Using WordPress As Online Store - Suggestions?

I've run an online magic supply store for several years. It's never really taken off, mostly because:

• I didn't have a clue and;
• My site sucks

In the past year, I've learned a bit about Internet marketing and am ready to spend some time on my site and marketing efforts.

Currently, I get a CSV file of products available from my wholesaler and I import that into a MySQL database. My online catalog is a PHP script I wrote to query that database and generate a product listing. The rest of the site was built with MS FrontPage.

So I feel I basically need to start over from scratch and wonder if WordPress might be able to help? Is there some plugin (free or pay) that can turn WP into an online store? Specifically, I'd really like a way to feed a CSV file into the MySQL database used by WordPress to automatically generate product pages instead of creating each individually, especially since there are over 7000 products. Plus as my wholesaler makes changes, I can just overwrite the database with the new CSV data.

So, any suggestions? Am I making sense?

Thanks for your time.

Cheers,

Drew

 

Hi. Most wholesalers have app specific datafeeds for say cre loaded. It is usually beneficial to use a proper shopping cart for this for the very reason your mentioned- not having to update everything manually if the distributor makes changes.

Without knowing who the distributor is and what they offer exactly it is hard to properly advise you. However, there is a very sound commercial solution that should tackle this. I came across this a few weeks ago while trying to sort something else out for a client.

http://www.datafeedr.com/

hope that helps. If you want to shoot me a link to the distributor I can be more specific.

Nigel

 

There are some shopping cart plugin for wordpress.

WP e-Commerce
Quick Shop
eShop
WP Live-Shopping
YAK Shopping Cart

Hope that help.

 

what is considered the best and most reliable shopping cart for wordpress?

 

wp- ecommerce is what i have seen most of the time ...

 

Use wp- ecommerce, it's easy and looks great

 

Thanks for all the replies. I'll start checking things out.

So how does this shopping cart work? Do products actually get loaded into the shopping cart software and then the plugin queries the shopping cart? Or do products load in WordPress (MySQL) and then the WP plugin sends data to the shopping cart?

Sorry, I'm new to this. Prior I loaded my wholesaler's CSV file in to my own MySQL and then used my own (crappy) PHP script to query and interface with a PayPal shopping cart.

Cheers,

Drew

 

There is a very nice WP plugin that can be found here http://www.instinct.co.nz/

We used that to build our site and it has everything you said you wanted in your original post. It even lets you input your CSV.

 

I've installed the free version of wp-ecommerce and it looks good so far. I will upgrade to Gold if it meets my needs. However I need a way to import a csv of my supplier's catalog. I know I see the import tab and an "example" of file format but there are way more fields in the MySQL tables than in that "example".

Is there some csv <-> mapping document somewhere?

I have to be able to import more than just those few fields in the example. And I really need to either display images via html links or have some way to automatically download those from my supplier's site and include them in my WordPress store. Is this possible with e-commerce? If not, other suggestions?

Thanks,

Drew

 

you can import csv file to mysql at the following site..
http://www.sqldbu.com/eng/sections/tips/mysqlimport.html

 

try to import csv file to mysql at the following site..

 

use WP-eCommerce.. that's great..

 

Yeah, the Instict solution is a good one - I did a post about it here: http://www.e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=46

 

WP_ecommerce has good basic ecommerce capabilities.

 

We like word press not only because it is a solid platform and has huge amounts of plugins but it will help you from the SEO side. wp-ecommerce is a good plugin. Word press has the good optimization pratices that will help you build your site.