Comments on: It’s Time to Shopp

By: Oral Boston

Oral Boston — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:33:53 +0000

Great post. In July 2009 I stumbled across Shopp as I searched for a WordPress based ecommerce solution for a client and found it to be fantastic. I concur with your findings and applaud Jonathan for the fantastic product he has put together. I now regularly recommend Shopp for all my clients that have WordPress based sites.

The only issue I have had with using Shopp is that I have found performance to be sluggish when I have more than 100+ products (in particular if the products have lots of options). Not sure if this is specifically an issue with Shopp or just a general limitation with WordPress and/or the webhost my client has used.

By: raj

raj — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:43:11 +0000

it’s good blog and i really enjoyed, thanks

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:33:11 +0000

Your blog posts always seem so timely with my current project issues! Thanks for the wonderful post, you really helped me out of bind. Shopp is just what I was looking for! (and your tips helped a ton with using conditional tags)

By: Joshua Giblette

Joshua Giblette — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:01:27 +0000

@Jonathan – Thanks for your reply to my article. One thing that I actually forgot to mention is how fantastic your team has been in responding to inquires and support tickets. It’s great to find a team that supports their product 100% and are quick to respond to the community’s requests and concerns.

Also thanks for walking through the issues that I noted.

Your explanation as to why Shopp does not set up full paths with categories makes total sense. It would be nice though if there was a feature to select whether or not to use category paths, as some sites may not have products that live in multiple categories. This would mostly help increase usability in being able to use conditional tags on single product pages.

Thanks again for your ongoing support and advancements to this wonderful plug-in. I look forward to seeing what lies in store for Shopp in the future!

By: Jonathan Davis

Jonathan Davis — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:36:33 +0000

Joshua, great to read about your experience with Shopp. I’m very, very pleased to see your candor about where Shopp succeeds and more importantly where it is lacking. We’d very much like to address those issues.

If I may, I’d like to respond to your points in the “Cons” list. I think the first and third points “Conditional Tags are tricky” and “Documentation is very scattered” are part of the same problem. So that’s an important one to figure out so we can solve two problems at once. I’d really like to tackle this issue, but as I am so ingrained in the project, I have a hard time looking at the documentation as someone new to the project. I monitor usage analytics, but so far it has not been revealing as to what we’re missing. We’ll keep working at it though.

On point #2, “Permalink structure does not include a full path to a product by default”
We actually had set Shopp up to support full path (by category) to the product, but as products can live in multiple categories, this can create multiple URLs to the product. This has a negative impact on SEO (ala canonical URLs), and so we changed the behavior to build URLs without category paths so that all products would have a single, unchanging permalink.

There’s not much to address on point 3, as we think its not just a fair price, but perhaps even a generous price for the amount of features and functionality we’re providing (and constantly adding).

Thanks again for your article as it gives your readers an understanding of what Shopp brings to the table as part of a developers arsenal of tools. It also helps me better understand where we need to improve! Cheers!