Streamlining the extension management flow

Say goodbye to having to install a plugin to manage your plugins!

Over the past few months, we have been working on figuring out how we could simplify our customer’s experience when managing the extensions they bought on WooCommerce.com; as well as the installation and subscription activation of these extensions on their self-hosted site.

In the past, managing your WooCommerce store and the subscriptions for your WooCommerce.com extensions happened in two different places within your site’s wp-admin – and yes, you even needed to install a plugin, the WooCommerce Helper, to assist you.

This experience worked, but it left room for improvement, and it also meant added steps for our customers – something all of us don’t need.

As of yesterday, with the release of WooCommerce 3.1, we made our first move to truly allow you to manage your extensions and theme purchases made on WooCommerce.com and we are doing it directly from within the WooCommerce plugin itself.

We’ve brought the downloading of extensions and the activation and management of the subscriptions for your extensions right into the same place where you manage your WooCommerce store. Once you have purchased an extension on WooCommerce.com you can download and activate the subscription all from your store. No added steps; and no plugin to manage plugins.

By adding this functionality into WooCommerce we aim to simplify both our first-time customers’ experience, as well as make it easier for existing customers to manage multiple extensions.

This new feature also:

• Shows you which WooCommere.com products are installed but do not have an active subscription, so you can easily activate them to receive updates and support
• Will notify you if an extension’s subscription is about to expire, and
• Allow you to see expired subscriptions and purchase a new one if you wish

We still have a number of further improvements planned to simplify and streamline our customer’s experience in managing their extensions as part of this new workflow – so more is coming!