Mystical Twilight

Ecommerce & WordPress

I know, I know WordPress is not what you would expect to use when you want an ecommerce site.  But most people are faced with a dilemma, do they shall out serious dollars for a site or do they go down the open source route, sometimes with much less supported formats.

I know some people I know have used open software to great affect like this mens dressing gowns site.  But that particular site got stuck after a while and had to spend a significant amount of money on software.

But is there another way?

I believe there is.  Our friend WordPress.

Now I’m not saying this is THE solution, its one solution and a good one if you’re just getting into your niche and funds are tight.  You want your site to look presentable, give an air of trust and you want to be able to take orders.  You can do this all with wordpress.  Save your cash in these early stages and spend it on marketing and getting people to the site.

All you have to do these days is to choose a theme with an inbuilt shopping cart.  That’s it, it really is that simple.  There are other solutions as well which I’ll discuss in a moment.

There are a stack of these themes to choose from such as Shopperpress, vanilla cart, crafty Cart (although this needs the ecommerce WP plug in to work properly) and my favourite storefront from the makers of the ecommerce plug in.  The storefront theme lets you use the ecommerce plug in to create much more valuable and attractive pages.

But you don’t have to have an ecommerce theme especially if you just have a simple offering.  You can use plug in to give you add to cart buttons almost anywhere on your site.  There are lots of these like yak, eshop or if you want something simpler still you can use simple paypal shopping cart.

So you see WordPress has got your back once again.  No need to spend thousand on an ecommerce solution.  Start small and grow big.  Once you are in profit I would look at other solutions as you may need support in the future and support is one of the negatives of these smaller solutions.  As is the constant updating of WordPress that can leave some plug in’s floundering.

Choose your solution carefully, go hang out in some forums and see what the actual users of the themes or plug in’s are saying before you use them.  This is usually the best bit of research you can do, it can save a lot of headaches down the line.