Originally known as WP e-Commerce, GetShopped is one of the oldest ecommerce plugins available for the WordPress platform. GetShopped boasts of a number of features making it ideal for starting your own ecommerce site, whether selling 10 products or in thousands. Being available for years, it has garnered a strong user following with hundreds of sites using the plugin. There are also a large number of themes and plugins available to suit your every need.
However from reading around the web and comments from other users, it seems that GetShopped is still riddled with bugs, after being 6 years in the market. If you are thinking of using the plugin for a large site, I’d suggest you thoroughly test it before going live and also go through their forums.
Installation
Installation of GetShopped is as easy as any other WordPress plugin. Some nice installation documentation and videos makes it easier to configure your server and check other settings.
Technical Support & Documentation
GetShopped comes with an excellent documentation, including step-by-step videos. Also a free public forum is provided where you can find answers to some undocumented features of GetShopped.
If none of the above works, you can try contacting one of the GetShopped consultants listed on the website.
Premium support is also offered but you need to buy a premium add-on upgrade to get the benefit of prioritized support.
How It Integrates with WordPress
Upon installation GetShopped creates 12 new tables in the WordPress database. All product related data is stored in as WordPress custom posts, including product variations. Other information like coupon codes, tax information is stored in GetShopped custom tables.
Additionally, the plugin creates various WordPress pages to facilitate the buying process. All in all, GetShopped uses WordPress API pretty well.
Product & Stock Management
GetShopped allows you to easily add products and the variations from the WordPress posts section. The product data however is stored in the custom GetShopped tables. Each products has its own url, which can be important for SEO reasons.
Product Variation Management
Like all recent ecommerce plugins, GetShopped has the ability to add product variations. Variations allows store owners to add options to their products like size, color etc. GetShopped makes it quite easy to handle such kind of variations for each product.
GetShopped handles variations in a very practical manner. After you’ve added your variation sets, you can then go to the product and add them. If you have two variation sets, one with 3 options and another one with 2 options, GetShopped will calculate that you have 6 variations of the same product. You can then specify a weight, stock count, price, and SKU for each one.
Customer Management
GetShopped uses the WordPress user management framework to store customer data. GetShopped allows users to make a purchase without registering first, wherein customers enter the billing and shipping information at the checkout area. However you can make it mandatory for users to register before making a purchase, in which case the customer data is stored in the WordPress ‘wp_users’ table.
Shipping and Tax Management
GetShopped provides you with the standard shipping options. You can calculate shipping by a flat rate, by the price of the order, or by weight of the items. You can also integrate GetShopped with external shipping calculators like Australia Post, UPS or USPS to get live rates based on weight and customer location. Integration with FedEx is also available as a $25 add-on from the company.
GetShopped also has full support for tax management. You can set a separate tax rate for each region you ship to or specify a tax band to be applied on per-product basis.
Admin User-Interface Design
GetShopped employs the standard WordPress UI, and is cleanly designed. There is one top level menu which contains all the links to manage products and coupons, while the other named ’store’ is tucked under the main ‘settings’ menu, which I think should have been kept in the GetShopped top level menu itself.
Accepted Payment Methods
On installation GetShopped provides the following payments gateways:
a. ChronoPay
b. Google Checkout
c. PayPal Express Checkout 2.0
d. PayPal Payments Standard 2.0
e. PayPal Pro 2.0
Other payment gateways besides the above which can be purchased are listed below, but I think most people will be happy with the ones provided above:
a. Stripe
b. DPS PXPay
Selling Digital Downloads
GetShopped allows you to add downloadable products to your site – products such as e-books, software’s, images etc. While creating new products you need to upload the digital files to your upload directory. Users can then download the relevant product immediately after checkout. However there are not many options to control the file download. You can only limit the total number of downloads per product and lock the IP from where it was downloaded, not of much use really.
The files will be uploaded to a special sub-directory in your ‘wp-content’ directory, and will be protected from unauthorized access.
Offering Discount Coupon Codes
GetShopped offers coupons feature to allow discounts to the customers. There are 3 type of discounts that can be applied – percentage discount, fixed amount discount and free shipping. You can also set start and end date when the coupon should be applied.
One of the other interesting features is the ability to add rules on when each coupon should be applied. For example, you could add a rule to a coupon which specifies that the coupon is only to be applied if the cart total exceeds a certain amount, or another rule that says that the coupon is only to be applied when the product name contains ‘apparel’. You can combine multiple rules for each coupon.
Sidebar Widgets
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.
Themes and Styles
GetShopped provides some wonderful themes for your ecommerce site. Some are free while others are paid. If you are unable to find one to suit your needs, you can create one using the documentation provided by GetShopped.
Some companies that sell GetShopped themes are given below:
http://storefrontthemes.com/
http://tokokoo.com/
http://splashingpixels.com/
You can also seamlessly integrate the Genesis framework with GetShopped using the documentation provided.
Affiliate Management
GetShopped does not come with affiliate features, but you can add the feature by purchasing a paid extension costing $47.
Multi-Language Support
GetShopped is available in almost all popular languages, including Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Croatian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish. If you don’t see your language listed here, you can easily make your own translation.
Who’s Using It
Many online stores are using GetShopped as you can see in the showcase. Famous brands such as City Surfs, Icon Dock, Pedal Play provide an excellent demonstration of the features and theme design of GetShopped.
Money Matters
GetShopped follows the Professional open source license model. The company offers the base product free under the GNU license, but the add-ons need to be purchased from the company. The add-ons add additional functionality to the base product, and ranges from $24 to $199. There are also community contributed plugins which can be downloaded free.
Every additional paid add-on is distributed under the GPL license, but GetShopped does not provide any refunds.
Lack of support, and a poorly designed forum, have been a problem for me. What cart did you choose as an alternative? I find there is NO GetShopped support from Dec 22 to Jan 9! If you have premium support, they may help if they have a chance over the holiday. Really? They expect peeps to pay for a two week+ turnaround? I chose it because I need digital download capability, but it doesn’t work. They apparently had the same problem on their own site a few months back, so I’m in good company, but where do I go now?
This product is great if you can get support. When I bought their product (i bought the gold cart) I got 1 support token, which gives you one opportunity to get direct support. I used it, and the support was ok. I then I had another issue arise. So I went back to their site to find out I needed to purchase more support tokens in order to get more direct support. Well I tried for over 30 minutes looking on the site to find out where you can buy these so called support tokens….couldn’t find them anywhere. So I tried asking on the forums…a week passes and no reply. I created another post….3 weeks pass and no reply. I finally created a third post…guess…no reply. I have since switched to another shopping cart due to losing one of my clients because I could not help them from the lack of support at Get Shopped. So be warned, if you buy this product the support is terrible and could cost you clients in the end.
Friction5, which shopping cart did you switch to?
I narrowly missed losing a client due to the total lack of support at getshopped. I am ready to switch but wary of just getting another plugin with many issues and terrible support. Which shopping cart did you switch to?