Review of PHPurchase WordPress Shopping Cart
With 15 years of experience in the hosting business it is always a pleasant surprise to find a software product that does what it claims to and is designed in such a way that it is easy to use, which is the exact opposite of my experience with ecommerce software.
After reading every review that I could find on WordPress Plug-ins for e-commerce, I finally settled on the Shopp plug-in for WordPress. Unfortunately, while it may have worked fine in the end we had an unknown static route on our Linux server that stopped the communication between our server and Authorize.net. Naturally, we thought there might be something configured wrong. There was something wrong. We selected a product that had no support. If you are lucky enough and confident enough with your skills you may want to purchase Shopp’s plug-in. If your end up needing support, good luck. Nobody responded to our support requests or answered any emails. In a word, their support was non-existent. $75 down the drain. Now I realize it was that odd static route on the server and we could get it working with Authorize.net now, we just don’t want to because we found one we like even better, PHPurchase. What a joy.
PHPurchase would have been working in minutes except we were not aware of the, once again, odd static route on the server, right. Serendipity can make life better or worse. I sent off an email on a late Sunday and within a very short time had a helpful response. How cool is that. It was really PHPurchase
that debugged the fact that the server could not see Authorize.net. With that insight we tried to traceroute from the server and the only place we could not go was Authorize.net which has an IP that by chance started with a 64.x.x.x block which the static route had essentially broken.
Within minutes we fixed the glitch, configured Authorize.net and PayPal and were joyfully adding products after successfully testing a real live purchase with both payment gateways. By the way, the authors of the plug-in, PHPoet encourage the use of the Quantum Gateway, which looks at a glance to be a very affordable CDG Commerce gateway. Also, unlike Shopp and many other solutions you don’t pay more for each payment method you wish to offer. If you think about it, not having at least a few popular methods to accept payments in a shopping cart and then selling it on the side is like buying a car and then having to make a separate purchase for the tires.
One of my very favorite features early on was the small compact profile. From one icon you can insert any of your products in a heartbeat.
I also particularly like that by simply inserting a button link to one of your pages it in effect becomes a product page in your online store. This is very flexible and allows for the most straightforward means to have your product pages look like anything you want. Most shopping carts are template driven which might be helpful for those without the powerful content management features of WordPress. If your are comfortable with adding pages to your WordPress site then you really don’t need your shopping cart to create webpages for you and in my case I much prefer that it does not.
You can also sell digital files which is a popular feature that for years nobody seemed to figure out how to do. In addition the software has the sophistication to configure a product item to solicit information from the customer. This can be useful more often than one might suppose. For example, you may sell fresh seafood and want to inquire what is the best time to deliver or do they have instructions for the delivery of an item or ask them which of their domain accounts do they want us to add statistics software to, etc.
Having worked on several large ecommerce sites it is apparent to me that the complexity and clumsiness of the software that runs the sites are to some extent the unfortunate and inevitable result of feature envy. The software vendor wants to advertise as many features as possible or at least one or two more than the other guy. Think Microsoft Word. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that feature bloat will invariably make a product harder to use. For most websites having a lightweight, streamlined shopping cart is exactly what they are looking for. The balance of features that PHPurchase has is ideal for businesses that want a straightforward way to monetize their website and don’t have hundreds of items.
Compared to a product like the now defunct StoreFront software, PHPPurchase excels with a one page checkout. The ease of making a purchase on the Internet cannot be over emphasized. In StoreFront, you were forced to slow down and actually give your user information a profile name (i.e. home, office) then save it before you did anything else and half the time you were wondering what they were asking for.
Yes, a big online retailer may decide they need a solution that will keep customer’s information for a future purchase. I promise you they lose a lot of customers too. With PHPurchase everything is one single page, both address and payment information. Combine the simple checkout of PHPurchase with an elegant product like RoboForm (a utility to fill checkout forms with one click) and the shopping experience can’t get any better – and that translates to your bottom line.
After installing PHPurchase it will create several store pages. You will want to hide them using the 
plug-in called pageMash which installed on the latest 2.9.2 WordPress with no issues. Realistically, even taking time to watch the videos and having a client that already has a merchant account and gateway like Authorize.net, you can expect to setup the store and be up and running in an afternoon with the first group of products.
The software was a snap to install and learn and is powerful enough to do what most of us could hope for. As an added bonus it is nice knowing there is good support available, lots of screencasts tutorials and articles and a staff that works hard to please. PHPoet stands ready to assist with all aspects of the process. If you want to contract with them to do any of the work, it is after all what they do best. It is a no brainer to give this software big thumbs up.
