[Plugin: WP e-Commerce] Poor support, don't waste money on Gold Cart

I must agree. WP e-commerce is a sham.

It may get a very basic site up, but you won’t have many (if any) real options to how your site will work or display.

Shipping rates is a complete nightmare if you want to do something as simple as flat rate, per item shipping.

It wastes tons of time and space creating an entry for every possible variation combination. I still don’t know why this is even needed. It just makes no sense to create all of those variation entries unless you need to edit them.

You cannot post in the community forums without someone approving your first post. I got an email saying it would not take long to approve my first post – that was 4 hours ago and my post requesting help is still not posted.

I think they are limiting the posts to limit the number of problems and complaints.

I also purchased the “Gold Cart”. It was nothing but a golden turd.

The idea behind WordPress was to make blogging easy. It did that (at least at first – WP.org keeps adding and adding to WP and making it more and more confusing to use for the general public). But, most plugins do NOT follow that same goal.

Most plugins, like WP e-commerce, are not intuitive. They confuse instead of empower. Even the documentation is out of date and confusing in many places.

I don’t mind paying for a plugin, I just want the damned thing to be dependable and easy to use.

Because I have had so many problems with WP themes and plugins, I will be checking out Joomla and Drupal after this site. I advise you to do the same.

I haven’t used Drupal before, but I have used Joomla and it looked a lot more polished than WordPress when I used it.

I had clients asking for WordPress and I saw so many others supposedly using it, so I went with it and have tried to use it for several sites over the last 2 years.

I find WordPress themes to be a scam – at least at Themeforest. They NEVER work like the demo. The documentation is frequently wrong. They are buggy as hell. Authors frequently ignore pleas for help. And there is no real way to get a refund once you are taken by these authors.

I have purchased around 45 themes on Themeforest – always hoping that the next theme would be a great purchase. With 2 exceptions, almost every theme was a complete waste of time and money.

IMHO the WordPress theme community is a scam.

Hello all,

I have read the above all comments and worrying about my project .

Can anyone give me some good suggestion whether shalll i use WP-ecommerce plugin or WooCommerce ??

I am looking for free plugins ??

Is that possible ??

and also i am more familier with wordpress even my clients wants WordPress only .

Hope i will get reply soon .

Thank You all in advance 🙂

I would just add that any decent plugin will probably cost money otherwise why would someone spend time developing and supporting a plugin? And presumably if you want an e-commerce plugin you are going to be selling ‘stuff’ for money so why would you expect such a plugin to be free to you?

That said, I understand WooCommerce and WP-Ecommerce basic plugins are free with additional facilitates and support being charged for.

In my experience of the WP-Ecommerce plugin, I have found it and some of the additional features we purchased (Gold and Members for example) to be buggy and the support we received was patchy to say the best. In the end we had to resort to paying a third party developer quite a substantial sum to fix fundamental issues with the plugin as WP-Ecommerce declined to help further.

However we recently discovered that the WP-Ecommerce password protected support forum / posts can still be searched and catalogued by Google. The result is that passwords and other sensitive materials were exposed to public searches. Despite WP-Ecommerce being made aware of this on 12 October 2012 they have still managed NOT to delete the posts containing the sensitive material which frankly is appalling behaviour. So I CANNOT recommend WP-Ecommerce or their ‘support’ team.

Can’t say I agree with much of the above. Creating an ecommerce solution as feature rich as wp ecommerce is a complex undertaking. Making it work in an environment where thousands of individuals are contributing themes and plug ins that may or may not be compatible is nigh on impossible.

I’ve had some problems using wpec but most were related to conflicts with other things on the sites or pilot error, not the fault of wpec itself. It does take some effort to understand how to get it working right but once it’s up and running it works exceptionally well.

As for support most of the real issues are reported on their Google code site and you can gauge the level of commitment from the devs better there than here or in their support forum.

If you’re considering an ecommerce plug in, be prepared to work at it in a WP environment no matter which one you choose. None are perfect out of the box.

I agree with everything said here. My experiences with WPEC as a developer have been aweful.

I currently use this Ecommerce plugin for all of my projects:
https://shopplugin.net/

These are also some other plugins I have heard good things about:
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
http://jigoshop.com/

That’s not really true. In my case, I tried the free version and only upgraded because I thought the paid version would have more features and support.

The free version was just as bad.