Butterflies and Light Bulbs – The Store Is Open

July 6th, 2009 | by Conrad Walton |

I have built and worked on many ecommerce sites for larger companies in the past. I’ve slogged through enough transaction files and credit card verification protocols that I decided that I never wanted to go back. Inventory management, product categorization, and fraud. Ecommerce carries a load of issues to deal with and I just thought it was too much work.

Can’t I just blog instead?

ecommerce

ecommerce

But…, and there’s always a but, in order for Mermaid’s Purse to sell jewelry on the web, she needed an ecommerce system. So I set about finding one. Since I’m a WordPress fan boy, I searched to see what was available that worked with it.

WordPress

WordPress

WP e-Commerce is what I found. It’s plug in that works within WP to add the product pages and create a store with a checkout process. I installed it and activated it and started to figure out how it worked.

Payment Options

Payment Options

Out of the box, it’s free and does a bunch of great stuff that works really well for a basic store. But, do I want a basic store? Of course not. I immediately started playing with their themes to customize the look and feel of our store. They wanted $35 for a “gold” package that added some features that we wanted like “grid view” and “multiple images”.

Small price to pay, so I bought those. They seemed to work well. As I was working away on version 3.6.12, they released 3.7 Beta 4. I wanted to see how that would work, and it didn’t very well. I spent half a day figuring out the differences. Yeah, it was beta. What do I expect?

Sea Glass

Sea Glass

Documentation for the whole thing is horrible on their site. I spent another $35 for a manual that one of the developers, or somebody, wrote. It consisted of a lot of tips and tricks that actually helped. Oh, except that they don’t work on the latest version.

The 3.7 upgrade changed the way a few things work, including the gold package. After some searching, they told me to re-download the gold files and put them in a different place. After following the directions, it all started to work again. The theme system is entirely different than the earlier versions.

The 3.7 does bring some cool new features and makes a lot of little things easier. It’s worth the upgrade. It does still have some bugs and the response in the forum is not exciting. I’m sure they will get around to fixing it sooner or later.

Do I recommend it? Yes, I do, with some cautions. Documentation is horrible. Don’t buy the “Bible” that they advertise. Not worth the money. Spend more time in the forums and you’ll find your answers instead. Also, wait until they get 3.7 released in final form. I think it’ll be great when it’s solid.

Pottery

Pottery

It was all working pretty well, so I asked Deborah if it was OK to make it live. She said yes. I’m not confident that I understand all of the processes involved in making a purchase, nor that everything will work right, but we’ll watch it and see what happens. Customer service needs to be king here, so we’ll go out of our way to make sure that people are happy.

Deborah was so excited to see that she had a real store, live and working on the web. She can finally sell her sea glass jewelry there. Her husband had butterflies in his stomach. He said that it was like having light bulbs in the sign for a while, but now someone plugged it it and they were turned on and working.

Check out her store and buy something. If you see anything broken, let me know. If you like what you see, tell a friend. If you want your own store, I can do that for you.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 11:52 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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