Created by UK-based company Jigowatt, Jigoshop was an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. This feature-packed plugin’s beta version was launched on May 31, 2011.
Jigoshop soon became a very popular choice for many WordPress online store owners. It was used by thousands of store owners around the world. It had everything that e-commerce shop owners needed. It ran on the freemium principle. The core version of the plugin was free for anyone to download and install with additional optional paid themes and add-ons.
The plugin was widely used because of its availability and the vast array of features that it offered. Jigoshop made creating and operating online stores simple thanks to its minimalist code base.
Users had immediate access to an intuitive dashboard, product search, product import and export, payment gateways, complete order management, shipping tools, and much more. A dedicated development team supported all of the plugin’s features.
Jigoshop also offered various different extensions, many of which were available free of charge. This included pre-designed shopping cart themes that could be used as the basis for a wide variety of projects. Jigoshop was a perfect blend of professional support packages, extensive functionality, and simple migration options.
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Jigoshop Review – How It Was?
Jigoshop was incredibly easy to use. Its simple user interface allowed people to easily manage and maintain their online stores with physical, digital, and service products. Users could use Jigoshop’s admin dashboard to access recent product orders and reviews, stock reports, use sortable sales graphs, and other relevant information to assess their store’s performance.
The setting explanations were useful and helped users configure their online store functionality and layouts easily. Adding new products to store with excerpts and detailed descriptions was no more complicated than publishing new blog posts. There were additional widgets available that could be used to enhance customers’ overall shopping experiences.
Jigshop had over 30 professional-looking themes. These themes ranged in price from $35 to $155. These full-fledged e-commerce themes were perfect for fashion stores, beauty outlets, and all kinds of other specialty shops.
Themes were divided into two primary categories: official themes and external themes. External themes were created by Template Monster (check ONE by Template Monster review) and other popular theme developers.
Managing your Jigoshop inventory was simple. You could set the quantity of inventory for each item in your store. After product inventories were added, Jigoshop monitored the quantities of each item that was available for sale automatically. It would even notify users when the inventory amounts of specific items were due to reach pre-determined threshold levels.
Jigoshop also had impressive features to enhance search engine optimization. Jigoshop’s SEO Deluxe plugin allowed users to maximize their online store’s potential by improving their search engine result rankings.
Jigoshop used third-party payment gateways for store orders. Bank transfers, checks, cash on delivery, FuturePay, and PayPal Standard were the payment options that were already integrated as options. Any of these methods were available to accept customer payments.
There were also over 70 free and paid payment gateway extensions available for users who weren’t satisfied with Jigoshop’s default payment methods. These options included Amazon Payments, PayPal Pro, ZaakPay, and other various payment processors.
Jigoshop had support packages for small and large businesses. Their support services were broken down into levels to make their support services more effective and efficient.
Jigoshop was a one-stop solution for online stores. Its payment gateways, themes, and other unique features helped online stores excel.
Forking Jigoshop – How WooCommerce Was Born?
What most people probably don’t know was that WooCommerce was born out of a fork of Jigoshop. WooThemes forked the Jigoshop plugin into WooCommerce. This caused quite a stir in the online community.
Jigowatt employees Jay Koster and Mike Jolley were core developers for Jigoshop. The plugin which quickly grew in popularity and started gaining traction in the WordPress community. WooThemes was struggling to build their own e-commerce plugin, so they sent job offers to Jay and Mike.
The pair accepted WooThemes’ job offer. WooThemes then offered to buy Jigoshop’s copyright so that they could take over the project. However, Jigowatt rejected the offer, stating that it was unfair.
It is said that WooThemes’ bid to purchase the Jigoshop project significantly undervalued the actual worth of Jigoshop and that it didn’t cover even the initial development costs. It also failed to consider the time, effort, and planning that was put into the project by the community and the developers.
After the initial offer was rejected, WooThemes then made an offer to “collaborate” with Jigowatt. The collaboration offer included conditions that would grant WooThemes complete strategic control over the plugin’s future development and direction. Jigowatt rejected that offer also.
This led to WooThemes’ decision to fork Jigoshop’s codebase and brand it as their own product.
Forking has always been a very sensitive issue for open source projects. Forking is a process of taking someone else’s source code and modifying it to start the development of your own code.
This is allowed under the GPL license, which plugins on WordPress repository fall under. WordPress itself actually started life as a fork of blogging software b2/Cafelog.
The original copyright holder of that code doesn’t have to approve the process or even be informed that it happened. This is a very useful feature if a developer has given up on the project and let it stagnate so anyone can continue his work.
Forking has also been used in instances when two parties working on a particular project disagree on the project’s direction. Forking tends to be a much less productive method because it can divide the users and developers into two camps.
Forking of codebase and project is completely legal under the terms and rights of any GPL license. There’s nothing that can prevent anyone from doing so. Forking is also used within GitHub to display another way of contributing to a project’s original code.
WooCommerce continued to grow and was eventually acquired by Automattic in 2015. Jigoshop also continued to do well, but Jigowatt eventually sold the plugin to Proxar IT Consulting in 2014.
End Of Jihoshop eCommerce Plugin
A version 2.0 of the Jigoshop plugin was released on the WordPress plugin repository in 2016. as a completely new plugin called Jigoshop eCommerce. The new release was promoted as a significant improvement for the plugin in terms of increased speed.
The plugin was rebuilt and added Symfony’s Dependency Injection component. This addition improved the plugin’s speed by lessening the impact of loading. This allowed Jigoshop developers to use the auto-load feature when loading plugins, override Jigoshop classes, and use the Jigoshop admin panel’s settings menus to add tabs and subpages.
The new version was three times faster than the original plugin when comparing performance in placing orders, adding items to orders, managing shopping carts, and other routine tasks.
The development team improved speed without having to use real caching but was able to use WordPress’ Transient API and Memcached to improve the plugin’s performance further.
Jigoshop eCommerce supported tools such as Bower, Composer, and Gulp to control dependencies and automate specific tasks.
Checkout and cart experiences were redesigned with a streamlined interface and purchasing process to encourage more customers to buy. Product pages were given more modern and appealing designs.
There were also improvements to the interface, including a complete revamp of the settings. Automatic saving was added to many fields, both the admin and on the frontend. For example, when adding product attributes, they would be saved automatically.
Jigoshop’s team of developers were working on additional upgrades. Some of those upgrades included extra settings, adding My Account and My Orders pages, additional payment gateways, variables, downloadable and external product types, and more shipping methods, coupons implementation, etc.
They were also creating a transitional tool for online stores that were still using the original version of the Jigoshop plugin because upgrading to the newer version was a major overhaul.
Reasons for why Jigoshop developers abandoned the project and stopped developing the plugin without any news or even statement is unknown.
The last version of Jigoshop eCommerce was 2.1.18. Unfortunately, the plugin is discontinued and has been closed as of January 3, 2020, and is not available for download.
Jigoshop Alternatives
While many various WordPress plugins offer the option to create and manage your online store, the most popular and worthy options are WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
1. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best solutions for companies that want to either create an online store or just want to integrate a shopping cart option to their existing WordPress website. The core WooCommerce is available free of charge.
With more than 5 million downloads, WooCommerce is the best choice for your online store. Due to its popularity, there are a lot of developers actively designing compatible themes and plugins for WooCommerce.
WooCommerce has a vast user community. You can always turn to them if you have questions or concerns about using the plugin, or if you have an idea for a specific feature or custom design that you want for your e-commerce site.
The free core plugin has all the resources necessary for building your online store. You can further enhance your website with some of the many WooCommerce extensions (see best WooCommerce plugins) that are available.
The WooCommerce add-ons and extensions are a combination of free and premium options that can add extra features and functionality to your store. Some of WooCommerce’s extensions were created by the WooCommerce development team and other by third-party websites and developers.
Using WooCommerce extensions, you can add:
- request a quote on products (best WooCommerce request a quote plugin),
- sell licenses (check best WooCommerce license manager plugins),
- offer product configurator options (best WooCommerce visual product configurator plugins),
- customize emails (see best WooCommerce email customizer plugins),
- send follow up emails (best WooCommerce follow up emails plugins),
- integrate DHL (best DHL WooCommerce plugins),
- add FedEx shipping (list of best WooCommerce FedEx plugins),
- add shipment tracking (see which are best WooCommerce shipment tracking plugins),
- integrate product filtering (best WooCommerce product filter plugins),
- add dropshipping features (best plugins for WooCommerce dropshipping),
- create coupon codes (how to create WooCommerce coupon code),
- set weight-based shipping (WooCommerce weight based shipping plugins),
- add lotteries to your store (which is best WooCommerce lottery plugin),
- allow partial payments (best WooCommerce deposits plugins),
- integrate product bundling (WooCommerce product bundling),
- provide recurring payment options (how to allow WooCommerce recurring payments),
- schedule sales (how to schedule sales in WooCommerce store),
- accept donations (which is best WooCommerce donation plugin),
- integrate booking settings (which is best WooCommerce booking plugin),
- set dynamic pricing (how to set dynamic pricing in WooCommerce),
- create WooCommerce affiliate sites (se best WooCommerce affiliate plugin),
- import orders (best WooCommerce import orders plugin),
- add store finder option using WooCommerce store locator plugin,
- add multisite features (best WooCommerce multisite plugins).
Extensions help you to offer a more professional shopping experience to your customers and hopefully sell more products and increase revenue.
If you already know how to publish posts in WordPress, then you will not have any issues in using WooCommerce for creating product pages and setting everything up. The admin interface is laid out clearly and built using the WordPress native user interface. Because of that, it integrates seamlessly with the rest of your site that you might think that it’s an actual WordPress component.
The difficulty level in maintaining your online store will significantly depend on how complicated your store and inventory are. However, WooCommerce can manage most store configurations and product types.
Many premium themes have been created to be compatible with WooCommerce like Astra (what is the difference between Astra free vs Astra pro), Deep theme (see Deep theme review), OceanWP (what are the differences between OceanWP free vs OceanWP pro), GeneratePress (Astra vs GeneratePress comparison), etc. Overall, WooCommerce is a wise choice for people who want to build their own e-commerce site and list available products, accept payments, manage inventory (WooCommerce inventory management plugins), calculate shipping costs, implement taxes, processes and manage orders, etc.
2. Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is another popular WordPress e-commerce plugin. Its pricing structure is very similar to WooCommerce. The Easy Digital Downloads plugin is free but also offers free and premium extensions that can be integrated to improve the store’s functionality.
One major difference between EDD and other eCommerce plugins is the fact that Easy Digital Downloads is explicitly created for selling digital downloads and other non-physical products. Due to its specialized niche and narrower target audience, the EDD plugin has been downloaded fewer times than WooCommerce.
Easy Digital Downloads has proven to be a quality resource for individuals and companies who want to use their WordPress website to sell digital products.
The plugin was designed to perfectly integrate with your WordPress site admin area so that it feels like a natural part of the site itself, much like WooCommerce. It was created to look and feel like part of your site’s central functions.
Easy Digital Downloads’ plugin has everything you should ever need to start an online store. It also has an excellent selection of add-ons to enhance your site’s performance further.
Easy Digital Downloads’ development team creates some of their extensions and add-ons, and third-party authors design others. If you’re thinking of adding a particular feature or function to your store, there’s a good chance that someone has already created an extension that you’re looking for.
Easy Digital Downloads is even simpler to set up than WooCommerce. This is partly due to the ease of selling digital products as opposed to creating product descriptions and maintaining inventories for physical products.
Within minutes, you can have a fully functional store that can display, sell, and deliver digital products on auto-pilot. Some of the available extensions can help you reduce that setup time, depending on what your needs are.
It’s one of the least complicated tools on the market today for establishing and maintaining an online store. Easy Digital Downloads and its supporting community are perfect for those who want to sell media files, eBooks, or other digital products.
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I worked for Jigoshop from early 2014 to early 2017 as a support agent and copywriter. Great people to work for and really enjoyed helping our customers! Miss it.
Jigoshop was really a great ecommerce solution. Too bad they are gone now.
Without Jigoshop we wouldn’t have WooCommerce.
Very usable and strong eCommerce Plugin.
Hi Michel,
If you are referring to Jigoshop, it was a very good eCommerce plugin before ending its lifecycle.