Aside from the level of customer service and vast array of features you receive with SEO-Cart, another good reason to use our hosted solution versus a 100% WordPress website is because of security.
Recent studies show that WordPress plugins, especially ecommerce ones, have a high chance of being riddled with security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
“Checkmarx’s research lab identified that more than 20% of the 50 most popular WordPress plugins are vulnerable to common Web attacks. Furthermore, a concentrated research into e-commerce plugins revealed that 7 out of the 10 most popular e-commerce plugins contain vulnerabilities. This is the first time that such a comprehensive survey was prepared to test the state of security of the leading plugins.”
According to the PDF [checkmarx.com], e-commerce plugins are in the list. We are a bit surprised to see that, assuming developers would be thinking about security first with e-commerce.
Security is always a top priority for us, especially when dealing with ecommerce. WordPress is still okay to use, but we recommend only using it for what it was originally designed for – blog posts only. If you must install any WordPress plugins, it is important to verify that it is secure before deploying on on a production website. SEO-Cart is a PCI compliant solution. We go above and beyond the requirements to keep your data safe and secure.