E-Commerce Shop Inside WordPress

This amazing plugin turns your wordpress website from a self-managed website and blog into a fully functional (and customisable) online shop. Created by kiwis at Instinct, this has to be the easiest way to sell your products on your own website anywhere.

Download WP E-Commerce Plugin

Once you have activated your plugin, an E-Commerce button appears on your admin menu. From here you can setup products to ship, products to download, registrations for courses, subscriptions and more.

Creating Product Pages

You create groups first to categorise your products, then assign each product to a group and simply click on the little shopping cart icon when you are creating a new web page and select that group for it to appear automatically on the page. See an example below on the new website I have just setup for Weekend Gardener magazine.

Sample Product Page

This is a product page showing all the products in the Quarterly Magazines group. The product listing includes a description (this can be extended), drop-down options (in this case whether it is a gift or not), a photo and the price. When you click on the Add to Cart button, your product appears in the shopping cart to the right of the page. From there you can add more products or checkout.

Other Websites Using WP E-Commerce

• www.farmcarbon.co.nz
• www.daretodream.co.nz
• www.weekendgardener.co.nz
• www.nzroses.org.nz

My favourite WP E-Commerce features

• Variations – This allows customers to choose different options relating to one product. The product might be available in different colours, on different dates, in different versions. You can assign stock numbers and pricing to the variations if you need to.
• Downloadable Products – Upload a pdf or other file available for purchase when you create your product listing. When the customer completes their purchase, they are emailed the link to download their product. You can set the number of times they can download it and the length of time before the link expires.
• Shopping Cart Widgets – The widgets which come with WP E-Commerce allow you to drag and drop a shopping cart (see image above), a list of product specials, list of product groups and a list of products by price range into your website sidebar.
• Checkout fields – You can specifiy what fields your customer needs to fill in when they checkout such as separate billing and shipping addresses. You can add fields for other information you need such as a message from the customer.

Checkout and Payment

Once the customer clicks on an Add to cart button, the product appears in the shopping cart widget on your sidebar. They can add more products, then click checkout to complete their order. Any shipping you have setup is calculated automatically when they enter the delivery country. Payment is processed by PayPal (you need to setup a free account) or another provider choosen by you. Both you and the customer receive automatic emails confirming the new order. Orders details are also available inside your WordPress website and can be downloaded as reports.

Selling products or services on your website is no longer in the “too hard basket” so get selling!

You can click on the link below to get a PayPal account.