Wordpress shopping cart?

September 21, 2011 8:25 PM

Any decent wordpress shopping carts? FOSS or for sale doesn't matter so much as good to go right now and stable for at least a few years into the future.

Horror stories and success stories equally welcome.

Looking into this for multiple projects, some of which will be selling physical items only, others selling downloads as well. US-oriented.

posted by jsturgill to computers & internet (9 answers total)

I have tried Shopp and WP-ecommerce, and both have been less than satisfactory. WP-ecommerce was buggy and support was non-existant (it's been a couple of years, don't know if it's improved). Shopp is less buggy, but managing variations and pricing is complicated and time-consuming and it can't handle lots of items with lots of options.

I'd love to know if someone's found something better.
posted by TallulahBankhead at 9:14 PM on September 21, 2011

A lot of people like PHPurchase (http://www.phpurchase.com/), though, I've never used it myself. It does have some nice integrations with GravityForms, though.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 9:16 PM on September 21, 2011

Stay away from Shopp. Far away. It's a damned shame they suck so bad because on the surface, it's pretty easy to develop custom templates for.

They make very odd design decisions that end up crippling your store (for example, if a cart has multiple items, the store assumes each gets shipped in its own box. Which results in astronomical shipping charges if you do real-time quotes with a carrier. And let's not talk about the clusterfuck that is their checkout process).

Their forums are full of ignored requests for help (I found problems with their zipcode lookup that didn't get fixed for months) and the few die-hard fans that are there are complete assholes to anyone who isn't a hardcore programmer. There is NO community.

Also, I found myself in a situation where I contracted programming work from one of the Shopp support team and he 1) completely blew me off for months ("I'll be done tomorrow..."), and 2) his code never worked.
posted by Wossname at 8:58 AM on September 22, 2011

I am sad to hear people are steering you away from the Shopp plugin, because I would also vehemently steer you away from the WP E-commerce plugin*, and I'm not sure what that leaves you with.

One option I've used with moderate success is Shopify for the actual e-commerce and Wordpress for everything else. Simply theme Shopify to look exactly like your Wordpress site and most people will never notice they're separate entities. Of course this depends on whether you're ok with separate databases, separate user logins, etc.

(And you could do the same thing with something like Opencart rather than Shopify, of course, though Shopify is closer to Wordpress' ease of setup.)

*Wretched code, zero support, tons of bugs, and it fairly forces you to edit core files in order to really customize it, which then makes it un-upgrade-able.
posted by EL-O-ESS at 10:58 AM on September 22, 2011

Sadly I have to echo the comments here. I wasted a lot of development time with WP e-Commerce which, despite its apparently widespread use, is garbage. The underlying code stinks, the support forums stink, integration with payment systems in any intelligent way stink, and they are forever promising fixes for basic e-commerce features that should have worked years ago.

We replaced WPEC with Shopp in a very simple deployment. While it is working for the client's limited needs, I am inclined to believe the criticism here that doing anything ambitious with it would be an equally frustrating road.

Ultimately I recommended to my client considering a hosted e-commerce platform like Shopify or Magento.
posted by thebordella at 1:20 PM on September 22, 2011

I've been poking at the e-shop plugin, but it (like many) e-commerce plugins for WordPress require a lot of work to get up and running. The Wiki they set up for it can be found at http://quirm.net/wiki/eshop/ for you to look at.
posted by mephron at 3:01 PM on September 22, 2011

I was hoping to find a solution that did not require monthly payments. Seems like that's not likely, from the responses so far.

Anyone used phpurchase/cart66?

How are the various horrible plugns at selling downloads?
posted by jsturgill at 6:14 PM on September 22, 2011

We're currently using CRE Loaded on our site. The shop side is CRE and everything else is WordPress. CRE has a FOSS version (Community Edition), but we're using the non-hosted, paid "Pro" version. They just announced a major upgrade this week, but haven't seen details yet. From what I've seen, CRE has pretty active forums and fairly good support, although I'm not a programmer/developer, just a humble store owner. I will say that it is very stable and that our web guys have been able to skin it to look just like the WordPress side of the site, but that's as far as I can go in terms of an evaluation. As an admin user on the back-end, it's OK, but not the most 21st century sort of look and feel (on the back-end).

We've been toying with changing to a more WordPress-integrated cart, but after reading the comments to your timely question, I'm hesitant at this point. I've favorited your Q to follow along and see where the discussion goes.
posted by webhund at 7:27 PM on September 22, 2011

I've definitely advised several clients lately that if you can't make enough money selling online to afford a hosted solution like Shopify, you shouldn't be selling online. Ecommerce software is just one of those things where you get what you pay for. I think people see Amazon and Etsy and think it's simple, and forget that there are thousands of people making millions of dollars making sure those things work smoothly.
posted by TallulahBankhead at 10:10 PM on September 22, 2011