To get started selling products from your new WAHM Blogs shop, you need to configure your cart to suit your needs. These instructions will assume that you are already familiar with the basics of blogging with Wordpress and will concentrate on the settings unique to the cart system.
The plugin automatically creates 6 pages for you, all of which are editable.
- Shopping Cart: this will automatically display the shopping cart when someone adds a product to their cart.
- Checkout: for when the customer wants to pay for their purchases.
- Thank you for your order: after a successful payment at paypal the customer, if they follow the link from paypal, will return to this page.
- Cancelled Order: if the customer cancels the order at payapl, and they follow the link from paypal, they will return to this page.
- Downloads: this is the page a user will be directed to after they purchase a downloadable product.
- Shipping rates: because of the different possible shipping rates the plugin allows, this page automatically shows the table of shipping rates for you.
Configuration
There are numerous settings that need to be set up before you can start selling.
Go to the additional menu item added to the Options menu eShop Settings. This page features the main options for the plugin. Defaults have been added for your convienance ,where possible.
eShop Admin
eShop status - is the cart live or in test mode? To test the shop you need to have an account on paypal sandbox. You will need to create and utilise email addresses for the ’seller’ and ‘buyer’ within the sandbox when you test the cart.
Items per page - this value sets how many items(orders, prodcuts etc.) per page are displayed on the various admin pages.
Merchant Gateway
Payment method: only paypal is available at present.
Email address: this is your paypal business acounts email address.
Business Details
Available business email addresses: when sending an email to a customer via their order details you can add in here extra email addresses you wish to make available to ’send from’.
Business Location - which country you are in, or registered as being in when setting up your paypal account.
Product options
Product category sort order - newest, oldest, alphabetically - these are the values available to sort products when they are listed on a parent page.
Options per product - how many different options values can you add to a product.
Out of Stock message - when you run out of stock you may want to temporarily display an out of stock message.
Stock Control - If this is used when a stock level falls to 0 or below then the stock is automatically made not available. However stock levels are not checked during the order process, and stock reduction is only processed after a successful purchase. Therefore it is possible to sell more items than you have in stock.
Show stock available - if using stock control this allows you to display the stock avaialble.
Random products to display - this is the number of random products to display if you utilise the <!--eshop_list_random--> code snippet.
Download attempts - the number of download attempts that you will allow per purchase, per file. If set to 0 you will stop all downloads! The default value is 3.
Currency
Symbol - whether it be $, £, etc.
Code - a 3 letter currency code that matches your country.
Credits
Display eShop credit allows you to hide the ‘Powered by eShop’ credit that appears on various pages in your shop. Disabling this will still add a hidden HTML comment to the page.
Link to extra pages
Here you can add 2 extra links to appear in various places in the cart/checkout procedure that link to a Privacy Policy, or Help page. The page id number should be used.
Other Options
The eShop Shipping Rates menu item also allows you to amend the shipping calculations and set whether you would like to use the zones set up by country, or by US States. The Show Shipping Zones on Shipping Page option allows you to automatically show the correct table for the zones. Be warned that these tables are large.
The eShop Style page allows you to amend the default style, or disable it completely.
Creating Products
A product is associated to a page, an additional section now appears beneath the page content editable area entitled ‘Product fields’.
The sku should be a unique identification number for your product.
The Product Description is a short description of the product and will appear in the cart.
Option x and Price x, you need to enter an option value and a price for any variations of a product. If there is only 1, then please use the Option 1 and Price 1 inout fields.
The Product Download selection box only appears if you have already uploaded a file. Choosing this option links the product to that file.
Choose your Shipping Rate carefully, F is set aside for any Free shipping (obviously downloadable products should use this).
The Featured Product product selection chooses whether that product can be listed as a featured product.
The Stock Available option would show an out of stock message if set to no, otherwise the standard add to cart form will appear.
Extras
Product Listing
Depending on how you structure your site, there are extra functions that are available for use.
<!--eshop_list_featured-->lists products that you have marked as being featured..<!--eshop_list_random-->This displays a random list of products.<!--eshop_random_product-->This displays a single random product.
To get the best from the above options a suggested layout of pages could be to create a top level page entitled Shop where you could use the <!--eshop_list_featured--> option or <!--eshop_list_random-->
The <!--eshop_random_product--> snippet can be used on any Wordpress page