The latest WordPress shopping cart to hit the scene is WooCommerce from venerable custom theme makers WooThemes. It boasts a number of features all brought together within one package, something that has long been missing from even the most lauded solutions available. It also happens to be a fork of Jigoshop, a competitor, and this fact has occasioned quite a groundswell of ill feelings within the community.
Be that as it may, this very quick review of their eCommerce plugin will only deal with cart functionality. Moreover, we shall investigate matters only as they relate to digital downloads. This is to keep everything simple, as befits a preliminary look! Besides, any analysis at this time can only be preliminary because of how very new WooCommerce is, having only been released at the end of September and occasioning no less than three updates in about as many weeks.
Anyway: Setting up WooCommerce is easy but can be quite involved (another good reason to limit the scope of our review), even for a digital products-only store. This is because WooCommerce is quite powerful, with the potential to power some enterprise-level operations. Running such a business, however, will likely require industrial-strength functionality in the form of extensions (basically plugins for a plugin — yet another good reason to contain the range of this report) — as they are made available, for a price (such is WooThemes’ business model); remember, this is the absolute latest shopping cart offered for WordPress.
Most of the complexity in the case of a digital products store involves customer accounts. Disable these (by simply deleting the user account creation and login pages, for example) and the whole affair is about as simple as the dProduct download functionality seen on other cart systems. This of course basically renders moot the whole point of using such a powerful plugin like WooCommerce!