e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging)

Lately I’ve been exploring different e-Commerece web applications and e-Commerce plugins for Wordpress. Since this blog mainly focuses on how to create profit from an Internet business, the first thing is to choose which web application is suitable for your Internet business. There’s not a one size fits all because each Internet business has different needs and requirements. Though, the foundation (system) can be the same across the board, whether you choose to use Wordpress as a customer management system (C.M.S) or an e-Commerce solution such as Magento, OsCommerce or Zencart. All of these systems work very well and they are constantly being updated and developed for users.

I Am Still Not Convinced With Using Wordpress e-Commerce Plugins

I wrote a post comparing Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website?, which discusses the differences between a blog and an e-commerce system. Then over the last few weeks I’ve been writing reviews looking at the different e-Commerce plugins available for Wordpress. If you want to see the various reviews, read the articles section under eBlog Reviews. What I am exploring today are the different options available to integrate a blog into an existing e-Commerce system. If you have read all of my reviews about the different e-Commerce plugins for Wordpress, you will see that I am still not completely convinced. Wordpress for blogging is a fantastic system and is more than capable of handling large volumes of data. Though, once you add on an e-Commerce plugin it does not have the same functionality in comparison to an e-Commerce system, which are more robust to handle large consumer transactions. Now, the big challenge is, most e-Commerce systems do not have a blog interface built-in, which raises the question of how to integrate an e-commerce system with a blog?

Why Have An e-Commerce System Integrated With A Wordpress Blog?

Over the years, web users have found blogs to be more compelling to look at than just shopping sites. Most blogs have written reviews and information relating to a product or service, allowing any web user to do their research before making a purchase. Imagine that you were looking to buy the latest iPhone and you wanted to look at some reviews and read other people’s opinions before spending your money. If you typed “iPhone review” in Google, the first site that appears is usually a review site such as Cnet or Smart Company, which all run a blogging application such as Wordpress. These review sites usually only provide a review and opinions, but don’t have a link saying where to buy. This is where having an e-Commerce system integrated with a Wordpress blog can benefit your Internet business. Instead of the customer going to other websites to read reviews and opinions about the product (by that time they may have forgotten your website), you can have your own reviews and comments linked to your products. This encourages the customer to stay on your website and helps them save time looking for other places for reviews and opinions.

Additionally, the benefit of having a Wordpress blog integrated with your e-Commerce system, is that it helps to increase your search engine rankings. With higher search engines rankings, your Internet business will be found much quicker and also help with becoming an authoritative site.

How To Integrate An e-Commerce System With A Wordpress Blog?

Luckily for us, most e-Commerce systems have a special add-on package which has been developed by experienced programmers. At this point, I would recommend you hire a web developer to install or modify an e-Commerce system because it will can save time for you to focus on other important business tasks. Though I will explain to you how it generally works with some systems I have test:

Magento: This is a relatively new e-Commerce system that is taking the e-Commerce Open Source market by storm. It’s very user friendly and is very powerful, just like how Wordpress has been very successful for many Internet businesses. Magento has an add-on extension called Lazzymonks Wordpress Integration 2.61, which allows Wordpress to be integrated with their system. You can easily access Wordpress from Magento’s administration as well and would save you the hassle of logging out of Magento and logging into Wordpress.

OsCommerce: This system has been around since March 2000, which shows a long history of e-Commerce development for them. OsCommerce also has an add-on which is quite easy to install – the Wordpress Integration. Unfortunately this add-on does require you to log onto Wordpress separately. Once you have installed Wordpress with OsCommerce you will be able to still post your articles as normal and all the posts will be integrated into the OsCommerce theme you choose.

ZenCart: This is the system I have been using for many years for many of my clients and own e-Commerce shops. It is easy to set up the Wordpress On Zencart add-on with a few installation files to upload. Though, I found it wasn’t matching the style of the shopfront at first with this basic add-on. I did hired a programmer to modify some files which generated a good result in the end.

With many Internet businesses seeing the growth of web users searching on blogs and search engines today, it would be unfortunate to see you lose sales because you did not have a blog integrated with your e-Commerce shop. There are great benefits with having both these systems integrated into your Internet business and someday e-Commerce with integrated blogs will be the new community called e-Blogging.

Read how you can promote your eBlog: eBlogging 101: Getting Your Internet Business To Stand Out From The Crowd

Tyrone Shum
Starting the e-Blogging Revolution.

Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website?

This is a subject I’ve been exploring over the last week to decide whether or not to use a blog with an add-on shopping cart, or to use an e-commerce system such as Zencart or Oscommerce. I have a few clients who will be using my services to design their e-commerce website and I’m deciding between using a blog with shopping cart add-on functionality or running an e-commerce system with blog integration. It’s been quite interesting reading comments from forums and on other blogs about this topic and here are my thoughts.

My Previous Blog / E-commerce Experience

I’ve been using Wordpress for a couple of years now and have tried integrating it for a ZenCart ecommerce site. It worked okay but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. The issue was that I have to create a WordPress site and an ecommerce site with matching themes, so that the end user would have the experience of a single site. This solution was not ideal because the site administrator would have to login to different backends to update information.

On the other hand, installing Wordpress as the main system and installing an e-commerce add-on sounds like the ideal situation (for now, I’ll call this an eBlog). Everything will be in one system and on one database and no need to log into two different systems as I previously had to. I have tried this method and so far it works okay as well, but there are a few issues such as payment methods, having large product catalogues and limited reporting. The Wordpress plugin can’t handle these things as yet compared to e-commerce systems which have been designed for this.

Advantages Of Using eBlog Vs E-Commerce System

Simplicity and easily customisable
The reason why I am choosing eBlog is it’s simplicity of use. Especially when you are training a client how to use the system for the first time, it is quite self explanatory from just looking in the back end of Wordpress. Additionally the vast amount of themes available make it easy for any developer to customise and install new website faster without consuming too much time on a project.

Search engine friendly
Another advantage is, search engines love blogs and the content that comes from them allows them to be easily ranked in search engines much faster than e-commerce websites. Most e-commerce website only have products listed and require additional programming to be allow them to be search engine friendly. In comparison, Wordpress has additional plug-ins that automatically make any article or product become search engine friendly saving time and money for a client.

Automatic upgrades
Since the release of Wordpress 2.7 every update can be automatically deployed with a click of a button and makes upgrades and changes very easy. Unlike Zencart or Oscommerce, whenever a new upgrade is released it takes me almost a week to upgrade due to the vast amount of customised plug-ins installed and main files that can be overwritten.

Disadvantages Of A Using eBlog Vs E-Commerce System

Payment methods
At the moment, there are limited amount of payments being accepted via the eBlog and a lot of development and programming would be required in eBlogs to accept the vast range of payments other e-commerce systems offer. The most common available is Paypal, but what if I wanted a payment gateway for eWay or other commercial banking gateways? It’s not possible as yet.

Handling 100+ products on a single database
Most e-commerce systems have been build to handle lots of products and be available to display on their website. The architecture for this is not available for eBlogs and limits any Internet business to less than 100 products. It’s possible to have 100+ products on an eBlog but to find them on this system will take forever.

Limited Reporting
It’s important to track what customers are purchasing and knowing what the numbers are in your business. Unfortunately eBlog doesn’t offer accounting and proper reporting.

Overall if you have an Internet business that has a few products to sell, this would be a simple way to get started and have your Internet business up and running quickly. Though for Internet businesses with a range of products and requiring greater functionality, a proper e-commerce system such as Zencart or Oscommerce is still the way to go.

Tyrone Shum
e-Blogger