Simple PayPal Shopping Cart — WordPress Plugin Review

Simple PayPal Shopping Cart by Tips & Tricks HQ is the most popular among all other lightweight shopping cart plugins. It has the most downloads and highest ratings on WordPress.org.

The implementation of the cart is pretty smart. Because it is focused on PayPal, it manages to outsource tasks, which are normally found within the cart software, to PayPal. For example, the plugin in itself doesn’t have the ability to calculate shipping or taxes based on customer location. But it integrates with PayPal in a way that let’s you have PayPal do these calculations for you.

On top of that, it has some advanced features, such as integration with Tips and Tricks HQ’s Affiliates management plugin.

Here’s how the plugin works. Activate the plugin and configure its settings. The settings page is found under WordPress settings admin menu.

The settings page also includes usage instructions, which are very simple, I’ll quote them for you here:

1. To add the ‘Add to Cart’ button simply add the trigger text [wp_cart:PRODUCT-NAME:price:PRODUCT-PRICE:end] to a post or page next to the product. Replace PRODUCT-NAME and PRODUCT-PRICE with the actual name and price. For example: [wp_cart:Test Product:price:15.00:end]

2. To add the shopping cart to a post or page (eg. checkout page) simply add the shortcode [show_wp_shopping_cart] to a post or page or use the sidebar widget to add the shopping cart to the sidebar.

As you can see from the quote above, you do not specify shipping or taxing information for the product. These can be handled inside PayPal.

Let’s see how the live product with the sidebar widget looks like (keep in mind that I didn’t add any styling. The looks of the live product can be customized, if you wish to do so).

One noticeably missing feature from this plugin is the ability to create product variations. Other than that, it’s a fantastic lightweight shopping cart plugin.

Visit Simple PayPal Shopping Cart Plugin homepage »»

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