Why use WordPress for ecommerce?

When most think of traditional online shopping cart software, Magento, Zencart, osCommoerce and OpenCart come to mind, but WordPress is becoming a powerful osCommerce trend.

As a web developer of over 20 years. I've had significant experience with each of these eCommerce solution programs plus.

Here are some options traditional osCommerce software have that WordPress online shopping carts don't offer.

Traditional eCommerce software

1. Shipping calculation modules for USPS, FedEX and UPS.
2. Extensive order processing process. This is good for keeping track of orders and alerting the buyer of their order status.
3. Built in newsletter options.
4. Lots of themes and templates to choose from.

WordPress eCommerce software

1. Faster loading pages including the admin interface pages.
2. A larger selection of powerful website plugins and modules to choose from.
3. A blog page option. This alone is a very significant advantage over the other shopping cart solutions.

So you can see that the traditional eCommerce software has some advantages and vice versa, but here's why I think WordPress is better.
The 'shipping calculators' are handy and WordPress lacks this in most of it's themes, but not all of them. WordPress is new to the world of eCommerce and improving every month.

The traditional eCommerce solutions have more themes and templates to choose from, but most of them are out of date and not Web 2.0. Most almost all purchasable WordPress themes are Web 2.0.
Traditional online store software have newsletter features built in while WordPress doesn't, but this isn't a bad thing.
All osCommerce software that send email newsletters have to throttle the emails which can take weeks to finish sending out newsletters. Because these scripts are sending email newsletters, and not an actual email server, there's a high chance the emails will fall into customer spam folders. Also, there's no way a successful online store newsletter feature will be functional once a store has over 5000 customers.

The best thing to do is to invest in an email list service at the start. Most Newsletter services are free for the first 500 sign-ups anyway and they are fully integrate-able with all online shopping cart programs including WordPress.

WordPress osCommerce doesn't have a very sensitive order process. With Magento there are label printing options, mailing feature options, 'order', 'processing', and 'sent' stages. The customer can receive email notes at each stage and have the option to track orders... All this is built into Magento. WordPress is much simpler, but the combination of fast loading web pages and a faster simpler process means less time processing orders. WordPress has less features to offer in this area, but it will get you by and in the end you can spend time doing what really matters for your business I.E. advertising, blogging to generate website traffic and making sales.