





1. WP eCommerce

The one that makes you pay for the product gallery

Themes

We have tested Mazine, the most popular WP e-commerce theme on themeforest.

Here are the main takeaways:

the design is pretty bad; I guess the template hasn’t been seriously updated for quite some time

you will probably need a designer and a front-end developer to make your shop look acceptable

Out-of-the-box features

table rate shipping is integrated (on woocommerce is available through a paid add-on)

Advanced checkout fields are also available

Product import – a very useful feature for any online store

There is a premium version of the plugin named Gold Cart (priced at $99 for a single site) which offers:

grid view

additional product images and product gallery (yes, you read it right)

live product search it is not as much a search system as it is a filter on the product category



Issues

on the checkout page, you have to choose your country and city before you can enter your shipping and payment info; we don’t like the default shipping calculator very much you can disable it from your store settings, or you can use an external one like UPS

product variations are added as individual products these could fill up your database pretty quickly, especially if you have products with a lot of options such as Apparel or Footwear each size and color combination will be a separate item if you have different images for product variations, you won’t be able to check it out when selection your options you will see a the variation image only on the cart page I’m guessing this is happening only for the free version of the e-commerce plugin

you cannot remove the base URL from categories or product pages on Woocommerce, you can eliminate the usual “/shop/” root from URLs just by setting the Shop page as the front page from the WordPress Reading Options

a user on a WordPress forum was complaining that WP eCommerce does not offer the possibility to ship internationally it isn’t true; you can ship internationally using different rates for each continent



an important issue is the product gallery: on the product page, you can’t display additional product images without the paid version of the plugin

Asking yourself how can such a weird limitation exist? Same here!

Extensions

45+ extensions on codecanyon

26 premium extensions on the wpecommerce.org official website (mostly shipping and accounting integrations)

Stats

3,252,585 downloads on wordpress.org with 60,000+ active installs active installs/number of downloads: 1.85%

downloads on wordpress.org with active installs average rating from wordpress.org users 3.5 (out of 5)

(out of 5) themes available on themeforest: 10+

there are no templates available on their official website, but you can pretty much integrate the plugin with any WordPress theme





2. MarketPress Pro

Get ready for monthly payments

If you need support, this plugin alone will cost you $19 a month.

Or you can go for the full WPMU suite for $40 a month including support for all their plugins.

If it’s not that important to you, cancel the subscription and keep the code. You won’t be able to apply future updates, though.

We should mention right from the start that Marketpress doesn’t offer any extensions or custom themes. They claim that the plugin has it all.

Does it now? Let’s break it down and see for ourselves!

Out-of-the-box features

it includes external payment gateways right from the get go prominent ones include 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and Stripe



shipping options it includes table rate and weight rate shipping it’s integrated with FedEx, UPS, USPS (the first two are in beta version)

it is multisite and multilanguage (WPML) compatible

the “User Capabilities” setting is pretty neat you can set custom permission for each user group

the variations system is ok you can add a different image per variation and set up price reductions for any of them you don’t have the ability to sort them, which could become annoying sometimes



you have the possibility to add downloadable and affiliate products

even though the claim is that you don’t need add-ons, the store has two default ones for coupons and PDF invoicing.

Ease of use

the quick setup process is very well thought going through the four steps of the setup resolves most of the settings you need here is a screenshot of the admin



the checkout page is very straight forward it has two steps (on the same page) Billing/Shipping options Order review and payment the ajax powered process gives it a great overall look

there are a lot of shortcodes designed to help you easily integrate Marketpress with your theme some of these include: navigation, categories listing, tag cloud, popular products, buy button, cart widget and so on

there are no graphic reports in the admin area like Woocommerce has

Issues

permalinks the URL base is present here as it is for most WordPress e-commerce plugins

there are no product filters here is a post on the wpmu forum from back in 2012



After all these years, they still consider that product filters aren’t worth the extra effort. I beg to differ!



Themes

there are no specific Marketpress Themes the WPMU team claims that the plugin is compatible with any theme that respects the WordPress coding standards

the widgets and shortcodes are a big help regarding the customization of the theme you can tackle it even without a lot of development or design experience



Free and premium version stats

premium version: 147000+ downloads (from the wpmu.org website)

free version on wordpress.org 169000 downloads with 6,000+ active installs active installs/number of downloads: 3.55% average rating from wordpress.org users 3.5 (out of 5) themes available on themeforest: none



3. JigoShop

The one with the sad story

I don’t know how many of you know the story between WooThemes and Jigowatt.

So, here is a quick summary:

Back in 2011, the Jigowatt e-commerce plugin called, you guessed it, Jigoshop started getting traction among WordPress users. WooThemes was struggling to develop their e-commerce plugin. They didn’t manage to do an exceptional job so they hired the two primary developers from Jigowatt. They also tried to buy Jigoshop, but they were turned down. So they decided to fork the Jigoshop open-source code. Forking means they copied the code entirely and started developing on that base.

Apart from the story, there is still a good plugin to be analyzed. Here we go!

Out-of-the-box features

free CSV import extension you cannot import reduced prices you cannot import brands, even though there is an option available on the product page unable to import fields with multiple values (useful for images and such) here is how you can map the CSV columns



*if you decide to purchase the Premium version of the plugin you can import sale prices, product variations or even orders

you can add custom images for product variations

there is a built-in personalized product field option

it offers three types of product attributes: text, select and multi-select

someone was complaining about the lack of a wishlist there is an available extension; only it’s not free



Extensions

50 dedicated extensions on codecanyon

dedicated extensions on codecanyon 312 extensions on the Jigoshop website, of which 42 are free

Better than Woocommerce at

support for the little guy – the Jigoshop team is offering free support on WordPress.org

they have paid support packages starting with $40/month with the $500/month plan, they are offering Full Website Support including 3rd party themes, custom development, and monthly updates/upgrades you can compare their pricing here

community involvement we are finding answers from two or even three Jigoshop support team members at the same time on wordpress.org forum threads



Worse than Woocommerce at

market share and popularity

number of optimized 3rd party themes

paid extensions for basic eCommerce functionality (free add-ons or built-in on Woo) up-sell/cross-sell functionality wishlist product sorting – really don’t like paying $49 for this (maybe the Jigoshop team could figure out a way of making it free for everyone as it should be)

multi-language: currently the Jigoshop WPML extension is under development, so you can’t use it on your website

less payment and shipping extensions

no iOS app 🙂

Documentation

every extension is documented on both Jigoshop and WooThemes, almost each one with an explanatory video

all the hooks and functions are documented

Stats

504,600 downloads on wordpress.org with 10,000+ active installs active installs/number of downloads: 1.98%

downloads on wordpress.org with active installs average rating from wordpress.org users 4.4 (out of 5)

(out of 5) themes available on themeforest: 2 available on Jigoshop.com: 80



Comparing costs with Woocommerce

We can’t argue that using Woocommerce could hurt your pockets if you need a lot of premium extensions. These are expensive, but they are doing their job properly.

Jigoshop offers a suite of extensions that are a little bit cheaper than the Woocommerce ones.

Just to name a few:

Table rate shipping: $49 vs $199

Subscriptions: $85 vs $199

Discounts: $69 vs $129

But, Jigoshop doesn’t have all the free extensions Woocommerce has. 61 vs. 1000+ free plugins on wordpress.org.

The community has stepped up for Woo in this case.

Bottom line

We can’t make this decision for you. The differences are hairline small.

If you narrowed it down to Jigoshop and Woocommerce, you would have to go with what your gut tells you in this case.

4. Shopp

The one that doesn’t like the WordPress way

Right from the start you are alerted to upgrade for support



*even the support forums are closed to the non-paying customers

There is a full API specification on their website that is open to the public. It includes the specifications regarding filters and hooks, template files, all the Shopp functions, etc.

Out-of-the-box features

there is an integrated discounting system someone was complaining about the promotion options on WordPress.org forum (this was about three years ago, so things might have changed along the way) we have to say that this is not the case; as you can see in this screenshot the options speak for themselves



they state Schema.org is integrated it is true, but the options are primitive at best the Schema.org properties are implemented using meta tags; most likely these won’t be considered high quality by Search Engines



virtual, downloadable and subscription products

default payment options



product variations good parts they are easily linked together (useful for multiple sets of attributes) fast ordering custom prices for each variation the bad: no custom image for each variation

good shipping options leading carriers are integrated

you can add destination rates

built-in backorders on Woocommerce, this can be done only by the use of an extension called “WooCommerce Pre-Orders”

product add-ons you can’t add images for these; it’s a dropdown of add-on options

faceted navigation you have to enable it for each category you want it to be present we had a hard time trying to set it up



Ease-of-use

good looking reports in admin I would say that these are prettier than the Woocommerce ones it includes heat maps for the order locations They are useful, but you need sales not pretty graphs! Right?

there is an integrated order return process

the checkout is a straightforward, one-page simple process

Issues

The Shopp doesn’t use the WordPress Media Library for product images.

We didn’t even try to fix the issue shown below because we think it’s a mistake not using the WordPress way of adding media.



Design

we found a free theme on their official website called Nature and paid one on Mojo Themes called Nancy (compatible with both Woocommerce and Shopp)

as far as theme integration goes you don’t have the diversity of shortcodes that Marketpress provides we found two: one for categories and one for products



Performance

Shopp implements the PHP autoload features to reduce vastly the amount of memory used

Search indexing – great feature that is available on Prestashop in our Woocommerce vs. Prestashop comparison, we have mentioned the Woo search shortcomings

Product summaries indexing: pricing, discounts and sales (same situation as with the search)

Image cache (make sure to clean this once in a while)

Official extensions

The Shopp Plugin store is listing 59 items, most of them to be used for shipping and payment integrations.

Also, 6 of these are support related (plugin installing, support credits, etc.). So not all of them are extensions.

Stats

45,000 downloads on wordpress.org with 6,000+ active installs active installs/number of downloads: 13.3%

downloads on wordpress.org with active installs average rating from wordpress.org users 3.7 (out of 5)

(out of 5) there are no themes available on themeforest expressly designed for shopp the design situation is similar to Marketpress, so you can pretty much integrate the plugin with any WordPress theme



5. Cart66

Going cloud

Cart 66 Lite and Pro versions are conventional eCommerce plugins for WordPress.

Cart 66 Cloud is their way of securing your checkout process.

You have the entire checkout process in the cloud. Everything is still hosted on your website (products, pages, etc.), it’s just the cart and checkout pages that are moved on your-subdomain.cart66.com

Good things

makes your store PCI compliant the users credit card details are stored securely in the Cloud even if your WordPress site is hacked, all the confidential data is safe

secured with an SSL certificate

Gravity Forms compatibility

the hosting is provided by Amazon Web Services

Could become problematic if:

you need full access to the code from the cart/checkout page

you need a different payment gateway than the ones listed in your dashboard there are a lot of options here; in most cases you won’t have a problem with this



you want to use one of the plugins it’s not compatible with not being able to use Yoast SEO is a deal-breaker for us



The price for the Cloud option is $95 per year.

Let’s carry on with the review of the actual eCommerce plugin.

Issues

First of all, we should mention that it was a real challenge to find the products on our site after we added them from the Cart66 admin.

Asking yourself why? Because they can only be added through shortcodes on pages and posts.

So the process of adding products involves two steps: creating the actual product and adding it to a WordPress page.

There are no categories on Cart66 because you will have to use the WordPress ones. It’s the same thing with product images.

Other problems we have spotted:

deleting the plugin does not remove the products from the database

promotions are only available through coupons, so tiered pricing is out of the question

there are no shipping integrations; you have to add manually each one in the admin

there are no product attributes

Good features

it offers digital, membership and subscription type goods

user-defined product pricing (donations and such)

good coupon code functionality



order export function – very basic using custom dates

cleaner URLs: you don’t have the base URL issue found on all of the other eCommerce plugins because you are using posts and pages as product pages

User experience

the non-cloud checkout is a two step process on the cart page, you have to select your shipping option from a drop-down menu on the cart page, you don’t have thumbnails for product images (product images don’t exist per se on Cart66)

variations aren’t able to have custom images

there are no category filters; Cart66 just doesn’t work that way

Recommendation

Cart66 could be useful if you are desperate about PCI compliance and you don’t have too many goods to offer. Managing more than 100 products with this eCommerce plugin will be a massive headache.

You have to pay for both the Pro version and for the cloud service to be able to offer the full Cart 66 functionality.

Stats

Cart66 Lite has 184,000 downloads on wordpress.org with 4,000+ active installs active installs/number of downloads: 2.17% average rating from wordpress.org users 2.8 (out of 5)

downloads on wordpress.org with active installs themes available on themeforest: 5

available for Cart66 Cloud on the official website: 5

6. Easy Digital Downloads

Digital products revolution

Themes

We have tested Squarecode. It’s not just a theme, but a marketplace. At least, they state it as such on themeforest.

Squarecode and all the Easy Digital Downloads themes are spotless and easy to use.

Just have a look at this product page and you will start to feel my excitement, too. It is simple, usable, beautiful.



Checkout process

The checkout process is outstanding:

after you add a product to your cart, the “Add to Cart” button becomes “Checkout” and the cart content appears underneath it

the Checkout page couldn’t be any simpler it’s a one step process out-of-the-box if you have only the Paypal payment method enabled, the form will contain just three fields of which only two are required





Payment options

Right from the start you can use PayPal and Amazon Payments.

Here is how the gateways admin looks:



On the easy digital downloads website, you can find 42 more payment extensions including Stripe, Authorize.net, 2checkout, Skrill, Payza and so on

You can also configure conditional payment gateways for each product. The extension that allows you to do this costs $29 for a single-site license.

Recursive payments

You have the ability to sell subscriptions with a paid add-on. It’s not very cheap (prices starting from $83), but it could become very useful for your business.

Extensions worth mentioning

Visual Composer

Marketplace Bundle – a discounted collection of extensions allowing you to turn your store into a marketplace

Discounts pro it allows you to create all kind of promotions on your website such as flat discounts, percentage price, product quantity, each X item, and discounts for all carts with more than X items for generating coupon-based discounts, you can use the integrated feature



there are a lot more extensions available on codecanyon (110+) and at their official website (165+ not including 3rd party)

Stats

918,901 downloads on wordpress.org with 50,000+ active installs active installs/number of downloads: 5.45%

downloads on wordpress.org with active installs average rating from wordpress.org users 4.8 (out of 5)

(out of 5) themes available on themeforest: 10+

there are no templates available on their official website, but you can pretty much integrate the plugin with any WordPress theme

We have to say that the only thing we honestly don’t like about Easy Digital Downloads is their name 🙂 Everything else is close to spectacular.

I hope they will get into the physical goods business. They could be a strong competitor to Woocommerce.

How are the trends?

Here is without Woocommerce

With Woocommerce

Obs.: we didn’t include Shopp in this comparison because there are a LOT of irrelevant searches from South America that mess up our data

Takeaways from the search trends

Easy digital downloads is looking good – our guess is that it will take off sooner or later

Jigoshop had a huge drop since it’s peak – let’s hope that their new management will get them back on the right track (the plugin isn’t that bad)

the key point in time was in 2012 when Woocommerce took their chance and exploded

All the plugins we looked at in this article have good parts and bad parts.

It’s important that you pick the one that is best suited for your business. Or, if you don’t mind the monthly costs you could try a solution like Shopify.





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