Once you setup a new website with WordPress the first thing you want to do is sell product. In fact there are many WordPress shopping carts out there. One of them which I personally use is WP eStore. One thing I like the most about eStore is it’s usability. It is so well designed that the users will never get confused with settings. And even if you face any problem you can post your issue on the plugin support forum and are expected to get a reply within 24 hours – which I hardly see anywhere else.

So How does eStore work?

eStore allows you to sell both digital and tangible products. If you are selling digital product (e.g. ebook, mp3 etc), every time a customer purchases your product eStore will encrypt the download link and send it out via email (Which makes it a really powerful shopping cart plugin). It means your actual product URL never gets revealed to the customer.

What happens if the customer knows the actual product URL?

This is a big security issue to your product as well as your business. If the customers knows the product download link he/she can just post it on a forum and other people won’t need to purchase your product anymore, they can just easily download the product from the forum.

How do I configure eStore?

1. Let’s get to the main point now i.e. setting up eStore. It’s fairly easy. Once you install the plugin go to the eStore menu under the WordPress Dashboard and click Add/Edit Products.

2. Every time you want to configure a new product you can do it from the Add/Edit Products menu. This is how the Add/Edit Products menu looks like -

3.  First You need to enter a name and price for the product.

4. Now Click on the Digital Content Detials Section. If it’s a digital product you need to enter the actual URL of the file in the Digital Product URL field. Make sure that the Downloadable checkbox is checked (Then the product will be offered to the customer as an anonymous download).

5. Click Save Product to save the newly configured product.

6. Once you save the product an unique ID will be assigned to the product ( you will need it later to use inside the shortcode).

You can always find the ID of a product from eStore->Manage Products menu.

7. Now that we have configured one product we are going to create an Add to Cart button for it. First create a page and insert the following two shortcodes -

The first one will be replaced by an Add to Cart button when you publish the page and the second one will show the items in the cart when someone clicks the Add to Cart button.

8. Once you publish the page you will see something like the following:

9. Now Let’s create a Thank You page where your user will be redirected to once they make a successful payment. You can place the following shortcode on this page if you want to deliver the digital download to your customer via Thank You page.

This is a sample Thank You page -

If you publish the page you won’t see any download link. The download link will be only visible after anyone purchases the product.

10. Now Let’s go to settings (under eStore->Settings).

11.  There are many things that you can customize in the General settings. I’m just going through the basic settings. The first thing you need to do is specify the URL of the Thank You page in the Return URL field. It will allow the customer to be redirected to the Thank You page after making a successful payment.

12.You can configure the global Shipping & Tax Related Settings for all the tangible products.For example – if you specify 5 in the Base Shipping cost it will add $5 to the original price of the tangible product (during checkout). You can also specify a tax rate if needed.

13. Make sure to keep the following checkboxes checked -

a) Use Automatic Post Payment Processing – Which allows the plugin to do post payment processing (e.g. sending out email to the buyer with the encrypted download link).

b) Use Automatic Customer Record Removal – The plugin will delete the customer record from the database if refunded.

c) Enable Transaction Result Display – Allows you to display the encrypted download link on the Thank You page after a successful payment.

14.Once you are done click Update Options at the bottom of the page.

15. Now go to the Payment Gateway Settings tab at the very top of the page

16. If you want to display the download link on the Thank You page you need to also specify the PDT Identity Token under the PayPal Settings. (please click here to learn how to retrieve the PDT Identity Token from your PayPal account)

Click Update option at the bottom to save the settings.

17. At this point we have configured the basic settings to sell the product – Test Product. Let’s go back to the Test Product page we created earlier. If you click on the Add to Cart button you will be able to see that one item has been added to the shopping cart. Click Check out with PayPal to proceed to PayPal Payment page.

18. Once you made the payment you will be redirected to the Thank You page and the encrypted download link of the Product will be delivered to you.

The buyer and seller will also receive separate notification emails.

What if it’s a tangible product?

1. Say, we want to configure the Test Product as a tangible product. The first thing we are going to do is change it’s price to $10.00 (as you really can’t add shipping and tax on $.01 product). Now let’s move to the Digital Content Details Section. Before we had a download URL in the Digital Product URL field. Now we will keep this field empty.

(Please note that only for tutorial purpose I’m editing the product to make it tangible. In your case you don’t need to do that. You can create as many new products (both digital and tangible) as you want.)

2. We also have a product specific Shipping & Tax settings section. You can specify a shipping cost for this item in the Item Shipping Cost field. If you want to override the Global Tax settings (we configured earlier in the General Settings) you can specify a different item specific tax. Otherwise leave the field empty.

Click Save Product at the bottom to save the product settings.

3. Now if you go back to the Test Product Page and click on the Add to Cart button you will see that a shipping ( base shipping: $5 + item specific shipping: $10) of $15 and Tax (10% of $10) of $1 have been added to the cart. You can now checkout the same way you did before.

This time after you make a payment the Thank You page will not display any download link. The buyer and seller will receive separate emails regarding the confirmation of the order.

Nice and simple! you can setup everything in 5 minutes.

Want to try eStore?

If are interested to discover the power of this shopping cart please check it out here -

• WP eStore