WP e-Commerce Lite – Install

I recently read an article on How to turn a normal WordPress installation into a working online shop. Although this was a very thorough and well written article it is certainly not the easiest way to turn your WordPress installation into a working online shop.

The easiest way to achieve this is by downloading and installing a plugin called WP e-Commerce.

e-Commerce Install

Assuming you have a working version of WordPress installed you must do the following:

1. Download the e-Commerce plugin.

2. Copy the folder to your local plugins directory

3. Activate the plugin & configure it to your liking

Expecting more? that’s it! (its easier then installing wordpress)

e-Commerce setup
Once the plugin is installed the most important things to do are:

1. Set your default shipping country and associated shipping settings

2. Setup and configure the presentation settings

3. Setup your receipt notification email address

4. Setup your payment gateway

5. Add products

6. Upgrade to gold if you want to add multiple images to products

PayPal Setup
These are the instructions for setting up PayPal for your WP e-Commerce store

At PayPal site

1. Browse to PayPal and sign up using your email address

2. Under Profile > Shipping Settings check the allow transaction-based shipping values to override the profile shipping settings listed above

3. Done

At your WP e-Commerce store’s Admin

Now that you have a PayPal account setup enter the email address you used into the payment gateway settings page in the WP e-commerce admin panel

1. Under e-Commerce > Gateway Options choose PayPal as your payment gateway.

2. In “PayPay Username” enter your email address that you use to login to your PayPal account.

3. In “PayPal URL” enter https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr

4. Click the button that says “Submit”

Conclusion

Now that you have setup your shop and have a working PayPal account you are ready to start selling! Upload your products and have fun.

Business Blogging

Why stop there. Business blogging is really starting to take off. More and more people are starting to use WordPress to power their websites – especially now that there are so many powerful plugins. Lets take a quick glance at some of the plugins we use to turn your average WordPress install into a business blogging solution.

1) Static Front Page. You might now want the front page of your web site to be your blog. The static front page plugin lets you easily stick a static page to the front page of a WordPress site – as a rule of thumb we call this the home page.

2) Forums. We use bbPress & WP Forum depending on the requirements. Both are easy to install and both have a range of useful features.

3) Email Newsletters. We use WP Campaign Monitor because it is simple to install and easy to get the hang of. It also integrates with WP e-Commerce lite.

4) Surveys. Information is power. We use the Survey Fly plugin because it is powerful and easy to use. Administrators can download .csv reports that they can manipulate internally using proper spreadsheet software.

5) Statistics. We use wp-slimstat or wp-slimstat-ex because they are both so easy to install. WP slimstat ex is based on wp-slimstat but full of AJAX goodies.

6) Google Analytics. Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. The Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress adds an analytics panel to the WordPress admin website.

7) Search Engine Optimization. Search Everything enables the searching of Pages, Comments and more. No Hacking or modifications necessary, just install, activate the plugin and configure it under Options > Search Everything.