Jigowatt jigoshop – WordPress eCommerce on the horizon
Dealing primarily with eCommerce projects we’ve built a wide variety of different sized stores. For medium to large shops we invariably use Magento but for businesses with a smaller catalog of products we tend to use our favourite CMS; WordPress.
WordPress is a fantastic solution for these smaller builds as it allows us to deliver the second-to-none UX synonymous with WordPress while also adding simple eCommerce functionality without compromising on content management.
Having explored virtually every WordPress eCommerce solution on the market we’ve never been 100% satisfied with either the functionality offered, the quality of code or indeed the support offered. So we’ve decided to throw our hat into a ring and create our own WordPress eCommerce plugin.
With the advancements made in 3.0 we’re developing an eCommerce plugin which will be easy configure and use while offering quality above any of the current offerings.
Development has begun but this is no small project and we don’t expect to launch for a couple of months yet. So I’ll just leave you with a little teaser of what we’ve built so far…
We’d love to get some response from the community in terms of desired functionality so please feel free to share any thoughts via the comments / email / Twitter / whatever.
Speaking of Twitter, dont forget to follow us for updates and more sneak previews in the future. You can also subscribe to the Jigoshop Newsletter and get a launch notification on the Jigoshop site.
David
This looks like a stellar product! Looking forward to a release.
Jay
Thanks David, be sure to subscribe at jigoshop.com for a launch notification
Josh
Really looking forward to trying out your product, it’s very impressive!
Jean-Michel Paris
1. Do you plan to add additional payment gateways (paypal, etc) such as new added modules (plugins) ?
2. Do you plan to manage stocks according to products options ?
Example: Manage stock for a “red tee-shirt in XL size”, options are “Color” and “Size”.
Jay
Yes and yes
Josh
Will you be supporting tracking # uploads and order status update emails in the initial version? This is something I consider vital for a shopping cart, and something Cart66 and other WP carts seem to lack.
Jay
Hi Josh, this isn’t something which will feature in 1.0. The main reason being that it requires integrating with third party systems. With Jigoshop being open to an international market it would be a huge undertaking to satisfy everyone.
What we will probably do is create an ideasboard once Jigoshop is live to gather feedback from the community and ascertain which features and providers are most sought after.
Our goal as of now is to launch on schedule with our proposed featurelist. This should be adequate for the majority of customers but of course Jigoshop is an ongoing project and we’ll always be open to development ideas going forwards.
Jean-Michel Paris
Hi Jay,
Don’t forget to moderate comments to see your answers in public
anna plain
It is a great leap into wordpress ecommerce unfortuantly though it seems fundamentally flawed in that it is all built into one page from the looks of the URLS. This doesn’t utalise wordpress for its most basic feature, search engines love it. Shopp is built the same way and I only started getting decent rankings once I started adding posts and adding the products to them. I would seriously consider your core build. It also stops the user being able to implement third party plugins to product pages like GD star ratings, video embedding etc. Shopp is also very slow as building on one page also affect performance.
Mike
I don’t know what your looking at – one page? Our plugin uses post types for products so I don’t think it can get any more ‘core’ than that :p
anna plain
Oh brilliant I saw that the urls for the products have the shop title in the url string rather than the category ie
http://demo.jigoshop.com/shop/playstation-move-starter-pack/
rather than
http://demo.jigoshop.com/accessories/playstation-move-starter-pack/
This coupled with a seperate section for adding products and product categories in the backend has indicated in other systems that it is all built upon a page rather than integrating with worpress posts. As this solution is integrated, you development is very exciting indeed. I am looking forward to trying it out when you launch as with the theme it looks brill.
The only feature I would suggest is allowing the system to bypass the address portion of checkoput if the user is using paypal as paypal send the address anyway.
Also to integrate paypal express checkout as one of the major features with shopp was that you could run more than one cart with the same paypal email as it would return directly to the shop the order was sent from. The other systems that I have tried that seemed promising used paypal IPN and as such the way they were set up you were limited to just one cart. As paypal don’t allow you to have more than one business account it is very limiting.
Great work guys the market is wide open for a wordpress shopping cart that actually works from a conversion viewpoint, nothing is there yet and yours seems to be a long way ahead of the rest. I think if you have an open forum for support so the community can help each other customise their features and paid priority support, per request/month/year then you will also solve the issue of monetisation versus time taken on support. If the shopping cart base is good then people will pay for direct support that is if they don’t find the answer they are looking for in the community forum.
Please let me know if you need any beta testers, what is you schedule for launch now?
Jay
We’re hoping to launch the free version next week
If you’ll have time in the next 7 days or so we could always use another beta tester. Just let me know your email address and I’ll add you to the system.
anna plain
Email sent whoo hoo can’t wait to get my teeth into this!
Jay
Where did you send the email Anna? We haven’t received it
anna plain
info@jigowatt.co.uk I will resend it
Josh Harwood
I was just looking at an invoice and thought of a great feature for the list. The option to include the “featured image” on the generated Invoice. This would be really helpful for certain clients, thinking of a jeweller that i am working with at the moment. Just for when she is fulfilling orders it makes it easy for the packers to double check they have the correct items.