I have to build a WordPress website with a shopping cart facility. Client doesn’t have a large budget so I’ve opted for WordPress in the hope that it will be fairly straightforward to set up and style.
I’ve been looking at the options. As it’s a first one I would like to know if any of you have used one of the WP shopping cart plugins and which one you would recommend. Are there any to avoid? Are there any you swear by? The one that seems to come up as well rated is the WP e-commerce from these guys: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/
I’ve used the Instinct cart a few times and my clients seem to grasp it very well, as far as adding and editing products.
The one thing I HATE, is how it deals with customer registrations. I’m actually in the thinking stages right now of creating a plugin that will manage customers a bit better.
If you want people to have accounts, then they have to register. The only way they can register is through the WordPress registration. Which completely sucks…because then WordPress has to send them a password, and then they have to log in with that password and change it to something else (IF they know how). When they’re logged in to the wordpress Admin panel, they see all kinds of news about the latest wordpress…which is confusing and not user friendly at all.
Aside from that - the cart is easy to use, easy to theme…there are a LOT of WordPress themes out there so that’s one of the reasons I use it, because of how well it ties into WordPress.
Another option you may want to look at is Shopp. Costs a little bit of $, but solves that customer registration issue. Haven’t used it yet, but it looks nice.
I have seen a few wordpress sites using 3rd party shopping carts. One was from a service that yahoo offers. You may want to check google and yahoo for those shopping carts to integrate into wordpress.
That one seems to be very well regarded (though I haven’t used it). Remember that you have two basic options: installing a cart yourself and worrying about security, SSL etc, or linking to a third-party cart (which can be integrated with your site and appear to be a part of it) where security etc are all looked after for you. Unless you are experienced with carts and security, I’d check out those hosted options. The third party carts usually have a small monthly fee.