WP Ecommerce Plugin

[billbenson]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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
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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 has been getting good reviews. Of course I did hear good things about wp-ecommerce.

There's a 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.