So you’ve decided to take the plunge into the wonderful, possibly wonderfully remunerative world of e-commerce powered by WordPress. But how do you go about choosing the right WordPress shopping cart for your site? There are so many options on the market today, more than ever before (this is a good thing) — but it can also mean a lot of time spent researching instead of running your business, which is what you really want to do!
The best way to go about things is to determine first whether you will be selling actual physical goods or only digital downloadable products such as music files, e-books, and the like. If your plans fall into the latter category, you may not even need a WordPress shopping cart at all! That’s because you may be interested in using PayPal’s easily integrated API on your site, so that customers may pay using their PayPal accounts. It’s the same deal with Amazon Payments and Google Checkout. In fact, a number of such services exist on the web, though they all offer fairly similar terms, where they get a certain relatively small percentage of each sale they process for you.
If you plan on offering any kind of physical products at all, however, you will almost certainly need to install a WordPress shopping cart system of some kind on your site. Payment processing is easy, but inventory and order tracking is much more complicated — never mind shipping rates and all the various tax tables possible! Of course, you may also do things the old-fashioned way, offline with pen (or pencil) and paper, if you so wish — or even just running off of an Excel spreadsheet — but if you start getting any serious amount of orders coming in, you’ll soon be swamped with unnecessary paper work.
That’s why having shopping cart software is so important to a web-based business’ success. Unless you don’t expect much interest from the buying public, or enjoy mundane clerical duties, it’s better to have things automated so that you can concentrate on selling instead of processing! That’s where these WordPress plugins come into the picture. ”But wait; there’s more!” You may not even have to pay a cent. There are robust solutions available that are entirely free for you to use!
The catch, however, is that you get sparse to no documentation at all: that’s how the developers of such software are able to make any money, by selling support services for their products instead of the actual products themselves. But if you’re a DIYer (and what businessman or woman isn’t, at heart?) and actually have the time to fiddle around and learn on your own, then the sky’s really the limit here!
Even if you have to pay, the solutions are almost always very low-cost, well under a hundred dollars for professional quality software. Few will run enterprise-level operations as efficiently as more established names in the e-commerce industry, but many developers offer trial versions or even stripped-down entirely free “lite” versions with limited functionality so that you can try before you buy, testing the features and determining for yourself whether it will meet your needs.