Another month, another review! Unlike our March in Review, April has a pretty specific focus: payment gateways. We pushed out a lot of gateway updates in April, and our entire WooCommerce development team attended WooConf. We’ve also got a lot of exciting stuff in progress already for May, check it out 🙂
General Updates
As our team was traveling for and attending WooConf this month, our blog was pretty focused on updates and less on tutorials in April. We did publish an overview of setting minimum / maximum input values for Measurement Price Calculator, and we updated our Memberships import / export doc with a new WP All Export pro connector (though native exports are almost done!).
I also got to chat with BobWP in the “Do the Woo” podcast at WooConf to discuss niche membership sites.
WooConf
Through the beginning of April, our WooCommerce team traveled to and attended WooConf. Even though our annual company SkyTrip was at the end of February, it was great to catch up in person again and see several more friends in the WooCommerce community. We wrote up a recap of WooConf as well.
Paytrail v2.0
Chase led the release of Paytrail 2.0 in April, which fixed some small bugs, but more importantly, updates the codebase for considerable improvements to performance and stability. Paytrail now uses our gateway library of code, which has been battle-tested for years.
You can check out his overview post for more details.
First Data v4.0
Max led First Data 4.0, which was a huge refactor for First Data. The legacy Global Gateway payment mode was updated to use our gateway library for better performance and easier troubleshooting. The Payeezy Gateway was improved for some great new features, and we added support for the new Payeezy mode, which is an API-based protocol. You can switch between your gateway mode when activating the plugin:
The new Payeezy mode supports the client-side tokenization library that First Data provides. This gives you a more secure checkout, as payment details are encoded before being sent through your server.
Both Payeezy Gateway and Payeezy (API) support TeleChecks for one-time transactions.
All gateways also now use our enhanced checkout form for better card inputs, automatic card detection, and automatic expiration date formatting.
You can learn more in Max’s overview post.
Payment Gateway Updates
In addition to Paytrail, Chase led our plugin framework v4.3 update. This was primarily payment gateway-focused, and it added some nice new features to several gateways that support tokenization, such as:
- First Data
- NETbilling
- Moneris
- Intuit QBMS
- Chase Paymentech
- Authorize.net CIM
First, the payment gateways that support subscriptions now have improved saved card handling for methods tied to a subscription. Customers are notified why they can’t delete a card tied to a subscription, and can view associated subscriptions to change the payment method. Once a card is no longer tied to a subscription, it can be removed.
Saved Methods + Subscriptions
This should improve renewal payments to avoid failures when a card / token is missing.
A new token editor was also added that makes it easier to manage tokens for customers’ saved cards within your WordPress admin. You can view and update tokens as needed by viewing the “Edit user” screen.
In Progress
We have tons in progress now as well! We’ve got some small feature releases either out or about to be shipped, and Fulvio is finishing Memberships version 1.6 for much improved integrations with other plugins (it will play nicer with plugins like Subscriptions, Composite Products, Dynamic Pricing, and others), along with a native member CSV import / export.
Once these updates are shipped, we’ll be doing a feature freeze as we devote a few weeks to WooCommerce 2.6 compatibility updates for all plugins. Note that WooCommerce 2.3 support will be dropped when these compatibility versions are released; time to update to at least v2.4 if you haven’t!
And on a final note, Max, Daniel, and Justin have been wrapping up one of our labs projects, and we’ve very excited to be launching soon! Our Jilt abandoned cart app is available already for Shopify stores, and our improvements and WooCommerce integration are almost complete.
We’ll be getting in touch with our email list for both a call for beta testers and a launch promotion price, so if you’d like to test the plugin or hear more, you can sign up for the email list:
