Wordpress is becoming more & more flexible every day, no longer is it just a blogging platform. The following guide should highlight everything you need to turn your website into a fully functional Ecommerce store with WordPress. This makes it incredibly easy for Designers, Coders & Artists to sell digital wares via their blog without the startup costs of typical ecommerce software.
WordPress Ecommerce Themes
Market Theme – $55
The Market Theme is an all in one WordPress Ecommerce Theme with a built in shopping cart. The features include:
- User Purchase History
- Product Search Capability
- Related Products Shown on Item Page
- Multiple Images for Product
- Sell Digital and Physical Products
- Easily Customizable with CSS and template edits
- Self-contained Shopping Cart System
- Fully functional WordPress Theme
- Grid Based Product Layout
- Paypal payment integration included
- Authorize.net payment integration included
Crafty Cart – Free
Crafty Cart is a free WordPress Ecommerce Theme designed to work with the WP-Ecommerce plugin (which is also free).
Ecommerce Theme – $79.95
The Ecommerce Theme is another fully fuctional WordPress Ecommerce Theme that works straight out of the box. Features include:
- Featured Product on Homepage
- Grid View on Homepage
- Change number of products on Homepage
WP Shop – $35.00
WP Shop is a feature packed theme with shopping cart integration. Features include:
- Simple Breadcrumb navigation
- Products are set using posts and categorized in single first level categories
- Thumbnails using custom fields
Home page
- Displays the Title of each category along with a thumbnail image of the latest posted product from each category
Category page:
- Displays the Title of each product along with it’s thumbnail image
- Links to the details (single) page as well as displays a button to directly add the item into shopping cart
Single Page:
- Displays the Title of each product along with it’s thumbnail image
- Displays “other views” of the same product using a mini-gallery of images.
- Uses the “jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries” plugin on the mini-gallery.
- Displays upto 5 titles of related products.
Sidebar:
- Category display
- Search
- Recently added (3) products display with thumbnail
- Track your order
- Widget ready
Tobashop – $25
TobaShop is a fully featured WordPress Ecommerce theme & shopping cart. It features Jquery drop down menus & admin backend & also:
- Integrated with eShop e-Commerce plugins for retrieving product price & option, it also support shopping cart display on pages and widget.
- Multi Column display, which is up to 4 column gird layout to display products.
- Wide featured slider to promote top products.
- Main category blocking to show leading categories.
- 5 widget positions to display Ecommerce widget in eShop plugins.
- Admin Panel theme options to easily entered the featured category to display on the homepage.
- JQuery drop down menu for category and pages.
- Scrollable latest products
- Threaded comments
- Browser Compatibility, including IE6
- Automatic thumbnail resize, upload any images and let theme do its magic
WordPress Ecommerce Plugins
WP-Ecommerce – Free
WP-Ecommerce has been downloaded over 300,000 times & is coded by Instinct Entertainment based in New Zealand. There’s a free version & a gold version both of which also work with WP-MU.
Features include:
- One Page Checkout
- Product Tagging
- Themes
- CSS Customisation
- Downloadable Products
- Product Newsletters
- Related Products
- Mulitple Payment Gateways
Shopp Plugin – $55
The Shopp Plugin is a commerical Ecommerce Plugin for WordPress with a rich featureset. The key features include:
- Single Page Product Data Entry
- Drag & Drop for multiple product images
- Support for Physical & Digital Products
- Order History
- Email Notifications
- RSS Feeds for Categories
- Fast Product Search
- Shipping Rate Calculations
- Shipping Discounts
- Promo Codes & Coupon Codes
eShop Plugin – Free
eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features. Including:
- Utilises WordPress pages, or posts, to create products
- Various methods available for listing products
- Products can have multiple options
- Upload downloadable products
- Basic Statistics
- Download sales data
- Various shipping options
- Admin has access to an Order handling section
- Automatic emails on successful purchase
- User configurable email templates.
- Configurable Out of Stock message.
- Basic Stock Control
- Google Base Data creation
- Uninstall available within the plugin
- Various discount options
- Several payment options
Yakk Plugin – Free
Yakk is an open sourcing Ecommerce /Shopping Cart plugin for WordPress. This product is a bit more simplistic than eShop & Shopp, it only has 3 management areas:
- Showing & Fufilling Orders
- Product Management
- Basic Sales Reports
We recently switched our website from Shopp to PHPurchase. PHPurchase was much less expensive and since we only sell a few different products we didn’t need all the fancy grid layout features and so forth. We just wanted to build the pages the way we wanted and then sell our headphones. Plus PHPurchase is backed by a nice bunch of developers at PHPoet which made me feel comfortable in case I needed some support. So if you are looking around, you may want to consider checking out http://www.phpurchase.com