Review of e-commerce plugins for wordpress
admin | Jan 07, 2010 | Comments 0
I’m going to take a look at the major e-commerce plugins (not themes, because this probably should be an apples-to-apples comparison). First up, let’s bundle all those features together into one nice big list and see who does what… this might end up being a work-in-progress, because in some cases, it’s not immediately obvious whether the features are included. If I’ve missed something, let me know.
| Feature | WP-Ecommerce | Eshop | Shopp | YAK | QuickShop |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free or $40/195 for Gold, plus other modules | Free, open source | $55 single site, $299 developer | Free, open source, €20 for detailed handbook | Free, open source |
| # of Downloads | 277,527 | 57,415 | ~3,000 | 19,575 (~7000 on sourceforge) | 30,310 |
| Memory Usage | 6.15MB | 0.90MB | 2.5MB | 1.13MB | 0.10MB |
| Post-as-product | * | * | |||
| Multiple types of product (options/variations) | * | * | * | *, plus multi-select options | * |
| Support for digital products | * | * | * | * | |
| Confirmation email | * | * | * | * | |
| Email templates | * | * | Text & HTML | Basic, text and html | |
| Product search | Gold version only | Products are posts, so searchable via WP | * | Products are posts, so searchable via WP | |
| Product templates | * | * | |||
| Product tags | * | * | * | * | |
| Product catalog | * | * | |||
| Products groups/subgroups | * | Yes, through categorisation (I think) | Hierarchical categories (probably the same) | Yes, through categorisation | |
| Product attributes or metadata | * | Yes, via normal post meta | * | Yes, via normal post meta | Basic properties |
| Configurable out-of-stock message | * | * | * | ||
| Order management/history | * | * | * | ||
| Dashboard Widgets | * | ||||
| Themes | * | * (not free) | Theme widgets, but not themes as far as I can tell | ||
| AJAX support (drag & drop, live update, etc) | drag & drop with Gold version | drag & drop shopping | |||
| Image upload | Bulk upload | Via WP | Drag-and-drop | Via WP | |
| Drill-down (or filter) menus | * | ||||
| Promotions/Coupons | * | *, plus discounts by spending amount | Rule Based (by amount, by percentage, free shipping and buy x get y free) | Price or shipping discounts with promo codes, plus discounts by spending amount | |
| Related products functionality | * | Possible with WP tags | * | ||
| Subscription | Module for Gold version | ||||
| Membership support | Module for Gold version | ||||
| Flat rate shipping | * | * | * | * | I think so |
| Weight based shipping | * | * | * | ||
| Tiered and/or amount-based shipping | * | ||||
| USPS integration | * | Add-on | |||
| UPS integration | * | Add-on | |||
| Fedex integration | Add-on | ||||
| Shipwire integration | * | ||||
| CA Post integration | Add-on | ||||
| CSV (or other) export | Products, Orders, Customer info | Products, Orders | Orders and Customers in Tab, CSV, (true) XLS and IIF for QuickBooks (orders only) | Orders and Customer info | |
| PayPal Std payments | * (plus express checkout) | * | * (plus express checkout) | * | Redirects to PayPal |
| PayPal Pro payments | * | Add-on | * | ||
| Authorize.net payments | * | Add-on | * | ||
| Google Checkout payments | * | * | Partial | ||
| 2checkout payments | * | ||||
| Chronopay payments | * | ||||
| PayJunction payments | Add-on (US-only) | ||||
| FirstData payments | Add-on | ||||
| HSBC ePayments | Add-on | ||||
| eWay payments | Add-on (AU-only) | ||||
| Payson payments | * | Add-on | |||
| eProcessingNetwork payments | * | ||||
| iDeal (moille) payments (Nederlands only) | Add-on | Add-on | |||
| NetCash payments (South Africa only) | Add-on | ||||
| Webtopay payments | * | ||||
| Manual Credit card payments | * | ||||
| Simple payments (cash, cheque, deposit) | * | * | |||
| Accounts receivable payments | * | ||||
| Recurrent billing | Members module | ||||
| Google Base integration | * | * | * | ||
| Google Analytics integration | Free add-on | * | |||
| Facebook Marketplace integration | * | ||||
| Email marketing | * | ||||
| Affiliate program | Gold (beta at time of writing) | ||||
| Reports | Business reports dashboard | Basic Dashboard Stats & Aggregate information in the order log (by filtering) | Simple sales reports | ||
| Category/Product RSS Feeds | Business reports dashboard | Basic Dashboard Stats & Aggregate information in the order log (by filtering) | Simple sales reports | ||
| 3rd party integration | * | Utilise feeds provided by WP | |||
| Developer API | * | * | |||
| WPMU support? | * | * | * (not officially supported) | * | |
| Internationalisation | * | * | * | ||
| Support Model | Free support via Forum, paid support available | Free support via Forum | Free support via Forum | Free support via Google Group, plus paid | Free support via Forum, paid support by request |
Hard to draw any real conclusions from this matrix — WP E-commerce probably leads in terms of features, but those features come with a (resource) cost. Shopp looks like it might come second (in terms of featureset), and certainly covers the most payment gateways, but it’s also a reasonable investment (particularly purchase of a developer license). Given it’s commercial-only, it’s impossible to know what performance or memory usage is like.
Given that no single plugin covers all the possible features, I guess it’s very much a case of identifying the things that are important to you, then choose the plugin which best covers that featureset.
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