WP e-commerce (part-1)

About WP e-Commerce

• It is easy to install.
• It is suitable to all WordPress theme.
• Easily customizable.
• It has instant support community.
• A wide range of payment options
• SEO friendly.
• Multiple languages.
• Multiple currencies.
• A wide range of shipping options.

Before installation

• Set ‘Site Title’ to Christmas Shopping
• Set ‘Tagline’ to Gift n Enjoy
• Also select ‘Anyone can Register’ option.

With over 1.5 million downloads, WP e-commerce is the most popular e-commerce WordPress plugin in the market now. It provides a wide range of payment options including Manual (cheques), PayPal etc. Some of it’s features given below:

Before installing WP e-commerce perform the following tasks:

1. Considering that you have already installed WordPress to any server. You can either host your site locally or using a web hosting service.

2. Now enter you WordPress admin panel (log-in) and remove (trash) all default posts, pages and comments.

3. Now go to Posts -> Categories and create some new categories. For this tutorial, we have created Bakery Items, Confectioneries and Flowers. We also have changed the Uncategorized category to Bakery Items.

5. You can customize and keep the current theme or go to Appearance -> Themes to install a new one that suits your e-commerce site. You can also use third party themes for your e-commerce site.

6. On the Appearance menu click on Header and upload your site’s header image. You may need to crop the image while uploading.

7. Under Settings -> General, change the following things.

Now save the changes by clicking on Save Changes button.

8. Under Settings-> Permalinks select Custom Structure field and enter text /%postname%/. Now save the changes.

9. Go to Settings -> Discussions, uncheck all the options. click Save Changes. This change will prevent any comment to your website.

Installing WP-eCommerce

Go to Plugins -> Add New and Search for WP e-commerce. From the search result install WP e-commerce plugin.

After installing, click on Activate Plugin.

So, our plugin is now ready to use.

Now, you should see a Products menu in your dashboard and a Store option under Settings. Product menu is for adding different products to your site and the Store option is used for the plugin settings.

Under dashboard you should see - Sales by Quarter, Sales by Month andSales Summary.

Additional changes

Go to Settings -> Reading. Under ’Front page displays’ select ‘A static page’ and choose the Products Page as your front page. This will ensure that when customers visits your site, the products page will be displayed by default.

Contact Us page

We will use the plugin ‘Contact Form 7′ to create a Contact-Us page.

Now install and then activate ‘Contact Form 7′ plugin.

Now, create a contact form using few options. Under the Mail option, enter your email address beside the To: field. Under Messages you can use your own error messages. Finally copy the generated short code and paste it into your post, page or text widget content. In our case we have copied the code [contact-form-7 id="18" title="Contact form 1"] to a newly created page named Contact Us.

Now our website would look like below:

set up the WP-eCommerce plugin

Go to Settings -> Store. Here you will be able to set the different options.

1. General

a) Select a Base Country/ Region of your e-commerce website.

b) Select the markets where you will sell products.

c) Set the amount of time the items in a customer’s cart are kept reserved.

d) Select Currency Type and Currency Sign Location.

Finally click Update to save the changes.

2. Presentation

a) Under Button Type, select Add to Cart.

b)You can enable additional options from Show Product Ratings, Show Stock Availability, Display Fancy Purchase Notifications, Display per item shipping etc. For now we will only enable the Display per item shipping: option.

c) Under the Gird View Settings we will enter 3 products per row and select Display Description, Display “Add to Cart” Button and Display “More Details” Button options.

d) Under the Shopping Cart Settings select Cart Location as Widget. and enable Display “+ Postage & Tax”:

e) From the Thumbnail Settings, you can set the product image thumbnail.

f) You can change other options depending your requirements. For now we will keep the default settings.

Finally click Update to save the changes.

3. Admin

a) The first three options are used for downloadable products like software, music, games etc.

b) Under Purchase Log Email and Purchase Receipt – Reply Address: enter your email address.

c) Enter your name against Purchase Receipt – Reply Name:

d) Set Terms and Conditions if any.

e) You can edit the Purchase Receipt and Admin Report under the Custom Messages.

f) Tracking responses can also be created from this page.

Finally click Update to save the changes.

4. Taxes

Here you can define the tax rules. You can also define the tax per item.

5. Shipping

a) Enable the Use Shipping option since we are selling Christmas Gifts.

b) By selecting the Enable Free Shipping Discount, you can provide shipping discounts to customers.

c) Under Shipping Modules we will select and edit the Fixed Rate shipping option and provided the shipping rates for the customers of different countries.

d) Under External Shipping Calculators we will select UPS as our shipping gateway and provided all the details.

Please note: You need to have a UPS account in order to use this option. You can also use other shipping options.

Finally click Update to save the changes.

6. Payments

Under payments, we select different payment gateways for customers. Among the various options available, we will use the Test Gateway and PayPal Payments Standard 2.0. We will also use the Test Gateway option as a means of manual payment. After editing the payment options, you need to provide all the details.

Finally click Update to save the changes.

7. Checkout

a) Under Misc Checkout Options, enable Users must register before checking out, Enable Shipping Same as Billing Option: and Force users to use SSL options.

b) The Form Fields define the Customer’s checkout form. You can create a new form or use the default one. You can change the field’s Name, Type and Mandatory options. You can also Drag and Drop, Delete different fields depending your requirements.

Finally click Save Changes to save.

8. Marketing

This option is used to share and broadcast your products among different social networking sites, RSS and Google Merchant Center. For now we shall select the Show Share This, Customer Survey and Facebook Like options.

Click Update to save the changes.

9. Import

The import option is used to upload products automatically using a csv file. We shall come to this later.

There is a another part of this tutorial where I will describe how to add products,  use widgets/plugin to your e-commerce website.