Online businesses - The wordpress ecommerce solution #2
Posted on June 13, 2008
Filed Under web design |
We’ve already dicussed how wordpress can be the best e-commerce solution for your online businesses and the fact that its free and comes ready to go, ‘right out of the box’.It is important that you understand search engine optimization if your online businesses are going to be successful. You may not need to pay for professional services, but understanding the way it works will eventually drive targeted traffic and generate income from your businesses. There’s a lot of information here about configuring the All-in-one-SEO wordpress plugin, please go through it and follow the advice and tips. So what’s the next step in setting up your e-commerce web site ?
The next step, like I said, is going into the wordpress e-commerce plug in. But first I’ll list a few of the new features and the online systems it works with ( These have been obtained from the developers web site ).
- Google Checkout Level 2 Integration
- New Product Groups (have replaced categories and brands)
- WordPress 2.5.1 Support
- New - Facebook Integration
- New - Google Checkout Integration
- New - Shipwire Integration
- New - Search Engine Friendly URLs / Permalinks
- Coupons in Marketing options under shop options
- Members Only / Subscription Module
- Customizable pagination for product listing
- Unlimited products & categories
- AJAX powered Sliding Shoping Cart
- Shop front highlighting for newly added products
- AJAX powered Web 2.0 DropShop - additional gold module
- Grid View - additional gold module
- Fancy AJAX Alerts on Add to Cart
- Purchase history for logged in users
- New and improved Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files
- Chinese Language file
- Share this / Digg Product social networking promo tools
- Downloadable CSV files
- Detailed Purchase Log & Filters
- Configurable Tax settings including USA & Canada
- PayPal IPN
- URL linking to products and images
- RSS product feed widget
- Google Cart
I think facebook integration, the AJAX capabilities, the RSS feed for your products and the advantage of being able to leverage social networks using Share This and Digg ( a sure way to make your marketing viral ) are excellent features and will be great for running most online businesses that need to sell products or services.
Like I usually do , rather than try to find already written tutorials and then try to re-write so that it seems like I’ve done it all myself, I’ll simply be giving useful links to the different stages in the process. First off, here are a few screen shots from already installed wordpress/wp-ecommerce solutions .
The developers have put together a useful tiny bit of documentation over here so you should also take a look at that.
If you choose to use paypal you will obviously need a paypal account, you can then go on to fill in the necessary details and then you’ll be able accept payments for your online businesses using paypal. you can sign up for a paypal account here, be sure to read the terms of use and understand any extra payments that may be necessary.
Finally you should ensure that your home page is not a post, it should be configured as a page. This way you aren’t bothered with updating, or removing dates , it acts as a static page with the added advantage that you can make modifications using wordpress. To do this just login to wordpress, create a page by clicking first on the “Write” tag, and then the “Post” sub tab. You can then go ahead to create a front page, images text and even embedded multimedia like videos. Once your through with that click on the “Settings” tab ( upper right of the screen ) and then click on the “Reading” sub tab , you’ll immediately see the option to configure the front page as a static page. Select this option and then choose the page you just created from the drop down box, don’t forget to click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page. Thats all !
You’ll need a theme, as the default theme that comes with wordpress may not be ideal for your business. I’m working on a well researched post about this. For now a simple google search will turn up a whole load of useful results, just ensure that the themes are widget ready and are compatible with your version of wordpress. Usually most theme developers make this information readily available.
I’ll be doing a shorter post later today on creating a 3d software box especially if you intend to sell digital products for which you may not really have conventional images. The next step is to set up a full demo here on eBizNuggets.com, I’m thinking of doing a video as I go along but that will depend on the feedback I get from you my readers.
Have you come across any e-commerce solutions that you’d like me to do a write up on ? Based on some of the sites in my previous article do you think wordpress can do the job for you ? I’m available to help if you run into any glitches. Hope you enjoyed this post.
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