Are you as excited as we are about all the WordPress shopping cart plugins to come this year, all the new features that will be available? We’re not normally geeks here, being good liberal arts majors one and all, but we do like making money (especially as we’re just liberal arts majors, each and every one!) and so we really appreciate it when the science majors we went to school with come out with some invention, some new piece of software, some discovery — just something that makes our lives better, especially if it makes us better at making money!
So that’s what a WordPress shopping cart is all about, really; software that’s installed on a site to help one make money more efficiently. Specifically, these plugins, as they are known in the WordPress world, help with order processing tasks, mainly clerical affairs such as calculating tax rates and shipping charges. This saves a lot of time, as can be imagined, and time is money in business, online or off. So we’re especially tickled this new year because it looks like the world of e-commerce with WordPress will take a dramatic turn for the even-better in 2012. No, we don’t have any special insider knowledge here, but we do have our collective wits about us and so are able to divine most things fairly accurately (it’s part of the reason why we’re a page-rank three blog, after all). Thus, we are confident in delivering such a prognosis based on the one simple fact below.
WooCommerce. Or, rather, we should say WooThemes: They’ve finally come out with a WordPress shopping cart of their own, called WooCommerce. This is big news if you know anything about WordPress. For WooThemes is one of the community’s great success stories, regularly featured in mainstream non-technical magazines as an example of how it’s possible to make a great living off open-source software that’s otherwise got nothing to do with you. In the same way that Microsoft has enabled a whole ecosystem of economic activity around its products and services, so too, on a much smaller but still impressive scale, has the world’s most popular blogging platform been behind many a small personal fortune. Exhibit A is WooThemes. So for them to now enter the world of e-commerce solutions with their own cart systmem is big. Really big. Why?
Because they are serious developers with the multi-million dollar-deep pockets to make it finally happen for real. They may well standardize WordPress e-commerce with their offering, something long established options such as WP e-Commerce and even Cart66 Pro has not been able to do to everyone’s satisfaction. A robust industrial-strength (that is, enterprise-level) shopping cart plugin has been the Holy Grail of WordPress plugins for years and years, and it looks like 2012 is going to be the year things are set aright at last.
But the title of this article is plural, “solutions,” concerning more than one. So who else besides WooCommerce from WooThemes? Well, there are the aforementioned WP e-Commerce and Cart66 Pro development teams, who are surely going to be harder at work than ever before improving their respective offerings in order to stay competitive with the heavy-duty programming efforts that multi-million dollar WooThemes is now bringing to this once cozy marketplace, with the upshot being big, big changes.
So, are you excited yet?? ;-)
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