Tribulant Shopping Cart plugin is also simply known as Checkout. For SEO purposes, Tribulant calls this plugin WordPress Shopping Cart plugin on their website.
Lame SEO practices notwithstanding, this is a pretty cool shopping cart plugin.
Considering its powers and features, this plugin is extremely underpriced at only $55.
Installation
The plugin does not contain encrypted code and does not require anything other than the standards for most plugins. So, after you upload and activate, enter your serial number and you’ll be good to go.
Technical Support & Documentation
Support for Tribulant Shopping Cart is provided through the support forum. However, the forum is not very active and many questions go unanswered. You can also try to submit a ticket.
Other than the forums and ticketing system, you can use the plugin’s documentation to solve your problems. The documentation is publicly available and it’s pretty comprehensive.
How It Integrates with WordPress
Tribulant Shopping Cart uses WordPress pages/posts to provide shopping cart functionality. You have to embed certain shortcodes to achieve the functionality.
As for product creation, Tribulant Shopping Cart provides a screen that looks very similar to the WordPress default “Add Post” screen. Through that screen you can create a new product and the plugin will save the product as a default WordPress post type. You can also optionally save it as a page.
Ability to Specify Product Variations
Tribulant Shopping Cart handles product variations pretty well, but some hardcore merchants may still face some limitations.
Variations are given their own dedicated screen in Tribulant Shopping Cart. On that screen, you add as many variation metrics as you want, i.e. size, weight, color, capacity, what have you. Then you go to another screen that’s called “Variation Options” and for each metric you added, you’ll now add its options, i.e small, medium, 10lbs, 20lbs, black, white, etc.
While you can specify a price for each variation option, you cannot specify an inventory count.
Screenshot: adding a product variation metric in Tribulant Shopping Cart
Screenshot: adding a product variation option to a metric in Tribulant Shopping Cart
Shipping and Tax Management
Tribulant Shopping Cart shipping features are great and very flexible. You can specify storewide shipping rates, per product rates, rates for bundles, and you can integrate your store with FedEx, USPS, UPS, Australia Post, and Canada Post.
And tax management in Tribulant Shopping Cart is no less sophisticated than its shipping management abilities. You can set whether you want to calculate rate or not, a default rate, whether to tax shipping fees, and finally, you can set a tax rate for various shipping regions.
Admin User-Interface Design
The admin user interface for Tribulant Shopping Cart is very good. The menus are sensibly labeled and well laid out. I just don’t like that there are so many administration screens. Other than that, it’s pretty good.
Accepted Payment Methods
Tribulant Shopping Cart has integration for eWay, Authorize.Net, PayPal (Website Payments Standard), 2Checkout, MoneyBookers, Google Checkout, FirstData, Realex, Payments, eMatters, Euro Payment Services S.R.L., and Ogone.
Selling Digital Downloads
It is possible to sell digital goods with Tribulant Shopping Cart. Unlike most other shopping cart plugins where you upload the file while you’re creating the product, file upload in Tribulant Shopping Cart happens in its own dedicated screen. You upload the file and assign it to a product you have previously created.
Unfortunately, you cannot set an expiration date or limit the number of downloads for files.
Offering Discount Coupon Codes
While Tribulant Shopping Cart does support coupon codes, it’s not as flexible as some of the other plugins, such as Shopp.
You can create a fixed amount or percentage discount and set an expiration date for it. And you can also limit the number of times it can be used. The discount is applied to the cart total.
Sidebar Widgets
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.
Themes and Styles
This is where Tribulant Shopping Cart is lacking. The plugin has no existing themes and there are not instructions or documentations on how to theme your Tribulant-powered store.
Affiliates Management
Tribulant Shopping Cart doesn’t have a built-in affiliates management capabilities and has no support for any 3rd party affiliates software.
Multi-Language Support
Tribulant Shopping Cart supports translations and currently it’s available in Spanish, Dutch, German, Hungarian, and Romanian.
Who’s Using It
The showcase page for Tribulant Shopping Cart lists more than 50 sites that are currently using the plugin. However, I’ve gone through most of them and they seem to be dormant without any activity.
Money Matters
Tribulant Shopping Cart is one of the most affordable shopping cart plugins for WordPress at only $55 for a single domain license. The unlimited domains license costs $275.
The licenses entitles you to 3-months updates, which can be renewed for $5 after that. But the installed version and serial key never expire. They’re good for life.
Keep in mind that there are no refunds.
This pluin is very bad! The only thing that is worse than Tribulants plugin is the fact that they wont stand by their software. Endless conflicts and when nothing works with even the simplest plugins they pretend to help but still nothing works. When you finally give up and ask for a refund they tell you its against their policy. What a joke!
This is one of the worst companies i have ever dealt with!
This plugin is made by the same people who make the WP-Ecommerce plugin. For that plugin they call themselves Instinct Entertainment. If you know anything about that plugin then you’ll already know that you shouldn’t waste your time with the Tribulant plugin. You’ll spend countless hours trying to get the plugin to do all the things the feature list says it will do. You’ll find that currently the forum for the Tribulant shopping plugin is dormant because they just recently started the shopping plugin. This indicates that they will soon abandon their first plugin WP-Ecommerce because too many people purchased that plugin are complaining, myself included. The problem is that they released an extremely buggy plugin and really don’t provide much support. Most of the fixes for their plugin are contributed by others who have also been duped into buying this plugin. Several updates of the plugin have changed the core files causing any previous customization to become obsolete. Basically you’ll have to start from scratch. You can however pay for support. But as you can see from their forum at http://getshopped.org/forums there are many people complaining that the support they paid for never materializes. Tribulant and Instinct Entertainment are the same rip-off artists selling the same product(s) under different names.
What lead you to believe and conclude that Tribulant and Instinct Entertainment are the same people? They have two different websites and their products don’t look the same at all. If indeed they’re the same people, I’d say they’re pretty goddamn prolific!
Good day,
We are not the same people who built WP e-Commerce and we are not affiliate with them in any way.
I’d say we have a very solid and robust WordPress Shopping Cart plugin which works great and has excellent support.
All the best,
Antonie
I think the plugin’s great! i’ve found it really easy to configure and the code is simple and well written, sooo easy to understand and customize. I haven’t tried the support yet but have only heard good things so far. I’m using it on an e-commerce site for the first time which will be online in a week or so, I can post the address to anyone whose interested to see it working. @mores -> Had a look at your site, nice!
I bought their newsletter plugin and never got it work. Support was very lacking.
I would disagree about having no support. The main article does not mention the ‘Live Chat’ as a technical support option. I have found this method of communication invaluable when I’ve encountered issue, you get to talk to the guys who actually developed the product. Excellent assistance.
I’m running Tribulant’s Shopping Cart plugin on a client’s site and I am more than happy with it.
I can’t comment on theme compatibility – I write all my themes from scratch. Checkout allows me to design a site with a shop, then adapts to the layout. Other cart plugins I browsed locked me in to a certain layout.
Tribulant support is awesome. They’re very flexible, they take your problems seriously and they helped me solve all the issues I had. Some were bugs, some were entirely our own fault.
The back-end is fine, it could be a bit more spiffy and show more statistics on your sales. But that’s on their roadmap I was told.
This is not a plug – if you want to check out “Checkout” in a custom theme, go here: http://www.1-stop-health-shop.com
I can recommend Tribulant’s Shopping Cart a.k.a. Checkout a.ka. WPCO whole-heartedly.
I installed this plugin on my sisters website and it has been absolutely brilliant. I did find that the forums were a little empty, but it does state that no support will be given on the forums. I ran into quite a few glitches and emailed support who were always prompt and quick to fix or explain what I needed to do to rectify the problem. I’d recommend this plugin for people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty with a bit of hard coding while updates are being applied, also if you get someone who knows what they are doing to install it for you – you won’t have any issues getting to find your way around it as the admin interface is pretty straight forward. It plugged straight into her existing theme too so didn’t find any issues there.
I can confirm where it is lacking! Absolutely no support and it does conflict with many themes. Tribulant doesn’t seem to want to help you identify compatible themes either. I don’t recommend spending the money on unlimited license until you know it works for you. I have yet to get it running on a theme that I like without a conflict