WooCommerce is a fine WordPress plugin for creating a shop, however, the latest version was causing all types of errors on the website. Last night, there were hours of 502 bad gateway errors.
In response, WooCommerce was deactivated and Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) was activated. I’d been testing EDD as a replacement shop for several months.
Price Increases
Yes. Prices were increased. I was not interested in selling XenWord 1.x for the past few months. The five hour commute has not been enjoyable and takes precious time away from coding 2.x. Instead, the shop was shut down. I really didn’t expect the TONS of emails of complaints, pleas to keep selling the plugin, as well as the nasty messages.
Anyway, I’m taking the advice several suggested – a price increase. The majority of customers have been very extremely kind. But let’s be open, those who did chargebacks because sales were stopped annoyed the heck out of me. Worse, were the ones who did chargebacks and continued using the product. Shame on them.
But rather than focus on the liars and thieves – let’s focus on the good people. The good people deserve a new version of XenWord. I hope you like it as much as I loved developing it.
Patience
I deeply apologize to everyone trying to download the latest version. The development of the 2.x release has taken 7 months and many of you were are very patient. As far as I can find, there is no fast means to move past sales into EDD. This means past customers must wait for me to move orders into the shopping system before they can download the newest version.
This is my fault. I thought enabling WooCommerce and uploading the newest files would be all that is required to get the latest version out to everyone. The 502 bad gateway errors were not expected.
Hopefully EDD will work for this site. As I’m typing this post, people have purchased and downloaded the plugin through EDD. At least that part is working. But I’m still trying to get past orders into EDD. Once they are in then past customers can download the newest version.
Licensing is a support issue.
The licensing extension is one of the main attractions for enabling EDD.
Keeping track of who purchased XenWord is a nightmare. The main issue is not piracy but meeting customer expectations; The expectations need to match the features of the plugin. No one wants to purchase a plugin and discover it does not meet their expectations. No one.
As the popularity of XenWord grrew, the challenge grew to log problems with themes and WordPress plugins – so that any errors in the XenWord plugin could be fixed. More important, problems in other plugins and themes could be quickly identified so users were alerted.
Currently there lacks a support page for people to list plugins and themes they are using on their sites. I believe adding a license will help me keep track of the owners of licenses. In the license, I’m going to ask people to volunteer a list of plugins and themes they are using on their site.
An additional benefit is that the license should help customers learn about new XenWord releases.
Finally, no license extension has been installed, yet. It will be done after past orders are in EDD.
Please let me know of any concerns you may have about the newest features, downloads, pricing, etc. Of course – remember that my answering your PM means I’m not putting in past orders 🙂
January and February sales have been entered into Easy Digital Downloads. It's time for dinner then I'll return to adding in more of the past sales.
March and April sales are now entered into EDD.