Shopping Cart Solution

Question

I have someone who sells a variety of physical products that have different weights and sizes. What's the best way to set that up so customers aren't charged multiple flat rate fees? Also, what plugin would be best for this? I'd like to have one that allows handling fees.

Answer 1

What you are talking about is called Table Rate Shipping which will give you better control for e-commerce.

There are some very good ecommerce solutions for WordPress including

• WooCommerce - free and has premium extentions like table rate shipping and themes - Sth African parent company with 30++ ecommerce extensions and 90+ WP themes
• Jigoshop - free and WooCommerce was forked from this - UK based company
• WordPress ecommerce by Get Shopped is one of the best known and oldest options around. It has a free and premium versions - NZ based company
• WPMU - Aus based company has an annual premium membership fee which meets most of your needs

Personally I think choice comes down to other factors

1. Payment gateways (who they want to use for payment and is there an extension for them.
2. Payment options & subscriptions (one off, monthly recurring)
3. How technical / skilled is your customer for setting up and managing an e-commerce shop.
4. What other marketing / sales promotions will they want (like cross linking / upselling content)
5. Do you need to manage variations of the same product (by colour or size / weight / length)
6. Delivery options / couriers - eg Royal Mail here in the UK, has a plugin for WooCommerce

to be honest ... I can say it is likely that GetShopped or WooCommerce can do all of these so it will be a matter of adding up the premium / plugins costs.

There are plenty of other WordPress ecommerce solutions, but many of them will not meet all 5 of these requirements

...

and dare I say it ... you should always compare this to Magento which is also a LAMP stack / PHP / Apache / SQL based ecommerce solution.