10 Powerful Shopping/Ecommerce Plugin Solutions For Wordpress

Impressed and grateful! Just returned from New Zealand where I spent a week with the flu and a migraine in meetings. This was a ‘nice surprise’ to come back to and start reviewing.

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There is also Shopp which is a new e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It’s still in beta, but progress is fast and furious. You can still apply for the beta to get a copy to try out.

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Very helpful list. I’ve used wp-ecommerce on a couple of sites for clients now and it works really well, but I hadn’t seen many of the other plugins you’ve listed. Thanks.

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Thanks for the ArtPal plug! :)

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Don’t overlook this one either – it looks to be a major contender with WP e-Commerce: http://tribulant.com/products/view/10/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin

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Heads up. The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is about to release another version.

Speaking of APIs a lot of the core code behind the WordPress e-Commerce plugin has been written from scratch making it still the best e-Commerce solution for blogs on the market ;P

We have spent a lot of time on WordPress 2.7 integration. I am positively shaking at the knees – I can’t wait to get your feedback on this one :)

Functionality wise we have been following all e-commerce plugins and we still do one or two things that other plugins do not. The WP e-Commerce plugin is mature and has been in active development for over 4 years :P

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Very useful thanks. I’ve used WP-ecommerce on a site for a client and found it to be pretty good. Only problem was the lack of documentation. Will be looking at all of your other suggestions now.

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WP e-Commerce Plugin Update: The WordPress e-Commerce Plugin is rock solid… especially with the release of the WordPress e-Commerce Plugin 3.6.10 which is pure poetry.

The Protx payment gateway has been updated to work with WordPress 2.7 and the latest Gold Cart files.

Support is always given to nice people with big smiles (but not on the Weekends NZT) ;)

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More ninkenpoopery from David (if that is your real name)…

The WordPress e-Commerce Plugin team have been contributing code to the WordPress community for well over 4 years – that is more then most Davey boy so show some respect ;)

The WordPress e-Commerce Plugin is a great tool with many great features designed for retailers and people wanting to sell goods online.

The WordPress e-Commerce Plugin team (us) are in our own forums every day, I am in our Blog every day, and we respond to as many emails as humanly possible… every day.

This reminds of a Bob Dylan song… “So how many bombs must be dropped before someone stops them forever?”

The WordPress e-Commerce Plugin just got featured on Smashing Magazine, which is a big site that do their research.

If the WP e-Commerce Plugin is good enough for them. Good enough for the thousands of people running paid upgrades then it is going to be good enough for the well to do readers on this blog who just want to get on with business and sell.

Use the WordPress e-Commerce Plugin.

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WP e-Commerce is horrible, horrible, horrible!

I’ve recently come across Shopp, and its a life saver: http://shopplugin.net/

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Helpful post, I think I will try out the WP e-Commerce for my Personal Development Blog.

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Nice ecomerce plugin

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I wanted to like WP e-commerce.. I really did.. I should have taken the hint when after installing the plugin I go to Ecommerce>Settings>Shipping and select the USPS module and saw the message “Known issue: USPS doesnt support shipping inside the US, cutomer zipcode needed, which we dont have before checkout”

Not to be discouraged I decided to use table rates instead. Only there’s one small hitch.. No way to support a separate rate table for international customers or even a way to add an additional handling fee for international customers.

In the end I mainly ended up ditching WP e-commerce because the shipping functions did not allow me any options to work with both domestic and international customers. Had there been a working fully functional USPS option, it would have solved my international shipping issues.

I’ve also used eShop. This plugin allows you to easily create products using WordPress Pages. While the setup of shop categories and products requires a little more “manual” work than WP e-commerce, I was able to ease the “manual” work by making use of the “Duplicate Post” plugin Enrico Battocchi.

The shipping options in eShop are limited to variations of different table shipping options. There are no tax options in eShop, but I worked around that by configuring the PayPal account to collect taxes during the PayPal payment process, and this worked just fine. (I made sure to inform customers that if they resided in X state, the tax would be added) Overall I had less issues with plugin incompatibilities using eShop than I did with WP e-commerce.. (I found that WP e-commerce had to be activated BEFORE all of my other plugins or some of the tables it needed would not be created or populated during the install)

IMO however, neither of these solutions is ideal for stores with more than 10-20 products. I think I will opt to NOT build anymore e-commerce sites using WordPress plugins (unless the client has 10 or less products to offer), but I will continue to keep an eye on these plugins. I hope to see some better shipping and tax options offered in future releases for both of these plugins as I think they are the closest to fully functioning e-commerce solutions available for WordPress.

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Is there a e-commerce wordpress plugin which allows me to choose which payment merchant I integrate with?

I don’t like using paypal, and this is severely limiting my options

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want to try this plug in ..hope i can get sale

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wow good plugin . thanks for share

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This is just what I was looking for, I will definitely try the first one and eshop. Thanks for the heads up.

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i just search it, thank you very much.

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I recently placed an order for the Shopp Plugin based on reviews I’ve seen but ran into a problem during the order. Though my payment went through on PayPal, the Shopp site wouldn’t let me download the plugin. It says “awaiting payment.”

I tried to go through the company’s support process with no success. Jonathan Davis responding to my support request initially, but now will not respond. I would have liked to use the plugin, but since I can’t even place a successful order for it and download it, I wonder if it doesn’t work very well for virtual/downloadable products. Now I have to go through the hassle of PayPal dispute resolution to try to get Ingenesis Limited to give me my money back.

My recommendation is to stay away until the company can get it’s support and service in order. I can only imagine if my customers couldn’t download their products because of a faulty store software, what they would think!

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thank alot… i will try.

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Everyone reading this should check out ShopperPress,( http://www.shopperpress.com/ ) a very polished e-commerce plugin for Wordpress that deserves some attention here, especially among those dissatisfied with WP-Ecommerce. Mark Fail is the man.

and uh Jonah, tribulant should try putting together a demo that will successfully load before attempting to sell anything. lol.

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I have been looking for a shopmodule for WP. Started out with WP e-commerce, but sees alot of people wirting about Shopp. One problem was that I’m not sure how easy it would be to set it up, so that I can play a musicfile on every productpage, because I wanted to sell music, and it should be possible to prelisten to part of the music.

So I decided to get the WP-ecommerce Gold version plus the mp3 module, so I go to the site and clicks the buy button, and it just keeps loading and loading, but never puts anything in the basket.
If I press F5 to update I will see the product in the basket, but not before.
I used IE8 though it seems to work well enough in FireFox 3.5.
Should I assume that they use the module themselves at this is the one not working well in IE8?

Or does anyone else know about a owrking system where it would be possible to setup a player on each product to prelisten to the music I want to sell?

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This is a great list and very helpful. There is a fairly new plugin at http://www.PHPurchase.com that we are using on our website. We used to use Shopp but recently switched. It was much less expensive and I really like how easy it is to configure. We only sell a couple products so we didn’t need all the fancy grid layouts and such that some of the other plugins have.

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WP e-Commerce Plugin Update
I’m sorry to hear that Paul – something weird must have happened. I wish we could have been of more help. Unfortunatly you must have fell through the support network – I’m sorry you’re so upset.

To say we’re useless is not true. We work really hard at what we do and for most people it just works – you would have been more accurate saying something went wrong and it did not work for me. Heck for all we know it may have been your theme or your server or even conflicting Plugins.

The official WordCamp organizers chose WP e-Commerce to sell tickets on the WordCamp website and over 730 attendees bought tickets successfully without any glitches – all the attendees know that WP e-Commerce works. Unless you think they are all useless too ;)

We had no issues installing WP e-Commerce on the wordcamp.org server. We copied the files into the correct MU folder on the wordcamp.org site. We clicked activate like most people do. We added the products. We helped setup Paypal and bingo it just worked.

The latest version of WP e-Commerce is pretty much rock solid. Also stay tuned for the book – I think the readers here should choose the WP e-Commerce Plugin that publishers choose because it must also have worked for them since they are about to release a new book.

WP e-Commerce Plugin works for
http://www.icondock.com
http://2009.newyork.wordcamp.org/attendees/
http://www.packtpub.com/wordpress-2-8-e-commerce/book
http://www.children-of-grace.org

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I’m in the process of selecting an ecommerce cart solution to sell web design and SMB marketing products to my clients. I have about a dozen different products ranging from web design reviews for $99 to hosting for $29 a month, to custom design packages for $1499.

Many of the products will have options, some will have monthly recurring fees, some will have yearly payment options (if they don’t want to pay monthly), and some will have partial payment options (like paying 75% for the premium web site package). Some will have digital delivery of the end product, accompanying manuals and getting started books. Down the road, I want an affiliate program as well (probably unnecessary to mention but it could be important).

I know its a lot to ask, but I’m wondering if something like this even exists that could work. I prefer wordpress driven but I’m open to any open source or saas based solution too. I haven’t seen anything that fits the bill perfectly quite yet.

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Just install WP e-Commerce. No products to sell yet.

Hope it works like you say Dan, rock solid when my e-trade starts running! Gonna trust you on this.

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Thanks for putting this together. I tried wp-ecommerce and a slew of others. Are there any that have slicker galleries? I don’t have an example, but Im looking for overlays that slide out versus page after page of info.

Either way, I’ll suffer through this stuff to keep it all in wordpress.

Rock on!

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Thanks for providing a great list of websites that handle the e-commerce solutions for WP.

@Rob Page, I have been looking at http://www.phpurchase.com/ and they look very good as well.

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wp-ecommerce is pain in the ass… i always got different bug/error on my every turn..

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Okay, if you actually have gotten down to this comment, I have been trying the WP E-commerce solution and it was a pain. That is not to say that it is not powerful or that it cannot be set up correctly but I am just saying it was a bigger mess then I thought it should have been. I had to change drastic amounts of code to make it do what I wanted. In the end I dumped it because it simply was more trouble then it was worth ( I had spent 24 hours of my time slogging through and finding things and changing them half the time was spent just figuring out what module held what )

Look it is a fine e-commerce solution and you can plug it in really quick to get something going, just not for the project I worked on. I am sure it would have been fine if I was using it in a different way.

Anyway, I think success with that plugin will depend heavily on what you are using it for. Don’t not try to use it but I would suggest if after an hour you are still trying to make it do what you want then dump it, as I said I spent far too much time trying to force it to do what I wanted.

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