Top WP Shopping Cart/eCommerce Plugins
The best quality of WordPress is truly is versatility. It can go from being a personal weblog to a fully functional online store with the click of a mouse, literally. With all of the options, ranging from Paypal integration to third party eCommerce services, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get exactly what you want out of your WordPress blog.
Here are my top eCommerce/Shopping Cart plugins for WordPress blogs.
WordPress eCommerce Plugin
This plugin offers an amazingly comprehensive toolkit that will ensure your online shop is as plug-and-play as possible. It comes complete with different templates, offering you control over how your shopping cart will appear to your customers. Social media is super simple, as they’ve optimized everything using the ShareThis technology, which will absolutely help your products get noticed. As far as payment options – they are plentiful. WordPress eCommerce supports Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, and several others. While the plugin is free to use, further customization options reveal themselves in the form of premium plugins (plugins for a plugin? I know, it’s crazy), including a FedEx quote generator, Members Only module, and NextGen gallery integration.
YAK For WordPress
This is another surprisingly powerful eCommerce plugin that’s being offered for free, but has some really integral premium options. YAK is an open source plugin, and for about $28, you can get your hands on their comprehensive Handbook, which will allow you further options regarding configuration and customization. This plugin associates new products with your updated blog, so blog posts containing new products have their blog ID, which is also the product ID. YAK supports downloadable products, so any e-books, plugins, or zip files you’re marketing can be easily purchased and dowloaded. Flash-based sales reports are also included. There is an excellent support system for this plugin, including a discussion group.
PHPurchase
This is a sleek, hard-working plugin. The plugin site lists a number of sites using their product, which signifies (to me, anyway) that this is a great option. Aside from its ability to create an entire catalogue of products with custom variables (size, color, etc.), a powerful dashboard-based order management system, and a bevy of other features, seeing that the plugin has loyalty and trust from past users is still nice. PHPurchase is a highly organized system that is easy to implement, and easy to use.
The single website license is $49, 5 site license is $199, and the coveted unlimited developer license is $299.
ShopperPress
This plugin combines the best parts of a WordPress blog (organization, cleanliness, and search-ability) with a stable online retail platform. It includes all the necessary features, including custom variables, promotion abilities (coupon codes, discounts, etc.), Adsense integration with dedicated advertising slots, and shipping/tax options. You also have the ability to import CSV files, which is a lot more appealing than individual entry any day.
You can get the ShopperPress VIP license (including extra themes and features) for $79 right now, but it’s regularly priced at $149.
WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin
Just like the name, this plugin is straight to the point. With a ton of payment options, product options, and affiliate and digital product support, it’s got everything you need to make a fully functional online shop. You may miss some features offered by the more advanced plugins listed here, but rest assured that this plugin will do everything you do to create an online shop.
The single site license for this plugin is $49.99, and the unlimited developer’s version is $249.95.
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I’m wondering if any of these tap into the new (from WP2.9) custom post types to solve the shop issue, or they just create new tables etc.
Any thoughts on this?
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Nikola Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 6:52 am
I invite products owners to come and to answer on your question.
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Thomas Clausen Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 9:28 am
Cool. I think it would be nice for the plugins to use the custom post types even though it’s not a necessity.
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Antonie Potgieter Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
@Thomas,
I’m not sure if I understand your question about the custom post types 100% but what I can tell you is that the shop categories, products, suppliers, etc… integrate very well with WordPress by creating pages for you as it goes along.
You can turn on/off the creation of posts/pages for the shop and also specify whether they should be posts/pages. Additionally, you can set a parent and several other settings to control the way it behaves.
Overall, you will find that it integrates well with WordPress and doesn’t separate/break away from WordPress like some custom shop plugins do.
See the WordPress shopping cart plugin here: http://tribulant.com/products/view/10/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin
All the best,
Antonie
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PHPurchase works by letting you place a variety of different shortcodes on any page or post on your WordPress website. So it doesn’t directly make use of the new custom post types but you can certainly use custom post types as product pages. The beauty of PHPurchase is that it works WITH WordPress rather than trying to overtake WordPress. Let me know if you need any help getting set up. Stop by our website and chat with us via our Live Chat. http://www.phpurchase.com
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Although I have not tried all of the above, I am a fan of the FREE “eshop” plugin. Multiple payment processors, digital downloads, no mucking around with shortcodes, etc.
Just my opinion
)
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most of the paid plugins are rather expensive for unlimited domains. we do WP as well as other ecommerce sites for clients. I wonder how does WP plugins compare to the open-source platforms like Magento, OsCommerce.
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I am looking for a wordpress plugin that can create a catalog page. I dont really want extensive features like shopping cart because my products have their own website. I want a plugin (or script) that will allow me to create a page with a gallery type image of each one of my product with a shot description and a link to the product website (which is an external site, not a page or post of the current wp installation). Can any of the above plugins do it? If not, do you have any suggestion how I can achieve that? I will appreciate it very much. Thanks.
Maria
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