It goes without saying that WordPress can be used to sell stuff. In its simplest form you’ll run a weblog or traditional site with WordPress as the backend, and use your reach to sell products. You can add affiliate links, which basically means that whenever you link to Amazon using your affiliate URL and someone buys something, you’ll get a provision. In fact, if you bought this article by following a link from any of my sites, I made a little extra. Thanks!
However, when most of us are thinking e-commerce we’ve got bigger things than affiliate links in mind. Shopping carts, digital distribution, payment received via PayPal accounts, that sort of thing.
You may be wondering if you can run a Web shop on WordPress. In short, the answer is yes; you could if you wanted to, and if you didn’t have too many products.
The long version: probably not, but don’t let that stop you since there’s really no reason why it shouldn’t work perfectly well if you’re prepared to extend WordPress with plugins, work with custom fields, and then figure out how to connect your shopping cart with PayPal and other payment solutions.
Kind of disheartening isn’t it? Relax, it’s not as bad as it sounds: there are plugins out there that do most of the work for you. Thing is, compared to the other e-commerce systems out there the available plugins are kind of bleak. There used to be a time when open source e-commerce meant tables and no SEO, ugly links and bulky admins. That was then, this is now, and with that in mind it is hard to truly recommend WordPress for e-commerce other than for hobby businesses or if you’re selling a small number of products.
That being said, there’s nothing that’s stopping you from attaching any of the various shopping cart scripts out there right into your theme. Most will probably work with minor hassle, and that would only leave you with the discomfort of figuring out how to charge for your merchandise. Luckily companies like PayPal (and many others, I should add) have made that easy, so you can certainly monetize your weblog or WordPress-powered site with a shop selling your goods if you want to. Just make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. This is sales, after all, and not the content business anymore.
Digital merchandise such as e-books are a completely different matter altogether. Absolutely nothing is stopping you from implementing a payment solution for a digital file, and when paid, you serve the file. In fact, it has almost nothing at all to do with WordPress since it is all about verifying that you got paid, and then directing the customer to the file in question. Adding that sort of solution to your weblog is really easy if you rely on a third-party service (which will take a chunk of your processed money at the very least) to both manage payment and delivery of the files, such as E-junkie (www.e-junkie.com), for example.
It’s just a matter of setting up a link, and then your provider will handle the rest; much like an affiliate program, but with the benefit of you getting a larger chunk of the money, it being your product and all.
You can do the same on your own as well with the necessary plugins or scripts. However, it is really hard to sidestep the fact that you need to actually charge for your products, which means handling payments. You can, theoretically, handle payments yourself as well. I advise against it, if for nothing else but the fact that people feel more secure when they recognize the party handling their money. Better to have someone else worrying about that stuff, but again, it is entirely up to you.
Digital products fit any site perfectly. While WordPress may be no Magento when it comes to e-commerce, it is perfectly well suited for selling e-books, MP3s, design files, or whatever you want to make money on.
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05132010
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