WP e-Commerce Review: A Free Cart Plugin for WordPress
There is a good reason why the WordPress ecommerce shopping cart plugin has been downloaded over 650,000 times, and that is because it is a top FREE option for anyone who wants to add shopping cart functionality to their website powered by WordPress. The most recent version of the WP e-Commerce plugin is 3.7.6.7 (3.8 release in Beta right now), and it has come a long way from the early versions of the plugin in 2005. Over the last couple years, the WP e-Commerce plugin has become the go-to choice for a free shopping cart solution on WordPress, surpassing other plugins by hundreds of thousands of downloads. The developer behind the very popular WP e-Commerce WordPress Plugin is Instinct out of New Zealand, who uses GetShopped.org as the home for their free cart plugin. The company has been dedicated to the product for a number of years, and still offer it up for FREE despite having a shopping cart solution that those running WordPress would likely pay to use.
The first thing you will notice about the WP e-Commerce free shopping cart is that the installation is very quick, and allows you to jump right in and get familiar with the administration options. Instinct breaks it up into Groups, Sales, Products, Variation, Settings and Marketing, so that you can navigate easily to the section you need to make changes to your online store. The process of adding products and organizing them into categories and subcategories is easy, and additionally they allow you to set up widgets to help display your products throughout your WordPress site. The WP e-Commerce free shopping cart even offers you the option to offer up coupon codes to increase online sales, which is a feature not common among free carts and usually only offered in paid ecommerce solutions. The one downside to the WP e-Commerce free cart that fans have always cited is the lack of documentation that you find on their site to help users out. Although they have been working to expand that on their new site GetShopped.org, so that users now have more help documentation. However it is a free shopping cart, so it is expected to have some limitations.
WP e-Commerce can be slightly "clunky" according to many customers that want to sell a large variety of pruducts through their online store. WordPress was not created to be an ecommerce solution, so turning it into one has a few drawbacks, like slower page load. At a time when search engines are taking page speed into account for their ranking algorithm, tying yourself to a slow loading online storefront could be a mistake. Regardless, WP e-Commerce is still a top pick for anyone looking to turn their WordPress site into an online store because it is free and feature rich. If you are comfortable using WordPress and familiar with PHP, then this solution is a good option.
If you want to learn more about the WordPress e-Commerce Plugin , then head over to GetShopped, which is the new home for this free WordPress store plugin from Instinct.
