Hi Callum, thanks for the feedback. The Woo design team are reviewing the WooCommerce navigation to look for ways to fit everything it takes to manage a successful store within WordPress.

To give some idea of the scope of the challenge, the team just stated usability testing on their 3rd iteration since February.

I don’t understand why all of WooCommerce’s menu items aren’t all placed under the WooCommerce menu item?

The key reason WooCommerce Payments has its own top level menu right now is because it has sub-menu items for screens a store owner will visit regularly (potentially many times per day for active stores).

With the current design, a store owner can get to their deposits, disputes and other transactions in a single click. If we were to add Payments as a submenu on WooCommerce and hide those pages behind tabs, we'd require store owners to make extra clicks to get to those pages. We'd also make it harder to discover those pages for new merchants.

When putting WooCommerce up against pure eCommerce competitors, like Shopify, this would make WooCommerce, and by extension WordPress, the sub-par experience for eCommerce. Something we need to avoid.

If a Not-for-profit is using WordPress for example, they are more than likely going to be collecting payments through a forms plugin and a donation plugin in addition to Woocommerce.

It seems like the core issue in that scenario is two independent eCommerce systems being used on a single site. The WooCommerce top level menu item is a symptom of that and there would be others, potentially worse, like if the merchant needs to have PayPal Standard sending two IPNs back to the same site with different payloads which can conflict.

While it's inevitable in an open ecosystem that this can happen, the ideal situation for site owners is to have one system that serves their needs. IMO that's what we should all be working towards, whether we are working on WooCommerce, a forms plugin, or a donation plugin, because the impact of plugins conflicting usual ends up in reputation damage to WordPress itself.