Highlighting Incompatible Payment Gateways
Preventing Lost Sales Through Proactive Merchant Warnings
Developed a feature for WooCommerce Blocks to detect and notify merchants about incompatible payment gateways, preventing potential lost sales and reducing support burden.
ReactReduxTypeScriptWordPressPHP
Clear warnings help merchants identify payment setup issues immediately
Preventing Silent Checkout Failures
Merchants adopting the new Cart & Checkout Blocks in WooCommerce often faced confusion and potential lost sales when their existing, essential payment gateways weren't compatible with the blocks. There was no built-in mechanism to inform them of this incompatibility proactively, leading to support requests and frustration only discovered when customers couldn't complete purchases.
My Role & Contributions
Recognizing this critical gap, I spearheaded a research spike aimed at finding graceful ways to inform merchants about incompatible extensions within the block editor environment.
- Led Research Spike: Conducted in-depth research into plugin compatibility detection methods, explored solutions used by other teams, and analyzed the technical feasibility of various approaches
- Synthesized Findings: Authored a comprehensive P2 post detailing the problem space and proposing several solutions, which garnered significant attention across teams (Product, Design, Engineering)
- Developed Proof-of-Concept: Created a working proof-of-concept specifically targeting the most critical incompatibility issue – payment gateways – demonstrating how merchants could be warned
- Implemented Feature: Based on the success and clear need demonstrated by the research and PoC, I was tasked with developing and implementing this warning system as a high-priority feature
Key Features
Before: No indication of compatibility issues
After: Clear highlighting of incompatible gateways
Before: No compatibility warnings in sidebar
After: Clear warning with list of incompatible gateways
Technical Implementation
The implementation required careful coordination between frontend and backend systems:
✨ Highlights
- Led research initiative that evolved into a shipped feature
- Prevented potential lost sales from silent checkout failures
- Reduced support burden by proactively warning merchants
🔍 Challenges
- Tracing data flow between WooCommerce PHP backend and React frontend
- Designing non-intrusive yet noticeable warning UI
- Handling edge cases with disabled or partially configured gateways
🛠️ Skills Demonstrated
- Research & Analysis: Identifying user pain points and investigating solutions
- React & TypeScript: Building type-safe UI components
- Redux/@wordpress/data: Managing complex state for compatibility detection
Key Takeaways
- Gained experience in driving features from research to implementation
- Deepened understanding of WooCommerce's payment gateway architecture
- Learned effective patterns for editor notifications in WordPress
- Improved skills in debugging across frontend/backend boundaries
- Developed expertise in creating user-friendly technical warnings
- Enhanced ability to advocate for UX improvements through research
Technologies Used
⚙️ Core Stack
- React
- Redux (@wordpress/data)
- TypeScript
- PHP
- WordPress Block Editor
📦 Libraries
- WooCommerce Blocks
- @wordpress/components
- @wordpress/i18n
- @wordpress/element
🔧 Tools
- WordPress Development Environment
- Chrome DevTools
- Redux DevTools
- Git/GitHub