It’s almost 2013. Why oh why can’t I find a professional, full featured shopping cart plugin for WordPress?
I have clients on old ecommerce platforms such as OSCommerce and ZenCart that I would LOVE to move over to WordPress (have you tried to SEO an OSCommerce or ZenCart site? It can be done but it’s like three pains in each ass cheek.)
I have a full developers license for Cart66, which I can use for a couple of personal projects, but it doesn’t support tiered pricing. This is a basic requirement of ecommerce, and it’s positively ridiculous that they don’t support it. Moreover, you can’t find out they don’t support it until after you buy it – the support forums for Cart66 are full of people who have been begging desperately for this feature for over two years – but the forums are only open to people who’ve bought the product. Megafail.
Jigoshop also doesn’t appear to support tiered pricing. I repeat – nowadays this is a requirement for selling online. Every single one of my ecommerce clients offers discounts for quantity (and always has).
I don’t want a hosted solution, such as Shopify or BigCommerce. We need to be able to self host.
Even going off WordPress – Magento is way overkill for what we want to do. I have one client on a mid sized Magento Enterprise install, and I’m only too familiar with what it takes to run well.
I looked at one from Tribulant, but it has compatibility issues with other plugins (for SEO and caching) that I can’t do without.
I tried WP E-Commerce but my clients had a difficult time understanding it (and ultimately they’re the ones who have to deal with it). It *does* have tiered pricing, but what it doesn’t allow for are add-on accessories that add to the price AND add to the shipping weight.
There are a number of free plugins (such as WooCommerce), and some offer some of the functions I need as an extension for extra money, but I can’t test them on my clients products without buying them first, and given my requirements (and the poor experiences I have had trying to shove products into carts that don’t fit), I have no idea if they will work even with the extensions.
And NOTHING seems to offer EVERYTHING I need for any one client. So for now, they’re stuck on OSCommerce and ZenCart (which isn’t very Zen). One of my clients has SEVEN PRODUCTS and four of them won’t fit into any WordPress shopping cart I have so far found.
Someone needs to jump on this. There is still room for a paid ecommerce plugin for for WordPress that offers the same features you can find in the old software.
Look, what I need isn’t that difficult. Ecommerce platforms (that aren’t WordPress plugins) have had these things for years.
- As mentioned, I need tiered pricing. That means discounts for quantity. Preferably set by table.
- I need the ability to offer price = FREE, but still add a shipping and handling charge.
- I need product variations (with pricing AND SHIPPING WEIGHT options)
- I need to be able to add a handling charge in some situations
- I need to be able to offer coupons, promo codes, and free shipping on some products.
- I need to be able to offer multiple shipping options (we have products from 1 to 500lbs) on a per product basis
- I need to be able to easily create category pages
- I need it to be able to work with PayPal (standard and pro) and Authorize.net
- I need it to work with a live shipping feeds from UPS and Fed Ex (and something in Canada – Fed Ex or Purolator)
- I want it to be self-hosted. Not interested in hosting elsewhere.
- It has to be reasonably easy to integrate – shortcodes are good
- It has to play nice with essential WordPress plugins
- An added bonus would let me export orders into QuickBooks
I have people willing to pay for this. Why can’t I find anything that I’m sure will work? Isn’t it time to do ecommerce in WordPress like the grownups do?
Have you looked at CS Cart? I have been using it for around an year now and it seems pretty stable and easy to setup and use, has tons of options and fairly decent SEO (but obviously not as flexible as WordPress).
Yea Magento is overkill for most small businesses and you need a fairly powerful hosting solution for it. CS Cart works fine on VPS if your product counts is in the hundreds. For a dedicated eCommerce website I generally avoid WordPress plugins because most are still pretty limited.
No, as I mentioned before, we're committed to WordPress pretty much. I'll look at this one if something comes up in the future, but what I need right now is something that works with *WordPress*
Have you looked into http://cashiecommerce.com/ they're the new one owned by paypal. (Caveat – haven't used it, just heard of it.)
Yea I looked at them; their pricing model (taking a percentage of the sale on top of the credit card or paypal fee) would not be acceptable to any of my clients. At least one client has done a hundred thousand orders since I put him in his first store; no way he'd give away a percentage of every order (he gets pissed off enough about the credit card fees)
I completely agree that virtually all shopping carts suck.
For my current project I am moving away from Shopify and using WooCommerce. The issue of essential functionality through paid extensions is becoming a pain in the ass.
However, I have been extremely impressed by WooCommerce's progress over the last year while Shopify evolves at a snails pace.
The problem is, in order to shoehorn my products in, I would have to buy at least four (and maybe more) extensions that *might* work, and plus there's my time getting them to work properly, and no guarantee that they will (because they sure don't make much information available about them)
Couldn't agree more… I've tried out most of them out there, and they all lack in some way. Check out OpenCart – far from the overkill of Magento, but has all the features you want.
No, that's not WordPress. For at least one client, I'm trying to keep to one platform – he has five sites and four of them are selling stuff. Trying to keep the number of platforms he has to deal with to a minimum; that's been an issue in the past. But I'll take a look at that.
Have you looked at MODx? You can create just about any website you like without constraint and there are a few fully featured e-commerce plug-ins.
I'd always avoid wordpress, it's ok as a blog or for a small website but anything else and it starts to show it's limitations, plug-ins can be pretty hit and miss too.
Agreed OS Commerce is very long in the tooth and Magento overkill for small to medium ecom.
No, we have evaluated and we definitely prefer to use WordPress. If you choose your hosting and your plugins wisely, implement a good caching solution, and otherwise optimize for speed, it works quite well. My sites easily handle 3000 simultaneous users pounding on the database.
I'm not familiar with MODx, and wouldn't want to put a client's mission-critical store into a platform I'm not at least moderately familiar with. Thanks for the suggestion though, it looks interesting.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
Having fun with Jigoshop at the moment, and already on one extension purchase (which doesn't work, but functionality is promised "by Christmas"). Questioning one other functionality as well (Automatic Related Products, which is fine, except they aren't that related. Could use a manual override, and not keen on forking out).
I'm with you, I **love** WordPress, so much so that I tolerate it for e-commerce. But by goodness, it can be so much better. (came from Actinic, yes I so prefer it)
Even though we've already chatted, I figured I'd leave a comment here for other folks to about CloudSwipe (http://cloudswipe.com). CloudSwipe is a whole new approach to e-commerce in WordPress. It's a full e-commerce platform with seamless integration with WordPress. Think of it as all the features of Shopify that folks love coupled with the flexibility and design of WordPress (themes, plugins, etc.). You get the best of both worlds.
Because we have a platform in the cloud, it's going to allow us to do a lot of interesting things coming soon that is just not possible with a WordPress plugin only (like WooCommerce, etc.).
It's free to try and we'd love to get your feedback: http://cloudswipe.com
That's a bit more of a product plug than I'd normally accept in the comments, but it is part of the continuing conversation so I guess I'll allow it. This once. I will note that at this time, Cloud Swipe doesn't really fit my needs as outlined above, but it may work for others.
Understood, it definitely was a product plug, wasn't trying to hide that fact.
Just thought folks might want to know about another option before they abandon WordPress altogether. Thanks.
I definitely dig this concept, however, this platform is way to limited in features to be useful for anything but the most super-basic of ecommerce stores. I think it's a great idea if you can flesh out many aspects of the platform. Needs more robust product options and shipping options, also needs more ability to customize product display options. Those are just a few things I noticed spending 15 minutes getting it up and running and adding a product.
Hi Orson,
We'd love to hear more about the kinds of features you'd like to see. We're adding new features every week to CloudSwipe. We have pretty robust product variations, including a newly released file attachment option which allows your customers to upload files for products they are buying (personalized gifts, etc.). What other shipping options would you like to see?
We'd love to get some more feedback from you!
Thanks!
Joey, CloudSwipe Co-Founder
I have to agree. Ecommerce on WordPress is currently a question as to which platform is “least bad”. Personally I have settled on WP eCommerce from Viser Labs which is relatively stable and has a good ecosystem of plugins and add-ons.
While it doesn’t work for you I’ve tried VirtueMart for Joomlae. V1 WAS excellent the latest iteration v2 is awful with the developer community almost abandoning the system.
For the majority of my project I have now turned to Volusion. Solid performance and outstanding support.
Good luck with your platform selection
Any comment about Ecwid?
Haven't tried that one yet. Right now the client is working on whether he can modify the way he presents his products to work with Cart66 (which he shouldn't have to do, but…) I will take a look though.
You may want to have a look at Foxycart. It's pretty slick when you're not afraid to dive in – and seems, at first glance, to do what you need it to do. Good, responsive team too – and great support in their forums.
Good luck.
Thanks for the comment. As I mentioned, we are not interested in hosted solutions, nor solutions that add transaction fees. That's non negotiable.
For now we're making do with Cart66, and either not offering the products with tiered pricing, or not offering the pricing options. My clients shouldn't have to change the way they've done business for ten years in order to accommodate a shopping cart, but that's the world we live in.
I use E-Commerce most of the times, and so far it fulfilled my clients 80% needs in total. The rest 20% i could go around with a little PHP magic.
E-commerce can have product addons (they are called variations) and they do add to the shipping weight. A proper setup is needed yes.
I explain my customers that if they want a complex system they need to learn a complex UI.
The latest E-commerce update cleaned up many UI stuff and I encourage you to check it out.
Ultimately if you don't like something – you fix it, or learn how to fix it, complaining does not do much since we are not in a shopping mall but on in a open-source environment.
Nonsense. I'm not a developer, and I don't want to be a developer. My talents lie elsewhere, and it would be stupid for me to spend time on "learning to fix it" myself. (Coders always think everyone wants to code – they don't) Complaining brings attention to the problem. And this is a problem.
Try woocommerce. I've built a couple good ecommerce sites and it seems fairly solid. It has all the features above if you purchase a few of the additional plugins. Check out my scandlecandle.com site as an example.
Cassidy. I looked at your scandlecandle.com –> http://abodycandle.com/ site. Impressive! I like the way the cart comes together, although it wouldn't be my choice to ever collect credit card info I see that PayPal is integrated. I'm going to look into woocommerce but I wanted to ask you a question about Analytics…. Do you use/get analytic data int Google? I assume that since the cart is hosted on your site that goals would be no problem, but what about sales tracking?
BTW-If you would like to see where I'm looking to use the new cart, check out: http://the5dKeeper.com
thanks Cassidy, I've been looking for the best shopping cart for my small business, I checked out your site it's beautiful. Is this cart the free Woo commerce plug in?
I've been feeling the same way since I started using WP years ago. At least we have things like wp-e-commerce and woocommerce, shopp and cart66 now. But definitely all lack some major feature from standard e-commerce practices. However for your 7 product client as you mention towards the end of your post, I can't think of how complicated these products can be that you can't use woocommerce, wp-ecommerce or shopp to handle it. A large store with tiered pricing, shipping, etc sure I can see that, but 7 products? Also upon reviewing your requirements, I'm pretty sure that wp-ecommerce handles all of them. There are also several companies that build up on top of those products to "complete them" — I know that kinda sucks but at least there are a few options to work with if the budget and desire is there.
Nevertheless, his seven products would not fit into those carts (or their add-ons). Hence my post.
Have you looked at CS Cart? I have been using it for around an year now and it seems pretty stable and easy to setup and use, has tons of options and fairly decent SEO (but obviously not as flexible as WordPress).
Give Word Press Shop Cart a go – I would love feedback on it. It seems to be full featured and fairly easy to use, install and maintain. Anyone used it? http://www.wordpressshopcart.com/
Amen! I have found this very frustrating as I build out multiple sites. No one cart option does all of the relatively simple actions I need. I have used variations of OpenCart, BigCommerce, several WP plugins (both paid and free) as well as a handful of other options. In every case I find that the cart can't do what I want it to do. Simple things, like tracking inventory on multiple item options (if a shirt comes in three sizes, I need to be able to track inventory on all three from one listing instead of cluttering my cart with 3 different listings for the same shirt) are left out over and over. This seems to be a result of carts being designed by those who have never run a store.
NetMeg: Since you've had 1.5 months to ponder these suggestions and look into this further, do you now have your top 3 recommendations for a shopping cart within WordPress?
Couldn't recommend three, to be honest. Right now, I'm using Cart 66 because it was easiest to bend fold spindle and mutilate my client's business model into it (and we still had to give up some things) I am not a fan of hosted solutions, nor any solution that wants a percentage of the transaction. WP Ecommerce would probably be second, except that it's not particularly intuitive for a business owner to work with. Not everyone can afford his very own developer, nor has time to learn the intricacies of the software (and in that one's case, its many add-ons). There's a shopping cart from Tribulant that one of my partners likes, and it worked for what we used it for, but we had to do an awful lot of back and forth with the plugin authors to get it to work right (and they're in South Africa so the time difference was a definite issue) So reluctantly, I was left with Cart 66.
Hi,
To make things more up to date – jigoshop offers quantity discounts throught our plugin. You can see documentation here: http://www.optart.biz/portfolio/customer-discount… and buy it directly from jigoshop site (link to purchase in docs)
I did look at Jigoshop, but it still (as far as I could tell) could not allow for extra shipping weights on product variations, and by the time I purchased all the extensions I'd need, I might just as well use Cart66, which I already had.
Don't know Cart66 so hard to comment that, but going back to Jigoshop:
v2.1.5 – 2012-12-08
* Added support for Jigoshop Multi Currencies plugin
* Added support for variable products
Ok, but the POINT is, my variable products add to the shipping weight – so when I add an option to a product, I need to be able to also add to the shipping weight. Otherwise my clients get soaked on shipping. This is not an unusual circumstance, and in fact shopping carts such as OSCommerce and Zen Cart have always had it built in. Possible that extension does it, but since I can't determine it from the documentation, I would have crossed it off the list.
That's another thing – will definitely look at it. Probably it'll be paid plugin, not core part, as we're third party devs. I assume, that better that than nothing!
Do you guys have a site in English?
Just stumbled across this post (looking for somethign different, but a good Shopping Cart is currently on top of my list too. This thread is rather very interesting…
Thanks!
The frustrating thing I've always found is to find out that a cart does NOT support all requirements! One spends hours reading through feature lists, all decorated with large green ticks, but unless you have a written list next to you of what YOU need, and then crosscheck the lists for missing items, you never get anywhere. And even if carts are offering 'variations', the question is still 'how' the product variations are being handled.
I discovered this the hard way when I had to find a cart for a bedding company. They sell beds, mattresses, and bed linen in up to five sizes (single, k/s,double,queen,king), but their ideal solution would be to enter a set of sheets as a single product, and then be able to offer this in 5 sizes, in 3 different colours per size, with different prices depending size, with different shipping weights depending size, and the option to offer a 'special' on only one size or colour they hold too much stock of… Sounds like a normal day-to-day situation in retail, but not according to online shopping carts.
I hope there'll be a continuation, either of the post, or in the comment discussion
Can you give some feed back on the thecartpress please? Thanks
Haven't tried it. But in general, I'm not interested in the free cart with premium add-on model – I don't know for sure if the add-ons will work until I buy them, and I don't have time for that over and over. Give me the whole thing for a couple days or a week, and if it works, I'll buy it, and I'll usually buy the developers version at that.
again one word about Jigoshop to avoid misunderstanding – you've got there demo installation with paid plugin preinstalled so you can play with them before purchase. I don't know how it looks like in other carts, but both jigoshop and woocommerce test paid plugins before selling them and take care about compatibility after purchases, so no worries there!
Ok #1 the question asked in this thread was about thecartpress, so you have no business trying to plug jigoshop in it. Second of all – you're not getting it. A demo version with paid add-ons installed is *not good enough* when I'm talking about a client's BUSINESS. I need to get hands on with every aspect to make sure it will fit the bill. Whether or not you test your paid add-ons or deal with compatibility has NOTHING to do with whether or not they will work with the way that customers do business or sell their products. In short – it's not about YOU, it's about US.
You can't school me on ecommerce; I've been doing it for large and small businesses since 1996. I know what I'm talking about and I know what I want. And so far, no one package fits the bill. And judging from the traffic this post is getting, and the comments I've received here and on twitter and in email, I'm not the only one who thinks so by a mile.
Ecwid.com is great for wordpress. I use it for all my clients.
Its free, give it a try!
Don't like their monthly pricing model, and they don't offer some of the features I need (as I mentioned previously)
Did you try Shopp???
Hadn't heard of that one, but at first glance it doesn't look like it does the table quantity pricing that I'd need (uses percentage off; my clients don't do percentage off) and I wasn't able to ascertain if they allowed for extra weight on product add-ons.
I'm a business owner who has stumbled upon this post. I'm doing the R&D for my company because I know the list of features we require,and netmeg you hit the nail on the head. When I saw your list of requirements I practically shouted "Hallelujah".
The only option I see that is going to work for my manufacturing company is Woo Commerce. I'm willing to pay for the plug ins if they work. The Dynamic Pricing add-on is $99. That's the table based tiered pricing that I absolutely need.
My website right now is stranded on OSCOmmerce. It can not pass PCI compliance. (That's another sticking point with shopping carts.) I'm also tired of every service trying to get yet another transaction fee out of you. The whole "Service as a Sale" continuous revenue stream model is killing small businesses, too. IE EcWid.
I have another website on Magento. It works and the SEO works, however my web developer agrees that it is a beast of a platform.
I'm going to do a little more R&D on Woo Commerce. I have to be sure that it is stable. I hope you find the plug in you need and when you do, you pass it along to us. Thanks
There is no appropriate platform for wordpress and there won't be. You are better off using wordpress for your blog and magento for your store and then integrating the two on the same site.
Nope, can't accept that premise, that would cut too many small shops and businesses out. Magento is way overkill.
just use Ecwid
I am a programmer with 15 years development experience. If I can gather enough interest in creating a good commercial cart plugin, then I will do it. I have created a landing page for this project so please send me a message if you are interested in seeing this happen. Would $40 be a fair price?
http://the-ultimate-wordpress-cart.site50.net/
I have built up a fair few e-commerce sites and personally WooCommerce is currently my favourite. Yes you have to get over that plugins cost, however they do work plus just buying one plugin gives you access to the support forum. If your a WordPress nerd then the back end coding is very well commented.
The plugins that I have purchased are:
Dynamic Pricing
Sage Pay Form
Variation Swatches and Photos
Catalog Visibility Options
WooCommerce tab manager
A grand total of $320. Not such a bad price for everything I need.
Good luck with your quest.
That's fine, if it works for you. And it's not the money, it's the time. When I'm putting together a *business* for a client, I need to know ahead of time that what I'm buying will work for them. I don't have time to start over and over (and I also don't want to pay to do it either) Having the right solution is important.
I have found that with WooCommerce, they put the documentation for each extension on the public page describing it. That has been helpful to me to figure out if an extension will work for a client without having to buy it first.
Yah; I prefer to actually use it first.
They give you thirty days as standard money back no questions asked. If you ask them nicely and explain what your trying to do. They have been very willing to work with me and ultimately want happy clients. If it doesn't work for you they aim to improve it but don't want to keep you from your money. They have been very fair in my 6 month experience.
I'm sure that works for lots of people.
I've used the responsive designs at Ecommerce Templates in the past. I see they now have a WordPress integration http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/wordpress-ecomm… – haven't tried it but their regular shopping cart is pretty solid. Be interested to hear if anyone has set up a store with them.
I just came across this article today and felt like somebody took put into words the frustration I have dealt with over the past two years. After making the decision to start building all of my sites in wordpress, the first two ecommerce sites that I was approached to build dealt with customizable products and rentals. This immediately eliminated nearly every shopping cart plugin for WordPress. The ones that weren't eliminated required money up-front and a leap of faith which (at the time) I was unwilling to take. I ended up going with Magento and it is one of the worst mistakes I have made as a freelancer. The other site I built using an ecommerce theme by ElegantThemes and the simple paypal shopping cart which left much to be desired.
I then made the decision to stay away from ecommerce because I wanted to focus on WordPress. I figured that given the exponential growth of WordPress that it would be a matter of time before some hot shot development company filled the obvious niche. Well two years have passed and I have yet to see any kind of shopping cart solution for WordPress that would get me back into building ecommerce sites.
Since making this post, I am curious if anyone put a solution in front of you worth sharing?
Not a perfect one, no. I'm using Cart66 for three sites, and for two of them the client had to modify how he offered his products. He wasn't thrilled about it, but we were under a time crunch and he decided it was better than nothing.
There are some things that Magento does pretty well. There are lots of things that WordPress does really well. There's a few things that Zen Cart and OSCommerce did really well that apparently aren't all that simple on either Magento or WordPress. Oh for a solution that encompasses the best of all and the worst of none. Yea I know, but I'm a dreamer.
I hear your frustrations! I am wondering if cart66 is easy to use … is it something that a small business owner (maybe micro business LOL) could set up on their own? I don't mind giving up some functionality, but I don't want to be fiddling with a cart for months … Just a bit nervous about pulling the trigger here.
I found it pretty easy. The good thing about it is that you can try it for free – at least try setting up your products and stuff. If it works that far, then popping for the paid version is not such a shot in the dark.
Stay away from cart66 and stay away from Tribulant. I have built carts in both and they have glaring errors. No mass import option for cart66 (and not easy to program on your own even if you know what you are doing). Tribulant themes create broken links on all your pages. Bottom line is WordPress is not setup up to be a shopping cart, their licensing makes real developers not want to develop anything for the system because of GPL, so you get a bunch of senior class projects that have no business in the real world. My suggestion is a combination of magento and wordpress. if you aren't going to do enough sales to justify some maintenance and programming expenses, you need to rethink your business plan, not your website.
Can't agree; as I said, that would cut out too many small businesses.
I am not going to agree or disagree with your comments – especially since I don't have experience with magento or cart66 … but I can tell you that the biggest problem and frustration (that is also echoed in the OP) is that most shopping cart software does not sufficiently outline what it will do or will not do on their pages so that business owners can make an informed decision about ecommerce platforms. I have experience with both very sophisticated shopping carts as well as very basic shopping carts and I will tell you that in terms of my business plan it most often makes more financial sense for me to reduce the number of options I offer to customers, rather than to pay a programmer endlessly every time that I want to add an option.
I hear your frustration. The problem is, however, that there are a bazillion possible features one could ask about regarding a shopping cart. Just check out their features page(s). If it doesn't advertise say, quantity discounts, assume it doesn't as well. If a shopping cart company supported key features they know their product would sell on, they would surely advertise them.
I have quite a bit of experience working with various shopping carts for WordPress (I recently started up a company to help newbies get started: http://wpsell.net/). Honestly, a lot of the issue comes down to developers working on features that are most demanded. Quantity discounts is pretty important, but it's not for everyone, so it's not at the top of the list.
I work for several e-commerce companies in their support departments and I can tell you that quantity discount requests make up of perhaps 3-5% of all inquiries.
Really? Because I've been advising ecommerce clients big and small for 15 years, and one thing they ALL have in common is the need to do quantity discounts. It's a standard feature for pretty much any shopping cart OTHER than the ones available for WordPress, including Magento, OSCommerce and Zen Cart, among others.
I agree, it's a major feature and anyone who needs to compete in today's market need to be able to easily compete on quantity, especially if the competition is already doing so. If you have a small inventory you can work around the problem. This is simple marketing 101 – If you have a product to sell, make it available, and make it very easy for the consumer to purchase it in a variety of ways.
I've used OSCommerce for many years successfully with extremely high profile customers who can afford constant changes. Not everyone wants to pay for every little change that normally needs a programmers time and attention.
I've been using Woo Ver 2.x.x and so far so good. They are a rapidly growing company and are addressing many issues. The support in most time zones has proven very effective. No one likes lots of plugins but we live in an increasingly ala carte' world.
I know some things just need to be included in one package so you have a pleasant out of box experience.
I can totally see larger businesses requiring it, but as Craig said below, you can work around the problem if you have a small inventory. That may very well be the case.
Dont' get me wrong, I know it's an important feature.
That said, I do know Cart66 plans to include quantity discounts eventually, but they are tackling the more commonly requested features.
It would certainly be great to have one cart that "does it all"!
Not holding my breath. I first put in my request for that feature in 2011.
It has been slow in coming for sure. I work on their support team, so I can vouch that it's being planned. I'd look for it in Cart66 2.0. It'll probably be a while in coming though since their development team isn't huge.
The biggest issue I am running into right now is this: Client needs to offer a product with the ability to add color, font, and size options. The size option needs to adjust the price. With all of their available options, it creates hundreds of possible combinations. Solutions like WooCommerce want me to create individual products for every possible combination. Not gonna happen. OSCommerce and Zen Cart provide the ability to add options and attach prices to specific options. But their SEO sucks. At this point I'm considering creating my own database to access with short codes or something and pass off the item info to a cart or PayPal (shudders). Still looking for a solution that will give me the product flexibility with SEO. Would appreciate any ideas at this point!
Your situation sounds fairly similar to the problems I faced with a bedding company – and we went at the end with BigCommerce's hosted solution, but that doesn't cover all variations either. It works with individual pricing for varied base products, and with varied shipping weights, but you cannot apply individual specials or free shipping to only one or two variations of a base product.
I later set up a questionnaire, which I sent out to all commercial providers of shopping carts known to me, detailing all options we really required. I added to this a link to the existing cart, to show that this was a serious business, willing to change provider if the conditions were right. Only around 40% replied, and only ONE was willing to discuss our needs. This was an Australian company, but their pricing was "out of this world": around $2500 up-front plus an ongoing commission of over 12% on every sale. The small margins of my client would have never covered such high ongoing costs!
Wow that's crazy!
I have to find a self hosted solution I can deploy on a Linux dedicated server. Forgot to add that part!
I'm doing exactly what you described Bruce. Fonts, colors, and sizes (it's a sticker company) We've been running pretty happily on WooCommerce, with some added plugins (about $250 worth). Try using Gravity Forms plugin for fonts. That helps take some of the burden off the thousands of variations that are created. Also, any variations that are not price-differentiated can be done with Gravity. Save only the ones that need to be selected for price to use as variations. The only problem we run into is speed in the back end (front end is fine – loads in 2.7s). I'm troubleshooting my speed problem now, thinking of using a CDN.
WooCommerce really is a great option. They offer several of the features asked for in this blog, though not ALL of them – I agree. They are very quickly developing, and I believe they will release all requested features in time.
Since your using fonts, if you run into any way to preview them in the customer's text, please let me know!
I'm using Tribulant Cart on a client site just because it allows for images on the options and the ability to add additional prices to the variation options.
Does anyone want to set-up a wiki product comparison table, hosted somewhere free, updated and checked for spam, and covering only WordPress carts?
I'm a DIY shopkeeper so my commitment would not last long; someone who installs shopping carts for clients would do a better job.
If you can assist with filling it with content, we'll be glad to set it up
Woo Commerce does not suck. Through 1 or 2 plugins and themes with a bit of css knowledge you can accomplish literally whatever you want to, but again it is not basic to fully customize. it is is php, css, and in troubleshooting situations you have to know what you are doing within the WordPress codex if it gets weird.
It is straightforward for most projects with templates to build off of for most sites and their plugins don’t suck like most. I would be more concerned with my host and their WordPress stability than anything from WooCommerce, they are reliable.
Hi
As a developer of the WP ecommerce plugin I'm little disappointed with your post
If you provide list of the requirements we'll try to resolve all of it. Waiting for your answer
Well I'm sorry you're disappointed. I have a partial list above in the post. The main problem I have with WP Ecommerce, honestly, is when I show it to clients, they scream. They don't find it intuitive to the way they sell their products. This is one area where I believe Cart 66 has you beat – it's been a lot easier to get my (less-than-technical) clients up to speed on Cart 66 than on WP Ecommerce, unless they are already developers or even web designers. And most small businesses aren't.
I don't mean WP ecommerce as a plugin
We develop that one http://readyshoppingcart.com
In your post I also see OSCommerce and ZenCart – they're not the standart of usability and user-friendly interface.
Then what is the standart? Can you show ecommerce solution powerful on the one side and simple on another? And I don't mean "standart" as "everybody use it" but intuitive and "not user screaming"
If I could, I wouldn't have written this post, would I? I did look at your cart, but the pricing model doesn't work for my clients. I'm not dissing it, and I don't mind paying a good price for a cart that does exactly what I need, but I need to know ahead of time that it actually WILL do everything I need, and that means I have to have a full version (with the extensions I need) to test before purchasing. I don't mind if there's a time limit on it, of say, two weeks to thirty days, after which it no longer works unless I pay for it. But otherwise, I risk wasting money and more importantly, time. Time is the one thing I never have enough of.
No problem
Email me which extensions / themes you would like to get and I'll email them to you
P.S. I don't like so many in our plugin, but I try accept this challenge "if you don't like something why don't you do it yourself? "
Next time I have an application for it, maybe I will. I wrote this back in November, I've already had to make do with Cart 66. Not sure what you're referring to in your last sentence, but if you mean me – I don't write plugins, I get businesses on the internet. And usually those businesses already have enough to do as it is just running their businesses, and trying to keep up in Google, without also having to learn complicated online shopping carts. Sure, it's easy to say if they can't afford it they should stay off the net, but that's why you see nothing but Amazon in the SERPs.
Yeah i would like an advanced search option that will search the content of an item, its products tags and variations not just the title of the product.
Nutmeg,
You've pretty much summed up the frustration I've had for the last year and a half, since I redid my website as WP site. I too need several of the same features (tiered pricing, table-based shipping prices, per-product shipping settings, among others). So far, the only cart I've found that handles everything is tribulant. Would be interested to hear more about your view of tribulant's shortcomings. Their website lists conflicts with a couple of caching plug-ins, (http://docs.tribulant.com/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin/3463) but it also provides what appear to be very simple fixes for those conflicts. Are there other conflicts or issues that you know about?
(netmeg) The biggest issue we had with them is that when something didn't work, they were a gazillion time zones away, and that just made getting support take too long. Most of my client sites, I consider them to be mission critical, meaning if they're down for more than an hour, I go all netmeg on someone's ass.
I guess netmeg makes more sense than nutmeg
I am SO frustrated with Tribulant it's not even funny. Its been neverending problems with their cart where my customers have trouble checking out, to the point where it's costing me orders and sales and I have to refund/discount to keep customers happy and tribulant can sometimes take a week or longer to respond to support tickets. I probably have about 40 tickets with them since I started using the cart 2 years ago, and the majority of the time, they tell me it's not their cart that's the problem and it's a server problem or a plugin that is causing the issue. I've had other web people look at it and tell me the coding is sloppy and then they find the problem in the CARTS CODING. the cart cannot handle large amounts of traffic either – for whatever reason if there's 2 people on the site it works fine, but when there's hundreds on simultaneously it just breaks continually. I've even disabled supercache like they said and it hasn't made a difference. All in All I need a new cart desperately and I'm so frustrated with tribulant. SIMPLE things that are add ons that they make like oh-say-check a box when you're checking out to be added to our mailing list – that breaks everything else too.
Yes! Yes! Love this!!! I am opening a small jewelry business, and I have spent my entire Spring Break trying to find a shopping cart that works for my Elegant Themes eStore. You all have helped me feel much better about myself and raised my self-esteem. I thought it was me!
I love WP, I love my theme even though is is contrained by templates. I don't want to put out a lot of money for a shopping cart. I have put out plenty already for hosting, camera, photo processing software, etc. I need something simple and easy, so I can concentrate on my growing business and not worry about printing pages of codex. Sheesh!
I am new to this, but I thought WP was created by a bunch of helpful, generous souls who wanted open source blogging for the masses.
Where did they go when it comes to shopping carts?
Update: I just spend my whole last day before school starts back up trying to add shipping to my jewelry items. Well, I can't figure it out, I'm disgusted, and I just made a business decision NOT to charge shipping for my customers at all!
This is screwed up.
Thanks for listening!
This is great. Thanks for triggering this massive debate and discussion. Any chance you will follow up on this? In programming world, this is like a hundred years have passed in the evolution of products. We need some current info.
I am not a programmer. I run an eBay store and have had it with their "cut" of my profits. Been getting some coaching on moving to my own webstore, but it's taking forever. Almost no budget right now, not a lot of time and minimal experience with code. Trying to consolidate a blog and webstore into one site. Not happy with any of the wp sites and plugins so far. Need simple but not the cheesy looking crap I keep finding.
Just moved to bluehost and WordPress. Abandoning godaddy and blogger ASAP. Any new suggestions?
For the most part, I am using Cart66 now. My client had to change the way he sells some of his products (and one product he just stopped selling online altogether, because for now, there's no easy way to do it with existing carts) There's a free version you can download and play with, and you might want to try that.
I recommend opencart, i know its not wp but it is a complete package and its free. Modules are available and priced quite resonable. I just finished a hair extension site.
Opencart offers tier pricing weight variations per product. Multiple payment gateway options. Page construction is very similar to wp with a visual editor or code, very simple to use.
Chris, I have been developing an OpenCart site for the last 4 months and suddenly my client wants different prices based on sizes. Upon contacting OpenCart developers they tell me I should create a separate pages for each size! Never heard anything so crazy! e.g. page 1 large shorts – price / page 2 small shorts -price I was trying to add a simply check box where clients look down the size list, check and add to cart! I have also tried numerous carts and wish there was a good one for WordPress and agree I don't wish to spend more money finding it doesn't do what my client needs!
I'll bump this conversation. wishing i could find a decent wordpress shopping cart for a fabric store client. the OP is right on; i would only add to the list "handles fractional quantities"
I'm looking for cart software that will handle multiple quantity discounts. C-cart is a definite contender; does anyone have an opinion about PrestaShop?
i am looking foe something that has a shopping cart feel but no cart i saw this site using i think agora but i could be wrong but looks like it would be great integration to wordpress…
you could try making one yourself
might find out why it's hard to make one fit into wordpress. not exactly a small plugin.
Dammit mike, I'm a marketer not a developer.
Yep, there is NOTHING available worth talking about here when it comes to shopping carts for WP – I couldn't agree more with the author – they all suck! OpenCart has all of the functionality that you would need (but it's separate from WP) and it's somewhat difficult to customize the cosmetics / layout to work with your site's layout, but it seems to be the best solution available – it's pretty user-friendly and easy to use. I would really love to hear if anyone has found something (or is developing) something for WP that is a viable solution – I guess its just a matter of time…
I just want my registered users to be able to use the damn cart without having to have a separate account/profile for the shopping cart. And I want my USERS — not hijacked by the shopping cart either. PayPal buttons keep looking better and better. It's ridiculous.
Woocommerce is the best option. I also used Cart66 and made the switch – hated it. Woo at least has a ton of extensions, that should be able to accomodate your requests. They are great at responding to customer issues too.
I have also been digging around and started off looking for hosted options as Ive never heard good things about ecommerce plugins for wp but seems crazy learning a new programme when Im just starting to get wp dialed. I just found Ready Ecommerce WordPress. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ready-ecommer…
It gets really good reviews, have some reasonable themes to start with and 99$ with 10 free addons. Anyone have any experience. How do most e commerce plugins work with child themes or is it not possible.
Thanks
Hi, I’m building my ecomm cart ATM and I’m a little frustrated with constraints. I’m by no means a big business, just starting out so don’t want to spend lots on something that won’t work (think we all understand the nonsense of paying something that doesn’t suit)
Anyways, I had used wp ecomm, loved it but it would Hv conflicts with my theme as I want it in grid view which is a gold cart option. I’m tempted to pay the money for It but what if it doesn’t work?
Now I’ve stumbled across dukapress seems easy enough and I’m even happy to compromise with its limitations, inability to Add weight for variations…
But here are some things I need if you could help me with a cart at minimal cost or refund if unsatisfactory:
Inventory tracking of variations (I don’t want 40 separate listings for different ribbon colours!)
Ability to exclude an item from a shipping group within same weight bracket (ribbons can post as letter but other items need to be posted as parcel due to dimensions)
I had been using congocart prior to this and it had been pretty good to fit in what I needed, but on the whole was not financially savvy as it was hosted.
I don’t think I’m asking too much, or am I??
Rhoda,
Have you looked into Cart66 (http://cart66.com/)? Cart66 does allow you to track the inventory for variations of products. While you can't exclude an item from a particular shipping group, you can specify the weight which will decrease the cost of shipping for that item OR you can set the weight to '0 lbs' in order for the shipping to be free for that item.
Cart66 also includes a Rate Tweaker for live rates. If you go with custom, flat rate shipping options, you can create a shipping method specifically for ribbons and give it whatever price you like.
Look the specs
The problem is your customers and you!
If you make that application, 99,9% sure that nobody will use it coz it takes one full day to add a single product! then they will call you and say that this need to happen with one click.
I was looking at a cart called Ready E-Commerce for WordPress. Has anyone used it? Got pretty good reviews on the WordPress plugins page.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ready-ecommer…