WordPress Shopping Cart Plugins

I wanted to let you all know about something I’m working on that will hopefully be out next week.  I have had the opportunity over the years to use a handful of shopping cart plugins that integrate into WordPress.  Some have been integrated into themes and some have been standalone plugins. Now I’m not going to call them all out but each has been great at the start and then in some instances over time I’ve had problems with them.  Some have been filled with awesome features but then they are difficult to setup.  Others are fairly simple but they just didn’t work right (or all the time). Other problems included being difficult to customize, registration problems causing people checkout issues, and problems passing the order to PayPal to checkout.

One of the problems with working with an open source system (like WordPress) is that there are times that things people create don’t work.  This could be because they are out of date, or that something is no longer compatible inside your website. You have a great site and you want to sell products and make money online but if things are difficult to setup or maintain over time you don’t want to deal with the headaches.  So what can a small business owner do?

Well last week I started working on a very simple PayPal shopping cart plugin that will allow you to setup simple variations and pricing.  This is probably not something you’d want to use with hundreds or thousands of products but if you have a smaller number of products it will provide you with a simple, hassle free shopping cart that is tied directly to PayPal.  Checkout is not tied to WordPress registration so you don’t have to deal with that, and your customers have the convenience and security of paying through PayPal.  Additionally, because the checkout and shopping cart are hosted through PayPal you don’t have to worry about SSL Certificates and PCI credit card compliance.

Although I’ve created a simple plugin in the past and I’ve customized others releasing a plugin through WordPress is a new experience for me.  I’m really excited to be able to do this and try this new project. I hope that it turns out exactly how I’ve outlined it and that I’m able to provide a simple install, setup, and checkout shopping cart plugin that you guys can use for your business website.  Stay tuned and I’ll keep you informed when I release it!