WordPress eStore Versus Shopp Review and Comparison
I’m writing this article in order to help customers, designers, and programmers make a decision regarding WordPress Online Store solutions. Here are my findings. Of course I am more than willing to hear your comments below, but I hope that my experience and opinion helps make you formulate a more informed decision before wasting your money on something you may or may not use.
I have an online store over HDRSource in which I sell HDR images for use with fellow 3D artists. I use a plugin called WP eStore to handle all of my transactions. Basically, you click an “Add to Cart” button, it adds the product to a cart, then takes you to Paypal where you finish the transaction. From there, you are provided with an encrypted download link which expires in X amount of days which you can specify. The system is fairly simple and that was exactly what I was looking for.
My circumstance is unusual in the fact that my downloads are fairly large – ranging in several gigabytes for some of my files. While the downloads haven’t been without their issues (there are going to be people with time-outs on slower connections with files that big), the eStore plugin has been fairly straight-forward in its setup and ease of use. The documentation supporting eStore is also fairly well thought-out.
Recently, I decided to switch hosts for all of my websites in part to provide a better experience with the download process. I signed up for the Mediatemple Grid Service which allows an incredible 100 gigs of storage space – this would be enough to host my content locally versus going through a third party such as Mediafire or hosting services. This would make the download experience more seamless, and plus I wouldn’t have to pay extra charges for using their storage space. When switching hosts, a variety of issues may come up – especially when transferring blogs which are dynamic and database-driven by nature over to a new host. Simply put, things can go wrong, especially when it comes to live online stores. These problems are to be expected.
With eStore, I ran into a minor hiccup in which my store downloads would download, but would lock you out of the website after canceling a transfer. I informed the plugin author of this issue as well as Mediatemple, and also began the bug hunt on my own. It was very difficult to tell what was going wrong. The system worked fine with my previous host, but fell apart on the new one. Was it something I did wrong, a limitation of the host, or something getting pulled incorrectly by the plugin itself? It was an issue that I would spend several days working on.
To complicate matters, HDRSource was mentioned in 3D world magazine. Some free libraries came out on DVD so my website was getting hammered by traffic from all around the world. I really needed to get this issue resolved immediately. The timing couldn’t have been any worse.
After several days of on and off experimentation, hours of midnight telephone tech support with my new host, and a flurry of emails flying back and forth between the eStore plugin developer and I, I decided to give WordPress Shopp a try. Here is my review and comparison between the two online store plugins. Keep in mind that this is for my setup and your needs may vary:
Comparison:
WordPress eStore Advantages:
- Cost: $34.95 (this was $20 when I purchased it this past summer.)
- Easy to install.
- Easy to use.
- Perfect for making simple purchases through Paypal or 2Checkout.
- Provides a return URL which takes you back to your website after a purchase is made.
- Flexible.
- Great shopping cart widget to show your purchases.
- New features being constantly added.
- Relatively new forum, but fairly useful.
- A strong focus on security by the author.
- Responsive tech support.
- Overall simplicity.
- Flexibility.
- Allows for free variations of your digital assets upon purchase.
- Return check-out page for Paypal standard.
- Multiple support videos.
WordPress eStore Disadvantages:
- I don’t believe eStore currently allows for sales to take place within your site. That involves a lot of work regardless with advanced accounts, additional charges, and SSL.
- This is purely cosmetic but the plugin website (in my opinion) isn’t as attractive, but in this case looks are completely deceiving. Everything is customizable.
WordPress eStore Support:
- The plugin author has been very accommodating and knowledgeable. To be honest, I’ve never experienced this level of tech support any where. He has literally “bent over backwards” to help me find solutions to my unusual circumstances. He has spent hours, if not days trying to help me out. The support is bar none. Keep in mind, he also has a separate day job.
- On several occasions, he has offered unsolicited refunds to which I refused because I could see that he was trying very hard to work on things.
WordPress Shopp Advantages:
- Restrict downloads to IP and maximum tries. However, I think eStore should have no problem implementing this.
- Easy to install but it installs too much and even broke my template by automatically inserting three unwanted pages.
- Shopp MCE button in the WP editor for production insertion/drop-down list shortcode. Again, I think eStore could implement this – right now there’s a little manual code copying but it’s really a no-brainer.
- The shipping options seem a little-bit more in-depth. I don’t ship physical products, so I really cannot comment. It was just an observation.
- More options for payment systems including the ability to embed credit card processing within your website without having to leave it. Again, there is a catch because this involves a lot of setup work of obtaining different processing accounts, additional charges, and SSL (Secure Socket Layer.)
- Prettier author website (but in this case, I found that looks are really deceiving.)
WordPress Shopp Disadvantages:
- Lack of simplicity. On the outset, you’d think by looking at their website that this would be “professional” and easy-to-use. Installing it is easy, but getting it to run is a different issue. You find yourself going through pages upon pages to figure out how to customize your site only to find out that you have to have some coding skills (editing php and CSS pages.)
- Cost: $55. $20 more than eStore.
- Insertion of three random pages upon install that will break your layout.
- No initial mention as to whether or not it encrypts digital download links (which I found out through having to purchase this.)
- Digital downloads only allow one product download per purchase. If you decided to provide a free alternative version of your product, you can’t. If you decided to provide multiple parts to a download to ease downloading, you can’t. They say they support resuming, but this is a major oversight on their behalf. Nowhere is this mentioned on their website. I had to wait a day only to find out it was unsupported.
- Their shopping cart widgets are beyond confusing. They offer 3 or 4 (I forget) different shopping cart widgets. In my tests, I added a product. Nowhere was a removal button. The widget only mentions price and not the product name when you add a product. It also wants to take you to a separate cart page on your website versus eStore which will take you directly to Paypal for checkout. Not only are you forced by default to be taken to a separate cart page, but then after you make a purchase, you get tossed onto another page full of marketing gimmicks for your site – you may find this useful, but I’m of the opinion that unless you want it there, don’t add this by default.
- Insertion of extra code and text into each product. All I wanted was a simple “buy now” or “add to cart” button below each one of my items or posts but no – didn’t happen. Instead, it inserted the product name (again although I had already written this), a description (already written), and a price (already written.) I’m certain you can “hack” the code” so that it doesn’t display these elements, but for someone that wants something simple, you shouldn’t have to. These items should be a checkbox disabled by default under the plugin’s settings. On top of this, it ran it’s own CSS styles which was one more thing I would have to tinker with. It also threw out a huge horizontal rule that I couldn’t ignore. For someone looking for something simple, this was overkill and quite frankly a “pain in the butt.”
WordPress Shopp Support:
- In digging through their confusing forum and documentation, I noticed that there were a fair amount of posts which went unanswered. There were also several dead links I came across. Almost everything I wanted to do needed to be hacked, and that would be possibly be broken anyways on their next update. For something simple like removing the titles it inserted, I shouldn’t have to spend several hours trying to figure that out. All I want is simple.
- I waited a day before receiving a reply. Time was critical for my installation.
- I asked for a refund and stated a couple of my reasons which I thought were quite reasonable and that perhaps they would make an exception to their policy (which admittedly I didn’t read in my hurry.) Here was their reply:
Dave,
Greetings Charles,
Please keep in mind that while Shopp does not support the handling of multiple files for download upon purchase, Shopp does handle resuming downloads. This means if a customer/client cannot finish a download right at that moment or is disconnected, they can come back and start where they left off.
Concerning the performance of Paypal Standard, it is stated that this version of checkout is a “remote” payment service. To have a seamless payment processing experience PayPal Pro or another provider would be necessary. Please see our documentation on PayPal Standard.
As far as a refund, due to our sales policy a refund cannot be available. For more information, please see our sales policy. https://shopplugin.net/sales-policy/
I encourage you to take the time to browse our community forums for any information that may assist you in your use of Shopp, as well as stay informed as to what’s coming in future Shopp releases.
Best Regards,
Dave
I asked one more time in an email and mentioned that I was going to write a review of their product. This is his second reply:
Dave,
Charles,
With the access of a demo versions of Shopp, sales documentation, feature documentation, as well as sales policy, it is not possible to issue a refund for this scenario. I’m sorry you don’t feel Shopp is the e-commerce solution you are looking for but we sincerely appreciate your feedback.
Regards,
Dave
Now, while I completely understand that they are trying to prevent piracy, you’d think that they might make an exception to this rule when someone states valid reasons for why they felt the product did not live up to their expectations. On several occasions, the author of eStore offered to give me a refund when I encountered a few issues – and I didn’t even ask for that. In my opinion, that clearly demonstrates that the author of eStore really cares for the product he is delivering. I couldn’t ask for more. It’s really miles above the cold replies I am getting from Shopp.
Conclusion:
The author of eStore ended up fixing my download problem yesterday. Everything was restored and in better working order than before.
If you’re looking for simple, than eStore is the way to go – it’s highly customizable, lighter in weight (from a code perspective), and less intrusive. Unless you absolutely need more payment options and credit card processing within your website (without having to leave it), than go with Shopp or another alternative. Keep in mind that built-in credit card processing is complicated, and quite frankly not worth the time. Paypal has become the defacto standard in credit card processing so it really doesn’t matter that when you make a purchase that you are taken to a Paypal page for final purchase.
Frankly, I am a very satisfied eStore customer and will continue to support the author’s efforts. I felt that he has helped me so much, that the least I could do is write this article discussing the differences between the two WordPress plugins.
p.s. I just noticed that Shopp left behind some code after deactivation as I was about to publish this article lol. I’m also out $55…
Thanks. I had been looking for a review of eStore. I had already eliminated Shopp because of poor reviews. Sounds like the eStore people are willing to work with you, a refreshing quality that hopefully will attract more developers to their platform.
Glad to be of some help. The Shopp people were far from being reasonable with me (in my own personal opinion) when it came to support as well as requesting a refund within a couple of hours of trying it. I think I had very valid reasons for wanting to cancel it.
1. Nowhere did they mention you couldn’t offer multiple variations of a digital download for free upon purchase. That was the biggest item which killed it for me. They actually don’t mention digital downloads much at all.
2. No mention of encrypting digital downloads, which they happen to do but I had to pay in order to find out the hard way.
3. Auto-populating my website and breaking it upon initial activation.
4. Unresponsive to people’s posts on their forum.
eStore simply wins in its ease-of-use and its overall simplicity. Amin over at his site has been extremely helpful – I really can’t stress that enough. A few times I ran into issues with my fairly unique setup, I put him through the loops and he came out on top. I’m so indebted to him for helping me, that’s in part the reason why I wanted to write this article.
Cleo, thanks for this detailed review. I’ve been searching for a good WP store plugin and found the estore plugin. I found your page by doing a google search on ‘estore plugin review’, so I do appreciate it!
We want to find the right cart the first time before we create an entire store.
Thanks again for the detailed review.
Patty Gale
You’re welcome Patty. I’m glad to have helped you out and it’s great feedback to know that this site is getting indexed well on Google. Let me know if you run into any questions or concerns – and also let me know what you think of the store once you have it set up. Best wishes!
Hi Cleo,
I am so glad that I came across your post. I am currently in the process of developing an estore myself and have been looking for a very simple solution.
Many thanks, your post helped me decide on which direction to go!
Cheers!
Thank you SOOO much. You saved me hours by sharing your experience. I was leaning toward Shopp and many of my download products are huge.
Hey Cleo,
Thanks for the great review and comparison of eStore and one of its competitors. I’m building my first wordpress site and was looking for a simple solution to sell digital downloads without all the bloated stuff that comes in free plugins such as wp-ecommerce plugin.
From what I read I think I’m gonna go ahead and purchase a license and tryout eStore since I feel confident that the dev of the plugin will continue to be involved with the product (he currently has v4.8.0 out).
Thanks again!
Thanks Cleo, awesome review……..decision made!
Hi ! nice review, and don’t now if it’s late or not, but I’ve being through some research for such plugin for my new site and found eStore nice and started working fine right out of the box however I wish it had a support for WPML which is a multilingual plugin that enables you to run a multi languages on the same site . For both of the two plugins I found a nice feature for “HUGE” downloads as you mentioned, you may consider trying “Amazon S3” for such burden on shared hosting, as (included) with eStore or (+25$ add on) for Shopp . That means you host your “Heavy” files on Amazon S3 and continue using a simple shared hosting for your site.
Awesome review, my friend. Thanks for helping me decide. I could have committed a very terrible mistake but now I’m set to go. eStore all the way!
Just wanted to point out how, assuming only people who have posted a reply have made a decision, $55 they didn’t refund has costed Shopp $330 so far. The power of customer reviews. “Rebuke the scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence” comes to mind. Thumbs up my friend.
PS. Did I mention your article came up in the very first results on google? I’m just sayin…
Apologies for my late replies as of recent. I’ve been rather busy.
@ MJ Glad this was helpful!
@ Duncan As for WPML, I run Transposh ony my main store’s site – it translates pages automatically via AJAX. Unless I’m misunderstanding your suggestion – this could work instead.
As for supporting very large downloads – the plugin works just fine – it does what it is meant to do. Hosting files on the other hand is a different issue entirely. I personally find that my webhost MediaTemple has plenty of space and speed to accommodate my files. As for Amazon S3, I found their interface and setup to be very confusing – hence they lost my business.
@ LD I’m glad to be of help. Quite objectively (my money lost aside – so much so that I’ve almost forgotten about it), I’ve been very happy with eStore and when there were some hiccups in the beginning, the founder of eStore spent many days trying to find a solution. Now that is true customer support – something which so many companies lack today. In my opinion, he deserves every bit coming his way.
As for how much Shopp lost, it’s probably a significant amount more than that. I know that this article has driven hundreds of people eStore’s way. Unfortunately, I had to be the one who experimented before encountering issues. I had tried to do prior research and it was spotty at best – hence this article in order to help others. Hopefully Shopp has taken note of what has been written here, and will try to improve their plugin as well as some of their documentation (in particular forum responses) – but as of this writing, they had never responded or offered up some sort of solution.
As for the first results on Google – out of curiousity, what was your search term? Thanks for letting me know!
great review thanks! I wanted to read some opinions on estore for a project I’m working on.
My google search was: compare wp estore
Only one digital product per purchase with Shopp??! Is that right? Might be an idea to front up on that one because if thats true it’s a major shortcoming.
WP e-commerce can do that – but I’m not convinced about support. If it wasn’t for the fact that I sell DDs and physicals eStore would be a no brainer. They even answer emails promptly – awesome!
eJunkie has a wordpress plug now but thats a subscription service
I sure wish I had read your review before purchasing the Shopp plugin and USPS Shipping Module. I paid for extra support and am still not happy. My client is pissed. I have spend a lot of time trying to get the store up and running that I will never be compensated for. The bulk product uploader (they don’t support it) was buggy and didn’t import all of the data (2k products) correctly so the client had to manually enter and correct data. Shipping is not correct and they are taking days to answer my emails, and then misunderstanding the problem. Very poor customer service. Lots of people have problems, it’s no wonder you cannot access the help forums until after you make the purchase. If you could see all the unanswered complaints no one would purchase.
I was using WP Shopp on my site http://www.horseconscious.com/ for a while but it was so horribly unreliable I had to stop using it. Maybe they’ve improved it since then but I wasn’t impressed by the support either, so ditto, $55 or whatever down the drain.
And it sure would have been nice, as a long-time e-junkie user, for them to send me an email notifying me of the plugin, don’t you think?? I guess programmers aren’t marketers.
So, it looks like WP eStore could be the way forward and it will pay for the e-junkie subscription in a few months.
Thanks for the info.
I had a horrible experience with Shopp and found a much better alternative. You can read about it here, if you like, just my 2 cents.
http://www.customgraffiti.com/?p=813
Well. I found everything I needed in eStore. It’s relatively inexpensive, fairly straight-forward, and the support is top-notch. The author is VERY accommodating. New features? Not a problem. It’s been up and running ever since. Since it’s not broken, then why fix it? I’d recommend people try it first.
I’ll check out eStore. We have wasted countless hours of unpaid time trying to keep our 3 Shopp client sites running and updated, and I’ve finally had enough. It would be refreshing to have an author that is responsive. Certainly haven’t had that with Shopp support. It’s terrible.
Hi Cleo,
Thanks for the nice write up on both. WPeStore’s support is indeed the best. If you ask me, all the other carts can learn from his support.
The thing I like about Shopp is their variations control. I am a printer and offer a great number of products in different variations and I found the way variations is setup in Shopp to be the best. But support is not really up there. I had a problem where I’m using a theme I bought and the paypal button was not working. Shopp said it works with the 2010 theme, so the plugin is fine. I tried to work with Dave to find out where the problem is, but he wasn’t willing to do so. If the problem was found and it was a theme code, then I could go to the theme developer with this.
I have spent weeks trying to find out where the issue is, but getting nowhere, so I think I’ll have to look at other options.
There is no eCommerce solution that works well. Each misses something. Shopp’s features are good, but their support is bad. WP-ecommerce code is buggy and support even worse. Cart66 and WPeStore are great, but their variation control and shipping options could be a bit better.
Just my two cents.
Cheers
twum
Brilliant and concise review, Cleo, thank you.
Thanks also to all the informative replies. I agree, developer support is highly prized when purchasing code/support.
I always feel that if one pays for support, replies should be timely, and, at the very least, somewhat sooner than the client can debug their code. : )
Let me add here that a few posts ago, someone made some false accusations. towards the people of eStore. While I completely tolerate and appreciate constructive feedback as well as differences of opinions, making false accusations and trying to call people out personally is not something I will tolerate unless it’s me doing the dirty work. I felt that it was in the best interest of the plugin author to remove this person’s offending comment.
Hi Cleo, I just wanted to give a quick update. We have added more gateways to the eStore plugin via the Extra shortcodes plugin. This allows for PayPal Payments Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.net AIM and ARB, and SagePay at this time with more to be added. This will allow for payments to be processed on site with PayPal Pro and Authorize.net AIM. =) You can read more about it here: http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wp-payment-gateway-bundle-plugin
I had a terrible experience with the support group on this product. I bought it and it was buggy out of the gate. It had a strike through on every price in the system which they fixed somewhat quickly, couple of days. But the worst was a little piece of code that automatically marked everything as a home delivery. My client was B to B. I recognized it had to be their code right away.
Two support personnel just could not get it. They gave me every lame excuse in the book that nothing to do with the problem I was reporting. Terrible customer service. Finally, Jonathan Davis, the owner, was included and it took only minutes to correct the problem that his support staff took 6 hours not identify. Then because I demanded to speak to a manager Jonathan Davis, banned me from further support! What a goober! Don’t buy this product. You will just be frustrated!
Nice review. This article is from last year, but Shopp hasn’t improved. The documentation is almost non-existent. I’m an 18 year veteran in app development, and I’ve never worked with anything this bad.
I’m working on a project for a client, and I hate Shopp. I have to guess at half the functions and options. Some of the function documentation has a list of options, although most are incomplete. One even has an option shown in an usage example that’s not on the list – both on the same page. One option that is documented, is wrong in the default template that is packaged with it.
My client wants a lot of pretty standard ecommerce layout things on her site, and Shopp won’t do it. It’s just not flexible enough to fit even the most common customizations. If you look at the sites in the show case, 1/4 of them are offline now – foreboding warning, here – and the rest are cookie-cutter skinned Shopp shops.
It’s bad. Stay away. Consider yourselves warned.
Good review! I personally chose eStore because of it’s lightweightness and I am very happy with my decision. Can’t afford to put an heavy ecommerce solution on my site and bring down the site performance.
Hello Cleo, I apologize for my bad English and I have something important to ask. Using the theme eStore and it’s great, simple and intuitive. One thing that I can not do. Since I installed this theme on a site I do not need motion of e-Commerce and I would like to change the green rectangle profitable deals in the all article that says “ADD TO CARD” with “MORE INFO” and divert users to a contact page. I hope I explained myself and expect an answer. Thanks for everything
Wish I saw this first.
Single BIGGEST, FUNDAMENTAL, problem is that Shopp doesn’t have a tool that will allow you to import multiple products.
If you are selling a few hundred different things, then they expect you to enter them one by one…crap product.
@Everyone. Thank you for writing in with your experiences. I’m glad to know that I wasn’t alone in my experience.
@Mark. Thank you for the update. I’m sure others will find this information helpful.
@Lisa. I agree completely. WordPress can be heavy enough as-is with all the other plugins we may be running.
@Raffaele. My apologies for the late reply, but I am not an employee nor an associate with eStore. If you have an adjustment question, it is probably best posed over on their forums.
“Irregardless.” It’s not a word. Thanks for the review.
Ha. Thanks for pointing that out Alex.
e-Store is the best business plugin for electronic downloads, probe more than 10 and not served. e-Stores has many extra features, is easy and efficient.
Francisco Carrysales