will be taken into consideration. If you would like to make this heard in yet another way, I would encourage you to add it to our “Ideas” board for consideration for future updates:

 

http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/133476-woocommerce

At this point, I would like to re-iterate a suggestion that was made earlier:

 

I have personally used the free User Switching plugin to log in as a user from the admin area, without their password. It’s not quite as seamless, but it works well:

 

https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-switching/

Is there anything else we can help with at this point?

Best,

Laurena

Happiness Engineer

Email Comment

 

Laurena Rehbein

Agent2 days ago

 

Mitch Rezman

 

All we agree on is the link – and that took 4 days

 

No one’s listening to anything I am saying – the view link resolves to a different page that it did 2 weeks ago woocommerce is broken and no one is acknowleging that  – fine

 

So if no one after 6 days and more than 4000 words can explain why when I click the view link under a customer it resolves to the home page (on 10 sites) I’d like to know the thought behind that –

 

if that’s too much of a challenge, please simply forward the links to 2 Woocommerce knowledge base articles

 

1) The use of “edit” “delete” and “view” links explaining their use when the user role is “customer”

2) As a merchant who had some of the same customers for 25 years many of whom have no computers – if they move – how do i change their address or email?

FYI – with every email, you are pushing me closer to BigCommerce

Mitch Rezman

 

Hi Mitch,

 

Yes, I agree there is some miscommunication going on here!

 

When I click the View link on my test site, I am redirected to the Shop page on the front end of my site. (This is as expected.)

 

When I click the Edit link, I am redirected to the user’s profile in the admin area. That’s where I would change a customer’s address or any other information.

 

We do not have documentation on this. It piggy-backs on the WordPress User system. Here is more information on that:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Users_Screen

Best,

Laurena

Happiness Engineer

Email Comment

 

Laurena Rehbein

Agent2 days ago

 

Firstly every ecomm platform (in 17 years I’ve used 9 and test drove dozens) has a way to access customer order info from admin – where would I change a shipping address or email address for a customer?

 

re: “This is as expected”

 

There are 16 user roles in Woocommerce

When I view the link in 15 of the roles is clicked you are redirected to information about that user

only customer role goes to the home page –

I wrote this after to aftership.com on 1/19

 

“but a new issue just arose with only one plugin activated woo commerce – when user->view is clicked I’m redirected to the home page”

 

Until the dates of between 1/17 and 1/19 when the view button was clicked under customer you were directed to the customer account page (which I’ve stated 2 or 3 times in the past

 

I need woocommerce to stop disrespecting me

 

For weeks my wife who is responsible for fulfillment was going through customer accounts (not having 22,00 passwords) – to ensure the customer migration was accurate

 

Accessing customer accounts through the customer view link –

 

If you don’t have documentation on this how can you say with certainty “This is as expected”

 

Where are you getting your information from?

 

If this document has nothing about user roles

* https://codex.wordpress.org/Users_Screen

how is it relevant to this conversation?

 

You are so blind to the issue why couldn’t you at least send me this

https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/roles-capabilities/

 

I’m done – don’t email me again

you are all a bunch of aggravating nitwits

 

I just need to document all this so I can share it on social – it’ll be fun

Mitch Rezman

CMO/SEO

Windy City Parrot where the sun never sets empire Tel: 312-492-9673

Mobile: 773-848-0687

Fax: 312-492-9674

Website: Http://WindyCityParrot.com

Address: 906 N Western Ave 60622

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.