PDA

View Full Version : WP Ecommerce Plugin



billbenson
07-29-2009, 02:58 AM
It hasn't come up recently, so I thought I'd re ask an old question. Has anybody used or heard any feedback or used any of the wp plugins for ecommerce. I'd like to play around with one. Preferably free, but if a pay one is worth it, I would be willing to buy it.

Last time I remember seeing posts on it, here or elsewhere, there wasn't much data good or bad.

vangogh
07-29-2009, 11:51 AM
I still haven't used wp-ecommerce, but I always hear good things about it. There is a free version of it which you can easily install and test on a development server. I think the main difference between the free and pay version is the amount of merchants it works with. The free version might only work with PayPal. It should give you enough of an idea about whether or not it will work for you.

I may need to look into it for an upcoming project so if I get a chance I'll install it on my development server and let you know what I think.

orion_joel
07-29-2009, 10:28 PM
I have given wp-ecommerce a try myself and was not as impressed as i hoped i would have been. I mean it was a good system and integrates to WP fantastically. However it had three downfalls for me.

1. The calculation of Tax and how it does it is confusing and i could not work out if it was doing it properly for Australia or not, and we are working on a flat 10% sales tax.
2. I found one or two very obvious calculations errors between the price, the cart and the final payment page. In one case it calculated the cart and the payment page different by a few hundred dollars. This maybe was my fault however i dont think so as in the testing i only had two products and the tests were quite straight forward.
3. The forum for their support last i looked was full of many more questions then answers. This may have changed and i do hope that it has, but i would make sure that you do plenty of testing prior to actually using the plugin live.

I think that it has the potential to be a good plugin, as long as the little issues i mentioned are either not actually the fault of the script or thye can be resolved.

billbenson
07-29-2009, 11:46 PM
I downloaded it and made a local test site installation with it. It appears that there are a lot of problems with paypal. Also, the complaints about questions being unanswered on the forum. See this link, its not pretty WordPress › Support [Plugin: WP e-Commerce] I agree, not worth the trouble (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/218549)

I don't know when I'm going to have time to play with it a lot. I'll try to see if I get any addition errors. I also want to be able to upload my current database of products; 2000 or so. I didn't find much of any documentation on it. My payment processor's web site says they support it?

If anybody plays with it, please stick your comments here. I'll do the same.

Oh, VG, the difference between the paid and non paid version seems to be support, but the comments I saw says the support was lousy either way?

vangogh
07-30-2009, 12:17 AM
Maybe wp-ecommerce isn't so good after all.

Here are a couple others I found that have been rated well at the WordPress.org site.

eshop (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eshop/)
Quick Shop (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-shop/)

I see wp-ecommerce has been updated since the thread you posted Bill. Maybe they were having problems after one of the upgrades to WP itself. It did poke around the forums and they don't seem to be particularly responsive to questions.

Maybe if there aren't any good shopping cart plugins I should start working on one of my own.

billbenson
07-31-2009, 12:23 AM
Well I've played with it some. I really had high hopes. It appears for the most part to be working outside of wordpress. They major oversights are lack of themes (I'm sure you could hack it, but thats not the point of WP) and no part number (you could use the product title for the part number, but really need both). I checked the db and there was no field for part number there.

The plugin didn't include a number of folders that were required for operation. I figured what and where they were from error messages and created them. Thats not a clean install.

In your other post VG on e commerce sites that don't all look like oscommerce or whatever, I thought they had a good point in that most ecommerce sites looks the same. I was hoping this would prove to be good for that, but it isn't built in.

With such significant oversights (and I only did some limited testing) as part numbers and themes; it seems like the spec was written by my grandmother (and she's dead) and coded by college kids.

They claim there are themes, but I couldn't find them if they exist. Here's a sample page from a site. Note that the part number is contained within the product description text and the layout is a big empty page where you scroll for images. Fendi Wallets | Fendi Bags and More (http://www.fendibagsandmore.com/category/wallets/fendi-wallets/)

VG, if you decide to do your own, you may want to look at this. It's probably pretty hackable into something useful. For a shopping cart, you probably don't need to have something that is truely integrated into wp like this. At a minimum, you could look at the table structure and how to edit it to suit your needs. I read on one post that there are only 4 Tags. It would be easy to write a bunch of php functions ie tags to make some customizable designs?

vangogh
07-31-2009, 01:12 AM
Sorry the plugin wasn't as good as it should have been. I had never used it, but I'd seen it recommended often enough. Guess in the future I need to test it myself before passing on what I've heard.

With that theme I think it's more the person who's site it is than the theme itself. The theme designer only has so much control of how things will look. They can't control the actual content on the page. In this case the site owner added everything they could to the sidebar and then didn't bother to add content.

Did you try either of the the other plugins I linked to. I haven't tried them either, but they had decent ratings at the WordPress plugin repository. I think both were 4 out of 5. That doesn't mean they'll be good, but they're probably worth trying.

I have a whole list of things I want to do for WordPress so why not add one more thing to it. Maybe another shopping cart plugin is in order given what the current plugins are like.

orion_joel
07-31-2009, 01:39 AM
I have some similar sentiments as i mentioned to what else has been said. Even besides Wordpress, what i would love to see is a straight forward, but powerful shopping cart. Really almost a wordpress of shopping carts. Wordpress itself is so easy to work with, customize and expand. So far i have not seen a shopping cart or e-commerce site that could match it for ease of use.

I can imagine that it would be quite a task, but i think in the long term would be worth it.

billbenson
07-31-2009, 02:23 AM
You don't need to try everything you recommend VG. You qualified your response from the beginning. The other two you mentioned aren't supported by my cc processor, so I'm not going to try them right now.

I agree joel. One of the objections I have, however, to reviews I have seen is easy installation at the expense of functionality. They give high reviews for carts that have one click fantastico installs rather than looking at features. WP has demonstrated that you can have both, however, just once I'd like to see an honest feature review of the carts.

I may do some hacking on the wp-ecommerce plugin and see if I can make it work for me. Meanwhile, I'm sticking to Zen Cart until something better comes along.

vangogh
07-31-2009, 03:39 AM
I've generally been underwhelmed by most of the shopping carts I've seen. I think I mentioned this one to you before, but Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/) has been getting good reviews. Of course I did hear good things about wp-ecommerce.

There's a demo (http://www.magentocommerce.com/demo) on their site too. You have to email for access to the enterprise demo, but the community demo works without having to email. There are some decent tutorials on SEOing Magento floating around too.

billbenson
08-01-2009, 03:22 PM
On a side note, but it really does apply here: I've developed a couple of tables outside the ecommerce sites tables. They contain product descriptions, order info, customer info etc. This is generally a bad idea in design, as duplicate data can create problems I use my tables as master tables. For any updates I update my tables and then update the Zen Cart tables from that. If an order online takes place, the Zen Cart table updates my tables.

As you can see from this discussion, the odds of being happy with the cart you are currently using and never changing is slim. What this does for me is allow me to more easily transfer my site to another platform. All my custom quote generators etc will still work so I wouldn't need to rewrite them. You would still have to write some new code to transfer the site to a new platform, but it would be a lot easier.

Just a thought. It's worked well for me.

vangogh
08-03-2009, 01:49 AM
Are those custom tables developed within the ZenCart system. I know there are ways you can hook into the cart instead of developing entirely independent of it.

In WordPress you'd be able to create your tables as a plugin so you could keep them independent, though it would also allow you to make use of the default WP tables.

Usually if I need to move from one system to another, I'd export the database data as either spl or a csv and then do what's necessary to modify the data so it could be imported into the next system. More and more applications are making it easy to convert data from one system to another.

billbenson
08-03-2009, 02:55 AM
They are tables I added via phpmyadmin to the zen cart db. So when as the work day goes, I get a call for a product thats not in the db. I call the manufacturer and get a price, description, add it to my table. My quote generator takes the data and generates a quote. Reasonably fast. The price, weight, descriptions are in two different tables in oscommerce and zen. Last week I had to add 8 new products. I wanted to get this quote to the customer quickly. adding it to multiple tables is twice the work and easier to make an error when more customers are calling.

The table with the product table is only one table with part number, description, cost, etc. Easier to update quickly.

Once a week or whenever I do one click to update the zencart db from my master.

Lets just say I decided to use the wp-ecommerce. I do the wp-ecommerce plugin, add my tables via phpmyadmin, write a short script to put the data in the proper place in wp-ecommerce. The best part though is my custom scripts all work. I must have about 50 of them.A couple would be modified, but if it was done under the framework of zc, all would probably need to be edited.

vangogh
08-03-2009, 12:06 PM
I see what you're doing. Other than being able to move the db easier is there any real advantage? Sounds like what you've created is holder set of tables that eventually gets updated to the main cart db tables.

How much would it take for you to create the rest of the CMS? If you're not happy with the current crop of ecommerce solutions you could develop a custom CMS that does exactly what you want. Not necessarily a quick and easy task, but maybe in the end it's the best one for you.

billbenson
08-03-2009, 05:22 PM
I actually did write a cms a number of years ago. This table thing may actually be an outgrowth of that. I primarily use my tables for my quote generators, order tracking etc. I don't want to alter the existing cms's tables as plugins etc won't work. As a side benefit, they simplify moving to a different cart.

One of the things I want to look at is how wp handles navigation as that was something I found difficult in the past. I haven't really looked at in about a week; been busy on other projects and sales stuff.

vangogh
08-04-2009, 11:03 AM
In WordPress you'd set up navigation through one of several tags. Which tags just depends on what kind of navigation you're wanting. Pages, posts, categories, etc. You have a lot of control over your navigation in WordPress.

billbenson
08-04-2009, 04:40 PM
In WordPress you'd set up navigation through one of several tags. Which tags just depends on what kind of navigation you're wanting. Pages, posts, categories, etc. You have a lot of control over your navigation in WordPress.

I'm really referring to how the db knows if a page is a parent, subpage 1, subsubpage etc. I assume its the taxonomy tables. I'm just curious how they work.

vangogh
08-04-2009, 11:36 PM
I'd have to check, but I think it's in the categories table. And categories are a taxonomy. The taxonomy table is just defining what are the taxonomies I believe. By default you have categories and tags and beyond that you have to create new ones.

billbenson
08-05-2009, 02:37 AM
But you don't have categories for pages, but can have pages and subpages. I'll do some dummie pages when I get a chance and see what changes. There are two taxonomy tables so it must be there.

vangogh
08-05-2009, 12:40 PM
Oh yeah, I was thinking posts. I don't believe there's a taxonomy set up for pages. I'm pretty sure categories and tags are it.

Here's a page from the codex on how the database is structured (http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description). Click on the image a couple of times to get larger view.

WP treats posts and pages as basically the same thing. It uses post_type to determine if it's a post or page. It you look in wp_posts you'll see the post_type and you'll also see post_parent. I think that's where the parent is being set for pages.

billbenson
08-05-2009, 02:30 PM
Interesting. When I did a cms a number of years ago, I had a far more complicated way of doing it. I don't remember how. The post_parent is so simple. I never thought of it before.

Is it possible to have two parents? For example in a ecommerce site, you may want a product to appear under two or more parents as it may be used with both parent products?

vangogh
08-05-2009, 06:04 PM
I don't believe you could have a post with two parents. You'd need to create two posts with the same content and give it two parents. Though you could always code your navigation in a way to make it look like the page was under two different pages.

billbenson
08-05-2009, 06:21 PM
You could use some character as a field separator and put multiple parents in there. Two identical pages would be unnecessary dup content, but it appears that is the only way to do it in WP.

vangogh
08-06-2009, 12:32 AM
You mean adding that directly to the database? I wouldn't think it's a good idea to go around altering the database, especially since an upgrade to WordPress could easily wreak havoc with your changes.

I'm not really sure why you'd want multiple parents on a page anyway. On my site I have one page that sits under two of my main categories of pages. It's under the design section and the seo section in the navigation. It only has the one parent though. In my case the parent is the design category. In the navigation under seo I just link to the page, but the URL will show it's still under the design category.

billbenson
08-06-2009, 03:02 AM
No, I'm going back to when you suggested building a cms myself, not with wp. The only way I would modify wp is with additional tables, not altering tables. I'm just saying that would be one approach for multiple parents if I did a cms of my own. Could start getting complicated pretty quick though. Probably better to create a parent table at that point. Not something I'm going to do in the near future anyway. I'm just trying to get a good understanding of how wp works.

As to why? The wp is support for a shopping cart. With 2k products In some sites there could be quite a bit of this. Since the wp part of the site is support for the catalog, it would have the requirements. I can see a lot of products having multiple parents. There are plenty of work arounds. A link in the page text is probably easiest but hard to keep up to date.

In the case of the redo of my site, one of my real issues is good navigation is very difficult. Realistically a lot of products should be in sub and subsub categories. They could be very hard to find that way. Multiple parents would be very advantageous in making sure a visitor finds the product. That will spill over to the wp support stuff.

The solution I'm probably going to go with is to put the stuff I make the most from in the top level of the navigation. The other stuff, if its hard to find the other stuff so be it.

I've played around with the search function. Its in multiple places on the page. I feel like putting a box that says "Idiot, use the (&(&* search box". My customers won't use it. In part because they don't even know what they need is called in a lot of cases.

There isn't an easy solution and the manufacturer has a more difficult site to find products. I usually use a G site search to find something on the manufacturers site. I'm just trying to figure out the best way, hence my interest in how wp handles nav. Maybe I should just remove it and force visitors to use the search function.

vangogh
08-06-2009, 03:47 AM
Oh I got it. Yeah, you'd probably want to go with a parents table in that case.

Instead of thinking parent/child you could use a different taxonomy. You could tag certain products so they could be listed across categories, but still keep each product in one category with one parent.

I guess you are looking for taxonomies here.