Though WordPress is not suitable for a high-traffic or a multi-functional e-commerce website, you can use it for selling one or more of your products. And the cost of implementation is rather small which makes it attractive to small business owners. In this article, we shall show how to implement an e-commerce website with WordPress.
To start with, you will need to install WordPress and implement a theme of your liking. Then download WorPress e-commerce plugin from the URL http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/ and unzip it to /wp-content/plugins/wp-e-commerce directory. Login to the WordPress admin and activate the plugin as usual. After the plugin is activated, a new menu-set “Store” will appear at the leftbar of WordPress admin. Click on it to see the different sections:
Sales – All transactions that take place on your site are recorded and are visible here.
Products – The list of all products and feature to add and edit them.
Categories – You can create product categories to organize product catalog.
Variations – You can add different variations to products. Once you have created your variation sets you can add them to your products in the product display form.
Setting – You can find all settings for the shopping cart here. We need to set the options as per requirements including payment gateway settings and administrator email, etc.
You can also modify the plugin theme to comply to the look-and-feel of your website. Here is how you can achieve this:
Duplicate the default theme and rename the folder to a desired theme name. Open the new theme folder and rename the default.css file to newTheme.css. Open the newTheme.css file and change the “Theme Name” and “Description” comments at the top. Login to your WordPress Admin, and browse to your Store > Settings > Presentation page. Click on the drop-down list, your new theme should be in the list!
Now you may like to customize the cart widget. In wp-e-commerce/themes or uploads/wpsc/themes, you will see a file named cart_widget.php, which contains the code for the widget.
You can also find more detailed instructions at the plugin official website http://getshopped.org/resources/docs/
Tags: e-commerce, Wordpress plugin
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