During the approval Stripe or WooPayments does not even evaluate your website until you’ve tested it by making your first order. That is too far down in the business process for most people.
WooCommerce’s hustle is that they will tell you that WooCommerce and WooPayments are two different companies. Apparently WooPayments is a for profit company that developed a plugin for WordPress called WooCommerce. WooCommerce is an opensource platform for WordPress. I did a little research to realized that WooPayments doesn’t really support the application they’ve developed (WooCommerce) and the WordPress-WoocCommerce community is not happy about it. They left the supporting of the application to the opensource community but they don’t charge for the application. It’s hard to complain, but it’s is confusing.
Accepting credit/debit cards online can be a challenging process. Part of the process for accepting credit or debit cards is that you need a merchant account and a payment card processor. A merchant account goes through an underwriting and evaluation process. Not everyone or every company is approved. It is in everyone’s the best business interest for everyone to be approved, though — One company or another will approve you. You’ll be charged based on your risk. Processing debit and credit cards has become a whole lot riskier since people started using them mostly online and not in person. Before that the riskiest industry was sports bars and other entertainment venues and clubs. The way most companies deterimine your risk is started off by asking you what industry you are in.