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 