Start your own professional e-commerce site in less than one hour
Ever wanted to sell stuff online in your own webshop but don’t know how? In this tutorial I am going to show you how to set up a professional e-commerce site in less than one hour (if you have knowledge with wordpress and have an PayPal account you can actually do this in 15-20 minutes).
The first thing you need is of course a domain and a web host. If you don’t have this it may take a little longer depending on which web host you chose. Hostgator is a good choice, they have 24/7 support as well. With their Business Plan you should be able to run a small webshop.
Now that you have a web server you need the following
The first thing you need to do is to install WordPress, WP-ecommerce and EasyCart. (All these comes with install instructions, so It’s no point repeating that.)
To accept credit cards on your site you need an PayPal account, if you don’t have an account now is the right time to get one (it’s free and only takes a couple of minutes). The next step is to set up IPN (Instant Payment Notification) within your PayPal account. You will also find info on how to set up this at PayPal.
Ok, I have installed everything and my PayPal account is starving. Now what?
Let’s assume you have installed WordPress, WP-ecommerce and EasyCart. Now you need to do some basic configuration. In the left sidebar in your WordPress admin panel you will find a tab called Products. The first thing to do is to go to “Settings”–>”General” and configure country, currency and tax options. This should be pretty straight forward so once this is done move on to “Presentation” and under “Product Page Settings”, change the theme to “EasyCart default”. Move on to “Product Group Settings” and check “Show Product Group Description” and “Show Product Group Thumbnails”. Now you need to set the default thumbnail settings correct so it looks smooth with EasyCart:
- Default Product Thumbnail Size: height: 200 width: 200
- Default Product Group Thumbnail Size: height: 96 width: 96
- Single Product Image Size: height: 200 width: 200
- Show thumbnails: Yes
Move on to” Pagination Settings”, set to “Yes” and show 3-5 products per page (If you don’t use these settings with EasyCart there will be way too many products in the recent products slider on the front page).
All of the other options are optional and should be self explanatory (I really like the Display “Fancy Purchase Notifications”, which is a small pop-up window that notify the user that they have added a product to their cart)
Accepting Payments
There are several options for payments in wp-ecommerce and PayPal is really simple to set up. Just go to “Payment Options” and chose . Fill in your username (which is the e-mail address you use for your PayPal account). IPN must be set to yes. That’s all (The url is already set by default).
Creating Product Categories
Now that you have set up your payment gateway you might want to create some product categories. In the left sidebar under “Products” you will find “Categories”. As you can see this is pretty straight forward but I strongly recommend that you use icons as category images. Let’s say you have one category that sells Mp3 Players, then you should go to iconfinder.net and search for “Mp3 player” “ipod” or something like that. Once you have found your icon you should prepare a 96×96 pixel image before you upload it so it looks exactly like you want. You should also write a good description of your category.
Adding Products
It’s time to add some products. Right above Categories in the left sidebar you will find “Products” which is the page were you can add… yes, that’s right.. Products. This is also very simple and straight forward but there is a couple of things I would like to mention. In the Title field you will notice a small icon on the right side. If you click on this icon once you have saved your first product it will give you some shortcodes and template tags. The template tags is code snippets that can be used in the theme core files, these are for the more experienced users. However the Shortcodes can be really useful even for beginners. Let’s say you have written a blog post and want to include your product in this post, then you can use the shortcode to display it, i.e. you get this short code:
Display Product Shortcode: [codesnippet]
If you paste this code snippet in your blog post it will display that product.
Some other things worth mentioning is the “Custom Meta” under “Advanced Options”. If you are selling i.e. cameras you can specify technical information in these fields. Here is an screenshot of how it looks with EasyCart:
Your site is ready to go public!
Before you go public I would recommend to do some testing play around a little with the settings. You should also test if the payment gateway works properly. Remember to use quality images of your products. If you want a little more in depth info on how to use WP-ecommerce take a look at the screencast at the bottom of this post by Hungry Dog Media. I have also added some screenshots and a demo of EasyCart (The demo is just a plain html version without all functions, but it will give a basic understanding on how it looks). You may purchase EasyCart for 29$ here
EasyCart Screen Shots:
can I control Quantity using Ease Cart?
Thanks.
Yes, but you must of course also use the wp-ecommerce plugin.
Thanks.
Hi,
does the easy cart WP theme just work as WP theme or can I use just the wp-ecommerce part/theme in my own WP Theme?
I´m looking just for a wp e-commerce theme.
thanx
You can use it seperate. It contains a theme for wp-ecommerce as well.
thanx. Does the wp-ecommerce theme support the german language as well, or do I have to change Buttons and other parts of theme?
thanx a lot!
You will have to do some translation and change the buttons. (don’t know if the wp-ecommerce plugin have german translation either).
Can I market your theme on http://wordpresspowerthemes.com. I think it would be a good fit. Do you have an affiliate program?
Yes, of course
Here is my affiliate program http://www.csstemplateheaven.com/contact-us/become-an-affiliate/