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WordPress + WooCommerce
Magento would be overkill.
I recently built a site for a client using WP + WC that has done almost $80k in sales in its first 6 weeks.
WordPress is definitely not just for blogging anymore.
Building the theme elsewhere and then converting it to a wordpress theme would be a waste of time, so I would start with a blank theme. Underscores or Bones are great starter themes. WooCommerce is the best plugin to get started with eCommerce, but right out of the box it really only does the basics -- minimal product variation capabilities, account page, order tracking and of course product listings. It's all you'd really need for most basic stores. It's pretty easy to extend and there are a lot of additional extensions listed for free in the WordPress plugin repo.
Good luck!
There are already plugins that do this. WooCommerce will give you the PayPal functionality. Product Add-Ons is an extension of WooCommerce that will enable customers to select properties of products. The extensions costs $49 for a single site.
Just up to you to configure it. You can pay someone to set all of this up, but it could be a few hours work depending on how many products and properties you have.
Also, it's annoying when someone asking for work assumes it's a simple job. If this is to be coded from scratch, it's definitely not a simple job. I don't know why you would assume it's easy unless it's to try to show that you somehow know what you're talking about, but it just makes you look like a know-it-all, which has nightmare client written all over it.
Just some friendly advice.
Shopify is well designed, and super simple to create something, however, it is less customizable and does take a proportion of your sales. If you want something a bit more hands on, then woocommerce and wordpress is extremely clean and free.
If you're set on WordPress, look into WooCommerce and Gravity Forms. Could definitely accomplish this relatively easily with a conditional logic based form.
As far as the e-commerce side of things goes, WooCommerce is a great plugin that turns Wordpress into a full-fledged e-commerce platform. It's free to install and runs out of the box with some relatively powerful features, but there are premium extensions available for it that are relatively cheap to extend the functionality to do whatever you want to do.
There is also another free plugin (separate from Woocommerce) called Easy Digital Downloads which is quite well reviewed as a plugin to facilitate selling digital goods on Wordpress sites, althought I don't have any experience with it first-hand.
If you're new to WordPress (not sure of your general coding background), adding eCommerce might not be as easy as he/you think it is.
The typical recommendation though is WooCommerce, but you may/may not find that the theme currently in use doesn't support it very well.
tl;dr: Hire a developer, it will save you money in the long run.
I'd be looking at WooCommerce to do this if it were me. Combined with an add on like OpenTickets maybe. I'm sure you could set parameters when shopping for the ticket similar to filling out a form - which seems like a redundant and possibly unnecessary step. Good luck!
I would definitely recommend WooCommerce. It has a lot of those features built in
Are you looking to be more of a catalog mode, or actual ecommerce? I used something like this for that particular feature.
Take a look at the last screenshot for an example of the layout I think you were looking for - it's just a shortcode away!
It's pretty easy to setup, and inputting products is as simple as editing existing pages in WordPress.
Hey,
Don't listen to what other people are saying, you got this! I think your best bet with reducing development time, but not abandoning design is to use a Wordpress site... I know I know...Wordpress sucks sometimes, but you'll have quick turn around.
I would check these free themes out: http://designscrazed.org/free-wordpress-ecommerce-themes/ and this cheap one from Woothemes: http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/.
Hope that was helpful!
Many start their webshop using Wordpress + WooCommerce. They are written in PHP but most likely the only thing you'll maybe want to change is the template so really you don't need to know much PHP if any. I say "maybe want to change" because there are crazy many excellent templates out there, both free and paid ones, so you might find even a template you like which you won't have to change.
> Also, I've been playing with WordPress a bit, but it seems to only work with templates? Is there a way to make a more robust cms like WordPress work with a custom design I've created?
What do you mean? What are you trying to create? I have created and seen my friends create any type of website I need. From a landing page to full e-commerce page.
So, here are my recommendations. First and the most important, learn how themes work. Here is a preliminary guide that will get you on the right track: http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
Secondly, check out Advanced Custom Fields. It is one of the most useful plugin for Wordpress. It has pro add-ons but they are totally worth paying for.
If you need ecommerce on Wordpress, check out Woocommerce.
What platform is your site designed on? WordPress or completely custom? If you used WordPress I would look into WooCommerce (http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/). Stripe has several integration options for different platforms. You can review their options under the documentation section.
Yahoo didn't write a parser for your site. They very likely wrote a parser for WooCommerce (the commerce plugin that your site uses). It makes sense for them to have written that parser because "With 9,843,057 downloads WooCommerce powers over 30% of all online stores."
I reccomend WordPress with WooCommerce.
Godaddy offers one click WordPress installs and hosting ...
There are a lot of WooCommerce features and addons as well so you don't limit your growth.
Plenty of documentation and help all around the web for it.
And its FREE(you pay for hosting)
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
Edit: some grammar and added some more info
I would say for a single product ecommerce website, the easiest and fastest way would be to build it using WooCommerce (WordPress plugin).
You can find free themes and ask for free help from WordPress folks in /r/wordpress or on WordPress.org forums, if you ever need help. There are powerful features built-in WooCommerce, like adding multiple payment methods, adding custom coupons, Tax rules etc. for more go through this page: http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
You can host your Woo store easily on any shared or dedicated hosting provider, but I would suggest you to go with cloud hosting company like Cloudways, they offer dedicated cloud servers and also added advance caching rules (Varnish) to WooCommerce based websites to make them faster. Their plans start at $5/month in which you get 24x7 tech support, auto backups, dedicated cloud server, unlimited staging urls and unlimited domains.
An ecommerce website loading under a second would definitely help you improve sales as user experience for your incoming traffic would be great.
Are you using WooCommerce? If so, this will show you how to achieve this. Woo Commerce plays very will with Stripe, but you'll need an SSL certificate to do so.
Ask them if they want to be able to manage the content, tell them you can provide a website in two ways.
One is static, which would not really allow them to edit the content themselves (no CMS) and could be a fine choice if they have a simple business and don't plan on changing any information that is on the website themselves or through you.
Two is dynamic, which allows them to have a little back-end login in where they can change information on the web pages and easily expand the website with more functionality, so this would include a CMS which could be WordPress, one of the many others or self built.
This is the easy way of explaining it for me to complete non-tech clients with small businesses. Ideally you will get them into some sort of agreement or contract in which they will still come back to you for any changes either way.
So personally I would always push the CMS/dynamic route unless I really don't think the client will change the website or can benefit from expanding the website, which is rare.
EDIT: Also, to go a little more into your specific situation, since you are building a shop you definitely want a CMS of some sort for adding new products and managing all that. If I were you I would have a look into building a nice design for him in raw HTML/CSS/JS, then convert that into a WordPress theme with the WooCommerce extension.
WooCommerce, an incredibly popular WordPress plugin, has an auction extension.
Wordpress configuration is about as user-friendly as you'll get.
They aren't themes - but check out WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions.
Although the subscriptions extension is definitely not free - if you can deal with it, we've had pretty good success with it right out of the box.
If you want to stay in their eco-system, I think WooThemes are also pretty into working well with WooCommerce.
Ugh. This sounds like a commercial.
Zen Cart is comparatively user-friendly compared to the other major open source e-commerce option, Magento, which is a bit more complex and probably better for more advanced users. WooCommerce may be something to look into, as it's relatively user-friendly and based off of Wordpress, which is known for being user-friendly, but it's not quite as powerful as a full-fledged e-commerce CMS like Zen Cart or Magento. You'll also have to buy premium plugins for any advanced features, though that will likely be the case regardless of which platform you decide to go with.
If you're willing to pay a small monthly subscription fee (starting at $29/month), I'd definitely recommend Shopify. It's super easy and designed for people that just want to get an e-commerce presence up and running without having to worry about the headaches.
I find WordPress to be a great CMS. The following succinctly illustrates why.
The WP go-to for E-commerce is WooCommerce.
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
A new plugin has been developed recently to bridge brick & mortar POS with WooCommerce, which looks very exciting.
You'll want to get your own security certificate, if you will host the transactions on your site. If you use Paypal as the payment gateway, you don't need to worry about this. Either way, Paypal isn't really a POS, at least not in the way you want. It's really a payment gateway, for which you have plenty of options to consider.
I hope that helps.
Shopify is easy to setup, but has a monthly fee. Learning some web design is a bit challenging, but it's priceless.
I would advise learning how to use Wordpress and then learn WooCommerce. It's the most used Wordpress eCommerce system.
You can just setup a Shopify account, but I can't justify spending that money every month unless you've tried your best at learning web design first.
Good lucks with the greens ;)
edit: added links
The design could be better. It basically looks like a default WordPress theme. It needs to look like an actual online retail site, because as it is right now, nothing about the site inspires confidence. I say this not as a personal dig at your attempt, but rather as someone who has created similar sites in the past and gotten nowhere with them.
I can see that you just have the astore placed in an iframe on the home page. Personally, I've never been a fan of their affiliate store thing. Even though it's legit, it looks very scammy and doesn't allow you to do a lot of cool stuff with it.
What I'd recommend is, if you don't have the knowledge / experience to design a theme yourself, then look for some WP themes that are marketed as e-commerce / storefront themes, and then download some plugins like Woocommerce and Prosociate and set up a nice looking storefront.
I haven't personally used these yet, but I do have them installed and plan on testing them out in the near future.
If you take anything away from this post though, it should be that you don't want it to look like a blog. You want to look like a reputable, trusted source for products and information, and that's easily doable through a new theme/design.
Good luck, keep at it!
for lead generation, use a plugin such as gravity forms to create a form
for ecommerce part, use WooCommerce with WooCommerce Subscriptions for recurring payments for your services
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
http://www.woothemes.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/
I'm assuming you don't have a programming background so I'll go straight to the options available under those circumstances. The most popular free option is Wordpress. The problem here is that there's still a bit of technical tinkering you'd need to do (though not prohibitively much). A lot of webhosts will have an easy install for Wordpress sites. The bigger hurdle is setting up your themes and the e-commerce functions (there are free themes available and WooCommerce is a free plugin option for e-commerce on WP sites). There's also a WooCommerce related WP plugin for accepting BTC, so that end would be covered as well. If you go this route, you can try setting up a mock store as a Wordpress blog (a WP site downloads a set of WP files to be used on a purchased domain, a WP blog is hosted right on Wordpress.com). Most, if not all, the things you can do with and on a WP site, you can do on a WP blog; the main difference is the domain name (yoursite.com vs yourblog.wordpress.com). Disclaimer: it's been a long, long time since I've touched anything WP.
Another option you could look into is Shopify. Admittedly, I've never used or worked with it myself, but I have a few acquaintances that are very non-tech proficient build out fairly good looking stores. Shopify isn't free though and their basic plan is $29/month. They do have a 14 day free trial however so it might be worth looking into if WP gives you a headache. And yes, Shopify also allows you to accept BTC.
Hope that helps. Good luck and keep up the hustle.
I'm afraid you're asking for a very tall order. Building a site like the one you've shared and integrating a payment gateway would be a lot of work even for an experienced WordPress developer.
If you really sold on doing this all on your own I would recommend starting with an existing WordPress theme. There are many free ( http://wordpress.org/themes/ ) and premium ( http://www.woothemes.com/ ) resources for themes. Some of WooTheme's themes support e-commerce out of the box ( http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/ ).
I hope this helps a bit.
A good place to start is picking a theme that could work for you. I recommend one with ecommerce (WooCommerce ready) built in.
http://themeforest.net/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=woocommerce
I might recommend finding one that works with WooCommerce (since WooCommerce has a plugin for payzippy)
http://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-payzippy-payment-gateway/
Like traxxas said, most every e-commerce system supports "variants" or "variations" that will let you accomplish this - However, some do it better than others.
If you're on WordPress, I'd highly recommend WooCommerce.
On Drupal? Check out UberCart.
Not using a CMS? Go for OpenCart.
My advice would be to go with WooCommerce and one of their themes, customized to give your site its own look.
An even better option might be to forego Wordpress altogether, and go with something like Shopify instead.
Creating an ecommerce site can involve a few nasty things that go well beyond designing normal Wordpress themes. It's definitely not a newbie-friendly kind of project if you want to do anything beyond what can be achieved with existing plugins and themes.
I wouldn't get bummed out. It would have been worse if you didn't ask and had a website with low or no sales and you didn't know why. You should check out Woo. It's a theme for WordPress. You should first see if your hosting service is compatible with WordPress. Then upload/install WordPress into your hosting and through the WordPress interface you install Woo. Then you can change colors, add your logo, add your products and descriptions, etc. The Woo plugin will allow you to add your SEO keywords and descriptions which will allow users searching for products that you have be able to find your site. Woo is just one I've heard of, there are many more.
Full disclosure: I work for an ecommerce development firm.
We use Stripe in our solutions and think it's the best pricing and they handle just about any PCI compliance issue. Stripe can integrate with many ecommerce platforms, it just depends what you want to spend.
I would recommend WooCommerce or Shopify based on your original idea of looking at squarespace. If you're not looking to fork over a lot of money, those would be my initial suggestions.
Here's an article from my company's blog about choosing open source or fully-hosted platforms.
Considering you are just starting into development I would consider using an already made solution like WooCommerce or Shopify.
Any of these will also have tons of templates already made in ThemeForest and other resellers. So it's a great way to get your feet wet.
I'll just mention https://easydigitaldownloads.com/ and http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/. Both are wordpress plugins. I have no experience with them, so i can't give you feedback, but you can have a look.
Of course, it's discutable if it's ok to build shop on top of blog platform. Usually i found responses to this like "if you have no more than 100 products, go for it".
PS: I'm looking for e-commerce platform for about week, and with Woocommerce I get farthest. Usually I got kicked in face when I try to import products using XML/CSV. With WP All Import plugin (lite version free) it was really easy. Then there were other traps I jumped in, like missing WooCommerce shortcodes (which they mention in every tutorial on Youtube)...
Stripe is for people with a website not (currently) Etsy, that's true. But you could easily get your own professional, ecommerce website with something like Wordpress + WooCommerce + Professional, Ecommerce theme + Stripe.
No need to create a payment portal. You don't need any deep technical knowledge to do all of the above yourself in fact, or fancy web design knowledge (I've setup multiple Wordpress sites.)
Background: I do some WordPress consulting. Feel free to PM me for more info.
Hi there...
from what I can see she uses ipage as a host and used their drag-and-drop site builder. One thing you can do rather easily is incorporate paypal, just adding paypal links to the products she wants to sell, and then doing your best to style that with css. Honestly though, that looks quite tacky nowadays.
What I would recommend you do is grab a free woocommerce enabled wordpress theme, and then just use css to restyle that in her ~~color~~ existing color palette, once you're done, grab the woocomerce plugin and she should be good to go. Since she is a friend, ask her for the credentials to login to her server, you can make a test wordpress installation on her site ~~seperate~~ separate from her existing site and use that to test what I'm saying... play around with the idea, once you're ready, just save your styles.css file, get rid of her old site, and then install wordpress into her root directory. Re-do the earlier procedure to download wordpress (using ipage, its pretty one-click-install), install the same free woocommerce enabled theme you found, install the woocommerce plugin, and lastly, add the styles.css file you saved from earlier.)
There's a sh*t-ton of information out there to get your started... see wp Codex
for a free theme you can get that directly off the woocommerce site here!
Good luck, and all the best.
edit: word edit2: more words :-/
I'd suggest that if you are serious about your business you talk to a web design professional to deal with all of that for you. When talking to them be completely honest about your expectations and let them know how big of a budget you have. You'll probably find that they have an option that fits your needs. The smaller your budget gets the more likely they'll tell you to use a WordPress or Joomla! theme that is compatible with a shopping cart add-on.
know this...
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT
Not every site needs to be some completely handcrafted work of art. Sometimes people need to get their shit to market and they want a dependable way to do that that doesn't cost them a bunch of money.
My suggestion if almost no budget is what we're actually talking about here:
When I'm dealing with someone that just wants to get their candle business or beaded bracelets business on the intertubes I usually point them at BlueHost, WordPress, some theme by WooThemes, and WooCommerce by Woothemes as a package. You almost can't fuck this up. If you have any CMS background at all WooThemes has made this as easy as possible. Then what you are dealing with is picking photos for the slider/products/pages/posts and the text for all that same stuff.
For the calender I would set up: http://time.ly/. I use it for a few different sites they have a great backend and it's free. They have awesome short codes to place sorted view around the site in widget areas or pages/posts. As for the ticker sales Woocommerce: http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/ with a free PayPal set up can be a great way to get the tickets sold and tracked. Feel free to message me if you need any help!
Install standalone wordpress.org on your host.
Install woocommerce plugin.
Activate plugin.
Set up store items and settings.
Add additional plugins to fill in needs.
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
You can sell unlimited items. You can load them in one at a time or bulk with certain plugins.
Comes with a default design and some free options. You can code your own, or buy a woocommere theme from a place like themeforest.
You can customize it anyway you want.
Even using a completely pre-built platform is typically complex when you start customizing things. You said in your other comment that you are using wordpress, and already have a cart. But what are you using to get the cart? Is it a plugin? If so, which one?
Basically we need more information to help out here. We don't know what your site is made up of already so we don't know how to advise you to move forward.
If you have have shopping functionality on your site already and just want to add categories to the side, that will still require a developer but is much easier. If you don't have shopping functionality already, then you will need something to handle that. Something like WooCommerce, considering you are already using WordPress.
Be careful not to underestimate the time and cost to get "simple" things done. Something that seems simple may actually be incredibly complex. Categories for example, it may just seem like links on a page, but where do the categories come from? Are they in the database? Do they need to be automatically generated or will they stay the same? Where do they go when you click on them? Do you want a product count next to the categories? Etc.. Simple things can often be more complex than we initially imagine.
I use Justhost.com for my hosting and domain registration. (I can get you a referral if you're interested) and love the service.
There are a few steps to this endeavor:
Buy a domain name (this can be done at JustHost or GoDaddy, or various other places) I recommend buying it from wherever you get your hosting accounts. as this will help reduce technicalities (like renaming DNS Servers) and may be free with hosting.
Obtain hosting for your site. All websites are just public files stored on servers, you need a server to store your files. This should also include email support (I have unlimited hosting and email for about $100 a year)
Set-up the email address and Outlook (or whatever) to receive the mail. Your hosting company should be able to walk you through this. I would make a few addresses (, , , etc) to filter out the thing's you'll need. Also be careful where you display these addresses as spam is more prevalent than gmail leads you to believe.
Set up your site. You can hire someone or build it yourself. Honestly it's pretty easy to set up a Wordpress site and add in Woocommerce and it will handle inventory and sales directly. I would look for a tutorial on YouTube and dedicate a weekend to the project.
Here are some plugins that may interest you:
Most definitely. http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce offers a free ecommerce plugin to get you started.
If you want a more customized solution check out http://www.shopify.com.
Wordpress is great because there are thousands of plugins to give you options. You can start out cheap and upgrade as you need to. Thanks for checking out my video!
You can look at something like WooCommerce. It has tons of additional add-ons that will allow you to import from .csv files. It is heavily supported and answers easy to find. There are lots of other 'stores' out there but that is the one that I use and fits well for several different types of clients.
Makes sense if they don't need to update their sites. I guess they've just heard Wordpress being all the rage nowadays and once someone heard "I've got my site done in WP, it's so cool" from their co-worker, they'll jump the wagon.
For shopping http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/ is a popular solution. For the galleries there's a myriad solutions, really. NextGEN is a decent all around solution but it all comes down to the quirks they want.. I had to code custom because client wanted a horizontally scrolling gallery instead of a slider :|
Your website looks awful and it's from 2004! That was 10 YEARS ago you made it. Also, your page seems to say "NO CANDLES FOR SALE AT THE MOMENT" when you click at an item. Why not head over to /r/wordpress and learn how to use Woocommerce to make up a webstore of your own?
It only takes a bit of skills to make your website nice. You don't need money, you need help.
Ps. also your email seems to only bring up your website on google search and nothing else.
I've been using and recommending WooCommerce for most of my Wordpress e-Commerce projects. It's easy to use for the user and easy to restyle and customize via hooks and filters and can grow to fit your needs. WooCommerce also has excellent reporting and support for a huge amount of payment gateways. It also supports subscriptions and you can read more about that support here
Woocommerce subscriptions would need to be coupled with wordpress groups. Here's videos and more info about those plugins.
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/ http://www.woothemes.com/extensions/woocommerce-subscriptions/ http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/membership/
My post in "Want to get started in learning web design and eventually to be able to create an online business - what language to learn first?" may help point you in the right direction for what you should consider learning.
In terms of your end-goal, I would suggest setting up WordPress to manage your website's pages, as well as it's news articles (called "Posts" in WordPress lingo).
Once you have that in place, the WooCommerce plug-in for WordPress is absolutely fantastic for selling either tangible (books, DVDs, clothing, etc.) or virtual (e-books, audio files, etc.) items. The base plug-in is free, and works with PayPal (Standard Payments or Payments Pro), Stripe.com (No setup/monthly fees, just flat 2.9%+$.30 for any major domestic or international credit card) and a handful of other payment processors.
If you need other functionality, there are more decent-quality free & for-pay WordPress plugins than you can shake a stick at that will likely do whatever needs doing.
Thank you everyone for your feedback.
Can I ask about several other services in hopes of getting additional feedback?
Google checkout and Yahoo small business offer store hosting services. Any thoughts?
Also, what about Woocommerce, a wordpress based service?