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I’ve created a new licence but when I try to create a new product and add the new licence I get an endlessly spinning wheel after I click-on “Licenses”. It will not allow me to attach the new licence.
I don’t want to make it default as this new licence will only apply to one physical product. Any ideas?
Robin – can you help with this please?
This problem is really holding me up and preventing me adding new products or applying a new license to existing products (as opposed to the sample default Symbiostock one they now have).
There seems to be no way of opening the “License” option in any media – new or existing – when I edit it. I get an endless “busy” loop. I have tried uploading new media and the same happens. I have tried to follow the instructions in Documentation and successfully created new licenses.
I do need to apply my own license to all images for digital downloads in time, but right now I’m trying to set the price for a single physical product (a book) and, so far as I know, have correctly set that media product to “physical product” in Edit and so on.
The site is not yet “live”, and never will be until I can get this problem sorted, but I have an advertising deadline for this book to comply with and cannot meet it (and will lose three months until the next issue) unless I can get this to work.
Thanks
Hi Mike – using WooCommerce 3.0.7 and Symbiostock Pro 4.0.1 I am able to edit the licenses for a new product. I am also able to create a license and add it manually to the product and see it on the front end.
This means the issue is unique to your install. If you believe the issue is a Symbiostock bug, please submit a paid support request and we will log into your site and examine and find the issue. If it is a bug, you will be refunded the cost of the support request.
Alternatively if you are using the correct versions of Symbiostock and WooCommerce and can provide additional details about the issue here that may help us diagnose the problem, we can try to figure it out together.
Robin – I have Woo 3.3 and Symbiostock 3.3. I have just updated to S. Stock 4.01 – it IS now working and allowing me to enter the licence section.
There was obviously a bug in the version I had when purchased.
I’m creating new licenses – I want one special one for ONE product only – a physical book for sale and delivery. It is not a raster file. I have created the license and called it “My License”. I try to edit it and state in the edit that it is a physical product. I set the price of £10 say. I save it and then try to apply that license to the single book product. I save/update the media/product.
I do that but when it appears on the site it insists on showing a whole bunch of size options for immediate download (I assume?) delivery. I clearly don’t need any of that, so back to the product and cklick “Licenses”. The only logical (but it doesn’t work) option to remove these unwanted options seems to be from “Default form values” choose “My license” and then below that “Add variation”, within which is the option “Delete all variations”. I do that as there is no other option of deleting these unwanted price options, and save.
The product STILL shows all the unwanted options and the £10 price I set for that license shows £5.99 under “My license” in the list.
I confess that although a patient man, who spends hours and hours trying to sort these issues myself before posting on this forum, I am finding Symbiostock the most unintuitive un-user-friendly software I have ever used. I’m no expert but I have been using websites for well over 20 years (but not WordPress until now). I’m frankly finding this much more trouble than its worth and certainly could not give any kind of review you want to read.
I’m sorry to put this for all to see Robin, but if you want to make it impossible for anyone to contact you without a $50 “Support ticket”, or wait sometimes days and days for a reply by posting on a forum – or wait and get no reply at all, as has happened – then that’s the natural result. The fact that the license feature would not work at all until an update was done (I only bought it a month ago) is not my fault. Now it does at least allow it to be opened but the Documentation is inadequate to answer the above and I’ve ploughed through all the license stuff again and again.
I’m about fed-up with Symbiostock Robin – I’m trying to run a business here and have wasted days and days on this. I really think you need to have a serious look at the product and the documentation support situation as right now it seems to me unfit for purpose. If the easiest option for you is to give me a refund I’ll gladly accept, write off weeks of wasted effort and start again with something else. If not then please urgently address these issues so I can do my work. I’m pretty annoyed, as you will realise. Over to you
Hi Mike –
1) If you want to add a book, you don’t use Symbiostock for that. You add it as a non-Symbiostock product in which case it will run through WooCommerce alone. This way you can set the price manually and it will not use the license system because there is no use for it.
2) Using websites for 20 years is a far cry from developing your own. WordPress, WooCommerce and Symbiostock have a learning curve to them, and as one of your first issues with using Symbiostock was learning that there is a difference between a Draft and a Published post indicates that regardless of your experience, this is a new ecosystem for you that takes learning. WordPress is one thing, but Symbiostock is relatively advanced software.
3) Further to point #2 –
a) The Symbiostock update you are talking about was released over 6 monhts ago. This indicates that you did not pay attention to the plugin updates page and ensure that the version you were using was the latest one. This is one of the default steps anyone using WordPress takes when encountering issues. You did not know this – this is not a problem with the developers or the software, but is a result of you entering a new ecosystem.
b) You are using the wrong WooCommerce version. This means you ignored Symbiostock’s clear warning not to update WooCommerce to a different version. This further indicates that you took it upon yourself to not update Symbiostock to the latest version, but rather update WooCommerce to an unsupported version and try your luck. You further failed to mention this fact in any of your support requests, making it very difficult for the developers to diagnose your issue.
c) You did not pay for Symbiostock Pro – Symbiostock Pro is free. If you paid for anything it is our optional theme or plugins which expand on the base Symbiostock Pro plugin.We have provided you ample support and attempted to assist you with every request. However as you expand your needs with the software and encounter issues that are as a result of your lack of experience with mainly WordPress (as you can see, no software updates were implemented as a result of any of your support requests, indicating that Symbiostock Pro functioned perfectly for your needs the day you downloaded it), you are going to encounter things you either do not understand or get frustrated by, and this is the cost of approaching a new system and doing it all yourself.
Everyone that has started their first WordPress site has had lots of confusing moments, and you are jumping into this with the addition of Symbiostock Pro – the fact that you’ve gotten as far as you have is commendable and you should be quite pleased that you’ve done so well so soon.
As you can see, our support ticket system is in place because we cannot spend time ‘teaching’ new users to use WordPress. We also cannot constantly monitor the forums and again, ensure that everyone has timely responses to a multitude of different questions that are not related to bugs with Symbiostock. All of your issues relate to learning about how WordPress works and we are more than happy to assist you in whatever way we can, but cannot be on call to teach anyone how to use WordPress. This is why we have added the support request feature for customers that want to get stuff done quickly without having to go through the process of learning things that may be new for them.
Finally, given that you have never used WordPress before, and are finding hiccups as you demand more out of the system and learn how to optimize your use of it, if you feel this frustrates you and wish to blame Symbiostock for it, that’s your prerogative. Please do not threaten the project with bad reviews in an effort to get timely assistance. All that will happen as a result is you are even less likely to receive free support from us. Our entire platform is free and the community operates through goodwill and positive intentions at assisting fellow visual artists to monetize their media and provide some autonomy from the yoke of agencies that take a majority of profits from end user sales.
I understand the desire to save money, I understand the desire to get your store up and running, I understand that you feel it is Symbiostock that is the confusing issue. But you have opted to challenge yourself with a new system, and that system is WordPress – there is learning to it. You’ve done fantastic, but everything has an opportunity cost to it, and we can’t be on call free of charge to help every user with every issue they don’t understand.
Additionally, please do not create multiple threads for the same issue – I have merged your new thread with this one.
Let me know if you have any questions about anything I’ve written here. Also, regarding the refund, if you wish to cease using Symbiostock Pro you are welcome to do so and we will gladly provide you a refund for any additional software you’ve purchased. Just contact me personally via the messaging system and let me know your email address and order ID(s).
Hi Robin,
I appreciate you are now as irritated with me expressing my concerns about your product as I am with its issues. I’ll address your comments in order, so far as I can:
1) I see nothing in the Documentation which says to use Woo Commerce for non-digital products. I do see in the product edit a checkbox to say whether the product is not downloadable and a physical product. I think 99/100 new users would assume – in the absence of instruction to the contrary – that is how you price a physical book or print. A short note by that check box would save hours of wasted time and frustration.
2) Most of the issues I experienced could and should have been addressed properly in the documentation. It’s rarely sensible to assume a level of experience based on your expert knowledge the new user is unlikely to have. That is the classic mistake of clever people who design clever things for others to use, but then can’t/won’t explain them properly, or at all, as in this case.
3) Your further points:
a) I don’t expect to have to worry about updating your product when I download it in November. If the update was available six months ago then why are you issuing an out of date plugin? There may be a good reason – if so then I suggest you print a prominent warning when the download is made. Customers are not mind readers.
b) I did not update Woo Commerce and in fact I confirmed in my last post that I was using the same version you suggested in your post – 3.7 – which you said was working perfectly when you tried opening licences, so that is a totally spurious argument. It follows I did not make mention of these issues in my posts as I was completely unaware of them. You seem to be suggesting on the one hand I ignore Woo Commerce updates when highlighted, but must apply Symbiostock updates. Which do you want me to do Robin, as it can’t be both?
c) True – I did not buy the plugin – that is merely your hook to sell Express. Nothing wrong with that, but you are splitting hairs – the fact is I bought a Symbiostock theme which has multiple problems for the unfamiliar user (by definition almost all users) and poor documentation in some respects – good in places but, like a hole in a bucket, the lovely shiny bucket ain’t much use with the hole in it.
I appreciate you don’t provide free support but that policy does make a decent, comprehensive documentation even more essential if you are taking money for the product. You cannot expect the paying customer to have expert knowledge of a complex piece of software without some means of support. Neither can you realistically expect him to pay $50 for a support question (which someone else on here said he had not had a reply to for a week – totally unacceptable). Again you can’t have it both ways Robin and just leave buyers to the mercy of a forum post which may or not be answered and may take days if it is – both of which I’ve experienced
I did not “threaten the project with bad reviews”. You solicited a review from me in a previous post and I was making clear that you would not want a review from me at the moment. I don’t generally leave bad reviews (and certainly never threaten to do so), but often leave good ones. I may still leave you a review – time and future experience of how this is dealt with will tell. You can be sure it will be fair, balanced and accurate.
As regards the refund, you and I are clearly never going to see eye to eye and will be a source of conflict to each other if we struggle to continue an obviously bad relationship, so yes please – but this is not going to be dependent on me buying elsewhere. That is my choice entirely and I may well revert to software I already use and was hoping to replace with Symbiostock (I can send order confirmation of this if you insist) or Free Digital Downloads or similar.
That sounds like a highly conditional “refund” offer and doesn’t impress, in fact it merely compounds the problem and adds to my irritation. If you are so distrustful that I might continue using Symbiostock, then I will give you one-time access to the admin of my test site so you can delete it – send me an email.
Why you think I would commit to uploading and keywording thousands of images using Symbiostock when I could never ask for support – paid for or via this forum – for the inevitable future issues defeats my understanding and demeans you. That’s why I’ve been using a test site before going “live” with this. Clearly a wise move on my part and a ridiculous statement on yours. Something else not thought through properly.
Please confirm you will make the refund and whether you want access to my test site to delete the theme.
Mike
I am sorry you are getting increasingly irritated – I do believe that Symbiostock Pro’s documentation is quite good, but certainly could be larger and more thorough, but given that it is a free plugin we do our best with the resources we have.
I think one of the things you don’t understand is that all WordPress plugins, paid or not, sustain development through paid support – almost entirely. In fact, Symbiostock Pro is very unique in that it is a full fledged plugin that is 100% free and does not require paid upgrades for unlimited functionality. I would suggest you research other plugins for other purposes and you will see that anything on the professional level will rarely provide dedicated, privatized support like we do on the forums for free.
As I said, please contact me privately with your order number and email address and I will process your refund. I realize you may be emotional about this, but I am not, and you are always welcome to contact me if you wish to try again in the future.
Additionally, if you wish to give it one more go, you can contact me privately and I can try to help you one final time to get it up and running as you’d like and answer your questions as best as I can there.
Refund request sent to you just now by PM.
I am not in the least emotional Robin – I’ve been around the block enough to be very unemotional and hard-headed for that.
I wish you luck with the project.
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