An Honest Marketpress Review

I am reposting this here from the WPMU site because I think it’s important to share a review of a product that purports itself to be the best thing out there…

I purchased Marketpress not too long ago. The WPMU site says it’s the ‘best designed and most powerful ecommerce/shopping cart plugin available for WordPress today – guaranteed.’ but I have found that to be completely misleading.

I’m not sure where the ‘guarantee’ comes in – after all, there’s no refunds on purchases. Anyways, that said, I have found that, while the code itself is generally nicely written and it’s rather lightweight, I’ve come across issues time and time again such as…

— Can I add category pictures? I asked. Nope, it doesn’t do that, I was told.

— Can I add coupons for just one category? Nope, it doesn’t do that.

— Can I bulk import coupon codes? Nope, it doesn’t do that. (but they said i can pay someone to help me – the free support ends where the work begins!)

— Can I add in my own shipping fields? Nope. (but you can sign up with this third party site to install their plugin… blah blah blah…)

And if you look through the support section of the WPMU site, you’ll find many questions like that with answers much like that. The support I seem to get is generally this: they answer quickly but most (but not all) of the answers I’ve gotten have been rather useless.

And then, most importantly, where can I read about the PHP functions and understand how it works so I can customize it without just using shortcodes? I was told: we have not written any documentation other than a sparse page in the plugin (this from the site that says they are ‘fanatical about documentaion’)

In short, while it works but it doesn’t do much more than that. it’s not a robust system and the ‘Full Version’ doesn’t do all that much more than the ‘Lite’ version. It is NOT the most powerful ecommerce system for WordPress. Trust me on that.

Like I said, it’s decent – it’s maybe even ‘good’, but it’s not great, not by a long shot.