Finding a WordPress Ecommerce Plugin – and why there aren’t any good ones

Looking for a WordPress Ecommerce Plugin?

Well, good luck with that!

The problem with ALL  WP plugins (not just the ecommerce ones)  are as follows:

• Plugin developers give up …  By which I mean they start out full of enthusiasm, and then that enthusiasm gradually dies as their workload increases (because maintaining a plugin and  replying to endless requests for help is hard work). Few plugin developers consistently maintain their plugins year in year out, and few are always on top of WP upgrades, meaning that  most plugins are almost guaranteed to be broken at some time. And that’s just not acceptable when you’re trying to run a business using an ecommerce plugin.
• Plugin developers acquire a mind-set of ‘good enough’, and update and maintain only what they’re interested in.
• Plugin developers get real lives Seriously. They get married, have kids and go off and see the world – and what was once a passion becomes a hindrance.

Ecommerce plugins have all the above in spades, and then some. An ecommerce plugin is an incredibly complicated beast if done well, and nowadays it has to be done well because it’s competing for mind-share with professional ecommerce solutions for non-WP sites.

The basics of an e-commerce plugin

Off the top of my head some of the basics of an ecommerce plugin ought to  be:

• Reasonably flexible front-end, beyond the ‘You can have a grid like this and that’s it’.
• Reasonably clear back-end, beyond the usual programmer ‘designed’ table layouts and user-unfriendly acronyms that are often the nightmare-world of shopping cart admin.
• Categories and sub-categories
• Product descriptions
• Product prices
• Product images, preferably automated thumbnails crunched from one uploaded image
• Special offers (discounts, sales, that sort of thing)
• Pretty urls
• Unique title elements and meta-descriptions. Programmers tend to have a blind spot when it comes to the value of title elements. They’re often convinced  that automatically generated titles (Product name: Site name)  are ‘unique’.
• Cross-selling -  manually or automatically (e.g. customers buying product A also bought product B)
• Ratings – customers can rate the products and/or leave comments about them
• Postage / shipping rates – by weight, by volume, fixed-rate, free above a certain price point etc.
• Integration with a variety of merchant accounts or other payment solutions
• Export to CSV and/or to accounting software of sales data
• Upload by CSV of price changes
• High security

That’s  a daunting list – and that’s only the beginning. Few dare take it on, especially for the long-haul. The only way they could maintain the enthusiasm to do that is by making a living out of it, and to make a living requires a lot of slog and a business model that works.

Assessing WordPress shopping cart plugins

So – how do we assess whether or not the latests WordPress Shopping Cart plugin is worth investing time and money in? Bearing in mind that if we build a cart for a client and it develops a bug and we can’t get help with it, or if it goes down even for one day (let alone a week or a month!) our reputation will be toast?

• Check out the features as listed on the plugin developer’s site. How limited are they? Limited features aren’t necessarily bad – a simple plugin that actually works and is going to be around for years is worth more than a feature-rich plugin that’s going to crash out of the game within a year or two. What features do the plugin developers consider important, and how do they rank them?
• Take a trip round the demo (if there is one) on the developer’s site. A few minutes can give you a feel for the practicality of their cart.
• Check out any featured sites that are using the plugin. Are they ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ sites without any visitors, kept alive as vanity projects, or are they actually big, busy sites? If everything else checks out you can come back and compare the source code of the best sites and the rest  and see if there are signs that the best sites have been hacked around a lot. That’s not usually a good sign, as it means you’ll have to put in a ton of work to get a decent-looking site.
• Check out the prices and the business model. If there are sneaky prices then you’ve had a glimpse into the mind-set of the developers. When you’re led to believe that you’re getting a fully operational, fully supported cart for free and it takes a lot of digging to find that you’re not then that’s a bad sign. When the license agreement is too complicated to understand at first reading that’s also a bad sign, either of confusion and incompetence or of deceptive intent.
• Go to the support forum (if there is one, and if there isn’t that’s another bad sign). The support forum will usually tell you far more than you want to know and in only a few minutes. The most common give-away are reams of unanswered posts. Answers that are cursory and don’t address issues properly tell you that ‘support’ will be non-existent and that the developers haven’t figured out a business model that will actually work long-term (they simply don’t have the time to respond to questions, probably because there are only one or two of them working flat out for peanuts).
• Go to Google and type in the name of the plugin. See what comes up. You might find that there are historical issues – for example, x years ago there were a lot of complaints about the plugin. You’d be surprised how mindsets don’t change, and how today’s seemingly healthy plugin briefly plateaued a short while ago and is now fast heading downhill.
• Go to the WordPress forums and type in the name of the plugin. Again, see what comes  up. What you’re looking for are signs of grievance. There are usually plenty of those. And the complainants won’t mince words, either. Their posts can’t be hidden or rewritten by plugin developers, because they’re on the WP forums. Take any recommendations about other plugins with a pinch of salt – the recommendations don’t usually tie in with reality (a quick and easy instal of  a plugin that’s been working for three weeks on a site selling two products isn’t  reason for a recommendation).

Why it’s ‘never’ going to happen

Realistically, nobody’s likely to make an ecommerce plugin for WP that actually works and is maintained for the long haul in the near future. The cost is too high in terms of time and energy.

To make any shopping cart requires high-level programming skills, and to maintain and update that cart and the infrastructure of the site selling it (support forums, help files, mailing lists, promotions) requires a minimum of three or four committed individuals working together year after year.

Our three or four programmers/designers need to specialise in WordPress, which itself is constantly evolving, as well as specialising in shopping cart software. They’ll probably need at least a year of hard work to get off the ground ( figure out a working business model, design, build, test and debug their cart and set up their own website to sell it from). There will have to be a certain price point at which they can sell their cart and a certain sales volume that they have to reach.

All in all only an existing and successful small software company is likely to have the resources, savvy and confidence to take on such a project, and that won’t happen until they see a demand there.

Meanwhile potential customers are unlikely to commit their business to a cart that could break, be unsupported, have security issues or  might fade away, until there’s a proven track record …

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Sunday June 27th 2010

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