Woothemes has released a new free Ecommerce plugin named as WooCommerce. Till now WP e-Commerce plugin from GetShopped has gained much popularity with over 1,346,175 downloads. That’s a whooping figure, right? But it seems now we’ve got a worthy competitor from Woothemes.
Closer look at WooCommerce
Now let’s take a closer look at this plugin. After installing and activating this theme, you can see a new menu for “WooCommerce” and “Products”. Here, take a look at this screenshot:
WooCommerce menu opens some new options like settings, reports, orders and coupons. The “settings” part is what needs to be configured on the first installation of this plugin. Set your preferences from this section. The screenshot above is just of the “General” tab, but you will also need to check all the tabs and configure them.
Coming to one of the most important parts. The payment gateways setup. It seems that currently there are only 3 payment gateways.
- BACS (Bank Account Clearing System) which is also known as direct bank transfer/wire transfer
- Cheque
- PayPal
More payment gateways like PayPal Pro, Google Checkout, 2Checkout, Sage Pay, Payson, etc can be purchased. They call it as extensions. So to sum it up, currently there are 6 commercial themes and 9 commercial extensions available.
Add Product Page
It seems that they have used Custom taxonomy for “products”. I think that’s a good idea to differentiate between normal posts and products. User’s will find it easy to just click on “Add Products” and start adding their products.
Take a look at the screenshot of this page for a better idea:
One functionality which I would still like to have is “Bulk upload”. E.g. there should be some feature so that a CSV or Excel file can be filled out with product data and then can be uploaded and voila, all products are live on the site.
Free Store Theme
It’s not about just the plugin, but you can also download the free store theme named as Wootique. It’s so true that we all like freebies, and therefore here’s the offering of a free Ecommerce theme from woothemes. Wootique makes full use of all of WooCommerce features. And don’t forget to download and install WooCommerce plugin, as that would be required to run this theme. Below are download links for both – the theme and plugin. So go ahead, download and try out the new WooCommerce.
Leave a Reply