Shopping Cart for WordPress: WP e-Commerce
May 4th, 2007
Just discovered a very nice shopping cart for WordPress. Fits in well with the upcoming FolioPress release. We will take WordPress from weblog software to CMS, bypassing bloat.
The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind. Perfect for
- Bands & Record Labels
- Clothing Companies
- Crafters & Artists
- Books, DVDs & MP3 files
All is not rosy however with WP e-Commerce lite. The URLs for shopping cart pages are atrocious, something like:
yourdomain.com/products-page/?category=11
That takes us back to the bad old Mambo days. At some point John and I should do a rewrite of the plugin to incorporate search engine and people friendly URLs so that the above would read:
yourdomain.com/products/non-latex
or even
yourdomain.com/condoms/non-latex
While the URLs above sound like a joke, that store really exists. But don't get the wrong idea: WordPress e-Commerce does power other more conventional and children friendly shopping carts.
For the moment, WP e-Commerce does seem horribly slow to load new pages. The sites using it are hosted in the States and not Australia so the problem appears to be with the script itself.
I advise serious performance testing before using WP e-Commerce.
If someone has performance figures for WP e-Commerce, I'd be delighted to see them.
By Alec
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5 comments on “Shopping Cart for WordPress: WP e-Commerce”
01
Hi
Decent wordpress shopping carts are very scarce. Hopefully we will see more of them come out soon.
Heres one that -
1) Will accept Paypal (website pro, and website standard), Google Checkout, 2CheckOut and Authorize.net
2) Uses your default Paypal settings (not IPN) so you can use it to sell stuff on several sites.
3) Generates hacker-proof download links if you sell digital products.
4) Has built in affiliate management system if you want to run an affiliate program, as well as ad/link tracking.
Will work on just about any web site, not only Wordpress.
http://www.wordpressshoppingcart.info (aff)
Nice blog theme btw, I really like the minimal type themes.
Have a great day.
Alan
02
[…] is still on the works. There are also comments that WP E-commerce is very slow to load from foliovision… The frugal law student have a blog on how to setup WP for ecommerce in 30 […]
03
[…] Products: This is the main page of the store. As some other people have noted, the URLs that are created for product pages and category pages are not good (for example, […]
04
WP-Ecommerce plugin by Instinct is a fairly good plugin featuring basic functions in its free version. Said that, The plugin is soooo slow since it starts preloading ll the images you use fo reach product from the access to the very first product page. To be clearer, even if you just want to enter the store to view the thumbnails, that plugin will make it laod all the images for all your store (not just the thumbnails) right in your first product page. this might be due to the fact that WP-Ecommerce uses lightbox to build the gallery (nice look, i have to say), which by default is pre-loading all the images… So unless you rewrite that plugin to actually load the images of each product only when you hit the thumbnail to see the gallery, WP-Ecommerce is gonna slow down dramatically your entire site. Please programmer, if you have a solution to this, post it here or email me, I would really appreciate, since I’m not a programmer. thanks
pg.provenzano@gmail.com
05
Hello Pier,
That’s a very astute observation about WP-Ecommerce. I had noticed that it was very slow back when I first wrote about it in 2007. I assumed that it was mainly an issue of code optimization which would eventually happen.
It appears that the performance bottleneck is built in.
You should write to WP-Ecommerce and let them know about this thread and perhaps they can fix WP-Ecommerce for us that it doesn’t try to download all the images right away.
On the other hand, some kind of preload can be very useful as well for catalogues - the issue may just be that people are trying to preload images which are too large.
A programmer would be able to set it up that the images preload as they can without interfering with the loading and performance of the website. If WP-Ecommerce was our plugin, that’s what we would do: regulate the rate and order of image upload.
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