One of the top feature requests by web design clients is of course the ability to sell items online and I’ve had to do a bit of research to find a suitable and robust shop plugin for my web design tool of choice WordPress. There’s a few smaller, basic plugins that do a job but for a proper cart the main plugin seems to be WP-ecommerce but I’ve had nothing but trouble with that, seems very buggy. Sometimes you just have to go commercial with plugins and get what you pay for! So here’s my recommendation for the best all round commercial wordpress shopping cart plugin at the time of writing.It’s logically called WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin by Tribulant Software and its priced at a very reasonable, once off $50 for a single installation. Here’s a rundown on the highlight features:

• Unlimited Products and Categories.
• Support for automatic Digital Product sales.
• Multiple payment methods including Paypal and Manual.
• Multiple Currencies.
• Customisable shipping structure.
• Discount Coupons.
• Product Variations/Styles.
• Inventory Countdown.
• Product embedding in wordpress posts and pages.
• Multiple widgets available.
• Custom Fields.
• Ajax powered content tabs.

The standout features for me are:

• Digital Product support.
• Ajax (fast loading) product information tabs.
• Flexible pricing and shipping options.
• Custom Fields.
• Realex Payment Integration.

There’s also a very interesting setting to make any product an External/Affiliate item. I also like the Recommended Retail Price option which displays the RRP struck out over the actual price. The checkout procedure is very nicely laid out in a step by step method which should help conversions and minimise confusion, a common problem on e-commerce sites.

The plugin is way lighter than its rival wp-ecommerce, is pretty much bug free as far as I can see and  is compatible with recent versions of wordpress including the current 2.8.5.

This is about the best e-commerce plugin currently available for wordpress and the price won’t break the bank.

Get it now on the Tribulant site.

Leon.

* UPDATE – Unfortunately I have had to stop using this plugin due to confusion between standard wordpress posts/categories and shop products. If you are not running or displaying a blog then this may not affect you.