In my work as a WordPress developer, I spend a lot of time on e-commerce sites. These sites generally use either WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, the most popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress.
The other thing I know about is PayPal, which has simple purchase buttons that I use on occasion.
I personally love WooCommerce, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to its potential drawbacks:
EDD is beautifully written by one of the best plugin developers out there, Pippin Williamson. Its obvious limit, though, is that it only handles downloads—not tangible, shippable products.
PayPal is, of course, a really well-known payment gateway. It’s fairly simple to use, but it has its own issues:
I was intrigued to hear about Snipcart, whose value proposition—as best as I understand it—is “simpler, better e-commerce,” with an emphasis on minimal code and a minimal e-commerce backend.
Snipcart does seem to have a bit of a checkered history with WordPress, including a cancelled plugin. This isn’t that surprising, given WordPress’s unique ways of handling data: Snipcart works through HTML code paste-ins, and WordPress has too much going on under the hood to accommodate that easily.
So I thought I’d present the code for a simple WordPress integration in Snipcart. It’s short—around 50 lines of code—and dead-simple: it doesn’t add any admin pages, settings lists, etc., and you control it with a simple shortcode that you can drop anywhere in your posts, widgets, and pages.
#wordpress