One of the top feature requests by web design clients is of course the ability to sell items online and I’ve had to do a bit of research to find a suitable and robust shop plugin for my web design tool of choice WordPress. There’s a few smaller, basic plugins that do a job but for a proper cart the main plugin seems to be WP-ecommerce but I’ve had nothing but trouble with that, seems very buggy. Sometimes you just have to go commercial with plugins and get what you pay for! So here’s my recommendation for the best all round commercial wordpress shopping cart plugin at the time of writing.
It’s logically called WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin by Tribulant Software and its priced at a very reasonable, once off $49.99 for a single installation or $249.95 for the ability to add it to as many sites as you like. Here’s a rundown on the highlight features:
- Unlimited Products and Categories.
- Support for automatic Digital Product sales.
- Multiple payment methods including Paypal and Manual.
- Multiple Currencies.
- Customisable shipping structure.
- Discount Coupons.
- Product Variations/Styles.
- Inventory Countdown.
- Product embedding in wordpress posts and pages.
- Multiple widgets available.
- Custom Fields.
- Ajax powered content tabs.
- Product Search Widget.
- Multimple Regional Taxes.
- Supplier Login.
- G-Zip Compression.
The standout features for me are:
- Stripe Payment Integration via extension. (Accept Credit Cards with NO Merchant or Gateway setup or monthly fees!)
- Realex Payment Integration. (Both Redirect and Remote/Onsite methods)
- Digital Product support.
- Affiliate Product Support.
- Ajax (fast loading) product information tabs.
- Flexible pricing and shipping options.
- Custom Fields.
- Invoice/Order PDF generation.
There’s also a very interesting setting to make any product an External/Affiliate item. I also like the Recommended Retail Price option which displays the RRP struck out over the actual price. The checkout procedure is very nicely laid out in a step by step method which should help conversions and minimise confusion, a common problem on e-commerce sites.
The plugin is way lighter than its rival wp-ecommerce, is pretty much bug free as far as I can see and is compatible with recent versions of wordpress including the current 2.8.5.
This is about the best e-commerce plugin currently available for wordpress and the price won’t break the bank.
Demos, Documentation and Support available HERE.
Get it now on the Tribulant site.
Leon.
Reverb Studios Design 
@Ciara Marks,Yes, exactly it was your faulty SSL configuration which caused the problem and I quote you said to us in our help desk “No go fix your product”.Misleading live support? It clearly states on our website that we have live support available from 9am till 5pm GMT+2. Screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/GodsJUMVB3DR . It is now 8:30pm GMT+2 and we are currently still on live support as you posted that comment so we are on.Thank you for your kind words, we appreciate it. We have a great product and excellent support to back it up. If you have a problem, talk to us. We cannot assume that something is wrong.Shall we continue discussing any help you need in our help desk please?All the best,Antonie Potgieter
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How Tribulant will f*** up your website like no other!
Started a small website on wordpress and used Tribulant shopping
cart. This was about a year ago. It has NEVER worked properly.
If this was a free open sourced kind of shopping cart I
would understand, but it’s not. There is no number to call if you need help. The
live support option is a lie. All it does is redirect you to a support ticket
site that has a 48 hour wait period.
Our site was left dead for days because they don’t respond
to support tickets after certain times, site goes down Friday afternoon? You
are S.O.L. They didn’t even get back to us until Tuesday. Must be a relaxed
place to work.
Another fun fact! Updates are not free, and every single
time there has been an update, our cart stops working. I like to call this
extortion.
To change shopping carts now is going to cost us as much as
building the original site as they have no way of exporting customers, order
invoices, or products.
I’m ready to submit complaints to the better business
bureau. It’s seriously frustrating after all the time and expense of setting up
an e-commerce site to have to start all over again.
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@Ciara Marks,
It is very odd that you submitted a ticket to our help desk after submitting these comments to several review sites where they were published.
Either way, your ticket has been answered and resolved accordingly. You made a mistake with the setup of your SSL/https, simple as that. I hope our solution helped and that the shop will keep running as it is now after we configured it correctly.
Please let us know if you need any further assistance.
All the best,
Antonie Potgieter
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@c44cdf6306a39bb533db317230268d13:disqus
yes, thank you for fixing the main issue, that was a fast response time and I do appreciate it.
the only thing is that I set up the https page after the shopping cart began to give our customers a “no data received” message (I tried many different things in an attempt to trouble shoot the problem)
not before, so not ‘simple as that’
you seriously need to take down the misleading ‘live support’ from your site
something POSITIVE about Tribulant software is that they are starting to provide more documentation about how to work around different known issues and with most updates they make checkout options more flexible
this software is still growing and I sincerely hope that one day it will become as versatile and powerful as some of the larger e-commerce options out there. with time, Tribulant has the potential to allow small businesses the same robust shopping experience as large corporate brands
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Thanks for posting the review.
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It is place as a mainstream easy to use.The written skill is so good.I appreciate to this one.This provide a good information.I am very impressed to this one.Thanks to share this blog.
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Wow it is amazing.I think I should try it into my
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can this plugin be easily integrated with UPS for shipping?
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You’d have to ask the developer, not sure – http://tribulant.com/products/view/10/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin?a_aid=reverbstudios&a_bid=c76d9958
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Thanks for this great plug in and i will definitely use this for my website.
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Wow it is amazing.I think I should try it into my
Ecommerce Website so that it can get a lot of visitors..
Thanks for this blog.I’ll share it with my friends.
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Well plug in is not so bad but yes there is time issue in it. It should work more fast and speedy so that its performance improved more.
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It a nice one but should be more efficient. Overall it is fine in usage.
Thanks for sharing.
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Yes you’re right, it was not because of the plugin. But I installed it just before the servers of the hosting company experimented some kind of crash, it took me a while to learn about their problems, so I thought the new plugin might have something to do with the slowdown. But it’s working just fine after reinstallation.
Thanks a lot for your answer.
Your blog is impressive, congrats! 🙂
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Installed the plugin but it slowed down dramatically the website performance. I had to give up as it took 20-30 seconds for the site to load. Too bad as I need a shopping cart for wordpress which integrates Realex 😦
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Can’t say I’ve ever really noticed a big slow down with it. Maybe it’s something to do with some of your other plugins? I have it installed here and the site speed is fine – http://www.celticrug.com
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Its slow on two sites that I have and the link provided above is also slow
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The CelticRug.com link no longer uses it and I havn’t used recent versions. Just make sure you’re using a recent version.
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Hi Jay. Kyle here from the support team at Tribulant.
Regarding the site speed, there are several things which you can do to help the performance of the site. I’ll list them below:
1) Enable GZip Compression. Go to “Checkout > Configuration” section, under in the General tab in the ‘General Configuration” section, see this screenshot http://screencast.com/t/lJK9YhC7
2) Increase the server resources. The PHP memory_limit on your site is define by your hosting provider. Depending on what hosting package you have and from which company, you may have a slow site because the PHP memory_limit is almost being exhausted. The Shopping Cart plugin has a lot of processes to run, but with sufficient resources it shouldn’t be a problem. At the moment we’re recommending about 128M on the memory_limit, but the more this is increased the faster the plugin, and your site will be.
3) Caching plugin. There are several caching plugins out there, we recommend WP Super Cache, although any caching plugin should work. Cached content for quicker page loads combined with the GZip Compression mentioned above and you should notice a big improvement in your site.
In the end, we sell Professional WordPress plugins, installing them on cheap hosting will not do it any justice. The above 3 things can be used on a cheaper hosting package to increase the performance, but ultimately you want to run the plugin on a great hosting package.
You can contact us at http://tribulant.com/support for more details if needed.
All the best,
Tribulant Support
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Thanks for posting the review of my plugin!
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