BIG Announcement📢: WooCommerce Becomes a Payment Gateway

If you open your email this morning and found a surprise from WooCommerce you’re not alone.

Today woocommerce announced that they are becoming a payment Gateway. So let’s look at what that means for store owners.

A link over to their announcement page and the sign up page is listed towards the bottom of this post.

So here’s the video that you going to see from that sign of page. And what it represents is a screen it inside your dashboard where you can manage all of your settings dispute transactions and your deposits.

So what this is showing here is that WooCommerce is now going to be interacting directly with your bank.

No Stripe Extension needed.

No PayPal Extension.

Forget Authorize.net

The merchant Gateway fees are quite comparable to the industry standard as they’ve announced over on their page to be 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction all United States issued cards only.

What does that mean for international payments? Well we have yet to find out. But of course that’s what their sign up page is for right? 😉

So what are the requirements for this?

You must be running PHP 5.6 or higher, (Dear 8lb. 6oz. Lord Baby Jesus Moses, please tell us you ARE!), must have WooCommerce Admin extension running, & of course a Jetpack account is required as well.

💡Note: Stop whining about Jetpack. It is the BEST place to store UNLIMITED VIDEO instead of making your viewers distracted via presenting video via YouTube! Think about that for a minute: UNLIMITED VIDEO!

Do you have to connect a WordPress.com account via Jetpack during the process?
ABSOLUTELY! (cbd, thc, whatever it’s called: STAY AWAY!)

Here’s a list of restrictions from their site. Copy / pasted word for word:

• Virtual currency, including video game or virtual world credits
• Counterfeit goods
• Adult content and services
• Drug paraphernalia (including e-cigarette, vapes and nutraceuticals)
• Multi-level marketing
• Pseudo pharmaceuticals
• Social media activity, like Twitter followers, Facebook likes, YouTube views
• Substances designed to mimic illegal drugs
• Firearms, ammunition

So, if you’re selling anything on the above list, don’t even waste your time!

Now, let’s move on to the next part.

After you get on the beta list to get WooCommerce Payments installed on your site what’s going to happen next?

See that button down there that says “Verify Details”? After you’ve installed the plugin that’s the first button you click on.

If you’ve ever set up the Stripe for WooCommerce Extension before, then this next part is going to be quite familiar. 👍

After you’re done on the first screen it’s going to redirect you over to the stripe API connection portal. And that screen is going to look like this:

Once done there, you are now connected and ready to start accepting payments.

Okay so this brings us to a lot of questions? Is there really much difference between this and the stripe extension that we’ve been using previously throughout the years?

Does this ‘new’ WooCommerce Payments work with WooCommerce Subscriptions?
Nope! 🛑

According to WooCommerce they “will support charging automatic recurring payments in a future version”. So if you currently have subscriptions on your site do not attempt this plugin.

So what about WooCommerce Pre-Orders?
You know those times when you run up a big kick starter or a big crowdfunding adventure and then release the product at a future date, or you just want to do pre-orders for a discount?
Nope.🛑

Don’t use this there either. Again, it “may support” doing those awesomely fun and revenue building pre-orders, however it would be “… in a future version.”

But….

For any other transactions? Yes, this new WooCommerce Payments Extension could work. Again though, it’s in beta and it is something you have to sign up for.

Remember the link I mentioned? Well, you’ve probably already seen it a few times already. However, we’re going to post it here for you to share, sign up, and tell all your friends about it!

👉 https://woocommerce.com/payments/ 👈

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Even though this is By Invitation Only, what are your initial thoughts on this?

If you are an existing WooCommerce store owner who is already using Stripe and PayPal what are your thoughts on this new plug-in and it’s new extension?

Would you switch?

…..and, ….uhm, (I’m sure more details will come) but why the heck would anyone want to use this over the already existing payment gateways? #JustBeingHonest

Again though, your thoughts matter even more!

Let’s talk about this in the comments below.