As of 2010, I have been actively building WordPress sites with the e-commerce plugin WPEC. For those of you who do not yet know about this amazing e-commerce plugin, go here to find out more. To sum it up, it provides WordPress a way to setup shop and start doing e-commerce business. While I will give a more in-depth review of the cart on a later article, today I want to talk about two plugins for WPEC that was recently launched.

The two plugins I want to introduce are the 2010 Product Slider and the 2010 Drop Shop. Let’s talk about the Product Slider first. I remember when I first installed this plugin prior to the 2010 version on a client’s site. I thought it was really cool as you won’t find many e-commerce carts out there that incorporates the “Wow” factor. Not only that, it is very functional as it allows you to put products in the slider and you can slide the products left and right to better the experience of the user. That was then. Now fast-forward to today. With the 2010 version, it has been completely overhauled and now incorporates many extra features like two different themes to choose from and you even have a slider that works just like the one on apple.com site. It doesn’t stop there — you can now choose to display categories or products. These are all features that were not available in the past version.

The second plugin I want to introduce is the 2010 Drop Shop plugin. I also worked with this plugin in the past and oh boy how far it has come. There are 6 different themes to choose from to match your site’s design and style. But wait!! Here is where the cream of the crop lies. It is now a widget!!! Yes it is widgetized!! That means you can control where you want it displayed either in your sidebar or your footer. It will automatically detect the location and change styles accordingly. How cool is that? In addition, this plugin works very well in conjunction with the 2010 Product Slider. You can simply drag products straight from your product slider into your drop shop cart. Again, here is another demonstration that Instinct (the company behind WPEC plugin) is thinking ahead and incorporating features that better the experience for the users.

As an avid user of the WPEC plugin, I will be expecting more awesome features to come. Rumor has it that version 3.8 is just around the corner and that will blow your minds. There are too many things to say about 3.8 which I will leave for another article and do an in-depth review on it when it is officially released.