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Looks Lo @jeYoco — From Plugin Problems to Top Performer: The WooCommerce Payments Transformation
Yoco, a leading financial technology company in South Africa, provides a seamless payments experience for small and medium-sized businesses. However, their WooCommerce payments plugin faced significant challenges that affected its stability and user satisfaction. Yoco sought a reliable partner with deep WooCommerce expertise to enhance the plugin and provide ongoing support. This case study explores how Progressus transformed Yoco’s plugin, improving its performance, reducing support tickets and ultimately helping Yoco better serve their merchants.
Summary
- Merchant conversion rates increased to 86%.
- Support tickets decreased from 30-50 per week to fewer than 5.
- Average ticket resolution time reduced from 5-7 days to 1-2 days.
- 70% of plugin installations now use the latest version.
The Brief
In August 2023, Yoco, a prominent financial technology company based in South Africa, launched a new WooCommerce payments plugin developed by an external agency. This plugin was designed to integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce, providing Yoco’s merchants with a reliable payment solution tailored to their needs.
However, as the project neared its completion, it became apparent that the plugin was not meeting expectations. Despite the initial excitement surrounding its launch, the plugin quickly encountered significant issues, leading to widespread dissatisfaction among merchants and a surge in support requests.
Yoco’s initial partner agency struggled to resolve the issues that emerged. The plugin’s stability was compromised by a range of problems, including installation failures, conflicts with various WooCommerce themes and critical errors in payment processing. These issues not only frustrated Yoco’s merchants but also threatened the company’s reputation in the competitive fintech landscape. As a company that prides itself on providing seamless payment experiences, Yoco knew that immediate action was necessary to salvage the situation.
The challenge was multifaceted. Firstly, the plugin’s codebase needed a thorough review to identify and fix the root causes of the instability. Additionally, there was a pressing need to improve the plugin’s logging capabilities, which were inadequate for troubleshooting and resolving issues efficiently. Without detailed logs, it was nearly impossible to diagnose and fix problems in a timely manner, further exacerbating the situation.
Yoco faced a critical decision: continue working with the original agency or seek a new partner with the expertise and reliability required to turn the project around. After careful consideration, Yoco approached Progressus, a platinum-certified WooExpert development agency known for its deep technical knowledge and responsive support. Progressus had been in discussions with Yoco before the project began, and although Yoco initially chose another agency, they later recognized that Progressus was better equipped to handle the complexities of the project.
Market
Fintech payments solutions
Technology
REST API
PHP
AJAX
Javascript
HTML
CSS
Services
Frontend Dev
Backend Dev
Visit
The Approach
A comprehensive and hands-on approach to the project was taken with an in-depth code review and significant improvements having been made after working closely with the team and merchants to ensure the plugin met their needs.
Upon taking over the project, Progressus began with an in-depth code review, which confirmed that the plugin’s code was in reasonable shape. But, it required significant improvements to meet Yoco’s standards and support their merchants effectively. The initial focus was on stabilizing the plugin by addressing the most pressing issues—namely, installation errors and payment processing failures.
Progressus also enhanced the plugin’s logging capabilities, which were previously almost non-existent. By implementing robust logging, Progressus enabled Yoco to capture detailed information about plugin operations, making it easier to diagnose and fix issues. This improvement was crucial in reducing the volume of support tickets and increasing the speed at which issues were resolved.
In addition to the technical enhancements, Progressus took a hands-on approach to support. They worked closely with Yoco’s team and directly with merchants to understand their pain points and implement solutions that would make the plugin more user-friendly and reliable. Within 3-4 months, these efforts began to pay off, with the plugin becoming significantly more stable and merchant satisfaction increasing.
Key Improvements
During their work on the Yoco payments plugin, Progressus made several key improvements to enhance both usability and operational efficiency. One of the first priorities was refining the plugin’s logging system. Previously, inadequate logging made troubleshooting difficult. The new logging system provided detailed information, enabling faster diagnosis of issues and making it easier to support merchants.
Progressus also addressed installation challenges, which many merchants faced due to unique hosting environments and WordPress configurations. They implemented clear notifications and detailed logs within the WordPress admin dashboard, allowing merchants to quickly identify and resolve common setup problems, such as connection issues or unreachable webhooks. Additionally, a fallback system was introduced to ensure smooth payment processing, even when webhooks couldn’t be reached.
Another significant improvement was made to the handling of order status updates. Previously, successful payments automatically set the order status to “Processing,” which caused confusion. Progressus implemented the payment_complete method, giving merchants more accurate tracking of their orders and improving overall order management. These enhancements made the plugin more stable, user-friendly, and reliable for Yoco’s merchants.
The Results
The hands-on approach led to superlative results within 3-4 months. These efforts resulted in a much more stable plugin and increased merchant satisfaction. The groundwork was also laid for its future success, ensuring that Yoco could continue to provide their merchants with a top-tier payment solution.
Our collaborative approach with Yoco has set a new benchmark for success. This made space for concentrating on broader business objectives. All while implementing the critical improvements needed to enhance their WooCommerce payments plugin and better serve their merchants with outstanding results:
70%
Of installations
using latest version
+86%
Merchant
conversion rate
90%
Less weekly
support tickets
75%
Decrease in
support wait times
Partnering with Progressus has been a game-changer for us. Their deep expertise in WooCommerce and WordPress, combined with their responsive and reliable support, has drastically transformed our plugin for the better. We’ve seen dramatic improvements in merchant satisfaction and our support ticket volume has decreased significantly. Working with Progressus feels like we’ve extended our web development team with true experts.
