A Really Simple (and Good) Shopping Cart for WordPress

I needed a shopping cart for WordPress but I couldn’t find anything that was easy to implement, didn’t slow down the site and would be easy to teach a client.

My client’s requirements were straightforward: an on-line shop that was an integral part of their site, selling a small range of merchandise (rugby shirts, polo shirts, golf caps and the like).

I should say upfront that, as comfortable as I am with technology, a true blue geek would probably look at me with a mixture of pity and sorrow.

So when I review a product I like to be able to immediately, and easily, see how it will work, how it will fit into the site and how I’ll achieve what I need to achieve.

I’d not been able to do that with any of the first few products I reviewed.

So when I arrived on the ecwid site I heaved a sigh of relief – it was all plain to see. (Note: I’m not an affiliate for them – they don’t even have an affiliate program)

The Demo was OK, but basically consists of a bunch of screenshots, so it was limited.

But once you’re in the demo area you get a great big link inviting you to create a free ecwid account so you can experience it ‘undisturbed’.

That enables you to use the admin area as if you were managing a real shop. A true free trial.

That was all I needed. The process of adding products, selecting currencies, interfacing with payment gateways, setting up taxes, selecting shipping charges, adding product galleries, and everything else you need to do is supremely intuitive.

There are lots of pre-configured interfaces built in too: DHL, Fedex and other shippers, PayPal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net.

Zoning is already built in to the Shippers interfaces and includes their individual calculation formulae for destination zones worldwide. All pretty neat.

Here are the sites, social networks, shippers and payment processors that ecwid integrates with (you’ll need to scroll down).

But here’s the part I really liked: everything is run from the ecwid site, not yours.

You upload your product images, manage pricing, set your notification email addresses and monitor stock levels through the ecwid site.

That means implementation is a piece of cake – you’re effectively embedding the shop-front in your site, just like a YouTube video.

On WordPress you can implement it as a plugin through the Add New Plugins screen, or you can simply paste the code into a new page.

The result is that your site’s performance is completely unaffected.

Ecwid fits seamlessly into your existing theme or site design but, in addition, there are 3 basic themes in your ecwid account, two of which you can customise.

This enables you to customise the layout of the shop itself (items and categories), control the fonts and other elements that don’t get picked up by your existing stylesheets.

The shop page itself takes a while to load initially. The shop-front is AJAX-based and enables drag and drop, meaning shoppers can drag and drop products to the shopping bag.

As nice as that is, the downside is a longer initial page-load time. But at least that only affects the shop page, not the rest of the site.

Almost all of the shopping-cart apps that I reviewed (including ecwid) claimed to enable you to set up your shop ‘in minutes’.

That, of course, is marketing mumbo jumbo. To include all the settings you need to make in setting up a shop will take you an hour or more. Probably longer the first time you set one up.

But, without doubt, ecwid is the most intuitive of the ones I reviewed.

Cheers,

Filed in: Internet Marketing Resources

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