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

Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic

For many people who are just starting out or have been running an Internet business for some time, driving traffic to their website is a key factor in marketing products and services. The more traffic gained, the more expose to your products and services. Furthermore, traffic isn’t the end result, it’s converting this traffic into sales. I will talk about how to convert this traffic into sales tomorrow, but for now I’ll show you some great ways to turbocharge your traffic using the latest technologies: (by the way, these are not in any order and try the ones that would fit your Internet business model)

Twitter
Twitter, a highly talked about social networking tool has done wonders for many Internet marketers and you either use it or turn a blind eye to it. I started using it only a couple of weeks ago and it’s helped increase my traffic by up to 500% in a few days, follow me at Twitter to see. It is easy to join and sends out a short 140 character message to all your followers letting them quickly see what you are currently doing. It works well if you approach this strategically by attracting people to follow you from your target market. If you have a blog, then tweet your posts automatically using a Wordpress plugin called Bird Feeder. It works wonders and Twitter is also a great way to monitor what people are saying about your products and services.

Linkedin
To join Linkedin, simply create a profile and you will be promoted a professional online network. Linkedin mainly targets business people allowing them to stay in touch with industry professionals. It’s great for people changing jobs and looking for business opportunities. Furthermore make sure you promote your website if your an Internet business. Many people look for products and services via Linkedin as well, and usually refer others to your website if it’s not relevant to them.

Wordpress Blog
If you’re reading this post, you may not know but you are actually reading it from a Wordpress Blog. This is an excellent way to promote your ideas and get your messages out on the Internet. Also search engines love blogs because they provide new content on a regular basis and that’s what people want, new fresh ideas to read about. It helps drive organic traffic to your website and builds your ranking on search engines.

Digital Press Releases
Have you ever wondered how people get their stories in newspapers, radio and other media channels? Lots of journalists nowadays look at digital press releases listed on sites such as PRWeb, Pressbox or PRLog to write their articles. Create a news story for your Internet business and submit it to generate free publicity and traffic to your website.

Web 2.0 Social Sharing
Have you noticed after reading an article there are icons and a button that say “Share This“? It’s commonly used in blogs and if a reader likes your article then they click on it and it will automatically distribute it via many of the Web 2.0 social networks. So why not add a simple social “Share This” tool to your website? If you want to also learn how to make money from Web 2.0, read my free report: “Make Money From The New Web 2.0“.

Social Networking Presence
Leverage social networks such as Facebook and Myspace by creating a fan page for people to see. Promote yourself and Internet business by developing a personality and brand which people will associate you to. So whenever they visit your fan page then your website they will see a consistent branding across the board and will rave on about you to friends and family.

Create A Mash Up
Feature news and videos from your industry by streaming free content onto your website. Yahoo Pipes allows you to pull in RSS feeds for news and YouTube helps you create and feature videos on your website. It helps drive more traffic from different sources in your market and increase your presence on search engines.

Crowdstorming
By asking your clients what they want you get free ideas on what products or services to create for them. You can leverage their needs and turn them into articles which you can post onto your blog. If there are enough people who demand for these needs, then you have yourself a product and more business will come along your way by simply asking a question.

Continue reading Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1: Generating Leads.

Tyrone Shum
Turbocharging Traffic

Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website?

This is a subject I’ve been exploring over the last week to decide whether or not to use a blog with an add-on shopping cart, or to use an e-commerce system such as Zencart or Oscommerce. I have a few clients who will be using my services to design their e-commerce website and I’m deciding between using a blog with shopping cart add-on functionality or running an e-commerce system with blog integration. It’s been quite interesting reading comments from forums and on other blogs about this topic and here are my thoughts.

My Previous Blog / E-commerce Experience

I’ve been using Wordpress for a couple of years now and have tried integrating it for a ZenCart ecommerce site. It worked okay but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. The issue was that I have to create a WordPress site and an ecommerce site with matching themes, so that the end user would have the experience of a single site. This solution was not ideal because the site administrator would have to login to different backends to update information.

On the other hand, installing Wordpress as the main system and installing an e-commerce add-on sounds like the ideal situation (for now, I’ll call this an eBlog). Everything will be in one system and on one database and no need to log into two different systems as I previously had to. I have tried this method and so far it works okay as well, but there are a few issues such as payment methods, having large product catalogues and limited reporting. The Wordpress plugin can’t handle these things as yet compared to e-commerce systems which have been designed for this.

Advantages Of Using eBlog Vs E-Commerce System

Simplicity and easily customisable
The reason why I am choosing eBlog is it’s simplicity of use. Especially when you are training a client how to use the system for the first time, it is quite self explanatory from just looking in the back end of Wordpress. Additionally the vast amount of themes available make it easy for any developer to customise and install new website faster without consuming too much time on a project.

Search engine friendly
Another advantage is, search engines love blogs and the content that comes from them allows them to be easily ranked in search engines much faster than e-commerce websites. Most e-commerce website only have products listed and require additional programming to be allow them to be search engine friendly. In comparison, Wordpress has additional plug-ins that automatically make any article or product become search engine friendly saving time and money for a client.

Automatic upgrades
Since the release of Wordpress 2.7 every update can be automatically deployed with a click of a button and makes upgrades and changes very easy. Unlike Zencart or Oscommerce, whenever a new upgrade is released it takes me almost a week to upgrade due to the vast amount of customised plug-ins installed and main files that can be overwritten.

Disadvantages Of A Using eBlog Vs E-Commerce System

Payment methods
At the moment, there are limited amount of payments being accepted via the eBlog and a lot of development and programming would be required in eBlogs to accept the vast range of payments other e-commerce systems offer. The most common available is Paypal, but what if I wanted a payment gateway for eWay or other commercial banking gateways? It’s not possible as yet.

Handling 100+ products on a single database
Most e-commerce systems have been build to handle lots of products and be available to display on their website. The architecture for this is not available for eBlogs and limits any Internet business to less than 100 products. It’s possible to have 100+ products on an eBlog but to find them on this system will take forever.

Limited Reporting
It’s important to track what customers are purchasing and knowing what the numbers are in your business. Unfortunately eBlog doesn’t offer accounting and proper reporting.

Overall if you have an Internet business that has a few products to sell, this would be a simple way to get started and have your Internet business up and running quickly. Though for Internet businesses with a range of products and requiring greater functionality, a proper e-commerce system such as Zencart or Oscommerce is still the way to go.

Tyrone Shum
e-Blogger