I’ve never implemented a shopping cart within a Wordpress site and I’m a little overwhelmed with the number of ecommerce plugins out there. I have an existing gallery of products and I’m simply looking for a simple solution to add a “add to cart” button below my images and a “checkout” button where user can make payments. I’ve tested out a few plugins, but haven’t found one I can get working and were not easy to get set up. I’m wasting far too much time searching for a good plugin for my needs, so I’m hoping someone can suggest a good one.
Any recommendations? (and ideally this would be a free plugin).
I did the mistake of using WordPress and an eCommerce website, consider using something like Shopify, you won’t regret it and it’s purpose is to create your shopping experience.
On the note of WordPress there are several plug-ins related to paypal which you can easily add a payment method. For a fully featured WordPress eCommerce website, consider this, http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/. WordPress is pretty much used for anything nowadays, it’s power is in it’s SEO, however, Shopify is better catered towards selling and managing your sales.
Wordpress is definitely a good CMS but it is not that CMS which provide proper ecommerce solution. Instead of using Wordpress for ecommerce website I would like to suggest you that use Magento. Magento is a platform which is specifically developed for creating an ecommerce website. In Magento you can easily create shopping cart with its own inbuilt shopping cart functionality.
I spent quite a bit of time looking for a solution and found this post useful in helping to explain the different requirements for an ecommerce website solution. It can be a tricky process matching what you need with a good robust solution. For my own needs we found many ecommerce packages would handle the shop just fine but the shipping was the issue as we are based in New Zealand. There weren’t any integrated shipping packages such as Fed-Ex etc like there are for other parts of the world. Finding a way to be able to manage multiple quantites of goods and provide automatic calculations on shipping was a real nightmare. There are solutions but some of the packages didn’t have them available.
Bottom line is that there are a range of solutions, take a careful look at your needs and make sure there aren’t any deal breaking features missing before you start.
Thanks for all the responses. I haven’t landed on one yet, but Shopify, Magento, and Ecwid all look good. I stumpled upon Jigoshop recently which looks really good and you purchase their templates. I’m looking for best solution to easily implement a shopping cart for an existing site requiring ecommerce as well as best solution for developing new site from scratch that requires ecommerce. I think there are different solutions for both.
I’ve used WooCommerce since it launched - for me it’s by far the easiest and most robust e-commerce plugin for Wordpress, but best of all it’s so simple for the end user.
I can’t recommend it highly enough, and it’s free!
There wont be perfect solution for every problem. But i would say magento was an e-commerce site first than wordpress. But the functionalities are almost similar but still you could try WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart which might suit your requirement.
