The first thing that strikes you as a Shopp plugin user is its professionalism. Aside from minor bugs here and there, everything about this plugin is made with high quality and care.
Shopp is great if you want to build a large ecommerce store with robust shipping and tax and promotions management capabilities. It also has one of the widest range of support for payment gateways and shipping carriers.
You may not want to use Shopp if you just want to sell digital goods or if you’re not willing to invest in customizing the appearance of your store, since Shopp doesn’t include any good pre-built themes. And customizing the appearance will take some effort.
All in all, though, it’s one hell of a shopping cart plugin for WordPress!!
Installation
Once you make the payment, you’ll be given the download link via email. After downloading and installing the plugin, you’ll have to enter your license key and perform the initial settings, like setting the location of your store, target countries, your email, etc. It’s all pretty smooth and easy with Shopp and its professional user interface.
Technical Support & Documentation
All Shopp customers get access to the help desk. The current response time is any where from 21 hours to 4 days. If you’re not happy with that, you can buy priority support (jump the queue, $49), or escalated support (one-on-one with the lead developer, $199). As always, terms and conditions apply. Note that according to the support policy, regular support is “not guaranteed”.
You may not have to use the ticket system with Shopp since there are plenty of community resources and documentation. The community support forum, which is only available to paid members, is active and pretty helpful. You can also submit feature requests as a paid Shopp member. But note that many questions in the community forum go unanswered.
The documentation of the plugin is also reserved for paid members, but I can tell you that it’s comprehensive. The goal of Shopp team is to reduce support requests as much as possible by creating comprehensive documentation. They even provide advanced tutorials and examples for customizing Shopp. There are also great videos that can be accessed from within the plugin so that you can learn efficiently as you go.
How It Integrates with WordPress
When you first activate Shopp, it creates its own tables for products and categories. It doesn’t take advantage of WordPress custom post types and taxonomies.
Shopp doesn’t take advantage of some of the APIs that WordPress provides. Shopp does things its own way, but it does those things pretty well.
Ability to Specify Product Variations
Shopp‘s ability to handle product variations is above and beyond all other shopping cart plugins. It creates different versions of the same product depending on how many variations you have for it. You can create as many product variations as you want, and specify a price, inventory count, sale price, and shipping fee for each variation.
In addition to variations, you can also specify products with add-ons in Shopp. Add-ons are extra customization and configurations that are made-to-order.
Shipping and Tax Management
Again, Shopp takes the prize for best shipping and tax management support in a WordPress shopping cart.
For shipping, Shopp can do flat rate or calculate shipping based on customer location, order amount, item quantity, and order weight. Shopp also offers extra modules to calculate shipping live with FedEx, UPS, USPS, AusPost, Canada Post, or Shipwire.
For tax management, you can specify a tax rate for each country or region you ship to, as well as a default rate. You can choose whether shipping fees are included in tax calculation or you can choose not to charge any tax at all.
Admin User-Interface Design
Shopp‘s admin UI is very clean and professional. It looks just like WordPress’ native screens, with the addition of ajax effects where appropriate. There clearly is a high level of attention to details in Shopp’s admin UI.
Accepted Payment Methods
Without any paid add-ons, Shopp supports PayPal Express, PayPal Standard, Google Checkout, 2Checkout, and offline payments (phone, check, etc).
The following payment gateways are also available for an additional $25 for each one: Authorize.Net, CyberSource, eWay, Beanstream, FirstData, HSBC, iDEAL, Merchant Warrior, PayPal Payflow Pro, PayPal Pro, Payson, and Sage Pay.
Selling Digital Downloads
Handling downloadable products isn’t Shopp‘s strong suit. You are able to upload files when you’re creating a new product in the plugin, but the upload mechanism is buggy. The alternative is that you upload the product yourself, via FTP, and protect the upload directory using your web-server administration mojo.
Offering Discount Coupon Codes
Shopp has extensive discount coupon codes options. In Shopp, coupons are given the more descriptive name, “promotions”. You can create “percentage off”, “amount off”, “free shipping”, or “buy x, get y free” type of promotion.
You set a start and end date for each promotion and you can create conditions where the promotions apply. You can create promotions for individual products, order amount, order quantity, and more.
Sidebar Widgets
Shopp has many useful sidebar widgets that allow you to add dynamic features to your online store.
Shopp Cart — this widget includes a summary of the cart contents and a checkout link.
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 — this is kind of like the above, but only displays children subcategories of the category that’s currently being viewed by the customer.
Shopp Faceted Menu – this is a product filtering widget that allows customers to filter products by their features, prices, etc. Setting this up requires editing Shopp templates.
Shopp Account — this is for account login and management capabilities.
Shopp Search – as the name implies, this allows your customers to search through your online store.
Themes and Styles
There’s a lack of pre-built themes for Shopp. The only theme I could find that was built for Shopp is Flexx by iThemes.
Shopp works pretty will with any standards-compliant WordPress theme. But you’ll most likely want to customize the appearance of your online store, in which case you’ll have to rely on Shopp’s own templating system. It’s a new skill to learn, but the process is well documented.
Affiliates Management
Shopp doesn’t have any affiliates management capabilities, and don’t expect to get help in the support forum with integrating with other affiliates management plugins. However, the good folks at Tips and Tricks HQ have outlined instructions for integrating their popular affiliates management plugin with Shopp.
Multi-Language Support
Shopp is completely translatable. You can see the translations here. If your language isn’t there, you can translate it yourself.
Who’s Using It
Among all other shopping cart plugins, Shopp’s showcase has a large number of sites. The showcase is full of interesting sites and some highly trafficked sites.
Money Matters
Shopp is GPL licensed, which means, once you download it, you can do with it whatever you please, even give it to the Cuban government or resell it.
However, to download the latest version of Shopp, you’ll have to pay $55 for the basic plugin ($299 for the developers license). Then for each add-on payment gateway and shipping carrier, you’ll have to pay an additional $25. Some default payment gateways are integrated with the basic plugin, by the way.
Your purchase of Shopp entitles you to lifetime upgrades and support. But there are no refunds!
I think WooCommerce will take the reigns on the WordPress Ecommerce market. I have a few clients running Shopp, it’s not SO bad. However, quantity pricing is a must for me.
So I made a plugin for Shopp’s lack of ‘quantity pricing’ or ‘tiered pricing’. If anyone using Shopp has a need for this, please check my plugin out! Thanks
http://www.fancyfoxcreative.com/shop/shopp-tiered-pricing-plugin/
Interesting plugin, that’s awesome man!
Equally interesting analysis that WooCommerce will take the reigns. I’d be surprised if a company specializing in premium themes (that has not, by any measure, “taken the reigns” in that niche) would take a significant leadership position in the e-commerce niche.
FWIW, the WP E-Commerce plugin has had this feature for a long time, they call it “Table Rate Pricing”.
Thanks for that…I might check out WP e-commercet. Does it have as many bugs as people say it does? Hah!
Shopp announced v1.2 in July 2011, its now December and its still not been released, whats worse is that they don’t reply emails and prospective customers have no access to their forums to see what kind of problems others may be having with the software.
If the product is that good why the secrecy and frankly I am leery of buying product from a company that does not even bother to answer pre-sales questions.
I’m trying out the eCommerce plugins to WP, and finding that each one has serious downsides (so far). The worst is JigoShop which is difficult to customise – to get into the developers code is a minefield.
MarketPress is good – but doesn’t have a gateway to SagePay, which is the UK’s default payment gateway.
Shopp… hmmm. Sounds possible. But there’s no way I’m buying something only to find it’s not suitable. Shopp should allow a lite version free – or maybe a time trialed version. Gotta move on to the next one.
Does Shopp have PayPal Adaptive Payments integrated into it? (See MarketPress for an example.)
There’s no mention of Shopp using PayPal Adaptive Payments anywhere. My understanding is that Adaptive Payments is just a flexible API that PayPal offers. What exactly do you hope to accomplish with it, what’s the end goal?
Forgive my ignorance on this one. I wish to host a multisite store (a “mall” or “marketplace”) where I can set up micro-stores on behalf of real store merchants and take a 10% cut of the sales without any messy accounting. My understanding with MarketPress is that there’s an admin interface to set commissions for each store.
Are you suggesting that what MarketPress does is nothing special and that an API call could easily be set up for most carts? I’m not a programmer, so I’m looking for an integrated solution.
I see what you mean now.
Yeah, I think your choices are limited to only MarketPress. Your requirements are pretty nichey, but I know that WPMU DEV makes a point of catering to multisite and BuddyPress needs specifically.
I don’t think Shopp, Cart66, or GetShopped can do what you want.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I was definitely starting to feel a bit “nichey”, but was also wondering if the tech was maybe just lagging a little behind the demand for such services. Cheers..
This looks so awesome – but I have a really important question, having been burned by WP cart plugins in the past.
Will you be offering (or do you offer – I couldn’t find the answer in your online documentation or in the forum) PayPal subscriptions as product types, and access levels to products based on those subscriptions like Cart66 does? I’m really tired of wrestling with Cart66 – I’d love to be able to use a solid plugin like yours appears to be, but I’m selling video and audio classes in zip files as downloadable products, tickets to my workshops and subscriptions to those classes – I didn’t see in the docs where you were able to do that. I know you can handle physical goods and digital downloads, which I also need, but I’m looking for that total solution that includes subscriptions, tickets and discounts.
Please, please be MY Heroes. Yes, I said that.
If all you wanna do is sell digital products, Cart66 is a good choice. There is also eStore.
eStore is a specialized digital goods shopping cart. I haven’t reviewed it in depth, but it seems pretty good.
Why don’t you consider making a membership site instead? All the good membership plugins allow you to restrict access to downloadable content, so that might work for you.
I hate Shopp, I had a horrible experience using it. I found something better, you can read more here if you like. Just my 2 cents.
http://www.customgraffiti.com/?p=813
Would just clarify one thing – I believe the GetShopped Showcase has substantially more showcased sites.
Thanks for pointing that out Justin. I removed the “largest” claim.