[Plugin: WP e-Commerce] Poor support, don't waste money on Gold Cart

IMHO I totally agree with the above statement. My WordPress developer has lost most of his hair trying to get this plugin working (we were using the Gold version and Members module – all paid for – for an e-commerce website selling products by monthly subscription) – support and recognition of issues from WP-EC (getshopped.org) is almost non-existent.

We have had to pay a developer $000s to just get basic functions to work correctly. The developer has been pretty good (I can provide details if anyone wants it) but the amount I have paid to get this site working has negated any benefit from using software like WordPress – I might as well had a fully custom store and website built.

Shame. The plugin seems great. I’ll try the Woocommerce one next time.

I must agree. WP e-commerce is a sham.

It may get a very basic site up, but you won’t have many (if any) real options to how your site will work or display.

Shipping rates is a complete nightmare if you want to do something as simple as flat rate, per item shipping.

It wastes tons of time and space creating an entry for every possible variation combination. I still don’t know why this is even needed. It just makes no sense to create all of those variation entries unless you need to edit them.

You cannot post in the community forums without someone approving your first post. I got an email saying it would not take long to approve my first post – that was 4 hours ago and my post requesting help is still not posted.

I think they are limiting the posts to limit the number of problems and complaints.

I also purchased the “Gold Cart”. It was nothing but a golden turd.

The idea behind WordPress was to make blogging easy. It did that (at least at first – WP.org keeps adding and adding to WP and making it more and more confusing to use for the general public). But, most plugins do NOT follow that same goal.

Most plugins, like WP e-commerce, are not intuitive. They confuse instead of empower. Even the documentation is out of date and confusing in many places.

I don’t mind paying for a plugin, I just want the damned thing to be dependable and easy to use.

Because I have had so many problems with WP themes and plugins, I will be checking out Joomla and Drupal after this site. I advise you to do the same.

…Because I have had so many problems with WP themes and plugins, I will be checking out Joomla and Drupal after this site. I advise you to do the same

Jim, I can’t really agree with you on the WordPress ease of use, as I believe it’s gotten better. But I can imagine it’s made it tougher for plugin authors who don’t get paid or work off donations for their work to make time to stay up with the changes. WP-ecommerce has no such excuse though.

I will tell you that if your displease with WordPress, then you’re unlikely to like Drupal’s interface and update system. It’s as far from intuitive as sticking your hand up a dog’s ass to stop it from peeing on you. It works, but it’s nasty and can reach around and bite you!

I haven’t used Drupal before, but I have used Joomla and it looked a lot more polished than WordPress when I used it.

I had clients asking for WordPress and I saw so many others supposedly using it, so I went with it and have tried to use it for several sites over the last 2 years.

I find WordPress themes to be a scam – at least at Themeforest. They NEVER work like the demo. The documentation is frequently wrong. They are buggy as hell. Authors frequently ignore pleas for help. And there is no real way to get a refund once you are taken by these authors.

I have purchased around 45 themes on Themeforest – always hoping that the next theme would be a great purchase. With 2 exceptions, almost every theme was a complete waste of time and money.

IMHO the WordPress theme community is a scam.

OK Jim, just to clarify this thread was not started about WordPress, it’s focused on informing people about WP-ecommerce. Thanks for sharing your opinions, but further comments about WordPress itself or themes would be more appropriate in a different thread elsewhere.

Hello all,

I have read the above all comments and worrying about my project .

Can anyone give me some good suggestion whether shalll i use WP-ecommerce plugin or WooCommerce ??

I am looking for free plugins ??

Is that possible ??

and also i am more familier with wordpress even my clients wants WordPress only .

Hope i will get reply soon .

Thank You all in advance ??

And also the thing is how we can sort Products ??
by Latest updates ? Prices ? Color ? And dates ??

I tried in google but did not get much idea

I would just add that any decent plugin will probably cost money otherwise why would someone spend time developing and supporting a plugin? And presumably if you want an e-commerce plugin you are going to be selling ‘stuff’ for money so why would you expect such a plugin to be free to you?

That said, I understand WooCommerce and WP-Ecommerce basic plugins are free with additional facilitates and support being charged for.

In my experience of the WP-Ecommerce plugin, I have found it and some of the additional features we purchased (Gold and Members for example) to be buggy and the support we received was patchy to say the best. In the end we had to resort to paying a third party developer quite a substantial sum to fix fundamental issues with the plugin as WP-Ecommerce declined to help further.

However we recently discovered that the WP-Ecommerce password protected support forum / posts can still be searched and catalogued by Google. The result is that passwords and other sensitive materials were exposed to public searches. Despite WP-Ecommerce being made aware of this on 12 October 2012 they have still managed NOT to delete the posts containing the sensitive material which frankly is appalling behaviour. So I CANNOT recommend WP-Ecommerce or their ‘support’ team.

Hey swearingdad,

Thanks for your suggestions

Can’t say I agree with much of the above. Creating an ecommerce solution as feature rich as wp ecommerce is a complex undertaking. Making it work in an environment where thousands of individuals are contributing themes and plug ins that may or may not be compatible is nigh on impossible.

I’ve had some problems using wpec but most were related to conflicts with other things on the sites or pilot error, not the fault of wpec itself. It does take some effort to understand how to get it working right but once it’s up and running it works exceptionally well.

As for support most of the real issues are reported on their Google code site and you can gauge the level of commitment from the devs better there than here or in their support forum.

If you’re considering an ecommerce plug in, be prepared to work at it in a WP environment no matter which one you choose. None are perfect out of the box.

You all can add me to the ranks of the dissatisfied WPEC users. I’ve had issues with variations not changing the price or picture, shipping issues and the PayPal payments pro gateway not working.

I have a client who wants her site to go live this weekend and I was hoping that gold cart would help with the issue I’m having. I can see now that upgrading probably won’t solve anything.

I also have to agree with the lack of technical support. Many of the issues I’m experiencing are posted on the GetShopped site by other users as well. Many of these posts have not been replied to or resolved.

I am in search for an ecommerce plugin that does what it’s supposed to and is well supported. If I find one, I’ll post it here.

I agree with everything said here. My experiences with WPEC as a developer have been aweful.

I currently use this Ecommerce plugin for all of my projects:
https://shopplugin.net/

These are also some other plugins I have heard good things about:
https://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
https://jigoshop.com/

It does seem that most of this post is a general complaint against the support for the paid version of this, Gold Cart – so this post doesn’t really belong on WP.org.

Asking a moderator to close this.

That’s not really true. In my case, I tried the free version and only upgraded because I thought the paid version would have more features and support.

The free version was just as bad.

Because you don’t seem to answer it from your forum that is why WE come here and let everyone knows that you’re taking us for granted once we buy a gold cart. Like me I bought a gold cart and you did not send me the api key and it’s been 7 days already. I have sent you 2 emails and post in your forum about it.

Anyone out there who has the same experience like me let’s come together and ask the www.ads-software.com to remove the wp-ecommerce plugin in the www.ads-software.com repository.