There is more than one way to sell products with your WordPress site, or along with your WordPress site. Depending on the size of your business and the number of products, you will want to choose from three general methods.

Three of the most commonly used methods of selling your products online are to embed a small snippet of code directly in the HTML for a single product, use a plugin with WordPress to manage from the admin panel within WordPress for specified pages or to install a complete stand-alone shopping cart solution to run alongside your site. There is also the option of hand-coding a site from scratch by learning a programming language such as PHP or asp, this, of course, requires years of coding knowledge to actually execute or to have a presentable store.

Using Paypal buttons with Wp

The easiest way to put a product online and make payment for it would be to create a free Paypal account. Go to the Paypal merchant center, add a product you would like to collect payment for and copy the code snippet they generate into your website code. Basically, every product will have a buy now or Paypal button underneath it that will redirect the customer to log in to their Paypal account, to pay with Paypal or a credit cart. This is an acceptable method when selling only one product. Statistics show that cart abandonment is high when using this method because the customer is forced to make a Paypal account to pay.

Using WordPress shopping cart plugins

These plugins can range in function on your WordPress site. Some Wp store plugins will allow you to manage your products within WordPress, others will have you manage your products from your account on their website and you will see a popup box on your site that displays your products to your customer. Wazala is an example of a Wp store plugin that shows a “buy now” button on the top of your site and displays your products in a popup window as shown below:

Other shopping cart plugins for WordPress will allow you to manage the products through the WordPress admin and actually list the product details on your website. One pro to this is that you can get your product pages indexed by Google and other search engines. This allows for more freedom in the way you present and market the products. One example of this method is WooCommerce, an online store plugin that’s essentially a theme that you upload to WordPress on install that has the store management modules built into the theme.

WooCommerce Plugin

Some of these plugins are free to download and install leaving the only fee you will need to pay to your payment gateway such as authorize.net. Other Wp cart plugins will charge you a monthly fee to run the plugin and manage the products from your user account on their site. These monthly fees may or may not include a payment method or

Some WordPress plugins you will find searching will have no demo site, no install instructions, and no reviews online. Needless to say, these are probably going to be disappointing. The ones that are worthwhile will have a nice website with a trial and or demo cart to view. Also note that a lot of these plugins will have the base “store” plugin and “add-on plugins” like extended admin panel, extended shipping, etc. There are few Wp e-commerce plugins on the market as of now that can match the power of a stand-alone shopping cart software but they are getting closer. The ease of use, however, is there.

Integrating a shopping cart with WordPress

This section could also be called ” adding WordPress to an existing online store“ because the option to run a professional shopping cart along with your current cms in its own directory, such as “/store” would be the same as installing a blog to an existing store in a directory called “/blog”. These programs can be mirrored to look identical to your current site and generally have the most functionality and marketing power. The only real difference between a stand-alone shopping cart and a WordPress plugin for a cart is the area you manage your products. The most intimidating factor for most is making the shopping cart program look like your existing WordPress blog.

A stand-alone shopping cart has a more robust management area that larger stores and stores doing more business will appreciate. Some desired features in product management include the ability to bulk edit products.

When you install a stand-alone shopping cart to direct your WordPress visitors, you will most likely want it to look identical or at least similar in theme to the existing site you built with WordPress. This can be achieved with 99 percent of shopping carts on the market although it is accomplished easier with some. Most modern premium shopping carts, such as Pinnaclecart shown below have incredible user, order, shipping, and product management, and also include a code-less site editor that lets you clone your existing WordPress site’s look easily.

pinnacle cart admin panel

You can use virtually any stand-alone shopping cart to run alone side your WordPress site. In most cases, you will just install the cart software in a subdirectory, such as “/store” or “/shop”. With these carts, you can even host the site on a different server/hosting account under a sub-domain of “store.yoursite.com” or “shop.yoursite.com”. All that really matters is that you have a link somewhere on your current website that directs the customers to the install so they can view your products.

There are free shopping carts on the market which are open source and premium carts that range in price. You will want to read up on the feature set of each and their reviews.

Read the reviews

The best thing to do when looking for a shipping cart for your WordPress site is to read the reviews on a few sites like this one and try a few trials to find out which one you can find your way around. Each shopping-cart will have similar features and the unique ones that stand out.

Adding a shopping cart to your website may seem intimidating but it is really not very complex. Basically, when it comes to setting up an online store, you need the cart software, a payment gateway (or a company you use to make money from the customer electronically). If it is your first store, figure those things out first, then you can worry about shipping, promo codes, etc.

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