Naturally, I looked to WordPress to handle everything — the products, the blog and the pages. With custom post types, this wasn’t a problem; a custom post type for the products and then an individual entry for each of the products, with standard posts being used for the blog and custom page templates for the pages. We’re not going to look at those, though, instead we’re going to look at how the e-Commerce part of the site worked.
Choosing a shopping cart
The problem was going to be the shopping cart itself. I was only after something lightweight — a full plugin like WooCommerce would have been overkill — and thus I turned to my (trusty?) friend PayPal.
The first thing to do was to sign up for a PayPal Business account and then get started with Website Payments Standard, the free PayPal checkout tool. There is a pay-monthly version, but it’s more complicated than we need to worry about.
Creating your button
The button creator tool is surprisingly easy and versatile. You can choose from a couple of different button types — shopping cart, recurring payment or just buy it now are the ones you’re likely to use — depending on what you want to sell. I used the shopping cart button.
You can then add an item name and ID, price and currency.
I’ve got fed up with WordPress ecommerce plugins. Shopp and WP Ecommerce have been a headache to work with. So for the next website, if it needs a simple shop, I’ll try a similar approach to yours. Thanks for explaining how you tackled it.
oo nice post
I had an online bookstore last year. And I was looking around to death to find a great e-commerce plugins. It was a small bookstore so I had no budget to buy more professional look website design. And I thought it would be simpler and easier to use and maintain if I built the store on wordpress. Too bad I didn’t find any good plugins. and now thanks to you for giving me this code, I think I am going to re-open my small store.
I’m glad you found the tutorial useful! 🙂
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That is so awesome, I have a customer that is not quite ready to start selling some of the items he currently stocks in his physical store, but when the time comes and he is ready I think your implementation sounds like a good fit for him.
Thank you for sharing.
Glad you found it usefull 🙂