A word with WP E-commerce
by Mark
I’ve been doing a lot of searching around lately for e-commerce software that will do what we need and do it well. That is to say, it needs to handle album downloads pretty damn well. Since our label isn’t exactly very big, ideally it would need to be free or of very little cost. This is my experience and rant with:
WP e-commerce 3.7.5.3 – WordPress Plugin (http://getshopped.org/) – Free / $40 single / $195 business
This is a plugin designed for WordPress to help you sell things on your blog/website. It’s one of the very first i found when searching for an e-commerce solution. We took this plugin into strong consideration because it was very easy to customize (WordPress is essentially the template and there’s thousands of them). The ability to use FTP to upload our .zip albums was a huge plus, since many of our albums run 100MB and over. With the help of an additional plugin (which you have to pay for), you can make single song uploading easy.
Here’s where the good comments end. The plugin is incredibly buggy and chunky. Changing the plugin and tweaking it to your liking requires PHP knowledge, time and a lot of patience. Support on the forums is nearly non-existent. Seriously, don’t even bother making an account to ask questions. There aren’t nearly enough developers to help and/or they mostly seem to be on vacation. If you’re hoping to sell multiple versions of an album (Such as offering MP3, FLAC, etc.), you’re out of luck as product variations don’t work well for downloads. The only options you have for user downloads are the number of times the customer can download the album and “ip-address lock”, which restricts the downloads to the customer (assuming they have a static IP). If you would like an easy way for customers to listen to the album tracks, you’ll need some crappy MP3 plugin that they sell (that ALSO requires the “Gold cart”).
The actual shopping experience for the customer is sub-par and incredibly basic. Ideally, you would like to have customers sign up to have an account on your e-commerce site so they can access their digital downloads if they need to, as it’ll hold their records. Upon checkout, you can assign whether or not the user needs to make an account before they can purchase, which means it’ll stick a “register” form right below the cart and above the checkout forms. That’s it. No log in form or anything for the customers who may already HAVE an account. There’s also no option for both guest and registered user checkout, something a lot of the other carts do have. Also, your customers will have NO idea how big the download is or how much longer it’ll take, since for some reason, no matter what browser you use, it won’t tell you how big it is.
Should you decide to use this plugin, your experience will vary greatly. From the very first time i set it up, upon checkout for a digital purchase, it kept asking for shipping method, even though it had no option to input it. In another installation, I had to up my PHP set memory limit because ’32M’ wasn’t enough for it. From my latest experiment with this plugin, i’m getting strange user account issues where registered users aren’t allowed to see their account information or downloads, even if they’ve already made their purchase.
The developers insist their plugin is incredible/the best and they even have plans to take over the world. Uh, sure guys, whatever you say. It’s really hard to take you seriously when you call us lazy in your own FAQ:
Q: Awesome! You don’t expect me to manually load them all do you?
A: Cough Lazy Cough… excuse me, I had to clear my throat…Q: Do I have to manually upload each and every track of an album? Can’t I just plonk the entire album online?
A: Cough Lazy Cough…oops, had to clear my throat again. I think I need a glass of water.Selling Tickets
Q: How do I sell tickets?
A: We’re so glad you asked!
That last question had no actual answer.
Under “Support” in their FAQ (Last two questions of the three):
Q: But you give the software away for free – shouldnt you help us for free?
A: HA! Oh wait, you were serious weren’t you.Q:Are you always so snarky?
A: Yes.
Q: Do JCROP images have to be so square?
A: Um…yeah. If you got a problem with it, crop your own damn images.Troubleshooting
Q: I upgraded WordPress, and now a bunch of the links in my store are broken?
A: That’s because WordPress hates you! Oh just kidding…Q: I changed the page name/title and everything is broken now – what do I do?
A: Ooooh, sucks to be you..
Yeah, every single one of those were pulled from the FAQ. Humor is good, this is not. Be a little more professional about your product. It’s a huge mess trying to deal with this plugin. But don’t take my word for it, go to their forums and take a gander at the thousands of unanswered questions.
Verdict for WP E-commerce:
MP3 Downloads: AVOID
Physical products: USE EXTREME CAUTION
Comments
I have been experimenting with this plugin and find it to be difficult to figure out how to use, even though the interface leads one to believe that it’s easy to set up. I have made several test transactions and can finally see download links in both the purchase receipts and the transaction page, but the link leads to nowhere. I can’t download anything and, to agree with you, support seems very minimal.
What did you end up going with? I would like to know, because I am looking for an easy solution as well, preferably free…
Likewise been poking around this plugin and have started getting that sinking feeling. Thanks for spelling out your experience with it. I couldn’t even figure out how to upload files larger than the 2 MB (!) limit that’s built into their settings. (Sounds like you got that far, at least.)
And like Phillip Ginn, I’d be curious to learn if you found a suitable substitute. Having poked around e-junkie (junky), foxycart (more complex than I can currently handle), magento (not much in the free ed.), it would appear that with e-commerce, one really gets what one pays for.
Hey Jeff.
Uploading files above 2MB is a PHP restriction, not limited to WP e-commerce. Changing it requires modifying php-config files on your server. Although you’re much better off FTP’ing the files instead of using the uploader, since lenghty and large uploads will most likely fail half way through.
I ended up going with Bandcamp, which ironically enough isn’t a WordPress plugin nor is it software we run on our servers. It’s a fantastic site that hosts albums and allows for instant full-song streaming, variably-priced downloads, physical purchases and music downloads in a wide variety of formats (MP3, AAC, FLAC, Ogg and Alac). We were able to make it look like an extension of our site with the ability to point subdomains to theirs.
Example:
http://pursecandy.bandcamp.com
http://pursecandy.unnamedlabel.com
The first link is the original link to the page at Bandcamp. The second points to it and masks the domain. It’s actually really quite neat.
Anyway, as far as other WordPress plugins go, I took a look at Shopp and was impressed with it, from the demo anyway.
http://shopplugin.net/
At $55, it’s not badly priced either considering a lot of the features it has, but make sure to do A LOT of research before dropping the credit card. Take a look at every single administrator setting in the demo and go through the forums carefully to see if there are any problems to be addressed.
WP e-commerce is still way too big of a clusterfuck to use. Apparently they still ARE improving on it so only time will tell if it becomes half-way decent. There’s eShop but i tried playing around with it and wasn’t all too impressed either. Shopp is the only great one i’ve seen so far, even though it costs money, it’s probably worth it!
Thanks so much for responding, Mark. I also came around to Shopp, thinking it looked worth the $55 — however, we have to upgrade our php (at the very least) to be able to use it. (The compatibility plugin Shopp makes available is handy.)
The Bandcamp solution looks outstanding. How hard was it to make the shop look like it was a natural part of your site?
The latest complication for me is shaping up to be “PCI compliance,” which just sort of knocks me on my ass. Any words of wisdom on that front?
Anyway, thanks again.
Thanks for the suggestions, Mark. I’ll look into Bandcamp, although we’re not going to be selling audio files; audio files are going to be included in packages containing other documents, so I’ll have to see if this is the right solution for us (plus, they made a drummer joke, and we’re mainly percussion-based, so… ;D ).
I will also have to investigate the option of using Shopp. In my search I have also come across eStore, another pay-for plugin. I’ve tested YAK and eShop, Zingiri, and Firestorm. There was a another pay-for PHP WordPress plugin, but I forgot the name and can’t seem to find it right now.
I even went outside of WordPress and tried out Magento, which is a huge, massive application that has a steep learning curve in relation to the amount of time I can spend on this project, and it doesn’t handle multiple downloads very well (it adds and subtracts prices you set for each variation, so you have to set the main price to $0.00, which is pretty misleading upon first look at the product).
In any case, I ended up testing eShop and WP e-Commerce the most.
eShop I liked for what I needed. It handled downloads in a manner that was easy and logical and the automated emails were very customizable. Unfortunately, everything except the automated emails worked. I didn’t get a single email unless I manually sent one myself. I posted about it on the eShop forums: (http://www.quirm.net/punbb/viewtopic.php?id=1243) and while the author did give attention to my problem, he was unable to help me and didn’t really go beyond trying to tell me that my problems were due to my email setup with eShop and the PayPal test site.
So, I ended up going back to WP e-Commerce because a) it was free, and that’s the solution we can afford right now; b) everything worked. Everything from creating a product to checkout to the automated emails seemed to work. After many, many hours of playing with it, from integration into a newly-created WordPress template to messing with the plugin codes and themes and figuring out how to manage it in a manner that would work for me I finally have something I can live with. There are bugs, to be sure, and I’m not a developer so I can’t really look into them (nor should I have to), but I’ve come up with a solution that’s workable. I wish it was public now so you could see what I’ve done with it.
For anyone looking to use WP e-Commerce, you’re looking at spending a lot of hours trying to refine it in order to get it to work for you. Plus, the way it manages multiple downloads for product isn’t ideal. There is no separate download manager, and you can’t FTP it to your server because it doesn’t go through WPE’s encryption process (I don’t know what else to call it). It gives the files a filename that is seemingly a string of random letters and numbers, which is part of their security process. If you FTP the files using a client, then the download links the customer receives won’t work.
I also agree that WPE’s support is lacking (it’s very basic), and one of the authors in particular is very defensive in his forum posts on the WordPress forums, which isn’t the kind of support I would want from a professional. However, the plugins I’ve tried are free, and I guess I should’ve expected such casual support from their authors, so long as the authors don’t expect me or other users to want to give them money for services or additional products based on their resulting PR.
I’ll look into using Shopp as a WordPress solution, but until we decide money should be spent on a shopping cart (and we know eventually we’ll have to), I may have to stick with WP e-Commerce.
Has anyone checked out PHPurchase?
@ Jeff G.
The thing with Bandcamp is that it’ll integrate to some sites extremely well or just “okay”, as far as design goes. You can specify background colors, link colors, etc. and a banner which can be image mapped to contain links (which is what we did). It will work for some sites but not all.
Domain masking isn’t exactly easy but it also isn’t hard. Just gotta follow the directions they give.
@ Phillip Ginn
Yeah, I know what you mean. I tried several different WP e-commerce style plugins and have even went outside of WP to find several other stand-alone free shopping carts, including Magento (which was extremely difficult to learn with). I came across quite a number of good carts but they just didn’t do what I needed. And don’t even get me started on having to custom skin the shopping carts.
WP e-commerce isn’t necessarily a horrible plugin, it’s just extremely frustrating. A typical user shouldn’t need to spend hours upon hours (or hell, days) of tweaking the shop to perform basic and/or desired needs.
It is a free plugin and fantastic support wouldn’t exactly be expected but the paid version ($40 or $195) support is on those exact same forums. And the same questions and problems people are having are not being answered even by those who have coughed up the money for the plugin.
I was, however, able to get downloads to work by FTPing our large files into the downloads folder, but yes, they aren’t MD5 hash encrypted. This, i think, is the primary reason why download size numbers never came up during our test downloads. Our files ranged from 50MB – 200MB so attempts to upload them via the upload form would be futile, even with PHP config files set to accept large uploads.
Regarding PHPurchase:
Whoa, was that there before? A while back, i visited this same website and it was completely different. I didn’t even think it was a WordPress plugin. I’d check it out but i don’t see any way to play around with a demo.
Regarding PHPurchase:
The lack of a demo is what is making me hesitant about purchasing it. I tried out the Shopp demo and I really like the way it’s set up. It seems to do what I want and it’s relatively inexpensive. However, if I want to use other merchant gateways aside from PayPal and Google, I have to pay for extensions in order to, say, use Authorize.net. I’ve also heard support can be hit and miss, but then, I haven’t explored their support forums.
PHPurchase seems to have everything I need, but I don’t know if it does what I need in the WAY that I need. Multiple gateways are already built in and it’s $6 cheaper for the standard version, but without a demo it’s hard to justify plunking down the cash.
I’m leaning towards Shopp as an alternative to WP e-Commerce, which did indeed take me days, but only because I got to play with a demo.
We did 11 carts with WP e-commerce and stuck with it in 2008 and 2009, but you’ve sort of hit the nail on the head here.
Recently (January) we ran into Shopp, and although we have only done one, we do like it. Furthermore, Shopp does state PCI compliance, which is really what scares me about WP-ecommerce or ANY shopping solution for WordPress.
I’ve not given up completely on WP-ecomm and changed all 11 carts out, because some were big projects, and because they do seem to have the largest following for WP carts – However, we’ll be doing no NEW sites with them for a while because it’s been a pretty bumpy ride.
Hey Mark,
Fair call, I’ve read through your Post and comments, I agree the tone on the FAQ is wrong and have already shot off an e-mail to get that cleaned up.
Regarding electronic Products I provide Plugins for WP e-Commerce which are very small – under 100kb – so haven’t noticed the lack of a progress bar, I imagine a few details included in the download header will fix that.
I’ve bookmarked your Post as I feel there are important issues to raise for future WP e-Commerce releases. Cool site
I Sooo agree. I bought the $45 upgrade and have been frustrated every step of the way. I came across your post trying to find an alternative to WP-ecommerce. Sucks since the site I’m working on goes live in 2 weeks and I’ve dumped so much time into this but I think I have to cut my losses here and find something better.
Hi, Mark.
I found your post after being frustrated on the customization of wp-ecommerce. I gotta tell you, mate, it’s not just bad for those who don’t know PHP. I’m a PHP developer since 2001, and the plugin back-end scares me, it’s a total mess!
I should have reviewed it before choosing for a big client of mine. Now my project is delayed and I’ll have to find another solution.
People who read this post, if your considering to use wp-e-commerce for a professional job, think twice.
Cheers!
Couldn’t agree more, i hate it took so much memory. And when i tried to add product, seems like it going to take very long for loading.
WP E-Commerce:
I’ve attempted to prototype the simplest of stores. Four simple product. No variables. No taxes. Flat shipping rate. The shipping module is an absolute nightmare.
Either I the state/country fields on the checkout screen are non-editable, or I set them to regular text fields in which case they are not saved as part of the sale information. Every step of the way is difficult.
EShop:
I just played around with it, and it seems to work as advertised, but it’s very non-intuitive. Every product is a wordpress page. It seems a user has to navigate to a particular page before they can buy it.
I’ve found even less useful documentation for EShop than for Wp Ecommerce.
I’m very close to purchasing Shopp.
Your account is pretty accurate with my experience. It takes a while to customize the plugin. I installed it on a fresh WordPress install because I’m developing a website for my husband’s psytrance project. All I really needed it to do was upload zipped albums and offer them for digital download. My server only supports 7MB uploads via web and when I tried via FTP, well it just wasn’t as easy as I thought. I tried contacting a developer and well, let’s see how THAT goes.
I went with wp e-commerce, complete lack of documentation and FAQ help, but what we’ve been selling needs stock control, and tbh is rubbish most of my time now is trying to sort stock because its not being adjusted correctly.