Very disappointing – I had much higher hopes for WordPress

WordPress does try to offer every imaginable function out there, but not all. So, yes you may have to mod plugins or build your own. A great resource for learning is youtube; search wordpress. woocommerce offers a catalog mode as well as a cart mode from what i have heard and Always try to go directly to theme/plugin support forum first for help.

Appearance>customization can have a beautiful front page running in about 30 minutes. Dont create a Home Page unless its custom, otherwise use appearance>customization and Post Layout is most common for a theme to manage home page

Also you may want to look into a Download Manager since you are selling digital items

It sounds like a different interpretation of what a “simple site” is. Some would say a simple website is one that you’d get out of the default WordPress theme, but it looks like you’re saying an e-commerce site should be simple.

Thanks for the replies… The home page isn’t the problem. Appearance>customize has made that adequate. My home page has the things on it that I need. There are things I wish were slightly different about the theme, but I haven’t been successful getting a reply from the theme maker, so it’s not just plugins where you’re left to wander in the dark.

My problem is the gallery plugins with rigid structures that aren’t adaptable to the way I’d like to present information to my users. And especially the shopping cart plugins that either cost more than it’s worth to take on the work myself (as opposed to leaving it to my current provider) or are so rigid and/or limited they’re useless.

The digital items aren’t the problem. Getting those to a client is easy. It’s presenting the images (albums/galleries) and managing the shopping cart (shipping/no shipping, etc) that’s the problem. As I said, I’ve had a half dozen questions sitting for days with no response. There would be more as I try to customize the plugin but I figure it’s a waste of time to keep posting questions that get ignored by the developer(s).

I’m not sure what the interpretation of “simple” should be. In my world, in 2016, I feel that what I’m doing is “simple”. I’m not selling a million drastically different products – I’m selling two – prints and downloads. There may be 5000 instances of prints and/or downloads, but it’s just two products. With one payment thing – either you go through Paypal or you send me an email. Seems simple to me, but I may not be recognizing the complexities of something.

WORST CASE, if I absolutely can’t get the shopping cart to work the way it has to for me to be willing to present it to users, I’ll dump it and post a price list on the site and anyone that orders will have to contact me. But in my mind that’s a rather sad step backward about 10 years.

I have to say that I agree with Andrew.

Every “just a simple e-commerce site” that I’ve ever done has ended up with between 20 and (very bad worst case) over 100 hours of customistaion work to get it working the way that the sites owner expected. Why? Because the tools that are available are made to be “most things for most people”, not “its exactly what you need” for your single case. That’s not a criticisim of what you want in any way, just a statement that no two sites are ever the saem, so saying that there should be something that works out of the box for your exact use-case is just not going to happen.

As for a “simple site”, I’d classify that as a blog and a few pages of content. That sort of thing can be done with a base WordPress install, a theme that suits your taste and a plugin or two. Anything more than that is no longer “simple” and in a case like yours it seems that you have very specific expectations of how things will look at work, and they don’t match what other uses do for their sites. That means that there will be modifications needed to make things the way that you want them. That’s the same in every CMS or system out there. At this point WordPress is one of the easier ones to customise. If you’ve ever tried to do any work in Magento (for example) you’ll understand exactly how complicated these things can be.

I’m willing to do the 100 hours, although I’ve already wasted a lot more than that just trying to get a set of pieces that are at least marginally usable.

I’d certainly hope your hundred hours included getting reasonable responses in a timely manner to at least point you in the right direction from the people that wrote whatever you’re using… If not, you must have massive skills ’cause otherwise I can’t see HOW you’d find and modify some of this stuff in a reasonable amount of time…

I’ve been trying to figure out how to do a simple thing like getting the shipping to print on the shopping cart for days, chasing things, trying to figure out what does what to what… It’d be a lot easier if I could get something to print when I do an echo or print, but that’s ANOTHER of those questions I’ve asked that hasn’t gotten any answer. It would be even EASIER if I could get the developer to point me in the right direction, but that isn’t happening either.

I get your point on support or lack of it, it’s completely understandable that support on these forums is not concrete as a whole. It’s tentative and based on the amount of spare time people have. I guess that’s a general issue with open source projects where people are volunteering their time.

Which is fine, I reckon, as long as some random new person who wanders in understands they can’t count on ANY support. I’ve had questions about the shopping cart plugin I was using sitting there for a week. I just deleted the plugin and deleted the bookmarks to the questions ’cause it’s clear I’m NOT going to get any useful assistance.

If they’re so short-handed or so busy they can’t check to see what problems their customers are having at least once a week…

Oh the plugin authors aren’t allowed to support their commercial products on these forums, and they might not follow these forums because of it. When moderators see customers requesting support for the Pro versions, we try to point them at their commercial support vendor.