WordPress eCommerce » how to

How to Create a Pay Per View Video Website

admin — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:10:10 +0000

Selling Pay Per View content online is very profitable. It allows your customer to access content for a short period of time. The good thing about Pay Per View content is you don’t have to worry about the security of the product as you are not giving away any product. The content is on your site. You are just giving certain content access to your customers temporarily once they pay for your content.

So how does Pay Per View Content work?

A customer lands on your product page where you have the pay per view content (e.g. videos). The customer chooses one and pay for it. After the payment he/she gets redirected to your site and can access the video.

In this tutorial I’m going to show how you can setup the pay per view content with WP eStore, a very popular WordPress shopping cart plugin.

Configuring Pay Per View Content with eStore

1. First we are going to create a normal HTML page with a video in it. We want our customers to come back to this page once they successfully pay for the video. Sometimes It’s really easy to navigate to a WordPress page by clicking on different links on your site. But we don’t want anyone to discover this page. That’s why I just created this static HTML page and uploaded to my server.

page containing the video

2. Now let’s configure a product which will be used to charge payments from the customers for this video. So click on Add/Edit Products under eStore menu on your WordPress Dashboard.

eStore Add/edit Products

3. This is how the Add/Edit Products menu looks like -

Add/Edit Products Menu

4. You need to enter a name and price for the product (e.g. video)

Add/Edit Products - Name & Price

5. Now go to the Digital Content Details section. In the Digital Product URL field you need to enter the URL of the page where you have the video. Check the Pay Per View Content option (that way the plugin will know what type of product this is).

Digital Content Details Section

Click Save Product at the bottom of the page to save the product.

6. After you save the product, it will be assigned with an unique product ID which you can see at the top of the page. You will need the product ID to use within the shortcode later.

Product ID

7. To find the product ID of any product you have configured so far you can go to eStore->Manage Products.

eStore manage products

8. Now that we have configured one product we are going to create a page and place an Add to Cart button on it. We need to use the following two shortcodes on that page -

The first one creates an Add to Cart button for the product ID – 33 ( the one we just configured) and the second one display the items in the shopping cart once the Add to Cart button has been clicked.

This a sample Test Product page -

Sample Test Product page

9. Once we publish the page we can see an Add to Cart button on it.

Test Product page (published)

10. 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 URL of the video page to your customer via Thank You page.

Don’t worry the page URL will be encrypted so the customers won’t know know the actual URL of the page.

This is a sample Thank You page -

: Sample Thank You page

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

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

: eStore settings

12. 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.

: eStore general settings return URL

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 video page 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 page link on the Thank You page after a successful payment.

: Post payment processing settings

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

: Save settings

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

: Payment Gateway Settings

16. If you want to display the encrypted video page 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)

: PayPal settings

Click Update option at the bottom to save the settings.

17. Now that we have configured the settings we can now go back to the Test Product page to do a test purchase and see how everything goes. First click on the Add to Cart button. You will see that one item has been added to the shopping cart. You can now click the Checkout With PayPal button to proceed to the PayPal payment page.

pay per view content checkout

18. After the payment your customers will be redirected to the Thank You page where they will be able to click on the encrypted page link to go to the video page. The seller and buyer will also receive separate emails containing the transaction details.

Thank You page with encrypted link

19. Once the customers click on the link they will be redirected to the video page.

Video page after the transaction

As you can see that the plugin has masked the actual URL of the page so that the customers don’t know the URL of the page. Even if the customers copy the mask URL for later use they won’t be able to view it until they pay for it again.

Want to Try eStore?

If you are interested in setting up your site with pay per view video you can get eStore from here

WP eStore

Ecommerce 101: How to Sell Product with a WordPress Shopping Cart

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:57:38 +0000

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.

eStore menu

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 -

Add/Edit Products menu

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

Product Details

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).

Digital Content Details Section

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

Product save

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).

Product ID

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

eStore manage products

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.

Test Product Page

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

Test Product Published Page

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 -

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).

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.

eStore general settings return URL

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.

Tax Related general Settings

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.

Post payment processing settings

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

Save settings

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

Payment Gateway Settings

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)

PayPal settings

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.

Add to cart - digital product

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.

Thank You page with download link

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.

Shipping & Tax Settings - Product Specific

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.

Add to cart - Tangible Product

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

How to Setup an Online Mp3 Store on Your WordPress Site

admin — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 17:30:45 +0000

Nowadays, everybody likes to shop online. You can get pretty much everything just with a few clicks on your computer. It’s really comfortable for the customers which is why this is also a lucrative business for the sellers.

Selling mp3 is a good option for you if you are planning to launch an online mp3 store. One good advantage of this is it’s a digital product. As soon as the users purchase mp3s they get the download links. So you don’t have to worry about shipping or delivering the products to the customers.Recently, after some research on different WordPress shopping cart plugins I found a quick way to setup a mp3 store. Basically, it’s a tutorial on setting up a mp3 store on a WordPress site. You need to get the following WordPress plugins for this tutorial-

Required Plugins

WP eStore – It allows you to sell digital products securely from your website.
Audio Player – A mp3 player which you can use to play the sample mp3s.
Extra eStore Shortcodes – A free plugin which enhances the features of eStore e.g. different fancy displays of products.

Once you upload and install all the plugins please follow the step by step instructions below:

1. Go to Categories under eStore.

2. This is how the category menu looks like:

3. Enter a name in the Category Name field e.g. My_Mp3_1. Now click on the Save Category button to create the category.

4. You should be able to see a Category ID for the category you just created at the bottom. Copy this ID to a notepad, in case you forget (you can always come back to Categories to have a look at the ID though). You will have to use this ID in the shortcode later.

5. Now go to Add/Edit Products under eStore.

6. We are going to add a product here (by entering name, price, download link etc.). The Add/Edit Products menu will look like this-

7. First, you need to enter the name and price of the mp3. For example:

Product Name: On_the_wing-Owl_City

Product Price: 1.50 (Please don’t use any currency symbol here. You can specify it in the General Settings of the plugin. Also make sure that you enter the price to two decimal places e.g. 1.00 , 3.00 )

8. Before you go to the next step you might want to upload a demo version of the actual mp3 file (Probably a duration of 10-15 second. It’s totally up to you) . So please open your FTP client (I personally use FileZilla) and connect to the server. You can also use the WordPress Media Uploader to upload the file but I’d recommend you to have a dedicated folder for the demo mp3s. This way it will be easier for you to manage the files later. Copy the URL of the demo mp3 to a notepad for now.

9. Now You can go to the Additional Product Details section. There is a field named Product Description where you need to enter the following shortcode:

Replace the URL with the URL of the demo mp3 you just uploaded. For example :

You can see how the Product Description field looks like:

10. Now please move to the Thumbnail Image URL field Where you need to specify a thumbnail image URL for the mp3. A thumbnail of 150×150 pixels would be nice for the display. For example:


http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/images/mp3-thumbnail.jpg

11. In the Product Category field, don’t forget to check the box next to the category (In this case, it’s My_Mp3_1) this product belongs to.

12. There is also a field name Button Image URL where you can specify an Add to Cart type button image.

for example:


http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/images/add-to-cart.png

You can access some button images from the images directory of the eStore which will be at -


http://www.your-site.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-cart-for-digital-products/images

13. Now please go to the Additional Product Details section. You can upload the full version of the mp3 if you haven’t uploaded it yet. Copy the URL of the uploaded file and paste in the Digital Product URL field. For example:

http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3/on-the-wing.mp3

You need to also check the Downloadable box which will allows the plugin to deliver the mp3 in an encrypted download link. It means the customers won’t know the actual URL of the mp3 while they download.

14. Click the Save Product button at the bottom of the page to save the product details.

You will see a yellow message at the top saying that a product has been added. This way you can add as many products as you want. I added four products for this tutorial. If you are done with configuring the products you can now move to the next step where I will show how you can display the products on a page/post.

15. Please create a new post/page and place the following shortcode on that page -

Where id is the Category ID (in this case we are using the ID of My_Mp3_1 category which is 1) and style is the fancy display number (here we are going to show the products using fancy display 1)

16. Now place the following shortcode after that -

This shortcode will show the items in the cart when added (You can also place the widget named WP Cart for Digital Products on the sidebar to display the shopping cart. You can find it in the Widgets menu)

Now if you view the page you will see all the mp3s (from category My_Mp3_1) in the following style -

Captains_and_cruise_ships-Owl_city

Price: $1.50

Fireflies-Owl_City

Price: $1.50

On_the_wing-owl_city

Price: $1.50

Whats_Left_Of_Me-Nick_Lachey

Price: $1.50

If you are interested please get the following WordPress plugins from here -

Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

How to Create an Amazing Photo Store on Your WordPress Site

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 06:46:47 +0000

If you have read my other post on how to turn your wordpress site into a digital photo store you should already know how to integrate Nextgen gallery plugin with eStore to sell photos from your blog. Nextgen gallery plugin allows you to show all the photos in a nice grid view on a page or post. But you just don’t want to create a photo gallery for other people to view. You also want to sell the photos. That is why you need to have a shopping cart plugin like eStore who offers integration with nextgen gallery plugin.

From my experience, sometimes I’ve heard users having trouble with integration. It’s fairly easy if you follow the detailed documentation.

Most of the time the issue was -

1. Rendering of template gallery-wp-eStore.php failed.

2. gallery is not loading on the page or post.

And the reasons for this issue -

1. In nextgen gallery and eStore integration we need to upload a eStore template file in the “view” directory of nextgen gallery plugin which is not there.

2. After you update a new version of nextgen gallery plugin you need to put that tempalte file back to the “view” directory again.

3. Typing mistake in the shortcode or using wrong shortcode for showing gallery.

Once you successfully integrate nextgen gallery with eStore you will be able to show “Add to Cart” button bellow each image which will look similar like below -

But what if you want to show the gallery in a nicer way? you can’t get anything better than the above display with this integration as nextgen gallery and eStore is two different plugins and eStore can’t change the way nextgen gallery displays the gallery. Well, we can make eStore alone display the images in a fancier way. Lets have a look at the following product display -

Nature Image1

Price: $9.99

Nature Image2

Price: $8.99

Nature Image3

Price: $7.95

Nature Image4

Price: $10.78

Nature Image5

Price: $12.56

Nature Image6

Price: $13.44

You can show the above image display using the fancy6 shortcode of eStore which is nicer than the previous display with nextgen gallery plugin. Now if you can show the photo products in a beautiful grid view then why wouldn’t you use only one plugin? you won’t have to bother about any integration and also you will get a good display with payment button.

How to Implement the fancy display

1. First, upload and install eStore plugin.

2. Now configure the basic settings of eStore (On your dashboard go to eStore->Settings)

4. Go to “categories” under eStore and create a new category. Remember the ID of the category you just created.

4. Go to “Add/Edit product” under eStore and enter all the product details. Save the product. In this way create as many products you want. Dont forget to enter a Thmbnail image URL for the product (this thumbnail will be shown with each product). Also you need check the Product Category while creating each product ( which category you want to include this product to).

5. Now create a post or page and use the following shortcode for showing products from a particular category with fancy6-

Where id=The ID of the category you created before, style=The fancy display type

So the above shortcode will show all the products from category id 1 with fancy display 6

You also need to place the following shortcode on this page to show the items in the cart once Add to Cart button is clicked-

Please note that you will need the free extra shortcode plugin to use this fancy display( which is used with eStore plugin to enhance the different fancy displays). You can get both the plugins from here:

WP eStore
eStore extra shortcode

How to Create a WordPress Membership Site

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:33:17 +0000

Creating a WordPress membership site is very profitable nowadays. With a WordPress membership plugin you can easily protect the premium contents of your site which only the premium members will be able to access. As soon as someone subscribes to the premium membership, he/she will be able to view the premium contents. In this way you can increase your website revenue from subscriptions.

There are many membership plugins out there but WP eMember, an easy to use WordPress membership plugin could be a good choice.

Why eMember WordPress membership plugin?

a) It allows you to create as many membership as you want.

b) You can set the content (e.g page, post, category etc) protection for all your memberships easily and choose which content can be viewed by which membership level.

c) It allows you to set up the membership payment button in plain Paypal button so you don’t need to have a WordPress shopping cart plugin.

d) Members can bookmark the page or post anytime. Those bookmarks can be shown to them in a list when they log in so that they can access them easily (A member can only bookmark the page or post which he/she has access to view).

e) It allows you to protect the section of a post or page (if you don’t want to show the whole page or post to your visitor you can protect a section which can be accessed if anyone subscribes to that membership)

f) It allows you to use the Auto Upgrade Feature to Drip Content (suppose you have basic membership and premium membership on your site. Now you can specify after how many days that basic member will be upgraded to premium member).

g) You can show the purchase history of members if they purchase something from your site while logged in (Each member can see only his/her own purchase history).

eMember Video Tutorial

Please watch the following tutorials to have an understanding of how WP eMember plugin works.

1. eMember Installation

A quick video on how to install the eMember plugin on your WordPress site.

2. How to Setup a Free Membership Site

This video tutorial shows you how to set up a general content protection for anyone visiting your website and how you can give access to members (e.g members of level “free”)

3. How to Setup a Premium Membership Site

This tutorial shows you how to set up a content protection for free members and allow access to premium members. Note that the payment button has been created with WP eStore in this tutorial but you can do it with simple Paypal button as well ( Watch tutorial-4 on how to do it with Paypal button).

4. How to Use a Plain PayPal Button to Create a Premium Membership site

5. How to Manage Content Protection in eMember

A. How to Create Membership Levels

A basic tutorial on how to create membership levels (e.g free, silver, gold).

B. Configuring the Settings Options

This tutorial shows you how to configure the settings options in eMember plugin.

C. Managing Content Protection

Integration with eStore for membership payment

If you are using WP eStore as a shopping cart plugin, this tutorial will show you how you can integrate it with eMember.

If you are interested in setting up a WordPress membership site with eMember plugin, you can get the plugin here:

WP eMember

How to Start a Complete Online Business on Your WordPress Blog

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:05:52 +0000

As the time goes by, WordPress is becoming very popular as a CMS (Content Management System). If you’ve already started blogging in WordPress, may be you are thinking of setting up an online business. The first thing to solve any problem is to identify it. Once you identify it, it’s very simple to get the solution. In this case you have to think what exactly you need to start an online business on your WordPress site.

When it comes to set up an online business with WordPress, You need to have 3 things-

1. A WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin.

2. A WordPress Affiliate Plugin.

3. A WordPress Membership Plugin.

Why do you need to have those plugins?

If you want to sell anything from your blog, you really need to have a reliable and easy to use WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin Which will automatically handle all your product sales.
Once you start selling products from your own website, you will certainly want to increase the sales. To increase your sales you need more traffic. You can get more traffic if other people refer traffic to your website. But they won’t refer traffic until you offer them a specific commission for each conversion. That’s why you need to have an Affiliate program on your website.
When you have both the shopping cart and affiliate program running, you can now set some of your blog contents (e.g- page,post) to premium so that only paid members can view those. A fully featured Membership plugin will be useful in that case.

1. eStore

It is a user-friendly WordPress shopping cart plugin developed by tipsandtricks-hq.com. You can sell any kind of digital or non-digital product from your website with this plugin. In fact, I’m using this plugin to sell e-book from my site. They provide great support to the customer.

You can see the Official plugin demo videos to see how it works-

i) eStore Installation

ii) eStore Settings Configuration

iii) How to Configure a Product

iv) How to Display a Product on a Post or Page

2. Affiliate Platform

This is an easy to use WordPress affiliate plugin to manage your affiliates. With this plugin any one can sign up for an affiliate and promote your product on his/her website.

Here is the official demo videos to see how the plugin works-

i) Affiliate Platform Installation

ii) Affiliate Platform Settings Configuration

iii) Affiliate Platform Affiliate Banner/Link Creation

iv) Affiliate Platform Click and Sale Tracking Test

3. eMember

A fully featured membership plugin for WordPress. With this plugin you can easily create different membership levels and protect different contents of your blog for different members.

Here is the eMember official demo videos on plugin usage-

i) eMember Installation

ii) How to Create Membership Levels

iii) Configuring the Settings Options

iv) Managing Content Protection

v) Integration with eStore for membership payment

Another good thing about all these plugins is they are pre-integrated with one another so you can use them simultaneously.

If you want to set up your website for online business, you can get all the plugins here:

WP eStore
WP Affiliate Platform
WP eMember

How to Turn Your WordPress Site into an Online Auction House

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:11:14 +0000

Do you want to create a WordPress blog where you can host different auctions? You can do it now with WP Auctions, a WordPress plugin which enables you to auction anything on your website.

Main Features

You can easily Create, Manage or Edit as many auctions as you like.

You can increment your own bid anytime.

You can specify the ending date and time

For any auction you can upload many images.

It allows you to Show your auctions in a AJAX powered popup

You can also place auctions in any page or post.

Additional Features

Any registered user will be able to participate in auction.

Payment through Paypal, check or wire transfer is accepted.

Shipping option is also available.

When there is no auction it shows 3rd party ads.

It allows to set your own currency.

Bid notifications are sent via email (e.g- when any bidder gets outbid).

If any bidder wins he/she gets notification via email with payment instruction.

It allows you to delete any fraudulent bid.

Google Adsense or any other CPC program compatible.

You can choose up to 5 different free color styles for your blog.

Here is the official WP Auction demo video showing you how to set up an auction-

If you are interested in setting up your WordPress blog with WP Auctions, you can get the plugin here

How to Sell ebook From a WordPress Blog Using Free WP Shopping Cart Plugin

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 05:45:23 +0000

Selling e-book is easy if you know how to do it. My last e-book “How to Sell eBook from WordPress Site- The Ultimate Step by Step Guide to selling eBooks from Your Site” was appreciated by many people. But the people who want to sell e-book for the first time might find it harder to follow any premium WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin. Even Many people may not know that they can sell e-book from their WordPress blog using a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin.This e-book “How to Sell ebook From a WordPress Blog Using Free WP Shopping Cart Plugin” is the simple version of my last e-book.

The main features of this e-book-

How to sell e-book using free WP Simple Paypal Shopping Cart Plugin.
Easy explanation with details.
Clear Screenshots to help you fully understand.

Some screenshots from inside the e-book,

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

Free WP Shopping Cart plugin can be found here

Download the e-book from here

How to Create a Simple ‘Buy Now’ Button with PayPal

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:47:57 +0000

Transaction through PayPal is very common for online shopping these days. PayPal can be used to sell both digital and non-digital products. If you do not use a WordPress Shopping Cart on your site, you might want to know how you can easily create a simple ‘Buy Now‘ button with PayPal and put on your product page or post to sell products.

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a simple ‘Buy Now’ button with PayPal. If you do not have a PayPal account, you can sign up for one here. If you already have a PayPal account, all you need to do is just log in to your account and follow the tutorial.

You can have either a PayPal ‘Personal’ or ‘Premier‘ or ‘Business‘ account to be able to create ‘Buy Now‘ buttons. If your account type is ‘Personal‘, you can always upgrade it to ‘Premier‘ or ‘Business‘ for free.

This is a very basic tutorial to create a simple ‘Buy Now‘ button. I did not customize the ‘Buy Now‘ button or the settings but you can play around with it on your own. Alternatively, if you are using WordPress then you can use a Free WordPress Shopping Cart plugin which will automatically create a simple PayPal button for you. The Free WordPress Shopping Cart can be found here.

How to Turn Your WordPress Site into a Digital Photo Store and Sell Photos Securely

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:59:24 +0000

Do you want to turn your wordpress site into a digital photo store so that anyone can purchase photo?Do you want to sell photo securely with an automatic system? In this video tutorial I am going to show you the easy steps to do it.

First, install the nextgen gallery plugin and WP eStore plugin on your wordpress site.

There is a template file called “gallery-wp-eStore.php” in the view directory of the eStore plugin. You need to upload it to the ‘view’ directory of the NextGen gallery plugin.

After that you need to look at some basic settings of eStore plugin. The default settings are fine but you may want to customize some settings. I am showing you some basic settings to get you started with this.

Once you customize the eStore settings, you can go through the following four steps,

1. Adding a New Gallery

Simply create a new gallery and upload images(which you want to show the visitors as thumbnail, not the actual images) to that gallery. Once you are done, upload the actual images (which you want to deliver to your customers after they purchase) of those thumbnail (e.g. nature1.jpg, nature2.jpg) to any directory of you website ( I have not shown this in the video tutorial though).

2. Add Products to eStore

After you upload images to the gallery, add those images as products to eStore. Note that while adding images as products, you will have to specify the URL of the actual image in the “Digital Product URL” section( not the thumbnail image URL) even though I put the thumbnail image URL in “Digital Product URL” section as an example in this video tutorial. This way you can prevent people from stealing your actual photos. Suppose, your actual image is 800 x 600 pixels and its thumbnail version is 200 x 150 pixels. when anyone visits your photo product page, they might be able to steal the “thumbnail image” but not the actual one as only eStore plugin knows the specific URL of that actual image.

3. Creating a “Add to Cart” Button

In this step you need to create a “Add to Cart” button for the specific images.

4. Showing the Content of the Gallery on a Product Page

The last step is to show the content ( e.g. images) of the created gallery on a product page where your visitor will be able to purchase from. Once anyone purchases any image from your “Product” page seeing its thumbnail version, eStore plugin will send an email containing the encrypted download link of the actual image to that customer after the payment processing is done.

Alternate Method

If you have thousands of photos that you don’t have time to configure manually this method will be suitable for you. In this method you need to configure only one product in eStore and you will be able to use that product as a template for other photos.

How to Implement The Alternate Method (For Buy Now button)

There is a template file called gallery-wp-eStore-auto.php in the view directory of the eStore plugin. You need to upload that file to the view directory of the nextgen gallery plugin (nextgen-gallery/view).

1. Configure a product in eStore for a photo like the first method. Note the ID the product you just created. Now go to eStore->Settings->3rd Party Integration tab. Under the NextGen Gallery Settings section there is a field Product ID to be Used as a Template. Enter the ID of the product (that you want to use as a template) here. Update the settings.

2. Go to Add Gallery/ Images under Gallery and create a new gallery (If you haven’t created one already). If you have already created a gallery then go to Manage Gallery. Start uploading images.

3. Now Go to a page/post and use the following shortcode to show the photo gallery with Buy Now button -

Replace the Gallery-ID with the actual ID of the gallery (e.g – 1 or 2)

Photo display with Buy Now button

How to Implement The Alternate Method (For Add to Cart button)

There is a template file called “gallery-wp-eStore-auto-addtocart.php” in the view directory of the eStore plugin. You need to upload that file to the view directory of the nextgen gallery plugin (nextgen-gallery/view).

1. Configure a product in eStore for a photo like the first method. Note the ID the product you just created. Now go to eStore->Settings->3rd Party Integration tab. Under the NextGen Gallery Settings section there is a field Product ID to be Used as a Template. Enter the ID of the product (that you want to use as a template) here. Update the settings.

3. Now Go to a page/post and use the following shortcode to show the photo gallery with Add to Cart button -

Replace the Gallery-ID with the actual ID of the gallery (e.g – 1 or 2)

Add to Cart photo display with products added to the cart

Once you are done with setting up any of the above methods, you will be able to sell photos from your site.

The two plugins can be found here:

NextGen Gallery

WP eStore

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Alternate Method

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