eShop (not eStore) seems to be the crowd’s favorite when it comes to free shopping cart solutions for WordPress. What makes this plugin unique is that it’s not only free, but it is also full of features, reliable, and on top of all easy-to-use!
This plugin has been in business for a long time, so it’s a dependable ecommerce option. You don’t have to worry about the developers suddenly losing interest and abandoning it.
But before you make a decision, read this review to understand what you’re getting into.
Installation
Since eShop is a free plugin that’s available through WordPress.org, installation is as simple as any other plugin. To start using the plugin, though, you’ll have to go to WordPress admin menu Settings → eShop to perform some initial configurations and turn off the test mode.
Technical Support & Documentation
Despite being a 100% free plugin, eShop has a dedicated and useful support forum. You can also get support on WordPress.org forums.
But before you ask questions in the forum, you may be able to find answers using the free documentation and help material. There are video tutorials and a wiki. Unfortunately, some features of eShop, such as sales tax and shipping management, are not fully documented. You’re expected to figure these out on your own or ask questions in the forums.
You can also purchase optional commercial support and customization services from the developers.
How It Integrates with WordPress
When you first activate eShop, it creates a bunch of tables in the database and creates “default pages”. These are your shopping cart, check out, thank you, cancel, downloads, and shipping rates pages.
Adding products with eShop is just like adding posts in WordPress. Each product is in a post. Then how these posts are displayed on the frontend is up to your theme.
Ability to Specify Product Variations
eShop calls variations options. By default, each product can have up to three options from the product creation screen. You can also create pre-made “Option Sets” which allows you to add variations to product conveniently. Sets can have up to five variations. Each option has a specific price. Variation management in eShop isn’t as flexible as with other shopping cart plugins and the number of allowed variations is actually configurable. Some users have up to 30 variations!
Shipping and Tax Management
Shipping and tax management in eShop seems pretty advanced. You can manage taxes and shipping by weights, countries, states, counties, provinces, modes, and more. But it’s not so easy to understand and it’s not documented. Fortunately, eShop is backed by a helpful support forum.
Admin User-Interface Design
eShop makes good use of built-in WordPress admin styles, but then it adds its own ugly touches to the interface. And there are inconsistencies in the admin design that make some features of the plugin hard to spot. Once you get used to the plugin, you become blind to these things, though.
The other thing I don’t like about eShop‘s admin menus is that they are spread all over the place. There’s one top level menu. Then there’s another menu under WordPress “Settings”. Then there’s yet another menu under WordPress “Appearance”. This makes stuff difficult to find, especially with lack of proper documentation.
Accepted Payment Methods
eShop works with PayPal Express, Payson, iDeal Lite, eProcessingNetwork, cash, wire transfer, Webtopay, Authorize.Net, and ogone.
Selling Digital Downloads
eShop handles digital downloads pretty well. First, it provides you with a form to upload files to your wp-content/eshop_downloads directory, which eShop protects from direct access. Then, you simply create a product and link it to the file you just uploaded. When the customer buys the product, they’ll be able to login to your site and download the files. You can specify the number of times they can download the files.
Offering Discount Coupon Codes
eShop allows you to provide discount coupon codes to customers. The coupons can be limited by time or number of uses. The coupon codes are a percentage of the total order amount. They cannot be a fixed price. And you can’t have a per-product coupon codes.
Sidebar Widgets
eShop has excellent support for sidebar widgets. There’s a widget for the checkout and view cart links. And then there’s another widget for products. The products widget is very flexible. You can place multiple instances of it in the sidebar, each instance showing a different set of products: bestsellers, featured, random, specific products, etc. And you can set it to either show images or text.
Themes and Styles
The developers for eShop have made a few different themes to go with their plugin. I don’t like the design and layout of most of the provided themes. Fortunately, it is possible to style the appearance of eShop’s HTML by going to “Appearance → eShop” and editing the CSS there.
Affiliates Management
eShop has no built-in mechanism for managing affiliates, but it can be integrated with Tips & Tricks HQ Affiliate plugin for WordPress, which costs $49.
Multi-Language Support
It is possible to translate eShop to your own language. In fact, there already are some translations available for download for the following languages: Dutch, Italian, Russian, and French.
Who’s Using It
Many interesting small stores are using eShop. Check out the eShop showcase here.
Money Matters
The plugin is 100% free and all inclusive. There are no premium add-ons or stuff like that.
I’ve been using eshop for a while – it works ok and is reasonably easy for a non-techie like me to use.
BUT – the appearance isn’t good, and since I last updated is even worse. You can’t just add a simple ‘add to cart’ button next to a product title, but instead end up with this huge icon (if you don’t have your own product image) which takes up loads of space and an ‘add to cart’ bit which really doesn’t look good. Trying to make the icon smaller or get rid of it just doesn’t seem to work (have tried several suggestions on the forums – and I’m good at following advice to the letter), and causes problems with the whole site, while uninstalling and reinstalling eshop causes you to lose all of your settings and product, order customer etc databases.
I’m looking for a new shopping cart now…
Nice and clean Writing about eShop. Liked This Blog
With regard to eShop’s documentation, we’re currently re-organising and expanding it. As you can imagine, it’s quite a major task and we do rely on our users to let us know if there are any gaps or if the documentation is still unclear.
So if you do want to see some additional documentation, please let us know via the eShop Support forum.
As an independent freelance developer with fairly intimate knowledge of eShop, I’d say this is a pretty comprehensive and accurate review. I agree that the documentation could be better, and perhaps the shipping features would be daunting for some new users. However, the settings are fairly intuitive so a lot can be accomplished by just jumping in and the support forum is top notch if you do need help.
My experience with eShop comes from building online stores with it as well as authoring three eShop related plugins:
FREE
eShop CSV Export
eShop Order Emailer
SMALL FEE
CSV Imp for eShop
As with all e-commerce solutions, when you have a lot of products, it can become pretty time-consuming to update them one by one. This plugin allows you to do bulk import/export of eShop products, and is popular with people who’s time is limited and also who have larger stores (50-10000+ products).
Paul
Freelance Developer
Paul’s Web Solutions