Warts and all
I’ve noticed what seems to be a predilection, by those who write reviews of WordPress shopping cart plugins and themes, to stick YAK at the bottom of the list. Probably because the number of downloads is below the others. But the final result is something along the lines of:
WP-Ecommerce: feature, feature, feature, feature…
Shopp: feature, feature, feature, feature…
Eshop: feature, feature, feature, feature…
YAK: [gawd I'm tired of listing features... let's not bother with it any more... what can come up with instead... oh I know] it’s a simple plugin!
It’s getting old. Frankly.
So, this is an attempt to come up with a reasonably objective comparison of the shopping cart plugins for WordPress, without excluding the one at the end because someone-got-bored-before-they-finished-writing. You might be wondering how I can be objective when I develop one of those very plugins — well, we’ll see how I do, I guess.
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, $25 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 | • | • | Add-on | ||
| Products groups/subgroups | • | • (through categorisation, I think) |
Hierarchical categories (probably the same) | • (through categorisation) |
|
| Product attributes or metadata | • | • (via normal post meta) |
• | • (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 | ||||
| Sales Tax Calculations | • | • | |||
| 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 | • | • | |||
| 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.
…At least, until YAK2 comes out, because that will do everything.
That’s a joke by the way.
More to come later, and do let me know if I’m made some glaringly obvious omissions.
Update #1: Added number of downloads, and project links.
Update #2: Changes to eShop features, kindly provided by Rich.
Update #3: Added info on WP E-commerce product search.
Update #4: Added info on Shopp, provided by Jonathon.
Update #5: Added iDeal to wp-ecommerce, i18n to eshop.
Update #6: Added 2 new YAK features
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Hi thanks for including myself – and yeah I really need to change my plugins description…
You’ve missed a few things off for eShop:
Product tags – uses WP Tags
Themes – available, but not free.
Image upload – Via WP.
Related products functionality – use WP Tags?
CSV (or other) export – download of orders is available. – as is products(see google base)
Google Base integration – well it is there…
WPMU compatible as well.
I’ve tried to make eShop as easy to install as possible, and as accessible as I can.
Thanks Rich. I’ve updated the table accordingly.
Hi Jason,
Thanks for this comparison table. It’s helpful!
One quick alteration: for the “Product Search” row, the WP e-Commerce plugin does not allow for product search in the free version. That’s only available if you buy the Gold version.
I think it’s a serious drawback compared to the competition, but as the developers might say, you “gotta pay the bills somehow.”
Cheers,
Mr. B
Thanks for the info. Updating now…
For WP E-Commerce plugin (first column) there IS support for the dutch iDEAL component.
Not included, but as Add-on via (for example),
http://www.ideal-simulator.nl/ideal-for-wordpress-and-e-commerce-plugin.html
it’s a plug-and-play component for both the Easy (free) and Professional edition of iDEAL payment gateway.
And secondly, about eShop.
They do offer internationalisation
Thanks Krinkle, updated…
First of all, this is a super matrix and helps quite a bit.
Question though, during your investigation of the plugins did any of them offer quantity discounts? For example 1 for 10, 3 for 25.
I am currently stumbling through all of these and as far as I can tell, none of them offer this feature — which is a drag.
To be honest, I didn’t notice. If you really want the feature, my recommendation would be pick the plugin that comes closest in terms of the other functionality you require and then ask the developer how much it would cost to add it. A pain if you’re trying not to spend any money, of course…
I will probably just add the functionality myself, I work cheap.
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There is another one, which might be worth a look:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zingiri-web-shop
From their website I take it that this would be the first and so far only solution for a truly multilingual shopping website.
I’ll try it these days…
Not sure about the “first and only” claim. YAK can be completely internationalised (both backend and frontend) even if there are currently only translations available for the frontend. I’m sure most of the other plugins are similar enabled.
Well, that “first and only” came from me, because I was specifically looking for a WP-Plugin that could replace some multilanguage ZenCart-Installations, but I’ve given up now.
Actually, I was not referring to “internationalisation” (which means “You can make the whole thing run in your language”, as I understand it) but to true “multi language” capabilities, which I would define as “I can activate multiple languages at the same time, which the customer can select in the frontend.”
Obviously a feature that the WordPress core still lacks, but the qTranslate plugin has become kind of a de facto standard – at least it would be not very hard to make any plugin work with qTranslate, but the people from the “e-commerce” plugin don’t seem eager to do it, while the programmer of “Shopp” said, he would do it some time in the future.
On the other hand, the WP-team itself seems to be thinking about integrating something like qTranslate into the core. When that happends, it might make more plugin coders actually support it.
Until then I will stick with ZenCart.
Thanks for that remarkable feature list. It really helps people
Matthias
P.S: I installed the Zingiri-Plugin, but I didn’t like the way it “integrates” the stand-alone software into WP. The shop-admin is completely separate from the wp-admin and it’s integrated into the frontend – which screws up the template sometimes. I didn’t look much further, but someone really interested might do and find it useful nonetheless. After all it IS a feature-rich shop plugin for WP.
Thanks for the great comparison table.
I’ve been using WP-E-Commerce and customising it quite heavily for some time but it’s great to have a quick and easy way to see other options.
I hate to say it but as good as this chart is it is out of date. I am most familiar wit WP e-Commerce and it of course has manual payments for checks etc., the out of stock message is configurable on wp e-Commerce, though not from the dashboard, it also now has Google Analytics integration. The chart is excellent but it needs to be udpated.
Thanks for the report. It’s now updated.