Choosing the right WordPress shopping cart for my needs should have been a piece of cake. Unlike many other people looking for such functionality, I don’t need to deal with shipping issues because I’m selling digital products, downloadable fare like music files and eBooks.
Yet my foray into the world of WordPress eCommerce could not have been more complicated. Some of it is my fault, as I have an obsessive personality and will wring my fingers over the smallest detail — such as AJAX soft add-to-cart effects. But some of it is really nothing more than simply the state of affairs right now, which is surprisingly paltry when it comes to WordPress eCommerce.
I eventually decided on Cart66 Pro though I was initially very much into the Tribulant WordPress Shopping Cart plugin. What the rest of this post will deal with is my experience deciding between these two options.
I liked Tribulant’s offering very much at first because it was the only commercial (that is, paid-for) solution to offer anything like the elegant JavaScript effects that’s now becoming standard for online retail — the aforementioned soft add-to-cart does not send buyers into the cart page but keeps them on the same page. This is important as the old way of doing things unconsciously communicated to the customer that now it’s time to checkout and be done, while it’s arguably more important that they keep shopping!
However, being the obsessive type that I am (in other words, a perfectionist) I had to have things just right — I don’t believe in compromises: it’s all or nothing with me! Thus, if I was going to have an AJAX cart at all, it had to have that fancy effect just so. (Specifically, I had in mind the best elements of both Volusion and 3dcart’s soft add-to-cart effects.)
Now Tribulant was willing to customize their software for me, at additional cost. However, they are, apparently, South African college kids busy with school, never mind a successful business, and therefore the deal eventually fell through, victim of scheduling conflicts on their end.
So that basically left me with Cart66 since I really liked their administrative interface, in particular how immediately obvious it was how I could style the add-to-cart button and its placement on the page — things like that. For my rather pedestrian purposes (again, digital downloads), it was all right. These folks weren’t going to customize anything for me, however. But that’s okay, being an all-or-nothing kind of person: and so I went with them.
Yes, it’s really all as mundane as that. But like I mentioned at the outset, it was anything but simple, as I investigated many shopping cart solutions. That paltry state of affairs also noted above? It actually made choosing harder, believe it or not. While there is such a thing as embarras de richesse, there also exists the opposite situation, a poverty of choices, at least if I wanted my WordPress cart just so.
That’s why I look forward to next year with great excitement. I expect that by springtime there will have been quite a lot of movement where WordPress carts are concerned. Indeed, I expect Cart66 to have finally provided just the kind of AJAX effects I’d been looking for, as it’s probably been the first or second most-sought feature request in internal company polling of its customers! Such an upgrade is almost certain to come to pass given all the intellectual creativity right now in WordPress eCommerce, with some serious companies putting out some potentially serious shopping cart systems at last.