WooCommerce vs Simple Shopping Cart

WooCommerce is the open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress. Our core platform is free, flexible, and amplified by a global community. The freedom of open-source means you retain full ownership of your store’s content and data forever. Whether you’re launching a business, taking brick-and-mortar retail online, or developing sites for clients, use WooCommerce for a store that powerfully blends content and commerce. Create beautiful, enticing storefronts with themes suited to your brand and industry. Increase revenue with an optimized shopping cart experience that converts. Customize product pages in minutes using modular product blocks. Showcase physical and digital goods, product variations, custom configurations, instant downloads, and affiliate items. Sell subscriptions, bookings, or memberships, with our developer-vetted extensions. Rise to the top of search results by leveraging WordPress’ SEO advantage. Build on a platform that scales. Get flexible ecommerce for high-volume stores. ALL THE TOOLS YOU NEED TO SELL Built-in tools and popular integrations help you efficiently manage your business operations. Many services are free to add with a single click via the optional Setup Wizard. Choose how you want to get paid. Conveniently manage payments from the comfort of your store with WooPayments (Available in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy). Securely accept credit cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers, and cash thanks to 100+ payment gateways – including Stripe, PayPal, and Square. Configure your shipping options. Print USPS labels right from your dashboard and even schedule a pickup with WooCommerce Shipping (U.S.-only). Connect with well-known carriers such as UPS and FedEx – plus a wide variety of delivery, inventory, and fulfillment solutions for your locale. Simplify sales tax. Add WooCommerce Tax or similar integrated services to make automated calculations a reality. Grow your business, add features, and monitor your store on the go WooCommerce means business. Keep tabs on the performance metrics most important to you with a powerful and flexible central dashboard built into WooCommerce. Expand your audience across marketing and social channels with Google Ads, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Facebook integrations. You can always check out the in-dashboard Marketing Hub for fresh ideas and tips to help you succeed. Enhance store functionality with hundreds of free and paid extensions from the WooCommerce Marketplace. Our developers vet each new extension and regularly review existing extensions to maintain Marketplace quality standards. We are actively looking for products that help store builders create successful stores. Manage your store from anywhere with the free WooCommerce mobile app (Android and iOS). Spoiler alert: Keep an ear out for the slightly addictive “cha-ching” notification sound each time you make a new sale! Own and control your store data – forever With WooCommerce, your data belongs to you. Always. If you opt to share usage data with us, you can feel confident knowing that it’s anonymized and kept secure. Choose to opt-out at any time without impacting your store. Unlike hosted ecommerce solutions, WooCommerce store data is future-proof; you’re free to export all your content and take your site to any platform you choose. No restrictions. Why developers choose (and love) WooCommerce Developers can use WooCommerce to create, customize, and scale a store to meet a client’s exact specifications, making enhancements through extensions or custom solutions. Leverage hooks and filters to modify or create functionality. Integrate virtually any service using a robust REST API and webhooks. Design and build custom content blocks with React. Inspect and modify any aspect of the core plugin code. Speed up development with a lightning-fast CLI. The core platform is tested rigorously and often, supported by a dedicated development team working across time zones. Comprehensive documentation is updated with each release, empowering you to build exactly the store required. Be part of our growing international community WooCommerce has a large, passionate community dedicated to helping merchants succeed – and it’s growing fast. There are WooCommerce Meetups in locations around the world that you can attend for free and even get involved in running. These events are a great way to learn from others, share your expertise, and connect with like-minded folks. WooCommerce also has a regular presence at WordCamps across the globe – we’d love to meet you. Contribute and translate WooCommerce is developed and supported by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com and Jetpack. We also have hundreds of independent contributors, and there’s always room for more. Head to the WooCommerce GitHub Repository to find out how you can pitch in. WooCommerce is translated into multiple languages, including Danish, Ukrainian, and Persian. Help localize WooCommerce even further by adding your locale – visit translate.wordpress.org. Connection to WooCommerce.com You can connect your store to WooCommerce.com to manage your subscriptions on WooCommerce Marketplace and receive product updates without leaving WordPress admin. Connection also enables installation of purchased products right from WooCommerce.com and streamlines access to technical support. If you’d like to learn about what data is gathered and how it is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

The Simple Shopping Cart plugin enables you to effortlessly add ‘Add to Cart’ buttons for your products or services directly on your website. This lightweight plugin transforms your WordPress site into a fully functional e-commerce platform, allowing you to sell products and services with ease. With this plugin, your customers have the convenience of paying for their selected items using popular payment gateways such as PayPal and/or Stripe. You can easily display the shopping cart on any post, page, or sidebar. The cart provides users with a clear view of their selected items, allowing them to adjust quantities or remove items effortlessly. The plugin offers the newest/latest PayPal Commerce Platform (PPCP) checkout option. You can enable it in the settings menu of the plugin. Checkout Process Demonstration It offers a simple and seamless checkout process for your customers. To see a demonstration of how the checkout process works, please refer to the following video: Easily Create Products You will be able to create products by using shortcodes dynamically. If you have a responsive theme, the shopping cart’s output will adapt seamlessly to ensure a mobile-friendly shopping experience. Furthermore, this plugin provides a simple solution for selling digital products. To see a demonstration of how you can effectively sell your digital media files using the simple cart plugin, please refer to the following video: Engineered for a Lightweight Solution Designed as a lightweight solution with minimal lines of code and a streamlined set of options, this plugin ensures optimal site performance. Moreover, it is designed to be a low maintenance solution, minimizing the likelihood of frequent site disruptions caused by upgrades. With this plugin, you can enjoy a stable and hassle-free shopping cart functionality while maintaining the overall stability of your website. Simple Shopping Cart Plugin, interfaces with the PayPal sandbox and Stripe testmode to allow for testing. Documentation For documentation, video tutorials, screenshots, support, and updates, please visit: Simple Shopping Cart Documentation or Simple Shopping Cart Details Page Features Easily create “add to cart” button with options if needed (price, shipping, options variations). The cart’s shortcode can be displayed on posts or pages. Use a function to add dynamic “add to cart” button directly in your theme. Minimal number of configuration items to keep the plugin lightweight. Sell any kind of tangible products from your site. Ability to sell services from your your site. Sell any type of media file that you upload to your WordPress site. For example: you can sell ebooks (PDF), music files (MP3), audio files, videos, photos, images etc. Your customers will automatically get an email with the media file that they paid for. Show a nicely formatted product display box on the fly using a simple shortcode. Option to enable terms and conditions for your customers to agree to before they checkout. Uses the newest/latest PayPal checkout option. Option to use the PayPal Commerce Platform Checkout option. You can enable it from the settings menu of the plugin. Option to use the smart payment buttons of PayPal. Allows the customers to checkout in a popup window (using a credit card, paypal or paypal credit). Your customers will be able to use the PayPal’ Pay in 4 payment option (Buy Now Pay Later). You can use PayPal sandbox to do testing if needed (before you go live). Ability to offer the Stripe checkout option. Your customers can conveniently make credit card payments through the secure Stripe payment gateway. You can use Stripe testmode to do testing if needed (before going live). The Stripe checkout will display payment method options based on what you, as the merchant, have enabled in your Stripe account. You can offer a manual/offline payment option using the Manual Checkout feature. Ability to display the order summary on the ‘Thank You’ page. Refer to this documentation for more details. The orders menu will show you all the orders that you have received from your site. Ability to configure an email that will get sent to your buyers after they purchase your product. Ability to configure a sale notification email that gets sent to the site admin when a customer purchase your item(s). Ability to configure discount coupons. Offer special discounts on your store/shop. You can create coupons and give to your customers. When they use coupons during the checkout they will receive a discount. Create discount coupons with an expiry date. The coupon code automatically expires after the date you set. Compatible with WordPress Multi-site Installation. Ability to specify SKU (item number) for each of your products in the shortcode. Ability to customize the add to cart button image and use a custom image for your purchase buttons. Ability to customize the add to cart button text via shortcode parameter on a per product basis. Track coupons with the order to see which customer used which coupon code. Ability to add a compact shopping cart to your site using a shortcode. Ability to show shopping cart with product image thumbnails. Ability to use a custom checkout page style. Ability to configure region based shipping additions. Store pickup option – let customers pick up orders from your store. Ability to use blocks to add the ‘add to cart’ button and the ‘shopping cart’ to your posts/pages/sidebar. Option to enable AJAX add to cart buttons for a smoother user experience. Option to hide the quantity field in the shopping cart. This can be useful for a site selling only digital products where the quantity is always 1. Works nicely with responsive WordPress themes. Can be translated into any language. and more… Shopping Cart Setup Video Tutorials There is a series of video tutorials to show you how to set up the shopping cart plugin on your site. Check the video tutorials here. Language Translations The following language translations are already available: English German Spanish French Breton Italian Japanese Polish Czech Hebrew Swedish Norwegian Danish Turkish Dutch Brazilian Portuguese You can translate the plugin using this documentation. Developers If you are a developer and you need some extra hooks or filters for this plugin please let us know. Github repository Usage 1) To add an ‘Add to Cart’ button for a product, simply add the following shortcode to a post or page next to the product. Replace PRODUCT-NAME and PRODUCT-PRICE with the actual name and price. [wp_cart_button name="PRODUCT-NAME" price="PRODUCT-PRICE"] 2) To add the shopping cart to a post or page (eg. checkout page) add the following shortcode to a post or page or use the sidebar widget to add the shopping cart to the sidebar. The shopping cart will only be visible in a post or page when a customer adds a product. [show_wp_shopping_cart] 3) Alternatively, you have the option to utilize the Gutenberg editor blocks provided by this plugin to conveniently insert the add to cart button and shopping cart in desired locations within your content. Read the documentation for using the blocks 4) To insert the ‘Add to Cart’ button from a template or PHP file, you can utilize the following PHP function: Replace PRODUCT-NAME and PRODUCT-PRICE with the actual name and price. Using Product Display Box Here is an exmaple shortcode that shows you how to use a product display box. [wp_cart_display_product name="My Awesome Product" price="25.00" thumbnail="http://www.example.com/images/product-image.jpg" description="This is a short description of the product"] Simply replace the values with your product specific data Using a compact shopping cart Add the following shortcode where you want to show the compact shopping cart: [wp_compact_cart] Using Shipping To apply a shipping cost to your product, use the ‘shipping’ parameter. Below is an example of how to include it in a shortcode: [wp_cart_button name="Test Product" price="19.95" shipping="4.99"] Visit the shipping setup documentation page for more details. Using Variation Control (Product Variations) To enable variation control, use the variation parameter. Below is an example of how to include it in a shortcode: [wp_cart_button name="Test Product" price="25.95" var1="VARIATION-NAME|VARIATION1|VARIATION2|VARIATION3"] Example shortcode usage: [wp_cart_button name="Test Product" price="29.95" var1="Size|small|medium|large"] To add multiple variations to a product (such as a second or third variation), use the following format: [wp_cart_button name="Test Product" price="29.95" var1="Size|small|medium|large" var2="Color|red|green|blue"] To add variations with price modifiers to a product (so the selected variation can update the price), use the following format: [wp_cart_button name="Test Product" price="15.00" var1="Size|small|medium::5|large::10" var2="Color|red|green::2|blue::3" var3="Sleeve|short|full::5"]