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x-sapphire-flames-x-blog · 7 years ago

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How to Use WP EStore, Ecommerce Plugin for WordPress

This is not a free plugin but it is probably the best plugin if you want to sell goods (either physical or downloadable digital items) from you WordPress website.

The plugin works, does not cost too much and it does have some support from the authors, there is also a sort of forum. Unfortunately the plugin (in common I must say with all WordPress ecommerce plugins) suffers from some peculiarities that make it a bit uneasy to work with. Let's see in this article how to make it work in a few easy steps. This walkthrough is intended for a basic use with Paypal. The plugin has many more options that I will not be covering here.

Installation is straightforward like any other WordPress plugin, with the difference that the plugin name is WP eStore and the installation directory for some reason becomes "wp-cart-for-digital-products", this could be tricky to identify or remember if you have lots of plugins. Another annoying thing is that the plugin gets updated quite often but the author does not email the customers, nor does it show up in WordPress, so you have to go visit the site every now and then to see if there is any update. How to find this is for me still a bit of a mystery, basically you must search for a page (try the forum) where there is a changelog and then you have to find another page where you create an update request and send this one out . Even more annoying, you also must indicate the PayPal transaction and the original email to prove that you are legitimate. All this takes time, in my case the last update took more than one hour because I could not find the PayPal transaction among my thousands of emails and I could not remember which of my email addresses I used to purchase the plugin. Once you manage to provide the necessary information you get an email with a time limited download link.

To use eStore once installed, go to WP eStore panel in the lower left of your WP Admin panel, there are nine options each with dozens of configurations panels, as said I will cover the basics. Click Settings and go to the General Settings. The important things here are all self explanatory, configure Shopping Cart Title, Currency, Add to Cart Button, Return URL (thank you page after the transaction), Hide Shopping Cart image (recommended), and Base Shipping Cost. The help here says "This amount is added to the total of the individual products shipping cost" but it actually adds a fixed amount whatever the number of items purchased. If you then indicate the Add / Edit Products panel under Shipping an amount like $ 0.0001 for every item, you get a fixed shipping amount added to the shopping cart – which is a nice feature for many sellers. Keep scrolling (we're assuming that you are not selling digital products) and check Use Automatic Post Processing Processing, Use WordPress Mailing System, Send Emails to Buyer After Purchase. Fill the From email address with your own and also edit Email Email Subject and Email Body. Notification Email Address once again is your own. The Seller Email details can be left alone. At the very bottom of this panel there is also an Enable Sandbox mode which is helpful to test a transaction with PayPal Sandbox (you need to open an account with PayPal for this).

Now go back at the top (still in Settings menu) and click the Payment Gateway Settings to check Use Paypal and enter your PayPal address. Nothing else to do there for the moment. All the other Settings options can also be left alone so we can click on Add / Edit Products. Enter Product Name and Price (important: with two decimals) and the Product Variations if any. Imagining we are selling shirts we could fill Variation 1 with Color | Red | Blue | Yellow, Variation 2 with Size | Small | Medium | Large and Variation 3 with Sleeves | Short | Long: 20, this will add nothing to the price if the buyer chooses Short Sleeves and + $ 20 if Long Sleeves. Neat feature.

Let's leave all the other options alone because we are finished, we could actually sell our product already. So go to Manage Product where you will see a list of items, Shirts for example, with an ID number like 1. Just create a new post or page and place the shortcode [wp_eStore: product_id: 1: end] on it, the plugin will do the rest. When editing or creating a Post / Page in visual mode you can also click the eStore icon and get all the shortcodes you may need, including the one to view the Shopping Cart (there is also a separate widget to display the Shopping Cart from the sidebar ). Even more shortcodes are downloadable and show up in WordPress like another plugin.

If you need to customize things, that is a bit more difficult because eStore is a complex plugin with more than 170 files. I always have a really hard time modifying CSS and php files to change for example spacing, icons settings and so on, depending on the theme you use and how picky you are. Whatever you change keep a changelog yourself because as said the plugin is apparently updated often.

One last word about the very useful capability of selling digital products. This works really well and is definitely the best feature of the plugin. I recommend to configure it to send to the customer a download link via email after the purchase. This is done automatically and you can also choose duration of download link, number of downloads allowed, and best of all the link is actually encrypted so the customer does not actually see the real link (you can save your digital product files anywhere on your site ). This is done in Settings / General settings, where you set the main settings, and under Edit Product / Digital Content Details where you indicate (between name, price etc. as before) the complete actual Url to the item and under that, remember to check Downloadable. As said the customer will not see this link.

As said the plugin does offer many more options, including Categories, Subscription Payments, Coupons / Discounts, and more. My favorite is the useful Stats, especially when selling digital products, it is nice to wake up in the morning and see how many products have been sold entirely on autopilot, nothing else left to do … the dream of every Internet Marketer.

Ata Rehman

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booknestindia-blog · 8 years ago

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Booknest.in

- 5 Reasons Why You Should Buy Books From Niche Online Stores

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Indian consumers are mostly driven by mouth-watering discounts, Free Delivery option and east returns. Buyers too are looking forward for bargains to buy the best brands for the least price. Is this situation real?

Why some reputed brand or established player would like to undermine its brand and quality product and offer you at unheard of prices. What do they gain by doing so?

The marketplace model of web-portals have a compulsive reason to come out with fabulous offers consistently, though on the select range of products, in order to lure customers on their sites and retain their interest for them to re-visit the website and make purchases impulsively. Online buying is infectious and addictive. Mobiles with high internet speed have opened a whole new horizon for online players and traffic growth has grown manifold in last one-two years.

Amazon and Flipkart, two large online players started their venture with selling Books online which later diversified with multi-product portals on Marketplace model. Now, they no longer sell directly to their customers but with the help of thousands of third-party sellers registered with them.

Some of these sellers do have privileged selling arrangement with them and they act as their instruments to influence markets with higher discounts, sale offers, cash back bargains and other means to offer incentives, with a view to retain customers with them for longer periods.

The marketplace model entail these Third party sellers to pay a fixed percentage of commission and administration charges, payment Gateway charges to receive payments online and Shipment charges for each transaction executed. These are the main source of direct earnings for a marketplace. In all, the commission payable ranges between 15% -22%, excluding the shipment costs.

While the Marketplace expects these sellers to offer optimum discounts to customers and compete with peer web-portals, the Sellers are not amused looking to hefty commissions payable and other unforeseen incidental payments, such as shipment charges on returns etc. Often you find that, of late, books sold on these marketplaces are at MRP or at a nominal 3%-7% discounts. Many of the third party sellers usually stop selling after some time for reasons such as, lower profitability, not enough orders coming their way or disputes with marketplace.

On the contrary, there is enough life at niche players who sale single or limited product on their web-portals under Inventory-led model and deliver products themselves. As such you are assured of the quality and prices. They offer you a host of other benefits such as better shopping experience, greater discounts and personalized service.

Look at the select 5 reasons why you should avoid buying books from marketplaces

1. Substandard or Unscrupulous Sellers making a killing on the marketplace websites:

The maddening rush and competition amongst the large marketplaces have led to registration of unscrupulous players too, whose intentions have always been doubtful. These merchants sell anything to everything online, such as garments, cosmetics, books, kitchen-wares and anything they could lay their hands on.

They engage in questionable practices and manipulate the system to their benefit. In some cases, customers have ordered a book but received another book and their refund requests were also not entertained.

Though, the marketplace have a system to rate these sellers on a pre-determined scale, such as 4.3, 3.2, 2.1 etc. But, unfortunately they do not blacklist them, but still allow a Seller with worst rating of say, 3.1 to sell products online. As a result, the customers get cheated and the complaints have grown exponential in recent times.

Read below some honest reviews and feedback taken from some popular e-commerce website:

· Sent a totally different book (After Empire by Dilip Hiro) and took 2 weeks to deliver. Totally not trustworthy. – Buyer A

· MRP of the book is Rs. 80. He blackened the MRP and then sold it on xxxxxxxxxxx of Rs.150. I have the necessary details /pictures if needed. – Buyer B

· Pathetic seller. I ordered Non-linear systems by khalil, I recieved some other book Scrum which looks used. Order was shipped late. – Buyer C

· xxxxxxxx seller do not understand English. First time they sent second hand/Used book, When I requested replacement, they sent different book. Avoid! – Buyer D

2. Manipulation in Prices and discounts is rampant on marketplace websites:

Tampering of MRP on products is one of the most common practices to deceive online consumers. The products would be shown with hefty discounts after their MRP have been hugely inflated. The customers often take this granted when they buy on a reputed web-portal, ignoring the fact that they are buying from a small retailer in Chandni chowk at Delhi or a non-descript shopkeeper from Crawford market in Mumbai.

I have come across one such incidence on a popular web-portal which is overwhelming. MRP of a book is manipulated to as high as Rs. 1,863 and is offered with a discount of 86% at Rs. 250. The actual price of the book is Rs. 250 and as such no discount in real sense is given. Is this an innovative pricing strategy, an act of deception or fraud with customer or a method to amuse the customer… you decide for yourself.

Let me tell you that this is not an isolated incidence but there are 000’s of products whose prices are artificially inflated with a purpose to outsmart the general consumers.

3. Quality of book is often heavily compromised:

A new trend is emerging on the marketplace model. The sale of old and new books are allowed simultaneously on the web-portal. You get hefty discounts and later came to know that what you got is not a mint condition new book but a used one.

Besides, several sellers have been aggressively selling pirated books on these web-portals. You may recall buying a pirated book at 1/5th of the MRP on the street of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata. You may also wonder that most of those vendors have since vanished or perished and are no longer seen on the streets. Why? Most of these pirated books are now available on popular web-portals at hefty discounts. So, next time when you place order for a bestseller book, take a look on the seller and the copy of the book you receive.

4. You are lured with heavy discounts on Old edition books:

Marketplaces have become a preferred platform for the Publishers and Distributors to get rid of their dead stock and old edition books. The consumers are looking for a bargain and they give what others are looking forward to. Limited period offers come handy and they have to announce mouth-watering discounts. Customers lap onto these as if there is no tomorrow. Bingo… Their stocks are cleared in a weeks’ time.

5. Third-party Sellers cannot offer better pricing to consumers and still remain profitable

Marketplace portals are a great level playing field and many instances are seen when even a Publisher is not the bestseller for their own titles. Many other small Sellers have seen to be offering substantially higher discounts than the Publishers?? I trust, by now you know the reasons for such bonanzas.. It is better for us to appreciate the fact that no seller can offer great discounts on marketplace portal, after paying hefty commissions and other charges and remain profitable.

I recommend that you shall now start comparing prices of books with other specialized niche web-portals and I am sure you would be impressed with the fact that their discounts are often much higher. As they also deliver the books themselves, chances are that the packaging and delivery experience would be much more satisfying that third-party sellers on marketplaces.

Dear Online Buyers, Please think…

Who is paying for your offers or discounts? Please note, that to change your online purchasing behavior, habits or addictions, eCommerce Marketplace web-portals are just racing to capture the marketshare to get more online buyers, increase their buying trends, capture all your shopping data only to raise the next billion dollars from venture funds. Are you in game for this?

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