Three things you will LOVE and HATE with the wp-ecommerce Gold Cart plugin

This Wordpress Plugin is amazing. Great for the simple shopping cart. I am going to share a few great things about this shopping cart plugin, but I will also share some challenges/problems/limitations.

I don’t have any doubts that are friends from www.instinct.co.nz will provide “fixes” in their future updates for these issues, but currently you are pretty much your own if you are not a complete web coding genius.

Let’s get started with some great things that you will LOVE about wp-commerce

1. Variables for products.  I love the fact that you can really control all the variables you want to set on a product.  Feel free to give your customers the ability to add as many sizes, colors and details on to a single product.  This is a great feature and well executed by wp-ec.

2. Quick set-up with PayPal.  You can pretty much start accepting payments right away with the PayPal integration.  With wp-ec your customers only have to see the PayPal page to enter their credit card number.  Everything else is handled through your shopping cart website.

3.  Shopping cart php code (shortcode).  The smoothly animated sidebar widget is just a snippet of code that you drop into your PHP page. You will love the CSS Control.  Having the ability to really control the look and feel of your site without having to worry about messing up the “shopping cart” is a major plus.  Just design your WP site as normal and drop in your shortcode for the shopping cart elements.

Here are some things you WON’T LIKE

1. Coupon Code Limitations - If you plan on making a promo code you will be limited. The most you can do for a promo code is a basic % or $ amount applied to all products. If your client needs to get any more complex with the promo/coupon code. You will be in trouble.

2. Shipping Control within the wp-ec dashboard.  You will be able to set a discounted/free shipping for orders over a certain price, but don’t get to excited about having much control beyond that.  wp-ec has really done a great job at making the shipping part easy if you don’t need any special requests aside from standard shipping procedure.  For example, if you want to make shipping an option because you offer in store pick-up.  Don’t count on it.

3. Organizing products.  You can list ascending/descending by “most recent added”, “price”, and “name”.  You WON’T be able to arrange products by your choice.  Example: If you have a popular product that you want at the top, you will need to either add it last, make the name start with “AAA” or make the price really low/high.   The only workaround to this is using the shortcode:

[wpsc_products product_id='']

You would place the product number within the quotes and drop into your WP editor.

Good luck with your Gold Cart WP-commerce website.  I’d love some feedback, comments, or questions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.