YAK Shopping Cart Wordpress Plugin Review

Amongst the other e-commerce plugins I have reviewed such eShop and WP e-Commerce, YAK Shopping Cart has come to my attention and the author Jason R Briggs describes the plugin as follows:

YAK is an open source, shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It associates products with weblog entries, so the post ID also becomes the product code. It supports both pages and posts as products, handles different types of product through categories, and provides customisable purchase options (cheque or deposit, basic credit card form, standard PayPal integration, PayPal Payments Pro, and Authorize.net).

Therefore I was interested in testing to see how it would compare to the other plugins I’ve tried. So let’s get straight into the pros and cons of this plugin.

THE PROS

Includes Sales Reports And Graphs
YAK Shopping Cart comes with a Sales Report option under the Tools menu. In comparison to other plugins it is definitely a positive with more reporting available to see sales progress. The reports in this plugin are:

• Best sellers for the year
• Best sellers for the month
• A simple graph to see the sales for the month

A Good Range Of Payment Options Available
YAK Shopping Cart has many payment options readily available and it’s built into the plugin. Unlike other e-commerce plugins which are limited or require you to purchase additional payment gateways, YAK covers a majority of them. This plugin offers:

• Manual Credit Card Processing
• Credit on Accounts Receivable
• Authorize.net
• Paypal and Paypal Pro
• Google Checkout

As long as you have an account with the above payment merchants, it’s not too hard to link your shopping cart to them. Though, I’ve noticed they are still lacking payment options such as cash, cheque / money order and cash on delivery. Also YAK does offer a secure SSL connection for all of the above payments.

THE CONS

Documentation And Help Is Hard To Find
I found the plugin quite easy to install but found it very hard to navigate through YAK’s administration panel. It is partly due to a lack of documentation on how to use this plugin. Without documentation most people would struggle to use YAK and would not find it to be user friendly. Additionally I was very surprised to find I had to pay for a handbook to get the documentation, giving the impression the plugin was designed solely to make money not from usage but documentation. I would have rather paid for a plugin with documentation than be given a plugin that you have to waste time figuring how to use it yourself.

Lack Of Functionality For Products
After setting up a product in a post and linking it to YAK I’ve found it to be really basic and lacking a lot of functionality. There are no fields to insert product images. It was not easy to find the fields for obvious product attributes such as weight and quantity. I felt lost when trying to add products.

Not User Friendly And Lack Of Design On The Front End
As I have mentioned already without documentation a user has to spend time working out how this plugin works. What makes it worst is that each section in YAK’s administration is not self explanatory. At first after installing the plugin I went to find a menu called YAK, but after realising there was nothing there I found it had been added to the Tools menu. It added 3 new links: Orders, Products and Sales Reports. I think the developers at YAK thought I could work out how to use this, but they were wrong. It made more frustrated!

To mention, there is a YAK link under Settings which does allow you to change the options for Basic, Products, Download, Payment, Special, Advanced, Shipping, Promotions. It did alleviate some of my frustration when I found this, but I still couldn’t see much on the front end. As you can see, a very poorly designed plugin and lack of user friendliness on both the front end and administration.

Conclusion
I decided to let this plugin go as I had spent over 3 hours just understanding how the plugin could fit into a Wordpress blog. Overall there is a lack of user-friendliness and without the user manual it is very difficult to work out yourself. For users who want something simple and a shopping cart that works straight away, YAK is definitely not your solution. I would go back to using WP e-Commerce or eShop any day.

My rating for this plugin is 1 out of 5 stars.

Tyrone Shum
e-Commerce Plugin Reviewer

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

My Top 10 Profitable Wordpress Plugins

I’ve noticed a lot of people are interested to install lots of plugins but really don’t make it profitable on their blog. You can have over 50 plugins that all work and make noise, but none of them are any good to make your blog stand out. (Additionally, my term of profitable also refers to helping you market your blog and also creating a brand). Since most plugins are free, it’s very easy to find them on the Internet and install them with Wordpress 2.71. Furthermore I’ve provided a link to the download page for each plugin. Hope this list will help others and it’s in alphabetical order, enjoy!

Add Post Footer
The Add Post Footer is very useful in helping you cross sell products, a free eBook to encourage readers to subscribe or other top articles that are related to your post. It allows you to enter HTML code into the footer of every post you write and is very simple to use.

All in One SEO Pack
As you can see from the name of the plugin – it’s an all in one SEO pack that assists each post in your blog to be “search engine optimised”. You can either leave your header, meta tags and description of your post just the way they are when you publish, or you can fine tune them to be more specific to keywords you want to use for search engines. I’ve found at times I wanted to add additional keywords and change the description of my post instead of having the default Wordpress summarised description. A must have plug-in for serious Internet marketers!

Bird Feeder
If you’re on Twitter and want to save time twitting – the Bird Feeder plugin will automatically feed your most recent posts in the format of: [your message] [post title] [short url] to Twitter. It’s great because you won’t have to double up by copying and pasting your posts back into Twitter or be on Twitter 24/7 (if you’re not already).

FeedBurner FeedSmith
This little gem, the FeedBurner FeedSmith takes your blog’s feed and redirects it to Feedburner. It’s better branding for your site and you won’t have FeedBurner’s domain name showing when a reader clicks on your RSS feed button, e.g. feeds2.feedburner.com/internetbusinesspath becomes internetbusinesspath.com/feed. For more detailed instructions.

Google XML Sitemaps
If you want to be found on Google, then Google XML Sitemaps plugin is a requirement for your blog. This plugin creates a compliant XML sitemap for the Google bots to crawl your site and it will help your blog achieve higher rankings if you want to be found on their search engine. Once you’ve install this plugin don’t forget to hop onto Google Webmaster Tools to let them know you’ve got a sitemap for them to crawl, otherwise Google won’t know.

Max Banner Ads
Monetising and profiting from your blog couldn’t be any easier. If you have advertisers and want a very streamline and easy way to insert their ads onto your blog, then Max Banner Ads is the plugin for you. I use this on my blog and it’s saved me a lot of time. It’s easy to use and can be very profitable for your blog.

RSS Feed Signature
The RSS Feed Signature is another great plugin to use within your RSS Feeds. It simply adds a customised signature to any RSS Feed that goes out to your subscribers. If you are keen on increasing your subscribers, I would suggest installing this plugin and add a “free eBook offer” to your RSS signature. If you subscribe to my RSS Feed you’ll see the link at the bottom of each feed to take you to the free eBook offer. You can read more about how to download your free eBook from the RSS feed.

Top Commentators Widget
This plugin allows your blog to display a user who has posted the most comments. The Top Commentators Widget shows other readers your highest commentator and will encourage people to find out who they are by clicking on their name. Also the highest commentators websites will be linked automatically onto your blog and can increase your search engine rankings as well. Therefore getting you more traffic and more comments all at the same time.

What Would Seth Godin Do
Most people would know Seth Godin as his name is associated with Internet Marketing Guru. The What Would Seth Godin Do plugin simply displays a welcome message on your blog for first time and returning users. It may ask them to subscribe if they’re a first time user or thank them for coming. It’s a great tool to have to create the “experience” for a user coming to your blog.

Wordpress Simple Paypal Shopping cart
If you’re like me who offers advertising on my blog and needs a simple way for advertisers to pay you, then the Wordpress Simple Paypal Shopping cart is an easy plugin to install and use. It allows anyone to pay you using Paypal which is used by millions of people worldwide and can save you time having to respond to advertiser’s email with your bank account details and so forth. The plugin has functions to let you add a “Add to cart” button and creates a shopping cart module when the advertiser or user decides to pay you. It will then redirect them to the Paypal website to pay. Very simple to use!

If you haven’t tried any of the plugins above I would highly recommend adding them to your blog. So give it a go!

Tyrone Shum
The Plugins Guy