Unable to activate paid-for partner theme on Woo Express staging site

[Brianmitchtay]

Prerequisites

• I have carried out troubleshooting steps and I believe I have found a bug.
• I have searched for similar bugs in both open and closed issues and cannot find a duplicate.

Describe the bug

After purchasing a premium third party theme from the WordPress.com marketplace, Woo Express users are unable to then activate the theme on the staging site they have in place for their Woo Express site. Instead they see a notice:

Partner themes cannot be purchased on staging sites
Subscribe to this theme on your production site.

This is despite having already subscribed and paid for the theme.

Expected behavior

Once a theme has been purchased and subscribed to on a production site, it should be available for use on the staging site as well. Since frequently users will be purchasing a theme then wanting to configure it on staging before moving to production.

Actual behavior

The theme is not available on the staging site.

If the theme has previously been installed (before the staging site was created, so that it exists on the staging copy) it can be activated by directly visiting the stagingurl.wpcomstaging.com/wp-admin/themes.php page of the admin area. However there is no UI route for users to access that page other than directly typing it in the address bar.

Screen.Recording.2024-01-15.at.5.03.19.PM.mov

Steps to reproduce

1. On a production Woo Express site, visit the themes page
2. Purchase a premium theme with credits
3. If no staging site exists, create one
4. Attempt to activate the premium theme on staging
5. See that it is not available, and you're prompted to subscribe

WordPress Environment

Not available at the moment due to ongoing testing for staging site restores on the same site (which required me to deactivate WooCommerce)

Isolating the problem

• I have deactivated other plugins and confirmed this bug occurs when only WooCommerce plugin is active.
• This bug happens with a default WordPress theme active, or Storefront.
• I can reproduce this bug consistently using the steps above.

[Brianmitchtay]

It's possible that this issue occurs on all Atomic staging sites, I only tested on a Woo Express site.