business interface (Photo credit: zavi007)
Now that you have everything you need for an E-commerce site such as the specific product you are promoting, the domain name and the hosting plan, what else should you possibly do to make your E-commerce site work?
A surefire approach to achieving your goals in the online business especially in building up an E-commerce site is to power it through WordPress. Why WordPress? Maybe it can be asked the other way around – and why not WordPress?
It is user- friendly software that is easy to set-up in a matter of minutes. Employing something that would take so much time would be impractical and WordPress can be installed without prior technical background given such a short period of time. Aside from its being easy and convenient to set-up, it is also very accessible to customize and enables interaction through comments and provides RSS feeds so more interested visitors can subscribe.
The WordPress software also has value added features in which many free themes are available for enhanced functionality. It basically creates search engine friendly pages and also has the ability to automatically ping the search engines to boost internet traffic into the site.
An E-commerce site needs WordPress because it has an E-commerce plugin that makes promoting products a breeze – after all, the main purpose of the E-commerce site is to sell and make some profit.
Other than managing the site, WordPress has a large online community that is always ready to lend a helping hand when something wrong gets in the way.
Given the pros of using WordPress as mentioned above, here are the steps to take in creating a WordPress E-commerce site:
- Install the WordPress Software – Carefully log-in the cPanel of your prescribed hosting company and search the heading “Sofware” for Fantastico. Clicking the icon shown would lead you to the link for WordPress. Click this given link in order to install the WordPress files. Do not forget to take down the password that it gave to log-in while managing the admin panel. With this, in just a few clicks, you now have default WordPress theme ready!
- Select a theme template – There are free themes for WordPress available and the list can be quite overwhelming. Make sure to choose the perfect one most suitable to your site. You can now download the zip file to your desktop and unzip the files. Next thing is to upload the theme files to your own site’s folder for themes alone (wp-content-themes). With this, you can already activate your new theme by immediately logging-in into the admin area and as you see the “Appearance” icon, you can click again. Choose your new theme, click “add new”, and voila, your new theme will now be seen in your browser.
- Download & install an eCommerce plugin – Search WordPress eCommerce plugin through Google, choose and download the chosen plugin. You can now install the files in the plugins folder on the server (wp-content-plugins). Activating the plugin will allow the eCommerce links to be seen in your sidebar which includes the products page, transaction results and your account in general.
- Include all your products for sale – Check out the general settings of your plugin and manage your product requirements, then of course, add now your products.
- Do not forget to optimize your site – Install an All-on-One SEO pack for your E-commerce site.
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