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 start out happy but end up sad By which I mean they start out full of enthusiasm but that enthusiasm gradually dies as the workload increases -  because making a plugin is hard work, keeping it updated is hard work, and  replying to endless requests for help is even harder work. Few plugin developers consistently maintain their plugin year in, year out, and very few are always on top of WP upgrades, meaning that eventually most plugins are almost guaranteed to be broken for quite a while. And that’s just not acceptable when you’re trying to run a business using an ecommerce plugin.
• Plugins can develop well-documented faults that can be consistently pointed out in forums, but some  developers never do anything about them.  They acquire a mind-set of ‘good enough’, and update and maintain only what they’re interested in.
• Plugin developers develop real lives Seriously. They get married, have kids and  go off and see the world. What was once a passion becomes a hindrance, then an annoyance and then eventually – quite possibly – a hatred.

Ecommerce plugins have all this 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 (concept-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 or 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.  And who wants to tweak code and then manually upload files in order to turn on or off various features (yes, it happens)?
• 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
• 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 basic. 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 business model that they’re pretty sure’s going to work, and a lot of slog.

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 that we can’t get help with, or if it goes down even for one day (let alone a week or a month!) then our reputation is 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. You can tell a lot from the features that the plugin developers consider important, and how 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  very quickly
• Check out the featured sites that are using the plugin. Are they little ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ sites without any visitors, kept alive as vanity projects, or are they actually big, busy sites? A  lot later – 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, that’s a bad sign. When the license agreement is too complicated to understand at first reading then  that’s also a bad sign – but maybe  of confusion and incompetence rather than deceptive intent.
• Go to the support forum (if there is one, and if there isn’t then 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, too. The most common give-away is reams of unanswered posts. Then there are also the answers that are cursory and don’t address the issues properly.  These both  tell you that ‘support’ will be non-existent  and that the developers haven’t figured out a business model that will actually work in the long-term since they simply don’t have the time to respond to questions – probably because there are only one or two of them working flat out, and for peanuts, too. That’s not sustainable, and indicates a mind-set that isn’t realistic, that hasn’t sat down and figured out a strategy,  that hasn’t looked ahead.
• Go to Google and type in the name of the plugin. See what comes up. You might also  find that there are historical issues – for example, x years ago there were a lot of complaints about this plugin. You’d be surprised how mindsets don’t change, and how today’s seemingly healthy plugin  in fact briefly plateaued a short while ago and  is now fast heading back downhill again.
• 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. Also take any recommendations from other contributors 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 all of three weeks on a site selling two products isn’t  reason enough to give 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 entry barrier is simply too high.

To make any shopping cart requires high-level programming skills, and to maintain and update that cart and offer consistent  support requires a minimum of three or four committed individuals working together – because the cart needs to be developed, debugged, promoted, supported and documented year after year whilst those three or four individuals live out their ordinary lives.  Our three or four programmers / designers  need to specialise in WordPress, which itself is constantly evolving, as well as specialise in shopping cart software. They’ll probably need  at least a year of hard work to figure out a business model, design, build, test and debug their cart  and  set up their own website to sell it from. They’ll have to make a living from their cart, without working themselves to the bone, and therefore there has 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, which won’t happen until they see that the demand is there. Meanwhile potential customers are unlikely to commit their business to a cart that could break, be unsupported, have security issues or that will fade away until there’s a proven track record.

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Sunday June 27th 2010

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