How to turn wordpress into a shopping cart

A great, free plugin for wordpress is called e-commerce plugin.  It allows you to turn your wordpress blog into an  e-commerce shopping cart.

Installation

Installation is pretty easy.  You just need to download the zip file, extract it, and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory.

Once the plugin is activated, you just need to add a product, and your new shopping cart is ready to go.

Features

All of the new features of this plugin are presented under the “e-commerce” tab.  They are split up into the categories: Sales, Products, Groups, Variations, Marketing, and Settings.

Sales:

Gives you a breakdown of the total number of sales for the day

Products:

• Adding, editing, deleting products
• Fields: price, description, and additional description
• product categories
• donation (allow donations)
• stock control
• downloads/digital goods (a download URL can be specified)
• shipping rates through a flat-rate table

Groups:

Groups help your visitors find your products. If you sell t-shirts, hats, and trousers you might want to setup a new group called clothing and then add the categories t-shirts, hats, and trousers to that group.

Variations:

A variation can be anything “optional” about a product. ie: Size, Color, etc
For example: if you are selling t-shirts you might setup a variation set called size with the values small, medium, large.

Marketing:

This is where you can setup coupon codes to use on the products in your store.

Settings:

Various global shopping cart settings such as:

• Taxes (percentage)
• Currency
• Shipping (UPS,USPS, flat rate)
• Payment Modules (paypal, google checkout, and chronopay)