This document offers guidance for the team providing support for plugins and themes sold on WordPress.com, including setup procedures, and expectations.

Support expectations

Plugin / theme developers ( vendors) will handle the support for all the products they sell through WordPress.com. Follow the Support Policy published on WordPress.com while providing customer support. Here are some Support Best Practices on how to respond to support requests.

WordPress.com will handle all questions related to billing issues, license provisioning, plugin / theme installation, and generic functionality questions.

The Vendor will handle technical questions as well as those related to the plugin / theme configuration. WordPress.com will forward these queries to the Vendor. Tech-savvy customers may also reach out to Vendors directly.

We expect Vendors to provide support to WordPress.com customers using the Service Level Agreement (SLA) they use with their highest priority customers. WordPress.com customers should receive a response from the Vendor within 12 hours.

Support flow

  • If a customer experiences issues with a vendor plugin on WordPress.com and the issue has been confirmed, WordPress.com support will escalate the issue to the vendor support team via email.
  • The customer will receive the escalation email (TO), with the vendor support team also copied in (CC).
  • The email will inform the customer that the vendor is responsible for plugin support as a partner on WordPress.com and will provide details about the issue for the vendor to help debug and assist the customer.
  • Vendor support team should create a new email and contact the customer directly to reduce the chance of any unexpected incidents, such as replying to WordPress.com support instead of the customer.
  • Please note: once the escalation email reaches the vendor support team, WordPress.com should be removed from the email communication (no TO or CC on the new email sent to the customer about the issue), and the communication should only be between the vendor support and the customer.
  • If the vendor support team requires assistance from WordPress.com support, they can contact WordPress.com on Slack and reference the Issue ID provided in the initial escalation email.
  • The vendor will respond to the customer within the timeframe agreed to in the SLA.

Refunds

WordPress.com offers a seven-day refund period for monthly subscriptions and a 14-day period for annual plan subscriptions. We aim to follow identical refund windows for all monthly and annual subscription offerings on WordPress.com including the plugins and themes.

WordPress.com does not have any conditions around refunds except the refund period. Routinely, we ask customers what/ how we might help them more effectively (and keep them on the subscription). Customer success with any offering is the primary goal, and WordPress.com wants customers to be successful, regardless of whether it’s with a  purchase or cancellation.

How to

Access a user’s site

If it is necessary to access a user’s site, do not ask them for their login details. Instead, follow these steps for a safer and more secure approach:

  1. Ensure that your organization has at least one WPcom account.
  2. Request an invitation as an admin-level user.
  3. Alternatively, if the user has SSO (Secure Sign On) deactivated, have them add your account via /wp-admin and then share the credentials with you.

Never ask WPcom users to share their site owner credentials. If the user faces any issues adding you as the admin on the site, you can ask the user to reach our Happiness Engineers in support.