WordPress 2.9 E-Commerce: A Review

I have been a big fan of Packt Publishing books for quite a while now. Packt Publishing is the first place I check to find out about the latest open source and web technology books. It does have a ton of books on WordPress and related technologies, so that always helps. WordPress 2.9 E-Commerce, which Packt Publishing was kind enough to provide us a copy with, is not your average WordPress book. It is written for those who want to start an e-commerce website using the WP platform. If you want to sell your physical or information products on the web and would like to use WordPress to get it done, this book is for you. So let’s dig in and see what’s covered in this book (for more information on this book and other exciting Packt Publishing books, visit packtpub.com).

Many WordPress users assume that you can only use WordPress to start and manage a blog. That can not be further from the truth. Those who have been around WordPress for quite some time have come to realize the true power of this platform. WordPress 2.9 E-Commerce is written for small business owners and anybody who’s interested in starting an online store by tapping into the power of WordPress. Startups and small businesses may not have the budget to hire developers and experts to build a fancy online shop. In reality, you do not need to be an expert in PHP or other web technologies to get your own shop online. WordPress 2.9 E-Commerce walks you through all the steps you need to take and shows you the plugins and the themes you need to take advantage of to take your store online. (more…)

Start a WordPress E-commerce Store with WP Store

WordPress is one versatile platform that can handle all kinds of websites. Whether you are looking to start a blog or take your business online, WordPress has you covered. WP Store is another Templatic theme that comes handy for businesses. WP Store is a powerful e-commerce theme that makes it so easy to take your offline business online or start an e-commerce business from scratch.

When picking up a top e-commerce theme, you want to make sure that you get a professional design and a powerful back-end to go with it. The look and feel of your website is important, but you want to pick up a theme that makes it easy to manage your inventory, customers, and listings easily. That’s all possible with WP Store.

WP Store is super clean and very attractive. It’s image friendly as well, so you can add your items to your website fast. This theme comes with auto-install feature which makes life easier for business owners. You just have to activate the theme, and it automatically populates your database with samples. So you don’t have to get started from scratch, and you won’t have to read a 1000 page tutorial to get this theme to work.

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Start Your e-Shop with E-commerce Theme

Whether your want to start an e-commerce business or just want to have the ability to sell your own art work, you are going to need a user-friendly website to help you close the deal with your visitors. You can always pay someone to design you a killer e-commerce website but thanks to E-commerce Theme for WordPress, you can save money and time and go live super fast.

Ecommerce Theme is a cool online shop theme for WordPress that lets you add your products and start selling in a matter of hours. The theme is search engine optimized, which means as long as you add your content the proper way, you are going to get free leads from Google, Bing, and other search engines and earn money in the process. It also does help that the theme is easy to customize.

As demonstrated in the above image, you can easily show your visitors your latest released/added products. You can also put your top products in a prominent place at the top of your theme to generate more leads. Another feature that I like about this theme is the drop down menu at the top that makes it easy to build a very comprehensive online shop.

Ecommerce Theme is very flexible as well. Whether you are a real estate agent or just have a few t-shirts that you want to sell online, you can easily modify the theme to make it fit your business model. Add to that the 6 pre-built color styles that you get with this package, and you’ve got one killer shop theme to start building your online business with.

6 Cool eBay WordPress Plugins You Should Try

Many bloggers use eBay to monetize their blog and pay for their hosting fees and even make a living online (if they are lucky). eBay affiliate program is one of the most innovative ones out there. It comes with a lot of widgets, banners, and link building tools to give you the opportunity to promote eBay products without having to do too much. You can always grab the code from eBay and slap it on your website. But you can’t do everything with what eBay offers you. There are certainly things that eBay could’ve done better. That’s where the following eBay plugins come in. Whether you want to integrate auctions into your blog or build an eBay store on your blog, you can easily do it with these 6 WordPress eBay plugins:

• eBay Auto Poster: if you are looking for a quick way to post eBay listings to your blog without doing a whole lot of work, eBay Auto Poster is the one to try. It automates the process. I wouldn’t recommend it to regular bloggers. It’s really made for affiliate marketers. It’s also compatible with WP Robot.
• eBay Store: a cool plugin that imports your products from your ebay store and allows you to sell products through your WordPress website/blog.
• Auction Affiliate: another plugin made for affiliate marketers that is designed to let you add eBay auctions to your blog. You can easily define what products you want to add to your blog. You can customize the look and feel as well.
• WordBay: WordBay is a simple but effective way to create a WordPress-powered site featuring eBay listings based on any keywords you choose. It’s really made for folks who want to focus solely on building eBay-based WordPress websites.
• eBay Sales Lister: a very simple plugin that makes it easy to add eBay listings to your sidebar or inside your blog. Now, this is nothing too complicated, but the fact that you don’t have to do much work to get this to work makes this attractive to WordPress bloggers.
• Free eBay Store:  an easy to use and free eBay WordPress plugin that makes it so easy to add an eBay store to your blog. If you are a fan of eBay affiliate program, you are going to love Free eBay Store. All you have to do is enter your account information, provide a keyword, and tell it how many rows and columns your store’s going to have.

There you have it. 6 cool WordPress plugins to integrate eBay into your blog easily without having to write a line of code. If you are looking for a new channel to monetize your blog, the above plugins can come in handy. Don’t forget to check eBay Affiliate Program for more information.

Your turn: did I miss anything?

Setup an E-commerce Site Using WordPress E-Commerce Training

I don’t know about you but for a long time I believe WordPress was only a blogging platform that could be used for blog sites only. It was in my dark hours with Blogger but still there is no excuse for that attitude. WordPress is one of the best content management systems ever made. I don’t care what the folks at Interwoven or Joomla say, but a well-done WordPress site trumps those “wanna be” solutions any day.

Membership sites are now becoming very popular these days. You basically identify a popular niche. You create a super duper resource site for that niche, and then you offer a membership plan to help fund your future research. It’s being done by all the top gurus in the Internet Marketing industry. And most of them use amember solution. There is no question in my mind that amember is a great script, but it’s not free, and you have to pay $100+ per each license. Why pay that kind of money when you can have thousands of membership sites made for free!

WordPress Ecommerce training not only has everything you need to create a membership site, but it also comes with 109 themes that are suitable for such sites. Running an e-commerce website with WordPress is like a breeze really. You need to figure out what form of payment you accept, and integrate that with WordPress. In addition, you need to know what you will be selling. Finally, you need to find a way to manage your customers.

An E-commerce website is not for everyone, and you shouldn’t get on the bandwagon unless you have specific plans to go about making money, but if you have decided on running an e-commerce shop, you are better off putting your trust in WordPress. It has never disappointed me, and regardless of how good other scripts are out there, they are still not WordPress.