I’ve had a few customers come to me looking for a website to display their products. Their budgets did not really warrant a custom built e-commerce site so I took a look at whether a customised WordPress site might be able to offer them what they wanted within their budget.
My first attempt was with wp-e-commerce, which seems to be widely supported in the respect that there are a number of additional plugins to go with it and a lot of downloads of the plugin – but it did not work for me. It just all seemed pretty buggy and the final straw was that I could not for the life of me find a way of accessing the basket once I’d selected products to buy. I think it may have had something to do with the Theme I was using but either way, a quick and simple solution it wasn’t.
Next up was Zingiri which seemed more stable and I thought it might do the trick, but then I found that the upload product image button did nothing so I had no way of uploading images to go with the products. I tried looking at their demo site but the interface was different to the one I had in my installation so I couldn’t compare – again I gave up.
My last and final attempt was WpStoreCart which seems to do the job nicely. Nothing too fancy, a pretty easy setup process which allows you to select the currency etc and a checkout to Paypal all setup. I setup a demo site for my prospective customers to take a look, it took me probably a couple of hours if you exclude the messing about with the other plugins initially.
