The WP eCommerce plugin for WordPress is the most commonly used (currently 175,000+ downloads) shopping cart system for WordPress.  I’ve been testing the latest version and it has a lot of additional features that come standard (compared to Magento and VirtuMart).  There are many advantages to using WordPress eCommerce, and below I have listed some of the best features.

Well Defined Categories / Groups Section
There is a self-explanatory tab that says Groups which allows you to add unlimited categories and subcategories to your ecommerce store. It’s very standard to see this available in ecommerce systems and it’s great to see this part of WP eCommerce plugin. In comparison to other WordPress shopping cart plugins they utilise pages or posts to separate categories and it becomes a total nightmare with manging your content and products together in the same database.  WordPress ecommerce keeps these two distinct pieces seperate; making your website more organized.

Adding Products is simple.
Adding products is easy when you click on the Products link. It offers a wide range of settings to customise your products – price and stock controls, shipping and weight settings, product variations, merchant notes, product downloads, coupon codes and promotions. These are very important features when you have different products to sell and helps you distinguish between A and B product.  There are a multitude of variables that each product can have; making entering multiple products (or the same product in different variations) simple.

Widgets make things easy.
Widgets make things easy to display products across your entire website. A widget people typically use on their ecommerce website is view the shopping cart. Having this displayed allows a customer to see what they have  selected, then will send to the checkout section to complete their checkout. The new widgets you’ll see in this latest release for WordPress ecommerce are: Shopping Cart, Groups, Categories, Price Range, Product Specials, Latest Products, Price Range and Donations. You can select anyone of those to display on your WordPress website at any time.

Profit Using Marketing And Cross Promotion Tools Provided
Under the Marketing link; there are options for coupon codes.   Everyone knows the importance of coupons in this day and age; so it’s a great way to encourage your customers to shop with you and make a purchase. It’s a definite plus for me to have this tool built into the system.  For Magento and others, coupon codes are typically add-ons that require additional development. More options you can switch on and off are:

• Cross Sales within your shop
• Show Share This (Social Bookmarks)
• Affiliate Marketing (getting others to sell your stuff)
• How Customer Found Us Survey option

Many Payment Gateways Available
WP e-Commerce comes with a few pre-installed payment gateways including Chronopay, PayPal, PayPal – Express, Google Checkout, and manual payment (for cash or money orders). If you want other payment gateways they offer such as Authorize.net or eWay, then you will have to purchase the Gold Cart Module. Also all transactions are processed securely through an SSL connection if you have SSL installed on your server.

314media can provide custom themes, setup, and configuration of WordPress eCommerce as well as advanced customization and programming support.  Contact us to learn more about our services and how we can help you create an eCommerce website for your business or organization.

Having a customized eCommerce solution in addition to your content managed website has many advantages.  Not only can you add, change, and delete products from your website in the same control panel, you get tight integration that allows your customers to seemlessly navigation your blog, web store, and website and keep the feeling the same throughout.  Here are some of the advantages of having WordPress and eCommerce together.

• WP e-Commerce integrates seamlessly with the WordPress Update System – so when you upload a new product the world knows about it!
• Social Networking:  We help ensure your site is a success by providing you with a range of tools that allow you to import your products into the Facebook Marketplace and Google Base. WP e-Commerce also utilises the populor “Share This” plugin so that your happy customers can bookmark and promote your products too!!!
• We make it easy for you to accept payments online. We can integrate with Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express and many other trusted payment processors.
• Evidence has shown that the less pages your customers have to browse to make a purchase the more sales you will make. This soltions is streamlined, quick and simple to use so that your customers have a great experiance shopping your site.
• Not only do you get to choose from a range of slick store front styles but you can customize and tweak your site to look however you want. We have made it easy for you by utilising WordPress PHP template tags, WordPress shortcodes and WordPress Widgets.
• We understand that different sellers have different needs so we have developed specific modules to cater for musicians, designers and people wishing to setup members only and subscription sites.
• We have been developing the WP e-Commerce solution for over 5 years. We have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of sellers and based on this unparalleled experience we have forged the best WordPress e-Commerce solution ever.

314media can develop a word-class shopping solution to integrate into your WordPress website.  We offer annual support contracts as well as customzied solutions to meet your online sales needs.  Contact us for a risk-free quote today to leanr how WordPress and eCommerce can boost your sales and generate more income for your business.