The Online Sunshine Plan

This is a study of work on a bookstore as a backend to deliver digital products directly to buyers.

Site: Midwest Journal Press

The specifics needed

• It has to be able to support secure downloads of products.
• It has to be able to be installed easily with no glitches
• It should be expandable to brick-and-mortar shops – not just a brick and mortar that has tacked on a digital delivery function.
• Has to be able to take PayPal and Google Checkout right off the bat.
• Should be able to export to Google Base, for use with their online Froogle search.
• Decent documentation and community support.

The backend has always been my nemsis and downfall. Nothing was easy enough, no solution was cheap enough (free and easy).

And here’s a (too) simple write up of how to start with ecommerce on WordPress and why.

History as it was writ

When I first got into this several years ago, shopping cart plug-ins were just starting to show up. As well, there were other solutions, which could be implemented through a paid hosting and its control panel. As the plug-ins were lacking, I went through Zen Cart and OS Commerce to see if a non-WordPress solution was possible. And these do work, but their approach to digital downloads didn’t.

Now, fast forward a couple of years. Lots of WordPress work meanwhile, and the plug-in scene has improved.

Out of all the plug-ins, I finally chose WP e-commerce, simply because of its popularity and due to the ease (now) of installation. At the beginning, like other ecommerce options, digital delivery was a pain. Now it looks like they fixed it.

I’d tracked this plug-in before (and it doesn’t mean they are the only good ones out there), and was impressed with it’s ability to handle a wide variety of payment merchants, as well as being a professional looking and acting install.

I settle with PayPal and Google Checkout for ease of use. Sure, there are cheaper and more robust offerings out there – but these two are common place.

Google Base needs support as having a local checkout system is fine, but being able to get it up with a search engine means more direct sales and better exposure. Marketing, again. Making it easy to buy, easy to deliver.

Theming a store, not a blog

The next big workout was that my site looked like a blog, not like a store. And that was a big paradigm shift.

Stores look like stores, not educational sites. The trick is finding a theme built for e-commerce that isn’t also a pain in the butt to make look nice. Theoretically, you could tweak nearly any theme to be an e-commerce platform, but where you get themes specifically built to take advantage of the plug-in’s specific strengths, it should be much easier – and faster.

The theme I selected (after hours of twidgeting a half-dozen themes) seems to do what I need.

The widgets on the sidebar kept throwing me until I could get my wits around the fact that this is not really some site that is going to get a lot of search engine love.  I just had to keep it to what a person would expect to find at an online store.

Oddly, the same rules for getting traffic to a site applies – and regular articles would make sense.

With my background and passion for art work – I’d be much better off concentrating on my comics and artwork, and just leaving this site as a mop-up, here’s-where-you-get-yours site and leaving it be.

Product Reviews that brief, not sell.

Another problem was sales blurbs. I thought originally that I’d be able to put long sales pages in the product description. Nope. What you see is an online catalog. So it’s a blurb, a “more info” link – and that has links to Lulu for the printed version and over to a stand-alone page about that particular book. That review page is where you get all the data and a rather dry view of what’s in that book.

Interestingly, depending on the tags, my related posts plug-in will act as a sort of “recommended products” list at the bottom.

Now, with this e-commerce plug-in, they are just giving you a starting pack. The rest of the bells and whistles cost more. But for just being able to sell a particular book (and I really only have about a dozen key ones), this is a perfect match for me.

On the other sites, when I mention a book  or author, the link goes directly to the review page, and then the person can buy the book right there if they want – or schlep over to Lulu to get my print version.

First step is to the sandbox

You want to post and test a single product before you go anywhere with anything else. So while I’ve laid out the broad scope of things, and my review pages need creation regardless, I have to make sure that WP e-commerce (or if I change to another package) actually, factually works. (I’ve earlier put a lot of produces up before with solutions that didn’t work from the beginning. Days of wasted time.)

WP-ecommerce sailed through sandbox marvelously. So it’s a done deal with this one. So far: nearly two days of research and testing, tweaking. One more article about SEO techniques for this, and meanwhile dump in products, reviews, links, etc. After that, go live with PayPal and Google Checkout – then simply update my other three main sites so they p0int to these book-links instead of directly to Lulu.

After years, I’ll finally be able to track my visitors and see what is selling my products or not.

The satisfying point is to see how this plug-in has matured over a couple of years. Now it connects directly to Google Base, something it didn’t have to begin with. As well, you can also add a “getShopped” plugin to your Facebook page, and so promote your own products directly.

But don’t let anyone tell you that adding new products is a piece of cake. Here’s a rough sequence:

1. Get the old Lulu page
2. Download the PDF of the cover so you can convert this to cover art and back-page text.
3. Get the Lulu blurb and put that on the product listing. While you also add the  artwork and upload the PDF file (which is somewhere on your hard-drive…) Add in the SEO title, excerpt, tags, etc.
4. Now, take that  back cover text and use it for the review. Get a nice image from Flickr if you can, and also cross link the product to that Review page.

Means you are doing a lot of back and forth with several windows open. Way slower than I thought it would be. But it’s just digging a ditch. Put up representative products and then start cranking in the others as you can.

Again, get the sandbox tweaked and then open up with PayPal and Google Checkout. At that point, you can then open up Google Base again and even your Facebook page. The idea is to have it ready for business and then expand to get more business.

Lot’s of detail-work, regardless. Rinse-repeat.

And now we’re done…

Well, that was a lot easier than I thought originally. And because of the nature of WordPress and it’s community of developers, the whole process became immensely simple and easy. Not that it didn’t take a lot of hard, slogging work and waaay to much detail for me.

But it proves that the whole scene can be implemented on any WordPress platform within a few hours and some existing products to offer.  A lot better than it used to be – and it’s actually taken the couple of years I was messing with those unscrupulous ripoff artists to develop into something useful and practical.

So that’s a wrap. Sure, I can keep going with the marketing and promotion of this site – since it’s still a blog at heart. And that means with some attention to SEO, any of this could be made to rank as a niche sales point.

And the point of being able to sell digital products from anywhere on the planet in order to “make a living” – regardless of personal location – is now possible to anyone with an Internet connection and some savvy.

Have fun with this, then.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a copy of “Online Sunshine Plan” from my bookstore.