As a user, i love the e-commerce era, since it offers good deals and virtually every product i’d need.
As a developer, though, i’ve always hated projects involving the setup of an e-commerce store mainly because of the complexity of available web applications. This is especially true when it comes to customize themes, logics and behaviors of the store.
In my experience i’ve worked on Virtuemart, OsCommerce and ZenCart finding them too complex and large for my client’s needs.
On this matter i’ve found really enlightening the Wordpress 2.9 e-Commerce guide by Brian Bondani, which presents the WP e-Commerce plugin for Wordpress which is both a great solution for small e-stores owners and an affordable solution for expert and novice developers.
The guide isn’t intended just for developers, but also for persons with basic computer skills willing to setup their online store. Technical knowledge of Wordpress, CSS and PHP will allow you to further customize the installation, theme and store’s styles even if a basic section of the guide explains the basics of customization for novice developers too.
Contents
The most prominent aspect of the guide is that it covers not just the configuration and customization of the plugin, but even the installation and configuration of Wordpress with a detailed step by step tutorial on compatible themes and options to convert the blog engine into a dedicated e-store system.
On the plugin side, you’ll be impressed of the different options and configurations available to customize and refine your store. Reading the guide you’ll be able to easily setup both digital and physical items, with flexible shipping rates and discounts.
Starting from a vanilla installation the author guides you on a detailed step by step tutorial on the various configuration’s options, like international shipping rates and product variations (different sizes, colors) using a clear language and many screenshots of the actual plugin interface.
This ends up in a no-surprises situation when you’ll be hands-on the plugin.
For more advanced users there’s also a chapter which covers the customization of themes, with technical but clear examples of CSS and PHP code.
What’s extremely useful about the guide is that many chapters move beyond technical explanations of Wordpress and WP e-Commerce plugin, focusing on how to market your store to increase your income.
By covering tools as Google AdSense, the guide serves also as a basic web-marketing reference introducing the most relevant aspects of e-commerce’s promotion which is often an overlooked aspect both by clients and developers.
Whether you are building your own store or you are a developer with non-professional skill on web marketing you’d find these chapters really useful even for other kind of projects.
Another good section of the book covers the most important online payment gateways like PayPal and Google Checkout guiding the developer throughout each step needed to correctly setup and manage these novice-unfriendly systems.
Even if many of these systems are well integrated in the WP e-Commerce plugin, requiring little effort for activation, i’ve found it a good choice to explain their functionality and every step to manage customers’ payments since that’s the most painful task for every online store owner.
The last chapters of the book are devoted to an insight of the plugin’s commercial addon and to alternative plugins. These are usually less powerful systems than WP e-Commerce but may be useful if you just need to sell some simple items.
Last Words
Before reading this guide i would have never thought to Wordpress as an e-Commerce CMS, but the in depth explanation of WP e-Commerce by Brian Bondani showed me how simple and powerful is this platform for every-day stores compared to big and mind-expensive systems like ZenCart.
This makes the overall feeling about this guide as of the discover of a new world, making it a good reading not just for Wordpress developers, but also for others looking for good and affordable ways to build and promote their online stores without having to deal with unneeded complexity.
You may tak check out the guide page at Packt Publishing, as well as the Table of Contents. Then you may also take a closer look at contents by reading the sample chapter.
Tags: e-commerce review, review, wordpress e-commerce, worpress review, wp e-commerce
Dwight Jack Workroom by Marco Solazzi is licensed under a Creative Commons License