Using WordPress for eCommerce

March 21st, 2010

When I set up Worm Sign T-Shirts I knew I wanted to use WordPress as the CMS. Personal projects are a great way of developing and practicing your skills, and it’s not really fair on clients to use them and their websites as guinea pigs, for you to learn new tricks. After having a look into some plugins that would allow me to use WordPress as an e-commerce website – I knew I wanted to see if WordPress could do more than just blog.

I initially looked at using the very popular WP Commerce plugin, but it took quite a long time to set up and the learning curve was just a little longer than I what I wanted – I needed something simpler, that I could jump into a use straight away. So I turned to eShop.

It’s real strength is in it’s simplicity – the plugin is very quick to set up and adding products to your site is very easy. The main part of the set up was taken up adding PayPal details and calculating the shipping prices for our T-Shirts, this can be done by country, by weight or by the shopping cart total. There are also options for discount codes and downloads, so eShop will work if you are selling digital music or ebooks.

Products are added either to blog posts or pages, I only wanted to have products on pages and so for each new T-Shirt I’ll create a page with it’s images and text, and then fill in the custom eShop panel to add the “add to basket” functionality, prices and options – which in our case are sizes. This is one of the only downsides of eShop, it only has one set of options when PayPal can accommodate two, it would be great to have a second set of options for different T-Shirt colours. We’ve got around this by having multiple pages for the different colours of T-Shirt from a single design.

This is all the necessary set up needed to get the plugin working, from here it’s all cosmetic tweaks to get the shopping cart and check out pages fitting in with the rest of the website. This has taken a pretty long time to get right, the majority of the styling can be done via a style sheet, but I’ve gone a little further and I’ve edited many of the php files that come with the plugin. I’ve added and removed text, I’ve also cleaned up the check out pages and taken out many of the fields that weren’t needed on our check out process. Now that I’ve edited all these php files, I’m a little stuck becuase any upgrade of the plugin would overwrite all my bespoke changes – so I’m stuck on version 3.5.4 – missing some of eShop’s recent feature additions.

We use PayPal to take payments as this is the only payment gateway that eShop works with, and that is fine – I’ve used PayPal on many of my client’s websites, so I’m familiar with how it works, and so are many website users.Many still have incorrect assumptions about PayPal, for example – visitors may think they need a PayPal account to make a purchase, or that they have to register their details with PayPal – not true. I’ve tried to address this in Worm Sign’s copy, hoping that it will appease any worries a potential customer will have when making a purchase, a simple paragraph in the footer explaining that payments are made securely and that all popular credit and debit cards are accepted. This information is duplicated on our check out pages, and is expanded further in our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Tags: eshop, plugins, wordpress, worm sign tshirts, wp ecommerce