How to Build an Online Store With WordPress

WordPress is a powerful and flexible publishing system. From blogs to entire websites, WordPress has proven to be a great content management solution for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of online sites.

We believe WordPress can also help you manage and run an ecommerce store.

We believe it so much that it runs our entire iThemes website and ecommerce storefront … with some help from Paypal and E-junkie.

So we thought we’d provide a resource, sharing our experience with it, for how you can run and manage your own online store with WordPress.

THINGS YOU’LL NEED

• Domain name and hosting (like Doreo, HostGator or GoDaddy)
• WordPress (it’s free software offered by all the popular web hosts)
  
• Payment processor (like Paypal, Google Checkout)
• Delivery and fulfillment service (like E-junkie)

Other items that will come in handy:

• Quality WP theme designed for ecommerce stores to showcase your products
• Email newsletter service (like Aweber)

HOW IT ALL WORKS TOGETHER

Here are some of the pieces to using WordPress to run your ecommerce storefront ….

First, WordPress is simply an easy way to manage your website’s content — the text, images, navigation, pages, etc. It’s an online content management system. (Read: Easy way to manage websites through online software.)

Second, Paypal or Google Checkout is the payment processor, not WordPress. You’ll use these services to accept payment, including credit cards, for your products on your website.

Third, for digital goods, like iThemes WordPress themes, we also use an ecommerce delivery service. When you buy a theme from iThemes, you pay using Paypal, but E-junkie manages the delivery process and sends you the download link for your theme. (It’s also good for tangible goods as well and includes things like sales tax and shipping information.) If we didn’t have a service like E-junkie, we’d have to manually email the purchase themes to our customers. This way, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it’s all automated.

WHY USE WORDPRESS FOR YOUR ONLINE STORE

Here are the major reasons we love using WordPress to run our own ecommerce storefront and suggest it to our clients:

1. It’s search engine friendly – With a good search engine optimized theme, you can help your site get indexed on the search engines and found by those looking for your product. (See also, 7 Steps to Optimizing WordPress video tutorials)

2. It’s free – No need to buy software. WordPress is open source software (read: free). It’s offered as a “one-click install” by most of the popular web hosting companies.

3. It’s easy – If you know how to use Microsoft Word, then you can use WordPress. With relative ease, you can manage your online store through the WordPress visual interface.

NEED A WORDPRESS THEME FOR YOUR ONLINE STORE?
Check out our Ecommerce WordPress Theme and get started on your ecommerce store today!