Ecommerce plugin

[frozenwaste]

Hi,

Can anyone (especially Studiopress mods or developers) recommend the best ecommerce plugin to use with the Studiopress themes?

Tried wp-ecommerce, had far to many problems to mention.

Now looking at Shopp or Cart66, will be selling physical products.

Thanks,

Peter.

[kpmedia]

I've never found one.
My solution was to use Magento for the store, and WordPress for the blog/article component.
It's easy enough to create matching themes, or edit existing themes to match.

I'd show you an example, but the recession nuked the last client I had (on that setup) in 2010.

[frozenwaste]

Thanks kpmedia, I'm not very good at the technical side of things though so Magento looks a bit out of my league. My store will only sell about 100 products so hoping some users on here have had success with Shopp/Cart66 etc.

[6288designs]

My experience with Shopp and Cart66 is still very minimal and hasn't been on StudioPress sites. But I've installed Shopp on a couple small (low traffic, well under 100 products) sites and played with Cart66 Lite on a test site.

I haven't modified my Shopp installations, pretty much "out of the box", but overall I've found it easy to use. Keep in mind my experience with Cart66 was the Lite version and only tested it briefly, but I thought Shopp's process of adding products was more intuitive.

I think Shopp is worth a try if you're looking for basic ecommerce and you could always try the free Cart66 Lite to compare.

[frozenwaste]

Thanks, if Shopp is the easier of the two to implement that might be the deciding factor.

Do any Studiopress devs/mods have any experience of these two ecommerce solutions with our themes? Or maybe even eShop?

[violet]

I have to say I would stay far away from Shopp.

I've used eShop before and heard many good things about its latest version.

I've heard good things about Cart66 as well.

[frozenwaste]

Thanks Violet,

Any specific reason why you would not recommend Shopp?

Also, do you think a non technical person (myself :-)) would fair okay with eShop or Cart66?

[kpmedia]

You really can find yourself in a mess.

If you're not technical enough to work with code, you'll be in trouble when the plugin flakes out on you (or becomes unsafe) as so many past e-commerce WP plugins have done. If this is for a business, and you don't want coding hassles, that's when you need to seriously consider investing in the help of a professional developer.

The main problem is you're really forcing WordPress to do more than it was ever intended, even by the WP-as-CMS crowd. You're basically at the mercy of the plugin developer -- many of which tend to lose interest and disappear in a year or two. That includes for-pay "premium" plugins, too! I've seen many WP commerce plugins die in that way, eventually compromised due to requirements on older WP code. You can't update WP easily.

There's too many systems being Frankensteined together. What's why it's best to use a dedicated e-commerce app, from a reliable open-source community. Magento is a great example. If you only have a few items, you're better off creating a Paypal shopping cart and embedded that code into a custom page template.

I just do not suggest putting an e-comm plugin into WP.
..

[computerkitten]

I agree with below and had nothing but problems with Shopp for a year and a half. The last straw was on an upgrade and it broke the website for over a month with no resolution.

At this point I am researching outside shopping carts but looking for a way to integrate still. Example, I just posted a question on using Shopsite with their OrderAnywhere buttons on a WordPress page. And asked too what the drawback would be.
I know that WordPress has great SEO and worried going to a full E-commerce site, like Shopsite, or Big Commerce, will not have as good of SEO. Also looking for inventory management with Quickbooks (so that if you update an inventory amount in Quickbooks, it automatically updates the cart). There are 3rd party products that work with like Shopsite and Bigcommerce to do this.

What about doing a domain setup of WordPress with a subdomain for the shopping cart? I wonder???

Thanks for listening.

Originally Posted by kpmedia

You really can find yourself in a mess.

If you're not technical enough to work with code, you'll be in trouble when the plugin flakes out on you (or becomes unsafe) as so many past e-commerce WP plugins have done. If this is for a business, and you don't want coding hassles, that's when you need to seriously consider investing in the help of a professional developer.

The main problem is you're really forcing WordPress to do more than it was ever intended, even by the WP-as-CMS crowd. You're basically at the mercy of the plugin developer -- many of which tend to lose interest and disappear in a year or two. That includes for-pay "premium" plugins, too! I've seen many WP commerce plugins die in that way, eventually compromised due to requirements on older WP code. You can't update WP easily.

There's too many systems being Frankensteined together. What's why it's best to use a dedicated e-commerce app, from a reliable open-source community. Magento is a great example. If you only have a few items, you're better off creating a Paypal shopping cart and embedded that code into a custom page template.

I just do not suggest putting an e-comm plugin into WP.
..

[frozenwaste]

Hmm, it's a shame someone somewhere can't release an ecommerce solution for wordpress that just does the basics but does them right without any technical know how for the client (half the reason they probably using wordpress in the first place).

Thanks for the comments on shopp, will give cart66 a go, my store will only sell up to 100 products so going for an "external" system and trying to get it to integrate with wordpress is not worth it really. Plus I'll only be offering paypal as a payment gateway so not much difficulty there either. I've seen quite a few wordpress sites that do ecommerce quite well was hoping to find out about some of them.

Thanks.

[hillers54]

I've never set up an Ecommerce site but it does surprise me that there isn't a simple free plugin that is easy to configure.
Presumably you have to pay for a plugin.

[dicemanorama]

I like Ecwid. It's super heavy on AJAX but there are some workarounds for that. It's an external system but super easy to integrate with Wordpress and gives your visitors a pretty slick drag-n-drop interface. It's free so worth giving a shot, I'd think.

[djgphotography]

I'm using 3 plugins made by the same author that work very smoothly together and am very happy with them. eCommerce, Membership plugin and Affiliate program. Easy to setup, add custom buttons, thumbnails and integrate with the leading autoresponders, aweber, mail chimp etc

Tried many others which just didn't work well. These 3 are simple, premium qaulity and easy to configure

[djgphotography]

I'm using tips and tricks estore which is great and i also have gravity forms with paypal plugin and freshbooks

[computerkitten]

That Freshbooks looks really interesting... however I'm not seeing that it would manage physical products but good for managing freelancing work. I will take a look at the rest you mentioned though. I am personally looking at bagging WordPress for any E-commerce solution for a big store and more at Shopsite with installation of WordPress in a subdirectory for blogging.

Originally Posted by djgphotography

I'm using tips and tricks estore which is great and i also have gravity forms with paypal plugin and freshbooks

[officeto-go]

Stay far away from Shopp and PHPurchase! I've heard good things about Cart66 but haven't tried it on a site yet.

[violet]

PHPPurchase is now Cart66. Although I know people who are using it and have good things to say about it, I haven't used it personally.

[leebezotte]

I'm going to give Jigoshop a try. It looks extremely promising. http://jigoshop.com/

[hillers54]

I've just seen an ecommerce plugin vote result over on Elegant Themes website.

Sorry to mention another theme supplier but the info on ecom plugins might be useful to us all.

Link is..
http://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/th...-peek-boutique

Just scroll down to the poll and hit "show results"

Hope that helps.

[strategio]

@djgphotography,

Unless you have a Gravity Forms Developer license, it appears that you're not allowed to buy this.

Nothing wrong with the Gravity Forms plugin itself - but for us, a big Boo Hiss for such a constrictive marketing policy.

Other observations:
WP-e-Commerce: (Free) Very capable but it's a sprawling monster and could be unraveled by client tinkering.
JigoShop: (Free) There's a 3rd party Genesis-Connect plugin. But Jigoshop busts our clients PHP memory limit.
Woo e_Commerce: (Free). Also busts our clients PHP memory limit.
Cart66 lite: (Free) By far the easiest to configure and pretty client-tweak resistant.

For clients' modest number of product listings - maybe up to 10 or so, we've been setting up just a Paypal cart with custom page.