e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging)
March 27, 2009 by Tyrone
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.
YAK Shopping Cart Wordpress Plugin Review
March 26, 2009 by Tyrone
Amongst the other e-commerce plugins I have reviewed such eShop and WP e-Commerce, YAK Shopping Cart has come to my attention and the author Jason R Briggs describes the plugin as follows:
YAK is an open source, shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It associates products with weblog entries, so the post ID also becomes the product code. It supports both pages and posts as products, handles different types of product through categories, and provides customisable purchase options (cheque or deposit, basic credit card form, standard PayPal integration, PayPal Payments Pro, and Authorize.net).
Therefore I was interested in testing to see how it would compare to the other plugins I’ve tried. So let’s get straight into the pros and cons of this plugin.
THE PROS
Includes Sales Reports And Graphs
YAK Shopping Cart comes with a Sales Report option under the Tools menu. In comparison to other plugins it is definitely a positive with more reporting available to see sales progress. The reports in this plugin are:
- Best sellers for the year
- Best sellers for the month
- A simple graph to see the sales for the month
A Good Range Of Payment Options Available
YAK Shopping Cart has many payment options readily available and it’s built into the plugin. Unlike other e-commerce plugins which are limited or require you to purchase additional payment gateways, YAK covers a majority of them. This plugin offers:
- Manual Credit Card Processing
- Credit on Accounts Receivable
- Authorize.net
- Paypal and Paypal Pro
- Google Checkout
As long as you have an account with the above payment merchants, it’s not too hard to link your shopping cart to them. Though, I’ve noticed they are still lacking payment options such as cash, cheque / money order and cash on delivery. Also YAK does offer a secure SSL connection for all of the above payments.
THE CONS
Documentation And Help Is Hard To Find
I found the plugin quite easy to install but found it very hard to navigate through YAK’s administration panel. It is partly due to a lack of documentation on how to use this plugin. Without documentation most people would struggle to use YAK and would not find it to be user friendly. Additionally I was very surprised to find I had to pay for a handbook to get the documentation, giving the impression the plugin was designed solely to make money not from usage but documentation. I would have rather paid for a plugin with documentation than be given a plugin that you have to waste time figuring how to use it yourself.
Lack Of Functionality For Products
After setting up a product in a post and linking it to YAK I’ve found it to be really basic and lacking a lot of functionality. There are no fields to insert product images. It was not easy to find the fields for obvious product attributes such as weight and quantity. I felt lost when trying to add products.
Not User Friendly And Lack Of Design On The Front End
As I have mentioned already without documentation a user has to spend time working out how this plugin works. What makes it worst is that each section in YAK’s administration is not self explanatory. At first after installing the plugin I went to find a menu called YAK, but after realising there was nothing there I found it had been added to the Tools menu. It added 3 new links: Orders, Products and Sales Reports. I think the developers at YAK thought I could work out how to use this, but they were wrong. It made more frustrated!
To mention, there is a YAK link under Settings which does allow you to change the options for Basic, Products, Download, Payment, Special, Advanced, Shipping, Promotions. It did alleviate some of my frustration when I found this, but I still couldn’t see much on the front end. As you can see, a very poorly designed plugin and lack of user friendliness on both the front end and administration.
Conclusion
I decided to let this plugin go as I had spent over 3 hours just understanding how the plugin could fit into a Wordpress blog. Overall there is a lack of user-friendliness and without the user manual it is very difficult to work out yourself. For users who want something simple and a shopping cart that works straight away, YAK is definitely not your solution. I would go back to using WP e-Commerce or eShop any day.
My rating for this plugin is 1 out of 5 stars.
Tyrone Shum
e-Commerce Plugin Reviewer
eShop Review For Wordpress
March 18, 2009 by Tyrone
Over the next few weeks I will be reviewing the different plugins available for e-commerce users who want to keep their Wordpress blog and want to integrate a shopping cart to their site. Today I am reviewing the eShop Plugin by Quirm
Recently I installed a copy of the latest eShop plugin, version 3.0.0 onto a test site to trial the store before allowing it to go live. I was pleasantly surprised how simple eShop is and well integrated into Wordpress. The HELP section in the administration proved to be quite helpful and I was able to get the shop up and running within 30 minutes.
PROS OF ESHOP PLUGIN
Allows For Featured and Special Products
Most ecommerce sites have this ability and it’s a good thing eShop implemented this module. It allows us to feature any products and promote any products on special.
Simple Ordering System
I’ve run Zencart and OsCommerce for various e-commerce stores in the past and they are somewhat quite advanced and definitely not for the faint hearted. The first time I used those stores it took me almost a week to learn how to use them. The admin section of eShop is basic and simple to use, showing the most important menu that we want to know when a customer has purchased a product from us – the order page. It has pending, awaiting payment, shipped, active and deleted options to mark the order and allows you to add comments in each process (a very handy field to have when tracking orders)
Google Feed Base
This is a plus, since most e-commerce sites don’t utilise Google Feed as much as they should. It’s very similar to RSS feeds, though instead of having posts and content syndicated into the Feed, it allows products to be syndicated and helps promote your store products on Google.
Customised Layout or CSS Styling
New in this version is the ability to customise your layout of the store and I know that this is very handly for me. It’s especially handy when your blog is customised and you want to keep similar colours and fonts consistent through the shopping cart.
CONS OF ESHOP PLUGIN
Limited Payment Methods and Payment Gateway Integration
For beginners using eShop, having Paypal, Payson and cash maybe enough to sell your products. Though when you are dealing with customers wanting to pay directly with their credit card, only has cheque or money order facilities, or wants to directly transfer money into your bank account, then eShop is lacking in this area. I hope they will be adding more payment options in the near future.
Unable To Print Invoices From Admin
If you don’t have Paypal or Payson and only accept cash via eShop, there is no function for you to print an invoice and send to the customer. Even if you needed a hard copy one as a packaging slip and one for invoicing, eShop doesn’t have that facility. If they add this function later on I hope it will automatically create an invoice in PDF and email it to the customer.
No Sales Reports
Reporting in eShop is lacking and there’s no where to see your overall sales on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It’s important to know how much business is coming in from your shop and most e-commerce software has at minimum a sales report function.
Unable To Edit An Invoice If An Error Has Been Made By A Customer or refund an item
If a customer at no fault chooses the wrong item by mistake then it should be simple to edit the order and update it to the correct item. eShop doesn’t allow for this and furthermore there is no option in admin to offer refunds if a customer decides to cancel. The process becomes tedious because you have to delete the order and either start again or the order is completed deleted when you just want to refund a customer.
How Would I Rate eShop?
Overall eShop has a lot of pros and can benefit a first time user allowing them to sell some of their products online. An important aspect that I believe they need to improve on is to offer more payment gateway options. Though, there are still a lot of developmental issues to overcome to get it up to comparable e-commerce solutions such as Zencart and OsCommerce. I would still stick with fully functional e-commerce solutions over eShop if I have hundreds of products to sell and a large database to manage and run the Wordpress blog separately.
Tyrone Shum
eBlog Reviewer
Top 5 Powerful E-commerce Plugins For Wordpress
Today I’m exploring the top 5 e-commerce or shopping cart plugins for Wordpress. Yesterday I wrote a topic about Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website, and this article continues from there listing the commercially viable e-commerce plugins to use if you are considering selling products or services to your readers.
eShop
The eShop plugin allows you to open your own store right from your blog. You can sell anything from eBooks, software to even PLR product with this plugin. At the moment it only utilises the Paypal payment system to receive money and is also compatible with Wordpress 2.7+. Visit the plugins homepage to get a more detailed description of the shop’s features.
ShoppThe Shopp plugin is a featured filled online shopping cart for your blog. It’s been designed to make it easy for just about anyone to setup online store in minutes while giving users the ability to easily customise every aspect of the shopping experience. This particular plugin does cost money and for a single license it is $55US or for a developer’s license it will cost $299US. The difference between them is how many times will you be using this plugin on different blogs? If you’re a business setting up ecommerce sites for clients then the developer license will be worth the cost. Also Shopp offers different payment options, such as Authorize.Net, eWay Payment, HSBC ePayments and PayPal Pro which will each cost an additional $25.00.
WP e-CommerceThe WP e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. This seems to be the free e-commerce plugin that is most commonly downloaded by users from around the word. It does offer many features and lots of options for users.
WP Live-ShoppingThe WP Live Shopping plugin is a widget that enables you to display all relevant live shopping offers within your Wordpress blog. You can add the widget to your sidebar and customise its appearance within the Live Shopping option panel. You will also need to have a Live account setup in order use this plugin.
Visit WP-Live Shopping Homepage
YAK Shopping CartYAK is a simple shopping cart plugin for WordPress. How it works is it associates products with blog posts, where the post ID also becomes the product code. There is an options screen in the admin section that allows you to configure settings for the shopping cart and had 3 additional pages for showing and fulfilling orders, for product management, and basic sales reports.
YAK Features
Tyrone Shum
e-Blog Reviewer
