best ecommerce solution? looking for import & product search features

We’re looking for the same thing for 2000+ products – sure hope someone answers…

I’m talking with the guys at phosphormedia.com (Bruce & Gordon) about making a better ecommerce plugin. All of the solutions that are currently available for WordPress are really pretty lame.

Yah all the current e-commerce solutions are not very elegant. I’ve been hacking eshop for the past fews, the frustrating part is I had to hack the core of the plugin just to get it to met my needs so there goes my ability to upgrade ??

i did a shop with eshop – i liked it except that each product and each category requires a separate page in the pages section which makes navigation in the backend pretty difficult
( i guess up to 50 products would be ok )

other than that i found it good – not too much hacking was needed and it was easy enough to get info on on their website bytes for all

didnt try to import anything though

here’s the site https://www.blissbeauty.ie/online-shop-elemis/

Not true at all. You can have your products in posts, which is very handy because you can use plugins to sort your categories as well as your posts within the categories.

I also ended up using eShop. Here is the link:

https://oldcarnetwork.com/

BTW, WP-Ecommerce recently added product import from CSV file.

Hi, everybody,

I am also looking for an ecommerce linked to WP,

It is amazing (If I may say) that for such an important matter
we end-up with less than 10 comments.

Is there no other solution Today?
I saw that there are a lot of ecommerce products for Word press…

I just want to sell one to 10 Products,
I will try eShop, and maybe.. come back

WP e-commerce does allow import of products:

“Import Products CSV
You can import your products from a comma delimited text file.

An example of a cvs import file would look like this:

Description, Additional Description, Product Name, Price, SKU, weight, weight unit, stock quantity, is limited quantity.”

You can also search products, but you have to purchase a $40/195 gold cart, and it can be restyled, but it’s a bit tricky.

I can also suggest Expression Engine. It’s going to cost you $249 for a license, but it’s a quality product and, I think, worth the money.

My experiences:
WP-ecommerce = I just couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t get the products to show up and after looking around and seeing all the complaints, I moved on, trying to avoid too many migraines.

So I moved on to Shopp ($55) = My mistake thinking a paid plugin actually offered support. You get very little response from the forum and they are VERY slow to actually deliver the upgrades in releases they promise. According to their forum, they are promising all these great upgrades in version 1.1. I saw this offered around version 1.08…they are now on version 1.017 after a year. I gave up.

eShop is free and pretty good, but you better be willing to live with products being posted on pages. Because as we’re told over and over again on the forum, that’s the way the plugin was originally designed to function. YEs, they have added the functionality to add products to POSTS…but wait a minute. Those shortcodes don’t work so well for getting a gallery view of your products onto a PAGE. You can do it…but it ain’t pretty. However, the guy over on their forums (sorry, all names have merged together at this point) is at least willing to RESPOND to your questions. Something I’m not seeing for the paid plugins. The biggest thing this plugin needs is the ELEGANT solution to post to POSTS AND a good tutorial system. Ironically, in a past-life I was an Instructional Designer and trainer and would have been more than willing to offer up some help in this matter…but not if I can’t use the product.

Zingiri was just weird. Sorry. I deleted it after about five minutes.

I have some questions asked on the support forum for eStore – another paid plugin. I don’t want a repeat of Shopp. If they answer, i’ll report back. If they don’t, I’ll report back because I think that is just as telling, if not more.

I think I’ve tried another one, but can’t remember the name because quite frankly, I’m getting confused and very disheartened.

PHPurchase is another paid product so I have no experience with it. I think they offer a money-back guarantee. Conveniently, Shopp does not. So I might take a look there next. But doubtful. I’ve pretty much given up all hope but came here as one last resort. Seems as though I can’t find any reports here either regarding a good and solid WP + ecommerce solution.

If you are using wordpress I would strongly suggest you give wp e-commerce another go. It is not perfect yet but they are certainly doing their best to move it forward. In just the last few months major improvements have occurred in all areas. It is a, mostly, free plugin and in an ideal world there would be more support on the forums but they do their best. There are some amazing technicians who pop in there and help out where they can and most of what you need you will find by searching the forums.

As I said, it is not perfect but it does work and the developers are proactive in moving this plugin forward. There is a great community of suppport if you look around. I don’t have any affiliation with wp e-commerce and have certainly had my frustrations with the plugin. As I said it is not perfect but most of my frustrations have been due to not knowing how to do something or expecting it to something that it can’t. Their documentation still needs improvement but again, I know they are aware of this, and are working on it. It is a case of never having enough time to do everything I suspect. I still feel it is the best option and it is a good option for a lot of situations.

Forgot to mention… go have a look at the show case. There are a heap of sites up using the plugin and some of them are featured here:

https://getshopped.org/showcase/

Also, I should clarify, was tired and in a hurry when I wrote the above post – when I said it is not perfect, I mean that it does what it does really well but there are more features that would be great to have. One is multi-currency which was a big thing for me and yay… they are working on that at the moment and should be done in a few weeks.

HI Calicosun,
I appreciate your opinion and when I get more time, I might look into learning how to use it. I am not a code-demon but I’m also not a slacker either. The product seemed very cumbersome and as though it would take a great deal of effort just to get something to happen. Since I personally am not in need of such a big ecommerce solution, I moved on — to what yet? I don’t know — still looking. When it comes time to looking into solutions for my clients, I might take another look – I just don’t have that much time to devote to it right now.

My biggest problem in researching the plugin and trying to find opinions and solutions was this: Every time I looked on a DIFFERENT website other than Instinct’s own…if someone expressed their honest opinion and stated they didn’t like it or found it buggy or cumbersome or whatever, one of the developers of the plugin would come on the site and totally scorch “the offending complainer”. I didn’t see that they were being rude or out-of-line. Just expressing their honest opinion. But yet this guy would come back over and over and over again to tout his plugin’s miraculous abilities and try to make the “offender” look like a dirt-bag loser.

I have a REAL problem with that. I wanted to tell him I felt he should stop spending so much time trolling the web looking for fights to pick and just stay on his own forums and make his plugin the best possible. But it wasn’t worth the effort to me.

It was a real turn-off for me as well as the people commenting on his remarks. But he just continued. Oy.

In regards to eStore, my update: The guy Amin answered my questions promptly and when I had more questions for clarification, he came back and answered more. He doesn’t tout his plugin as the panacea for all ecommerce solutions and will even tell you that upfront.

The plugin isn’t free and I wouldn’t consider it for large ecommerce sites…but I am seriously looking at it for my own use and for any clients who need to sell digital-wares and/or just have a few things to sell on their site without complicated shipping issues.

Big pluses for the quick forum feedback from the developer over at eStore. Because…..after a few days AND a help ticket submitted I AM STILL WAITING FOR ANY RESPONSE from the plugin Shopp — AVOID THIS PLUGIN AT ALL COSTS unless its exactly what you want and you don’t want any support, because it doesn’t look like you’ll get any.

i wish the WP e-commerce people would spend more time responding to customer issues and less time here, trying to shore-up their earned reputation. Just know that if you are using their cart – you are going it 100% alone. Sure, there might be a fan or 2 that might respond to a trouble report but, issues beyond the well-known bugs do not get attention from the instinct staff.

Whoever releases a sold ecommerce tool fopr wp is going to do quite well.

I’m currently trying to use wp-commerce on a French installation, but like most people have discovered the results are far from exceptional, the standard shipping and language options are frankly diabolical. Hoping someone will come up with a shop to rival virtuacart or ubercart on WordPress.