eShop Review For Wordpress

Over the next few weeks I will be reviewing the different plugins available for e-commerce users who want to keep their Wordpress blog and want to integrate a shopping cart to their site. Today I am reviewing the eShop Plugin by Quirm

Recently I installed a copy of the latest eShop plugin, version 3.0.0 onto a test site to trial the store before allowing it to go live. I was pleasantly surprised how simple eShop is and well integrated into Wordpress. The HELP section in the administration proved to be quite helpful and I was able to get the shop up and running within 30 minutes.

PROS OF ESHOP PLUGIN
Allows For Featured and Special Products
Most ecommerce sites have this ability and it’s a good thing eShop implemented this module. It allows us to feature any products and promote any products on special.

Simple Ordering System
I’ve run Zencart and OsCommerce for various e-commerce stores in the past and they are somewhat quite advanced and definitely not for the faint hearted. The first time I used those stores it took me almost a week to learn how to use them. The admin section of eShop is basic and simple to use, showing the most important menu that we want to know when a customer has purchased a product from us – the order page. It has pending, awaiting payment, shipped, active and deleted options to mark the order and allows you to add comments in each process (a very handy field to have when tracking orders)

Google Feed Base
This is a plus, since most e-commerce sites don’t utilise Google Feed as much as they should. It’s very similar to RSS feeds, though instead of having posts and content syndicated into the Feed, it allows products to be syndicated and helps promote your store products on Google.

Customised Layout or CSS Styling
New in this version is the ability to customise your layout of the store and I know that this is very handly for me. It’s especially handy when your blog is customised and you want to keep similar colours and fonts consistent through the shopping cart.

CONS OF ESHOP PLUGIN
Limited Payment Methods and Payment Gateway Integration
For beginners using eShop, having Paypal, Payson and cash maybe enough to sell your products. Though when you are dealing with customers wanting to pay directly with their credit card, only has cheque or money order facilities, or wants to directly transfer money into your bank account, then eShop is lacking in this area. I hope they will be adding more payment options in the near future.

Unable To Print Invoices From Admin
If you don’t have Paypal or Payson and only accept cash via eShop, there is no function for you to print an invoice and send to the customer. Even if you needed a hard copy one as a packaging slip and one for invoicing, eShop doesn’t have that facility. If they add this function later on I hope it will automatically create an invoice in PDF and email it to the customer.

No Sales Reports
Reporting in eShop is lacking and there’s no where to see your overall sales on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It’s important to know how much business is coming in from your shop and most e-commerce software has at minimum a sales report function.

Unable To Edit An Invoice If An Error Has Been Made By A Customer or refund an item
If a customer at no fault chooses the wrong item by mistake then it should be simple to edit the order and update it to the correct item. eShop doesn’t allow for this and furthermore there is no option in admin to offer refunds if a customer decides to cancel. The process becomes tedious because you have to delete the order and either start again or the order is completed deleted when you just want to refund a customer.

How Would I Rate eShop?
Overall eShop has a lot of pros and can benefit a first time user allowing them to sell some of their products online. An important aspect that I believe they need to improve on is to offer more payment gateway options. Though, there are still a lot of developmental issues to overcome to get it up to comparable e-commerce solutions such as Zencart and OsCommerce. I would still stick with fully functional e-commerce solutions over eShop if I have hundreds of products to sell and a large database to manage and run the Wordpress blog separately.

Tyrone Shum
eBlog Reviewer