WP e-Commerce plugin for WordPress seems to be one of the most commonly used (currently 175,000+ downloads) shopping cart system across the board. I’ve been testing the latest version 3.6.10 and it has a lot of additional features compared to review on eShop I wrote recently.
https://www.aloeveraproductsshop.eu/
The WP e-Commerce WordPress Plugin was developed by a New Zealand company called Instinct. Since this company has dedicated funds and resources to this plugin, I presumed they would want to make money from selling this plugin. Lucky for us, they didn’t and have been giving away this plugin for free. Though, the first thing you will see on the front page of their website is the following:
Home of the famous WordPress e-Commerce Plugin
The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.
Now, being the state of the art e-commerce plugin is a bold statement and I have tested out numerous e-commerce software that I will be comparing this too. Let me review this plugin to test if their statement is true.
THE PROS
Easy Installation
It took me less than 5 minutes to upload and install without any errors or conflict with other plugins so far. I could easily find the newly created section in WordPress administration called e-Commerce. It contained Sales, Products, Groups, Variation, Marketing and Settings links making it very easy to find what you need. I am glad they did this and made it simple.
Well Defined Categories / Groups Section
There is a self-explanatory tab that says Groups which allows you to add unlimited categories and subcategories to your shop. It’s very standard to see this available in e-commerce systems and it’s great to see this part of WP e-Commerce plugin. In comparison to other WordPress shopping cart plugins they utilise pages to separate categories and it becomes a total nightmare without proper documentation.
Adding Products Is Easy
Adding products is easy when you click on the Products link. It offers a wide range of settings to customise your products including price and stock controls, shipping and weight settings, product variations, merchant notes, product downloads, coupon codes and promotions. These are very important when you have different products to sell and helps you distinguish between A and B product.
Widgets make customisation a breeze
What I’ve found quite handy are the customisable widgets that you can install on your sidebar as part of this plugin. A common widget people have on their website is the shopping cart. Having this displayed allows a customer to see what they have currently selected, then head to the checkout section to pay for all their items. The new widgets you’ll see in this plugin are: Shopping Cart, Groups, Categories, Price Range, Product Specials, Latest Products, Price Range and Donations. You can select anyone of those to display on WordPress at any time.