Wordpress as e-Commerce solution.
As Timur mentioned yesterday (already?):
I am beginning to think that Wordpress is one of the most stable web applications I have seen.
Due to some plans, I’ve made a small research on the point of using a e-commerce CMS to perform basic shopping transactions. After few minutes of googling, I came out with Zen Cart, osCommerce, NucleusCMS and Wordpress as open-source solutions for installing your personal e-commerce shop.
It looks that I’ll stick to WP platform due to small facts that can be taken as an advantage of WP:
- Great Supporting/Development community
- Very neat and flexible Template design (no headaches with changing index.php, single.php, etc)
- Good CMS architecture (even me, as the second laziest person in Cyprus (After Leonid :D) can work with this platform)
- Big plug-in database (and the plug-ins are normally working, without redoing them)
These are the main advantages, you can notice from the first sight, after using Wordpress for a while. But I’ve never thought that things can be worse then this. They can. Zen-Cart Templates database almost made me cry.A main advantage of this CMS is XHTML template architecture, therefore, it’s very easy to accommodate for user needs. osCommerce amazed me with .pdf files in template archives, instead of ready-made solutions: you expect of getting a nice, handsome template, but as the result you get an Acrobat manual “How to customize your website”.Thanks! Therefore, this platform give a really good payment support for the products: Paypal, Google Checkout, Credit cards and so on.
NucleusCMS showed itself as a great CMS, which bunch of plug-ins, facilities you can install on your on-line shop, but after Wordpress admin panel, it’s really inconvenient to switch for Nucleus after Wordpress.
Although, Wordpress got few minor disadvantages for being used as on-line shop:
- Only two e-commerce plug-ins are in stock right now.
- e-Commerce plug-ins are an add-on type for the blogging platform, they don’t replace the major usage of WP
- Search problem issue. Built-in search of Wordpress do not index product pages from e-Commerce wp plug-in (so you need yet another plug-in, but not “search for everything”, because it won’t do)
- Main payment capacity is processed via Paypal, there is no Google Checkout plug-in, yet, therefore, GCheckout already earned 8% of the market as payment system, and it’s most probably the main competitor of Paypal in a close future
4 versus 4. A tie, but these disadvantages seem to be minor for Wordpress in comparison with support & development features of mentioned CMS. Maybe I’ve overstated negative features of those CMS’es, or I wasn’t searching an appropriate solution in a right way.
What over CMS can you suggest and describe their main features which you like?