Shopping Cart Plugins for WordPress
The beauty of WordPress is that it is so extensible, if you want a forum there is a plugin for that, if you want a picture gallery it’s got you covered there as well.
One of the most sought after feature of any business website, is the ability to be able to conduct e-commerce. This is another area where WordPress really shines as there are numerous choices based on your needs. Which one you decide to go with will depend on your needs.
WP e-Commerce
This is really the big boy of the crowd, WP e-Commerce has been around for over 4 years now and has had over half a million downloads. It’s list of features are many but a few highlights are:
- WordPress Integration -Perfect integration with WordPress, which means one button updates and maintenance
- Social Networking – With social networks being all the buzz, it is important that you include them in all elements of your website. E-commerce allows you to add products to your social network pages like Facebook Marketplace and Google Base.
- Payment Gateways – WP-eCommerce integrates with Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Expres and Google Checkout
- Extendible – The base install of WP- eCommerce is free and for most shops it will be more than enough, but if you are looking for more features they offer Premium Upgrades at their Gold Cart Shop
Shopp
Shopp is relativel new (compared to WP e-commerce) but it has carved quite the niche out for itself over the last year. It is a premium plugin and cost $55 for the single site licence and $299 for the unlimited developers version.
- Plays nicely with most themes
- Dashboard widgets for at-a-glance sales and marketing performance tracking
- Shortcode support for placing products and categories in blog posts or pages
- Out of the box, product grid. This is an add-on for WP e-commerce
- Search-able products
eShop
eShop is a free WordPress plugin that is designed for smaller shops that don’t need a lot of bells and whistles.Features include:
- Utilises WordPress pages, or posts, to create products
- Products can have multiple options
- Basic Statistics
- Various shipping options
- Basic Stock Control
Quick is another free plugin. The WordPress site will need to be using a theme that supports sidebar widgets to make use of this plugin though. It adds a SideBar widget that shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove the items if necessary. Features include:
- Inventory listing tied in to TinyMCE
- Integrates automatically with CFormsII
- Shopping cart Widget
- Checkout page
- Ability to create different product options in a drop-down
YAK
YAK is a simple shopping cart plugin for WordPress, associating products with weblog entries — thus the post ID also becomes the product code. Features include:
- Create products from either posts or pages
- Downloadable products
- Multiple product types
- Sales Reports
- Promotions
Summary
One thing I really hate about these lists, is when you get to the end and nobody steps up to say who they think is best. Well I am not going to do that, right now this is a two horse race with WP e-commerce and Shopp being the best solutions by far. WP e-commerce has time on their side and therefore has had the option to fix a lot of bugs or hitches, unfortunately they have also become a bit lazy, they have a very good product that could be excellent. Shopp on the other hand is the up and comer that is working hard to take away market share from WPE, in my opinion they have the better ‘paid’ solution, but if I need a quick and cheap solution I will probably go with WP-ecommerce. What is your opinion?
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