Building Web Apps with WordPress

Chapter 15. Ecommerce

At some point, you may want to charge for access to your app or otherwise accept payments on your site. In this chapter, we’ll go over the best ecommerce and membership plugins available and give you a few pointers for choosing between them. We’ll also go through setting up a typical paywall in the software as a service (SaaS) model.

Choosing a Plugin

There are many different plugins that will allow you to accept payments on your site. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Choosing between the various plugins can be daunting, but we’re here to help.

WordPress ecommerce plugins generally fall into two main categories: shopping cart plugins and membership plugins. We’ll also cover a couple of plugins that don’t fall inside these categories exactly.

All plugins in this section have these features in common:

• Integration with multiple payment gateways
• Secure checkout forms
• Saved order information
• Products (or membership levels) with pricing

Shopping Cart Plugins

The plugins we’ll cover in this section focus around offering products for sale on your site.

Features of these plugins include:

• A products custom post type
• The ability to browse products
• The ability to search through products
• The ability to purchase multiple products at once
• Support for shipping addresses and shipping price calculations
• Support for custom tax rules

Our favorite: Jigoshop

Why: the Jigoshop ecommerce plugin is released under the GPL license and available in the WordPress plugin repository. ...