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questions about online shop integration

hey guys,

be warned: this is a completely offtopic, non-wpmu realted question but I knwo we have a lot of people with vast knowledge around here so here is the question:

I am looking at building/implementing my first web shop.

Its going to be a small project, it won’t be a huge web shop, so I was looking at building it on top of wordpress with one of these two plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eshop/ or http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

My problem is I haven’t ever dealt with online payments.

I see that the first plugin supports Paypal, Payson, eProcessingNetwork, Webtopay and Cash/Cheque while the second one supports Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express and many other trusted payment processors.

I am not really sure what the difference between these "providers" are, except of course their exact offer, the percentage they take, the costs etc.

What would one look at when chosing one? Does it matter at what target the web shop is aimed at?

I.E. the project I am talking about is aimed at south african citizens, meaning I am interested in offering payment by credit card VISA and MASTER card. can I chose any of the payment gateways lsited above that offer support for these two types of cards?

Any other hints/links/tips for me? I know I really need to do some serious reading but am unsure where to start.

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 9:18:25
  • Hiranthi
    • Recruit

    First of all I would never use WP E-commerce, I hate it.. I bought the gold cart last year, got no support whatsoever. Documentation sucks and they steal code from other webshop plugins. And did I mention I hate WP E-commerce?.. :wink:

    Did take a look at the eshop a while back too, but wasn’t that pleased with it either.

    I use Shopp for all the webshops I make (and highly recommend it to everyone). Jon (the author of the plugin) has helped me (and other users) numerous times via the forum, mail and even through Skype. When I couldn’t get the iDEAL Mollie payment gateway to work (in development) he took it upon himself to make the payment gateway happen and made a lot of Dutch users very happy with it (incl. me ofcourse :grinning:.

    Anyway, the guys from WP E-commerce had stolen some code of at least his plugin (and really just copy-pasted it), while they where all saying Shopp was bad news, bla bla bla..

    Shopp isn’t that old yet, but the people behind it are doing everything they can to make it an even better plugin :slight_smile:

    Oh, you can use PayPal for creditcard payments btw.

  • Ovidiu
    • Code Wrangler

    hey thanks :slight_smile:

    heard of shopp recently, but didn’t have time to check it out yet.

    I know about PayPal as the simplest solution, but I am still investigating about availability and acceptance of PayPal in South Africa as this is where the project I am working on is targeted at.

  • Hiranthi
    • Recruit

    There are a few different types of PayPal (Express, Standard). Don’t know what the difference is between them but I know that there’s also the possibility of not having a PP account when paying with CC (I believe that the owner of the PP account it gets on has to edit something for that in the PP control panel @ PayPal’s website).

    Anyway, Shopp also has a default built-in payment gateway for offline payment with creditcards (have no idea how you would use that, because CC’s aren’t that popular around here).

  • Hiranthi
    • Recruit

    Personally I would never use Magento (or osCommerce). Did try to install it on my VDS a while back (and a year before that) but it needed so much changes (ridiculous ones) that I decided to throw in the towel and never look at it again.

    I’m sure it can be useful for larger webshops, but if you want to use a CMS incl. a shop for not too much products I’d always recommend Shopp (there are people that use Shopp for large webshops too btw).