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

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• How to Turn Your WordPress Site into a Digital Photo Store and Sell Photos Securely (43)
• How To Turn Your WordPress Ecommerce Site Into A Membership Site (10)
• How to Start a Complete Online Business on Your WordPress Blog (12)
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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.

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 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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1. Have you been trying to figure out how to sell eBooks online?

2. Are you looking for a fast and simple way to sell your eBooks online for some extra cash?

If this sounds like you then the “How to Sell eBooks from Your WordPress Site” eBook may be the right one to start with as it has step by step instructions.

Features

1. Complete step by step guide on selling eBooks from your wordpress site using the WP eStore plugin.

2. Easy explanation.

3. Direction with clear screenshot for every step.

Note: We don’t offer wp eStore plugin with this ebook as It’s a product of tipsandtricks-hq.com. You will have to purchase it from here.

Download the eBook

Download the How to Sell eBooks from WordPress site eBook and start selling ebook from your wordpress blog right now.

Download Now

You can also sell e-book using a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin. You can find it on my other e-book “How to Sell ebook From a WordPress Blog Using Free WP Shopping Cart Plugin“

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• How To Use VideoPress On Your WordPress Blog (2)
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