January 5, 2010 
There are a number of different avenues for enabling e-commerce within your WPMU blogging network. Today we’ll examine a plugin that has recently become a viable option for WPMU. If you want a shopping cart that is free, WPMU-compatible, and a completely WordPress-contained solution, check out the WP E-Commerce plugin develped by Instinct. It has a fantastic set of features that are very flexible within WordPress, easy to style if you know a bit of CSS and simple to set up. Best of all, a great deal has been done to make sure that it works well with WPMU and it’s been operating seamlessly for about the last three months. They have a sticky post on their forums for those of us who are interested in using this plugin with WPMU.
In this post we’re going to help you get a store, and even a network of stores, set up in under 10 minutes. Did you know e-commerce could be this simple?
1. Start with a working installation of WPMU.
2. Download the WP E-Commerce Plugin and drop it in your plugins directory. Grab the Development Version, if you like to live on the edge.
3. Activate the plugin sitewide.
4. Configure the settings for your store under Products >> Settings
5. Add a product! Products >> Products.
You should be operational! If you already know what kind of settings your store will require, then you can set your store up in under ten minutes. The plugin has a decently user-friendly interface. Paypal Website Payments Standard is probably the simplest payment gateway to set up. The gateways included with the free version are Chronopay, PayPal, PayPal – Express, Google Checkout, and manual payment (for cash or money orders).
Note: Your users may get a list of directories that are not writeable and the following notification: “You won’t be able to upload any images or files here. You will need to change the permissions on these directories to make them writable.” Just follow the instructions to make those directories writeable after you activate the plugin. I have found that you will not get this error if you add the plugin to your installation and then create new blog owners after the plugin has already been activated.
Considerations:
Please keep in mind that WP E-commerce is not perfect and people are continuing to work to make it operate more smoothly with WPMU. Support for this plugin is abysmal but you may get lucky and network with some people who are using it for projects and who can help you with issues you encounter. During certain times of the year, the support forums become a virtual ghost town. Documentation for the plugin is weak. Some payment gateways are not available except through a paid upgrade, but it’s a fairly nominal fee for what you’re getting. Each subdomain you run will need to pay for the premium upgrades if you choose to use them. There are other options for e-commerce with WPMU, but they do not all share the great number of features of this plugin.
Create Your Own Premium Hosted Network of Stores
If you activate WP E-commerce sitewide you will be able to build a community of networked stores, each with their own separate logins, products, payment gateways, and settings. With a little tweaking, you can use the main blog site as an aggregate of all of your stores with featured new products selected from among the stores in the same way that you might feature posts from different blogs. Combine this with paid membership and provide hosting and support, and you have a premium hosted store network website in operation. If you need support for this plugin, please contact Instinct on their free forums. The more WPMU users they hear from, the better this plugin will become for the WPMU environment.
I’m not sure how to take this review/recommendation. If I could summarize, you’ve used it for 3 months, but the support is abysmal (your words) to non-existant and you might run into issues for which your best option may be to network with other users. It would be possibly worth considering if a paid license provided support, but that’s not noted anywhere in your post.
So, why would someone risk their business operations and customer satisfaction?
It’s been working well with WPMU for 3 months. However, I’ve used it for several years. Even if you pay for upgrades with the plugin, the support isn’t that much better. I think they’re working on getting paid support forums sometime in the future. I reviewed this one because it’s simple to set up with WPMU, has a great number of features that work out of the box, and is constantly improving. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things to consider before using it.
Yeah…
I’ve been working for several weeks with this setup and the “support” is lousy.
It has many capabilities, but out-of-the-box I found that quite a bit of legwork had to be done to get things running nicely. I tried a few templates and all required extra CSS ~help~ to get things displayed properly. Also, because some CSS code is stored in atypical places (theme.function.php anyone?) it’s not easy for a beginner to figure out.
Then there’s issues with domain mapping. The checkout page does not load correctly or function with this enabled. I’ve changed up domain mapping and also spoken with some devs over at instinct and this has yet to be corrected.
I’m not saying the whole thing’s horrible, I hope to see the domain mapping issue in particular corrected soon, but I don’t know if I’d give it the enthusiastic review you’ve provided here.
Potential, yes, but definitely proceed with caution. Just my 2 cents.
Instinct is notorious for creating plugins that are buggy, disorganized and horribly incompatible with any other plugins. And as masonjames noted, their customer support is lousy.
Worst E-commerce plugin around. The thing is impossible to skin, it comes tangled in a sea of PHP code, they charge for their plugins that dont work half the time and the backend is a mess. Not to mention to the terrible support and ghost-post foums.
Try out Shopp at shopplugin.net. its 100x better and the support is amazing.
http://www.phpurchase.com/
This is relatively new one but it’s should work quite well.
despite that how much bugs this plugin having but note it that it provides you an initial platform for E-Commerce in WordPress also they have made this plug-in to earn money and they gave a basic setup to the devs that they customize it if they want to use free and offcourse if any company serving you paid services then it is obvious that the paid and unpaid service will be having some difference
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I tried and had a nightmare with it. I will give Andrews phppurchase a whirl to see if I fair any better -:)
I totally agree with Barbara’s comment. Many thanks for sharing such an insightful article with all of us. I’ve bookmarked your blog will come back for a re-read again. Keep up the very good work.
An interesting plugin indeed, but the lack of decent support is a pain.
on a sidenote: their own wpmu implementation at http://www.getshopped.com is really nice. Most interesting part is their sign-up process. It’s a two-step process. In the second step you can choose a theme to start with.
http://getshopped.com/wp-signup.php
Does anyone know if this a custom made solution or is there a plugin to get this to work?
Getting fed up with unanswered questions in wp-ecommerce forums, and the plugin breaking down or behaving oddly each time there’s an upgrade. Is it reliable enough for us to use with WPMU?
But Cotton has a point. They’ve got themeselves a great WPMU implementation of their own plugin.
This is almost exactly what I’m planning to set up (except that mine will be for a particular niche audience with appropriate themes). So how do they do it? What’s that two-stage sign-up plugin?