Over the years, we’ve designed and built over a hundred blogs, and have spoken to hundreds of people about their online needs. One thing we’ve seen time and again is that people want a truly simple way to do e-commerce on WordPress. There are a handful of plugins out there that purport to turn WordPress into a full bore e-commerce application. We’ve tried ‘em all and have come away unsatisfied. WordPress does many things very well. E-commerce is not one of them.
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Talking about this in the office today, we realized that most of the folks we consult with are looking to do fairly basic e-commerce on their WordPress site. They want to test the waters, and sell somewhere between 1 and 20 items. They do not have, and do not want to pay for a merchant account to process credit card payments. They want to see if e-commerce is going to work before dropping 10 grand on a full-on e-commerce setup. It’s for this group that we’re building the as-yet-unnamed super simple e-commerce plugin.
The current crop of e-commerce plugins for WordPress suffer from similar shortcomings. Many were built in the early days of WordPress’ development and either override or ignore many of the improvements made to recent WP releases. Many are overly complex. And some are just horribly built.
We reached our own internal tipping point this week when a plugin claiming to work with PayPal flatly refused to cooperate. There were so many things wrong with the plugin, and the code was so convoluted that we finally decided to build our own. Leaning on those hundreds of conversations I mentioned at the start, we realized that we owe it to our clients to build a dead simple, rock-solid, totally modern e-commerce plugin designed from the ground up specifically for those with a modest number of items to sell.
Once the plugin has been thoroughly tested, we’ll release it to the wild. We’re a few weeks away from that yet. As we get closer to the release date, I’ll share more details with you through the blog. If you’re interested, be sure to grab our feed, or sign up for updates via email in the form at the bottom of the page. Happy blogging!
