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Hi I am in the process of creating a website for an importer who wants to showcase his products. There are over 1,500 products and they also need to be categorised by brand.

At this point for this client I only need to display a catalogue with no options for actual purchasing, but he wants to be able to switch on the purchasing part in the near future if required. So that is my main reason for wanting to build this right now with an ecommerce plugin, rather than going for custom post types.

I've indentified the following plugins that seem to be the leading ones at the moment:

  • WP ECommerce
  • Shopp
  • WooCommerce
  • JigoShop

Given my requirements any tips for which one of these four would be ideal for me? I don't mind paying for a plugin.

Edit: I am considering things like user-friendliness, ability to use the plugin as a plain catalogue rather than an e-commerce system (switching off price display and carts), support for the plugin, documentation etc. I understand that maybe the 4 of them can be used successfully in my case, I was just looking for the opinion of people who have used more than one of the above, and can thus take a general view and say whether they liked one more than the other.

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  • Would love to get some feedback, I'm sure someone with more experience has already tried these platforms.
    – urok93
    Jan 10, 2012 at 10:29
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    There's no right answer to this question as-is, any of them fit your single requirement.
    – Milo
    Jan 12, 2012 at 15:48
  • agree w/ Milo. have used Woocommerce personally. liked it and woo support is solid, but can't compare to the others since i've not used them. am curious to know how to plan to create 1500 posts? been looking for a way to bulk create posts for similar situations. (woo does come w/ a sample .xml file)
    – helgatheviking
    Jan 12, 2012 at 16:20
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    Please make requirements more specific. There is not enough info to give answer other than "anything fits" in current form.
    – Rarst
    Jan 12, 2012 at 17:21
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    In my experience all eCommerce plugins for WordPress suck hard, but WP eCommerce is the worst. I personally use Shopp, but it still sucks at times. Importing in particular is a pain in the ass, and not very reliable. See shopplugin.net/blog/shopp-product-importer
    – Ian Dunn
    Mar 30, 2012 at 17:52

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WooCommerce & Jigoshop are built on the same foundation so they approach things the same way, but WooCommerce is likely the winner because of the amount of sub-plugins and resources. I just finished a WooCommerce project and really like how it's coded as well as its usability.

I haven't used WP E-commerce in a long, long time ... but I don't ever plan on going back.

Shopp has had a buggy history, but with their latest update I'm about to upgrade a client and looking forward to the tighter WordPress integration. Has plenty of extensions as well.

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  • Shopp also has a really nice template system that I found lacking in WooCommerce.
    – Dean Oakley
    Nov 5, 2014 at 7:25
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alternatively, i have only ever used woocommerce. the code is clean and i've found it easy to work with: lots of filters, hooks and pluggable functions. there is decent documentation and the developers are very responsive to bugs on github. probably just a matter of what you get used to.

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I'm starting on an ecommerce project in a few days and have chosen WooCommerce to go with. This was not done with a lot of research, just a quick review of the main suspects and uneerstanding above all that in the worst case, if ever I'll want to switch - it is not too painful, and even then there are services that provide converting services for very attractive price. That said, WooCommerce seems most geared toward the way I like developing on Wordpress, nice shortcodes, the option themes or plugins to work with your own themes.

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Woocommerce and Jigoshop are similar, and both can handle hundreds of products, and they're well featured. Woocommerce is a fork of jigoshop, so they have a considerable amount of shared code

Both support products that cannot be bought and are simply 'listed'. To do this, just don't enter a price and the add to cart buttons will vanish.

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I'm also in the process of creating an ecommerce website for a customer. I've used Magento in the past, but wanted a simpler way for this small project.

I've tested WP e-Commerce and WooCommerce so far. Both has a similar featureset and therefore it's a matter of requirements. After some hours of testing, WooCommerce was the winner for me. The key benefits here:

  • Attribute and attributeset management. WP e-Commerce has a similar feature called "Variants" but lacks in functionality.
  • Cleaner UI for the user. It's still a bit complicated for a normal user, but a lot of features means a lot of menus.
  • Different approach for the theme integration with shortcodes. WP e-Commerce requires you to copy&past a lot of template files to your theme. WooCommerce instead creates some static pages on the first installation with some shortcodes as post content.
  • Both have a lot of filter and action hooks, but the sourcecode of WooCommerces looks cleaner for me and is more organized.
  • The real download URL for a digital file is hidden for the user. I haven't found a similar setting under WP e-Commerce.
  • Javascript isn't required for shopping. In WP e-Commerce I cannot save a product in the basket without AJAX.
  • Worked out of the box with non-standard WordPress sites. For example: I've installed WordPress in a subdirectory. I've also moved the wp-content directory. WooCommerce uses the correct WordPress core functions and constants for the plugin. With WP e-Commerce I had a lot of bugs during the first installation.
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WooCommerce and Jigoshop both use custom post types with categories and tags, so using it as a catalog type website should be easy. They also have action hooks and filters that allow you to modify the output of almost anything and therefore you could put the nix on pricing/options/etc (or you could just create a single product and categories template to accomplish the same).

Whichever Wordpress E-Commerce platform/plugin you use, make sure you are PCI Compliant.

All of these plugins will allow you to use either Paypal or some gateway's hosted checkout page which places you in compliance but weakens the brand and discomforts the potential buyer (something you don't want to do right before they're about to give you their money). You can go the Paypal route, implement the PCI standards yourself (read: $$$), or use a hosted checkout page that offloads the PCI compliance. Check out this article about the complexities of PCI Compliance. Here's a snippet explaining the levels of PCI Compliance:

Even if your website does not store credit card data, if it transmits credit card data you need to complete the Self-Assessment Questionnaire C (SAQ C) in order to be compliant.

Credit card companies and merchants are cracking down on PCI non-compliance and the penalties are hefty. Here's the list of requirements on the PCI Security Standards website.

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I've only ever used WP E-Commerce but I have certainly found it satisfactory for up to 300 products and see no reason why it should not cope with many many more if your categories are suitably thought out... one or two glitches (pagination seems to break down if you use full category and subcategory paths in the URLs) but nothing I haven't ever been able to solve to suit my purposes... and with familiarity hacking the templates and css is fairly easy. Documentation is a bit haphazard, but if you are prepared to google and find previous solutions, or if need be ask on the forums, help is out there.

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I researched the same thing several months ago. I needed to provide an e-commerce solution to a client as a catalog without prices or shopping cart. I ended up using WooCommerce and added a visibility plugin to hide the cart. To hide the prices you simply do not enter price for the product. Here is a url to the site that I did this on: http://eclipsemercantile.com

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I use WP E-Commerce more than 2 years. I don't know about other plugins, but this one works like a good shop after tons of customizations. The source code is not clean enough. But I still use it. And the reason only one - habit.

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For a shop with 3-4 products I recommend WP ECommerce. I'm using Woocommerce, it suits my need for big and small shops.

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  • So, are you recommending Woo or WPE?
    – Brian Fegter
    Sep 28, 2012 at 21:42
  • Woocommerce, of course :)
    – joe.moJito
    Nov 6, 2012 at 22:49

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