Kathy Rose wrote:
Hi there, Cretan Studies! Nice to see you!
Have you looked at WooCommerce (Wordpress)? I just set up a small store site for my husband's hobby business and was extremely impressed with it. I think it does the things you mentioned, and it's free. It's really impressive.
The other shopping cart I'm familiar with it is for Joomla, and that's Mijoshop. I don't think it's free--I think you pay support subscription. It's really powerful and also probably does all the stuff you want. I found the learning curve was a little steeper for it than for WooCommerce (and I got my money's worth out of that support subscription!), but I would use either of them again in future projects. For a small project though, I would lean toward WooCommerce.
Good luck with your project!
Thank you Kathy, I tried WooCommerce and it fitted the bill just fine. I would have liked it even more if it supported the new "Express Checkout" feature of Paypal, allowing customers to make purchases without ever leaving your site, but still it is very clean and configurable.
I had some trouble at first because the geniuses who translated the plugin into Greek actually also translated the "slugs" themselves, which lead to all sorts of trouble, broken links, weird redirects etc.
Wordpress is actually very easy to get up and running, I had the basic and necessary settings for the site and the plugin completed in 20 minutes (including installation time).
Clearly defined and comprehensible settings, properly structured, practically no learning curve required...did not need to look into the documentation (the issue I faced was with the greek localization files, not with WooCommerce).
Woocommerce works and looks great on most themes (my personal favorites are Parabola, Nirvana) but if they are not made compatible specificallywith this plugin, the widgets one sets for the sidebar are not visible in catalogue/shop pages and some default widget (reporting categories, pages etc) show up instead, even if absent from the Widgets settings.
Found a clean and fast compatible theme, Vantage, which works great, offers some basic options but is also easy to figure out in its style.css file.
By the way, the only really appealing extension I found for my project in JED - incorporating the 'Express Checkout' feature - was
"SP Digital Goods"
Love how it allows "in-site purchases" (like buying apps in Google Playstore) and immediate access to downloads for the customer (no checking emails and stuff)
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But it costs 33 euros, which is not cheap and I had no way of testig prior to purchase, so Wordpress it is...But it would have been my pick for Joomla, surely, for selling 'digital goods"
So I would declare the project a success.
I liked how after making a test purchase, I refunded the order from Paypal and the order status was automatically changed to reflect that in WooCommerce...
Excellent!
Thanks again for the suggestion