E-commerce Multisite on WordPress.
I’ve spent countless hours looking for a wordPress multi-site e-commerce solution. Here is what i went through before settling on my final solution.
- WpEcommerce There where a few bugs when i was testing this. And answers in the forum where hard to come by. This was the premium version of the plugin too.
- Shopp Nice plugin but, doesn’t support multisite as yet.
- YAK Probably not suited to my audience, the use of shortcodes could make it a hard to explain to users how to upload products.
- Cart66 (phpurchase) Tax options not available for Australia
I used WPMU’s Marketpress for the final solution. It was really the only option i had for an E-commerce multisite with wordpress.
The draw-backs to WPMU where plentiful.
- WPMU products themes/plugins are loaded with unused buddypress code. I don’t use buddypress. I don’t even know what it is exactly.
- The marketpress software i’snt brilliant but it works.
- The only source of documentation is the forum
- I found The support team frustrating. They would prefer to dodge questions rather then provide straight answers on the software capabilities. They are in america somewhere and there is a massive time difference to Melbourne. This made the process so slow.
- So many times i asked the support team detailed questions, with screenshots etc, only to wait 15 hours for a basic routine response like “Is the plugin switched on?”
- Fortunately for WPMU, when your monthly membership expires you aren’t allowed to post forum messages. I think this is quite an unethical business practice. I feel as if I’m paying to notify them of bugs in their software
- WPMU are expensive.
This was a difficult project in general as there is plenty of functionality to consider with multisites. You have multiple accounts, multiple sites, different user roles and capabilities Gasp I got in done, and i have got to say I quite enjoyed creating this monster. New people sign up everyday. New products being uploaded consistently and for me, it’s a peek inside a world of craft I never new existed.
