Best solution for a WordPress Ecommerce site?

[Luminated]

Hey all,

I am anticipating on developing a site for a photographer that wants a very sleek /artistic site that is easy to update that he can sell his photo prints on. Considering my (frustrating) experience with other shopping carts like Zen and OSCommerce, I really love WordPress’ easy theming and back-end for updating, as well as it’s tiny package and blog capabilities integrated. I found the two most popular plug-ins for WordPress like Shopp and wpEcommerce. Seems to be a pretty large divide over which people think is better.

Does anybody have any suggestions for building a site like this? WordPress seems like the obvious choice but I want to make sure I get the best plug-in. I’d want high level of custom theming, since I want the site to be very sleek, minimalistic and professional. The client won’t have a ton of options for each item, just lots of them. I also noticed Foxycart works with WordPress, does anybody have any feedback on that either?

Thanks everyone! :mrgreen:

[Luminated]

Chris, do you happen to have a suggestion? Foxycart looks mighty tasty but that $15/month really kills it for me (and the client).

[AshtonSanders]

From what I’ve seen, the best e-commerce plugin for WP is wp-ecommerce. The are a pretty active community, and they have recently added themeing to the product and category pages (finally!).

Earlier this year, I made a very custom cart (http://www.glamheadbands.com/) using a very crappy version of it. I had to hack the system pretty good to make it do what I want. I just finished installing it on a newer site with the latest version, and was very pleased. They still need to add the checkout page to the themeing (as far as I can tell), but I’m starting to recommend it again.

[Luminated]

Very nice, man! I think that will be the way to go then. I was wondering how custom the plugin could be and that site assures me it’s dynamic enough to do the job.

Curious, do you ever contract your work out to other people? I might run into some issues and need some assistance in getting this to work the way I want. If you do, can you PM/e-mail me what your going rate is for that kind of work :?:

[AshtonSanders]

Sure man. Give me a holler any time.

*sent PM*

l8r

[milehighdesigner]

Hey Luminated,

I too am starting a project with wp e-commerce. We should help each other out if the other needs… So far, I’ve discovered that you don’t need to purhcase the gold cart, just for the grid view? that can be accomplished by CSS, I’m 99.9% positive. Secondly, the most awesome feature, which if you find out how to replicate for free, please let me know, is that drag to cart thing. Its on panic’s site for t shirts. Only thing I’ve found so far is in mootools(via google search). I would like to add this into the site, but I don’t want to guarantee them without knowing I can do it.

Anyhow, I’ll post the site here once I’m done, and keep you updated on my progress with wp e-commerce. I literally had the same question, and posted roughly 3 weeks ago. I researched and demo’d tons and tons of solutions, even Magento. Magento is good for ecommerce… if you’re selling 10,000 things and you want it to look like target or something. But other then that… I read a post that one guy was running wp e-commerce with 3,000 items. Pretty impressive.

[Chris Coyier]

Never used that particular plugin but I’ve heard lots of good things…

I did a screencast back when on using WordPress + FoxyCart. That’s just how I roll, I like FoxyCart for most things.

I feel $15/month is pretty trivial. If you are creating an eCommerce store where your profits are going to be so low that $15 a month makes or breaks it, you probably have bigger problems.

[AshtonSanders]

Yea, I’ve checked out Foxycart. I love the pop-ins and user-friendliness. I almost got to use it for one client… One of these days, I’ll get into it.

Re: Shopp
There it is. I was looking for that.

Honestly, I’ll really need to see how it actually works. I’m surprised they don’t have a free, useless version (maybe that doesn’t have any payment options) so people can see how it works.

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