The Ultimate Jigoshop Ecommerce WordPress Plug-in Review

Jigoshop is an open-source and user-friendly WordPress e-commerce plug-in developed by highly-experienced folks at Jigowatt, a UK based company. The first public beta version of this feature-packed plug-in was released on 31 May 2011. Since then, it has been updated many times with the recently released version Jigoshop 1.11.4.

Till date, which is more than three years since its launch, Jigoshop has been downloaded over 370,000 times. Trusted and used by thousands of shops and individuals worldwide, Jigoshop provides you everything you need to set up your eStore lickety-split. If you’re looking for a simple yet very advanced eCommerce solution for your WordPress online store, then you should definitely give Jigoshop a try.

I know that everyone would be interested to know about Jigoshop controversy with WooCommerce, another free eCommerce plug-in for WordPress. Very few people know that WooCommerce was born out of a fork of Jigoshop. Yes, you heard it right! Jigoshop began its life at Jigowatt, where Mike Jolley and Jay Koster were core developers on Jigoshop. Incidentally those days Woo team was struggling to build their own WordPress eCommerce plug-in, so they hired Mike and Jay. Later, Woo team attempted to buy Jigoshop's copyrights, but Jigowatt rejected their offer. And finally, Woo team simply forked the Jigoshop codebase and branded it as their own WooCommerce plug-in.

Jigoshop Video Preview:

Jigoshop Features:

The best thing about Jigoshop is that it’s not only free to use, but also one of the most feature rich WordPress eCommerce plug-ins available. Having a minimalist code base, Jigoshop lets you get your online shop up and running in minutes. Out of the box, it offers a wide range of payment gateways, shipping tools, a beautiful dashboard, full order management, product import/export, product search and much more with a great community of developers.

Furthermore, you can extend the functionality of Jigoshop by using over one hundred extensions, out of which forty are free. There are more than 40 pre built shopping cart themes, any one of which you can use as the base for your project. Needless to say, Jigoshop is a perfect combination of easy migration options, extensive functionality and professional support packages.

Jigoshop Ease of Use:

As Jigoshop is built upon the WordPress core, it’s as easy to use as possible. With its intuitive user-interface, you can prepare and manage your shop in very less time with digital, physical and service products. Inside the Jigoshop admin dashboard, you can see how your store is performing with sortable sales graphs, stock report, and recent product orders & reviews.

Apart from this, all settings have good explanations which make it easy for a general user to configure the store layout and functionality. Adding a product with detailed descriptions and excerpts to the store is as easy as publishing a new blog post with a specific web address. There are also numerous widgets offered, which you can use to deliver your customers the best online shopping experience possible.

Jigoshop Themes:

Jigoshop currently has over 30 highly customizable and professional looking themes ranging from $35 to $155. Whether you want to build a boutique shop or fashion store, they offer fully fledged eCommerce themes suitable for all kind of online stores. Their extensive collection of themes is divided into two sections: official themes and external themes. In the first section, they are featuring their official themes, while in the second section; they have showcased Jigoshop themes designed by leading online template providers like Template Monster.

Jigoshop Inventory:

Managing inventory with Jigoshop is like a breeze. Jigoshop allows you to set the quantity of inventory for each item in your store. Once you’ve added inventory to each product, Jigoshop automatically keeps track of the amount of inventory available for sale and notifies you when the quantity of a certain item is about to hit a preset threshold level.

As I mentioned earlier, you can see which products are low/out of stock in the dashboard area of Jigoshop. One of the best things about Jigoshop is that it allows backorders. Using the product editor, you can allow/disallow backorders for each item. After viewing the simplicity of their inventory system, I must admit this is one of the most user-friendly inventory managers I’ve ever seen.

Jigoshop SEO & Marketing:

Jigoshop has a number of powerful SEO features to help you get your site easily found at the top of all major search engines. By taking advantage of SEO extension such as Jigoshop SEO Deluxe Plug-in, you can optimize your store to get ranked higher in search engine results. Additionally, if you want to make more money via your Jigoshop store, I suggest you to go through their SEO guide.

Other than this, Jigoshop offers more than 40 free and paid marketing extensions that give you the ability to reward your customers, integrate Jigoshop with your MailChimp lists, integrate Affiliates with Jigoshop, and highlight the discount offered. Overall, Jigoshop seems to be a SEO-ready solution with advanced marketing tools.

Jigoshop Payments:

All payments in Jigoshop are handled by a third-party payments processor. As built-in payment options, Jigoshop has FuturePay, Bank Transfer, PayPal Standard, Checks, and Cash on Delivery. You can use any one of them to accept payments from your customers.

In case, if you’re not satisfied with default payment gateways, there are over 70 free and paid payment gateway extensions available to choose from, including popular payment processors like PayPal Pro, ZaakPay and Amazon Payments.

Jigoshop Support:

When it comes to support, Jigoshop offers best in industry support packages both for small businesses and large enterprises. To make their support system more effective and efficient, they have divided it into different levels. While going through their support package comparison page, it seems that the more you’ll pay, the quicker you’ll get response for your queries.

One thing I really liked is that they provide initial 14 days free support with money-back guarantee for every extension that you purchase via their official website. Additionally, if you come across a bug or an issue with Jigoshop or any of its official extensions, you can directly post it to their WordPress Support Forum.

Conclusion:

As you can see in this review, Jigoshop offers almost everything you require to sell anything online. From theme to payment gateways, Jigoshop excels in all aspects of building a multi-million dollar eCommerce store. After taking a deep dive into outstanding features of Jigoshop, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that this professional WordPress eCommerce plug-in is best suited for small to medium-sized websites enterprises. Keep in mind, this plug-in is absolutely free to use. So I’m sure you’ll have no reason to feel disappointed after using it.

What do you think of Jigoshop? Let me know your views in the comment section given below!

Author Bio:- Ajeet is an experienced web developer at CreativeWebLogix – Get Your PSD Converted into Responsive HTML. His areas of interest are WordPress, HTML5, CSS3, and Responsive. In his spare time, he likes to read about new technologies and loves to play with Photoshop.Don't forget to follow @CWL_WEBDESIGN to get latest updates via Twitter.