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Awhile back David Esrati wrote a post on the 3 available shopping cart systems for use with WordPress. It didn’t go into very much detail on any of them, giving each only a small paragraph. He ended by asking readers to give links to any others in the comments (there was only one addition). The first person to comment was Dan Milward the creator of Wp e-Commerce who suggested that there was no need for more competition. I beg to differ, and here’s why.

It blows me away that there are only 3 options for shopping carts that integrate into WordPress. Personally I think competition is exactly what is needed to push good development and good products to the fore.  After all how many blogging platforms are there and how much better are they for it.

At this point any cart would have a hard time catching up with WP e-Commerce. If you’ve had a look at their Gold Cart version you know they have almost everything; however, they are lacking in 3 areas.

First and most important is SEO. Sorry guys but friendly URL’s is way down on my list of important SEO factors. As long as they aren’t dynamic URLs Google et. al. have no problem with them and put little importance on them for SEO. What is killing this cart for SEO is the Title tag. Doesn’t anyone get how bad it is to have thousands of pages across hundreds of sites that all say “Products Page” believe me it’s a killer for your rankings.  Dan has recommended a solution on their support forum, but it only works for categories and I believe it would end up creating duplicate content pages which is exactly what you don’t need in the SEO department.  So another cart could come along and really clean up in this area.

The second thing is documentation. I don’t expect much for free, but when someone pays they should get more than a few photos on Flickr.

Finally there’s the support. I am torn on this one. These guys shouldn’t have to give free support. They aren’t a big crew and frankly for the free version I think the support forum is enough, even if the developers don’t hang out there much. But the additional support charges for those who buy it are a little steep.  That said, they are not the only company, by a long shot, charging for support and the person who made a complaint against them in Rip Off Reports has only shown how flawed such complaint sites can be.  I think another company could come along and offer superior customer support which might force Instinct to do more in this area to stay competitive.

All three of the above are areas of weaknesses which Instinct could do better in and probably would if there was a competitor willing to make these their strong suits.

In spite of all that, for the moment, they are the best option going so even if you don’t need it why not buy the $15.00 version and help them out. I bet it wouldn’t take many sales of whatever your selling to pay for the cart.