[wp-hackers] WordPress E-Commerce

[Shasta Willson]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Andrew Bartel <andrew.bartel at gmail.com>wrote:

> We've been given a broad reach to redesign a current WordPress E-Commerce
> site and I'd like to know what everyone's opinion is on the leading
> ecommerce plugins for WordPress.  What do you recommend to your clients?
>

I've used both WP E-commerce and Cart66.  The latter has a nice clean code
base that's easy to work with, but I encountered a flaw that was fatal for
my purposes: if the purchase of an electronic download fails, the buyer
still gets the link to the product.  That was maybe six months ago and at
that point they didn't seem to feel it was a high priority.  It was a
deal-breaker for me, and also made me wonder what else might be odd.

WP E-commerce does everything I need it to do, but as a developer I find
the code base horrifying. The main place it causes me active problems are
that the failure to combine and minify css and js leads to a larger than
necessary number of http requests (and they don't limit them just to pages
running the store) and it is a plug in where you truly want to make sure
you backup the database and files before every upgrade, because there have
been several that roached sites.

Even so, WP E-commerce is my current choice, because it does what I need.


> Is WordPress still an
> acceptable medium for modern day ecommerce or should we strictly be using
> magento or something based on yii/cake/etc?
>

That's not an either/or question.  e.g.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/wordpress-integration.html

Wordpress is your site development platform/CMS, while Magento or a plug-in
runs your shopping cart.  Integration will vary with the plug-in and theme.

- Shasta