WP e-Commerce Review For Wordpress - Part II

THE CONS
Lack Of Documentation

I am quite surprised from a company that has devoted resources and time to develop this plugin that they do not have a detailed documentation available. Especially when programmers develop a software there needs to be a way to track back and make changes, which is where documentation helps. So I was a bit disappointed. Their website has a very good “description” of each section but lacks in details on how to install, modify and add other functions. If you’re a beginner and do not have any programming experience then I would forget trying to tweak any of the files yourself because you will get frustrated reading through poorly organised code, with insufficient comments. I suspect they want to keep the details of the code within the company so they can offer add-on solutions they can sell.

Invoice Printing Is Not Available

This may sound simple to implement, but I am very surprised that this is not standard in their plugin. Most e-commerce software have options to allow you to print invoices, packaging slips (which is available) and labels. This is one area I believe they have totally overlooked. How do I print out an invoice to send to a customer or a label to put on my shipping box? I know you can just hit print on your Internet browser screen but what if I want to customise the invoice or label in different sizes? This is an area that Instinct needs to look at.


Inclusive of Tax Option Is Not Available

For business owners operating in Australia like myself, our customers expect that prices displayed have tax included. Unfortunately the plugin forces you to add tax separately at the checkout and only show prices excluding tax on each item. It’s another issue that needs to be address for future upgrades.

Lacking Reports

If you click on the Sales link, it will take you to a page showing sales for the month and columns of basic data, such as sales, pending transactions and closed transactions. There are no reports to say where your customers come from, no reports for sales of dollar amounts, quantities sold and customer item was sold to. These are usually standard within an e-commerce software and also very important to have if you’re running a business. One just has to look at ZenCart’s reporting system to get an idea of how comprehensive their system is.


Lack Of Template Options

A few other reviewers have mentioned about the lack of template options available. At the moment there are 4 or 5 of them, and most of them have proven to be not very useful. Additionally if you have a customised template for your blog, integration of this plugin can be a real nightmare because there are no detailed documentation on how to edit certain areas of this plugin.


Conclusion

I am still on the hunt to find a state of the art e-commerce plugin for Wordpress. I think Instinct have made a very bold statement about their plugin and personally I still see further development needed for this plugin to be a complete turn-key solution for an e-commerce site. For a beginner to use this plugin it maybe sufficient enough to do a few transactions per month. But for a business owner, I would still stick to other solutions available such as ZenCart, OsCommerce and Magento.

My rating for this plugin is a 3 out of 5 stars.