WP e-Commerce Review For Wordpress
March 25, 2009 by Tyrone
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
My Top 10 Profitable Wordpress Plugins
March 2, 2009 by Tyrone
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
Top 5 Powerful E-commerce Plugins For Wordpress
Today I’m exploring the top 5 e-commerce or shopping cart plugins for Wordpress. Yesterday I wrote a topic about Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website, and this article continues from there listing the commercially viable e-commerce plugins to use if you are considering selling products or services to your readers.
eShop
The eShop plugin allows you to open your own store right from your blog. You can sell anything from eBooks, software to even PLR product with this plugin. At the moment it only utilises the Paypal payment system to receive money and is also compatible with Wordpress 2.7+. Visit the plugins homepage to get a more detailed description of the shop’s features.
ShoppThe Shopp plugin is a featured filled online shopping cart for your blog. It’s been designed to make it easy for just about anyone to setup online store in minutes while giving users the ability to easily customise every aspect of the shopping experience. This particular plugin does cost money and for a single license it is $55US or for a developer’s license it will cost $299US. The difference between them is how many times will you be using this plugin on different blogs? If you’re a business setting up ecommerce sites for clients then the developer license will be worth the cost. Also Shopp offers different payment options, such as Authorize.Net, eWay Payment, HSBC ePayments and PayPal Pro which will each cost an additional $25.00.
WP e-CommerceThe WP e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. This seems to be the free e-commerce plugin that is most commonly downloaded by users from around the word. It does offer many features and lots of options for users.
WP Live-ShoppingThe WP Live Shopping plugin is a widget that enables you to display all relevant live shopping offers within your Wordpress blog. You can add the widget to your sidebar and customise its appearance within the Live Shopping option panel. You will also need to have a Live account setup in order use this plugin.
Visit WP-Live Shopping Homepage
YAK Shopping CartYAK is a simple shopping cart plugin for WordPress. How it works is it associates products with blog posts, where the post ID also becomes the product code. There is an options screen in the admin section that allows you to configure settings for the shopping cart and had 3 additional pages for showing and fulfilling orders, for product management, and basic sales reports.
YAK Features
Tyrone Shum
e-Blog Reviewer
How To Access Your New Website?
February 18, 2009 by Tyrone
These instructions have been written to help guide you on accessing your new website. If you have other questions, please email us at support@internetbusinesspath.com.
We will send you a separate email with your username and password for your website account and also your email account. Please replace anything that says yourdomainname with your new website address.
ACCESSING YOUR WEBSITE
To access your administration section, copy and paste the following address below into your web browser’s window.
http://yourdomainname/wp-admin/
You will see a screen like this below:
Simply type in your username and password and you will be able to access the administration section of the website.
If you need more assistance on how to use the administration section, please send an email to: support@internetbusinesspath.com.
Also, an additional tutorial to help you write posts in on your website can be found at: How To Write A Post.
ACCESSING YOUR EMAIL
To access your email, simply copy and paste the following address below into your web browser’s window. Remember to replace yourdomainname with your new website address:
http://mail.yourdomainname/
You will see a screen like this below:
