WP e-Commerce Review For Wordpress

WP e-Commerce plugin for Wordpress seems to be one of the most commonly used (currently 175,000+ downloads) shopping cart system across the board. I’ve been testing the latest version 3.6.10 and it has a lot of additional features compared to review on eShop I wrote recently.

The WP e-Commerce Wordpress Plugin was developed by a New Zealand company called Instinct. Since this company has dedicated funds and resources to this plugin, I presumed they would want to make money from selling this plugin. Lucky for us, they didn’t and have been giving away this plugin for free. Though, the first thing you will see on the front page of their website is the following:

Home of the famous WordPress e-Commerce Plugin

The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.

Now, being the state of the art e-commerce plugin is a bold statement and I have tested out numerous e-commerce software that I will be comparing this too. Let me review this plugin to test if their statement is true.

THE PROS

Easy Installation
It took me less than 5 minutes to upload and install without any errors or conflict with other plugins so far. I could easily find the newly created section in Wordpress administration called e-Commerce. It contained Sales, Products, Groups, Variation, Marketing and Settings links making it very easy to find what you need. I am glad they did this and made it simple.

Well Defined Categories / Groups Section
There is a self-explanatory tab that says Groups which allows you to add unlimited categories and subcategories to your shop. It’s very standard to see this available in e-commerce systems and it’s great to see this part of WP e-Commerce plugin. In comparison to other Wordpress shopping cart plugins they utilise pages to separate categories and it becomes a total nightmare without proper documentation.

Adding Products Is Easy
Adding products is easy when you click on the Products link. It offers a wide range of settings to customise your products including price and stock controls, shipping and weight settings, product variations, merchant notes, product downloads, coupon codes and promotions. These are very important when you have different products to sell and helps you distinguish between A and B product.

Widgets make customisation a breeze
What I’ve found quite handy are the customisable widgets that you can install on your sidebar as part of this plugin. A common widget people have on their website is the shopping cart. Having this displayed allows a customer to see what they have currently selected, then head to the checkout section to pay for all their items. The new widgets you’ll see in this plugin are: Shopping Cart, Groups, Categories, Price Range, Product Specials, Latest Products, Price Range and Donations. You can select anyone of those to display on Wordpress at any time.

Profit Using Marketing And Cross Promotion Tools Provided
Under the Marketing link it allows you to offer coupon codes for any product in your range. It’s a great way to encourage your customers to shop with the coupon code to follow through with a purchase. It’s a definite plus for me to have this tool built into the system. Some additional options you can switch on are:

• Cross Sales within your shop
• Show Share This (Social Bookmarks)
• How Customer Found Us Survey option

Many Payment Gateways Available and SSL Connection Included
WP e-Commerce comes with a few pre-installed payment gateways including Chronopay, PayPal, PayPal – Express, Google Checkout, and manual payment (for cash or money orders). If you want other payment gateways they offer such as Authorize.net or eWay, then you will have to purchase the Gold Cart Module. Also all transactions are processed securely through an SSL connection if you have SSL installed on your server.

An e-Commerce Plugin That Is Free
Lastly to top off the PROS, WP e-Commerce Plugin is FREE and it’s worthwhile to try it if you are considering using a shopping cart facility in Wordpress.

THE CONS

Lack Of Documentation
I am quite surprised from a company that has devoted resources and time to develop this plugin that they do not have a detailed documentation available. Especially when programmers develop a software there needs to be a way to track back and make changes, which is where documentation helps. So I was a bit disappointed. Their website has a very good “description” of each section but lacks in details on how to install, modify and add other functions. If you’re a beginner and do not have any programming experience then I would forget trying to tweak any of the files yourself because you will get frustrated reading through poorly organised code, with insufficient comments. I suspect they want to keep the details of the code within the company so they can offer add-on solutions they can sell.

Invoice Printing Is Not Available
This may sound simple to implement, but I am very surprised that this is not standard in their plugin. Most e-commerce software have options to allow you to print invoices, packaging slips (which is available) and labels. This is one area I believe they have totally overlooked. How do I print out an invoice to send to a customer or a label to put on my shipping box? I know you can just hit print on your Internet browser screen but what if I want to customise the invoice or label in different sizes? This is an area that Instinct needs to look at.

Inclusive of Tax Option Is Not Available
For business owners operating in Australia like myself, our customers expect that prices displayed have tax included. Unfortunately the plugin forces you to add tax separately at the checkout and only show prices excluding tax on each item. It’s another issue that needs to be address for future upgrades.

Lacking Reports
If you click on the Sales link, it will take you to a page showing sales for the month and columns of basic data, such as sales, pending transactions and closed transactions. There are no reports to say where your customers come from, no reports for sales of dollar amounts, quantities sold and customer item was sold to. These are usually standard within an e-commerce software and also very important to have if you’re running a business. One just has to look at ZenCart’s reporting system to get an idea of how comprehensive their system is.

Lack Of Template Options
A few other reviewers have mentioned about the lack of template options available. At the moment there are 4 or 5 of them, and most of them have proven to be not very useful. Additionally if you have a customised template for your blog, integration of this plugin can be a real nightmare because there are no detailed documentation on how to edit certain areas of this plugin.

Conclusion
I am still on the hunt to find a state of the art e-commerce plugin for Wordpress. I think Instinct have made a very bold statement about their plugin and personally I still see further development needed for this plugin to be a complete turn-key solution for an e-commerce site. For a beginner to use this plugin it maybe sufficient enough to do a few transactions per month. But for a business owner, I would still stick to other solutions available such as ZenCart, OsCommerce and Magento.

My rating for this plugin is a 3 out of 5 stars.

Tyrone Shum
e-Commerce Plugin Commentator

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