Plugin: Turn Your WordPress Blog Into An Online Shop With WP-eCommerce

This guest post was written by Jean-Baptiste Jung, who maintains a blog (written in French) that covers WordPress. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I’m always surprised by the incredible extensibility of Wordpress. We already knew that you can use Wordpress as an online magazine, as a photoblog, or even as a Twitter platform. Now, it’s also possible to use your favorite blogging platform as an online shop, just by the use of a single WordPress plugin, WP-eCommerce.

Installing WP-eCommerce

Nothing hard: Just download the WP-eCommerce plugin here, extract the archive on your hard drive, and upload the wp-shopping-cart directory into the wp-content/plugins directory of your Wordpress install.
After activating the plugin, you’ll see a new tab named e-Commerce next to the Comments tab in your Wordpress control panel. This tab contains all options needed for running an e-commerce website, right into Wordpress.

I must admit it, i was surprised - in a good way - by the number of available options: language, localization, tax rates, brands, products, paypal integration, and so on. Sure, this is not Amazon.com, but everything is here to create an online shop which will give satisfaction up to 90% of online sellers. You can easily manage products, payment methods…There’s also a sales journal available, which will help you a lot to manage orders.

User Experience

In addition to its powerful management panel, WP-eCommerce comes with no less than 6 widgets in order to make your clients purchases simpler, and more pleasant. I particularly loved the “Shopping Cart” widget and its ajax interface. Clean, easy, and pro, definitely. Some other available widgets: Categories & brands, Special products, donations…

Conclusion

I was really impressed by this plugin. WP-eCommerce has absolutely everything you need for starting an online shop. There’s also a non-free version of this plugin, which will give you, in addition to the “basic” plugin, a search engine for your products, a picture gallery and some others nice things.