Most WordPress shopping cart plugins provide merchants the ability to display essential sidebar widgets. The most essential is the widget that displays the cart contents and checkout link. However, many plugins go beyond that. They include widgets that show bestsellers or most recent products.
The best in this category is Shopp. It has many useful sidebar widgets for your online store.
You can click on the name of the product below to view its full review.
Shopp
Shopp has many useful sidebar widgets that allow you to add dynamic features to your online store.
Product related widgets
Shopp Cart — adds a summarized shopping cart to a widget area providing at a glance reminder of the current contents of the customer’s shopping cart. By default it shows the number of items in the cart and the total cost of the items.
Shopp Product — this widget allows you to display products in the sidebar by category, or simply by bestselling, highest (or lowest) price, newest (or oldest), or randomly. You can also specify the number of products to display.
Shopp Categories — this widget displays a list of the categories and subcategories in your store. It is highly customizable.
Shopp Category Section — like the Shopp Categories widget, displays a navigational menu of category links for all categories related to the current category by sharing a common base category.
Shopp Faceted Menu – when a customer is viewing a custom product category that has faceted menus enabled, this widget will display a drill-down navigation menu for filtering products by shared product attributes. Setting this up requires editing Shopp templates.
Site related widgets
Shopp Account — this is for account login and management capabilities. This widget is only visible if you enable ‘Account Logins’ from your Shopp ‘Store Preferences’ settings.
Shopp Search – as the name implies, this allows your customers to search through your online store.
Shopp Tag Cloud – adds a weighted list of links for the most frequently used product tags.
Shopp Recent Shoppers – Adds a configurable listing of your most recent customers to a widget area.
Cart66
Unfortunately, Cart66 doesn't support many sidebar widgets. It only supports one widget for showing the customer how many products are in their cart, the total price, and links to view cart content and checkout. There is no way to show best selling products or things like that.
GetShopped (WP e-Commerce)
GetShopped comes with a variety of different widgets for achieving various things with your online store:
1. Shopping Cart: Displays the cart contents as well as checkout links in the sidebar.
2. Price Range: Allows customers to narrow down their product search using price as a criteria.
3. Product Tags: Allows customers to filter their store’s product based on tags.
4. Product Categories: Same as Product Tags, but for categories.
5. Specials: Displays products on sale.
6. Latest Products: Displays your store’s latest products.
7. Donations: Displays products in your store that are donation products.
One common widget people have on their website is the shopping cart. Having this displayed in the sidebar allows a customer to see quickly what they currently have in their cart.
eShop
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.
MarketPress
MarketPress has four sidebar widgets.
Shopping Cart -- this shows dynamic shopping cart contents along with a checkout button for your MarketPress store.
Product List -- this one shows a customizable list of products from your MarketPress store. You can filter the products displayed by category or tag. It allows you to display thumbnails and buy button next to the products.
Product Categories -- you can use this widget to display a list or dropdown of product categories. Remember that product categories in MarketPress are separated from post categories.
Product Tag Cloud -- this one is for product tags.
Tribulant Shopping Cart
Tribulant Shopping Cart has two widgets built-in: products search and shopping cart widgets.
Product Search simply displays a search box in the sidebar that allows your visitors to search products in your store.
Shopping Cart is for displaying cart contents as will as links to view the cart and checkout.
YAK
YAK has only one widget, the YAK Order Panel. It provides the basic shopping cart functionality, i.e. showing cart item count and checkout link.
DukaPress
DukaPress comes with some useful sidebar widgets.
- DukaPress Checkout -- displays a link to the checkout page
- Mini DukaPress Shopping Cart -- displays the minimal shopping cart
- DukaPress Shopping Cart -- displays the DukaPress shopping cart
- Product Display -- allows you to display your products
- DukaPress Search -- let's your visitors search your online store
wpStoreCart
wpStoreCart comes with a few different widgets.
- cart contents
- top product, recent products, product categories
- user account login
For some reason, the developers of wpStoreCart don't care about the layout of their input Shipping Options fields, so the widgets are kinda messed up by default.
Jigoshop
Jigoshop features an extensive set of sidebar widgets, 15 at present. The various types of widgets are listed below.
1. Best Sellers: Lists the best selling products.
2. Cart: Shopping Cart for the sidebar.
3. Featured Products: Featured products on your site.
4. Layered Nav: Shows a custom attribute in a widget which lets you narrow down the list of shown products in categories.
5. Login: Displays a handy login form for users.
6. New Products: The most recent products on your site.
7. Price Filter: Outputs a price filter slider.
8. Product Categories: A list or dropdown of product categories.
9. Product Search: A search form for your products.
10. Products on Sale: Display a list of products currently on sale.
11. Product Tag Cloud: Your most used product tags in cloud format.
12. Random Products: Lists a random selection of products on your site.
13. Recently viewed: A list of your customers most recently viewed products.
14. Recent Reviews: Display a list of your most recent product reviews.
15. Top Rated Products: The best of the best on your site.
Zingiri Web Shop
Apart from the others features, one nice feature of Zingiri Web Shop is the sidebar widgets. Zingiri Web Shop comes with a total of 6 sidebar widgets, for all the common functions a shopping cart should have. The only off-putting point of the widgets is that none of the widgets is configurable. The list of widgets is shown below.
1. Web Shop Cart – Displays the status of your shopping cart
2. Product Carousel – Displays random products in a carousel fashion
3. Web Shop General – Displays general web shop links
4. Random Product – Displays a single random product from a random category
5. Shop Categories – Displays a list of categories
6. Shop Search – The standard search
Keep in mind that the widgets shown in the screenshot below are shown with the default WordPress theme installed. You can style the widgets using CSS to match your particular WordPress theme.
TheCartPress
TheCartPress features an extensive set of sidebar widgets, 15 at present. Some selected widgets are introduced below:
Navigation Clouds:
Allows you to create your own customized non-hierarchical navigation clouds, like product category clouds, product tags clouds, product supplier clouds or any other custom taxonomies or products attribute menus.
Navigation Trees:
Allows you to create your own configurable and customized navigation trees, like product category trees, product tags lists, product supplier lists or any other custom taxonomies or product attributes. It can be used to create the product category (taxonomy) navigation menu and other attribute menus.
Custom Post Type Lists:
Allows you to create configurable product lists. You can also create any other product type lists by taxonomies and terms, etc. It is one of the important widgets and requires some investment in time to control all of its possibilities.
Shopping cart:
This widget displays the shopping cart and the products added by the customer to the cart. It also displays the cart price and quantity. You can customize the widget with additional settings.
Shopping cart Resume:
This widget displays a shopping cart resume. It displays the number of products and the cart amount. You can customize the widget with some additional settings. It is same as above but with smaller number of attributes displayed.
WP Online Store
WP Online Store unfortunately does not offer any widgets. The plugin is still relatively new, hopefully the developers will add some in the next version.
