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I tried out some affiliate links and reviews on this blog before and even just a couple of reviews had click thru’s that ended in purchases. My review of my Three Skype Phone has generated 30 quid in commission so far (60 USD) and my Tefal Quick Cup Review had 7 purchases. Google adsense isn’t very prevalent, I put a block on some of the popular posts and a small banner below the related links on a single post. That’s not brought in very much at all so I think I’ll chuck that out eventually.

Instead of affiliate links, I’ve decided to start selling some items on this blog, it’s getting a fair bit of UK traffic and I have a good source of stock from an auction and a ‘job-lot’ selection of electronic things. Some were a bit useless but there are some good portable speakers and headphones in there that should sell. My missus wants to try selling some items too, she does some wonderful Chinese characters for good luck sayings and traditional charms which look wicked good in a wooden frame.

I’m going to use the WordPress shopping cart plugin from Instinct because it allows you to start small. You don’t have to go to great lengths to setup an entire themed site like you would with ZenCart or oScommerce scripts. I can set up the plugin and add just one product within a couple of hours. Probably even quicker but I’m such a tweaker that I can’t help try every combination of option!

I think it’s worth a go, I’ve got a company that I could use the stock for but I think seeing as I bought this myself and not through my company, I can have an experiment to see if any of it can move through here, I’d be interested to hear about any of your experiences if you have sold items direct from your own blog or site. (a chance to plug your site in the comments if you do!)

My blog name kind of works nicely into this idea it’s a nice memorable name just on it’s own but to add a memory hook to it I am pretty sure I’ll be doing UK postage at FiddyP (50p) for any item regardless of size, this makes it much easier for a buyer to know how much they’ll pay at the checkout as well as being the theme of the site. oh how convenient!
Of course, all the regular stuff will be going on as well like the AJAX tutorials, other hand step throughs and whatever else happens in my head which I think is worth sharing..

I’m working all weekend so I’ll get on with it and see if I can’t have my first product on sale by Tuesday.. yey!

Here’s a great way to add a shopping cart to your WordPress blog so you can sell products directly from your site without the user having to go to an external site. If you offer products for sale on your blog, it’s much nicer for your customers to stay on the same site that they see the products on.

This plugin is simple and powerful, it uses AJAX for some parts of it and it seems to work just dandily on the blog I have installed it on. Here’s how you do it…

[expert instructions]
Download plugin, upload to plugins directory, activate it.
Visit the ecommerce tab and set options for country and currency, edit categories, edit checkout options, edit gateway options, add products.
sell!
[/ expert instructions]

[Hand hold instructions]
First, get yourself a copy of the WP Shopping Cart plugin and upload it to your plugins directory, go to you plugins page and activate it :

You should see a new tab at the top of the dashboard labeled ‘ecommerce’ . Click that and we can set up the options for our country and tax rate. Just select your country from the pull down box and it should set the tax rate for you.

You can also require someone to be registered before they can purchase products. This is up to you, for now, you can leave it as ‘no’. The only problem with requiring a user to register first is the non-immediate way in which WordPress allocates a password to a user by emailing it to them. Also, once someone logs in to your site, they get presented with the dashboard and not the site but there’s a great plugin to use to beat that here.

Leave the URL settins for now, they’ll work just find and dandy as they are (they may look different on your setup if you have a different permalink structure)

Choose your language and keep the theme as default:

Next, you need to choose your cart location. I use the setting as a widget because this blog is widget enabled. You can choose to add it manually yourself by inserting the code to anywhere on your sidebar if widgets aren’t your thing.

Choose which options you want and be sure to choose the correct currency setting for your country:

The next section asks you if you want to charge shipping, if you are selling physical products then you need to choose ‘yes’ and set the base shipping charges. (base charges are standard and only added once regardless of how many products are added to the cart, you can add additional delivery charges on the product settings) :

Click ‘submit’ and that’s one page done!

The next option is stock control, if you are selling physical products then you can tick the box for ‘limited items’ and it will give you a field for putting how many items of this you have, once you run out the software wont show this product any more until you get more stock and edit the amount here.

Variation control is a way to add options to a product, like size for a t-shirt or a colour choice which will be selectable on the product description page before a customer adds the product to the shopping cart.

Additional shipping costs can be added so that each item that is added to the cart will also add that amount to the shipping (good for heavy items)

Product images are self explanatory and always a good idea to use a decent picture for your product, the plugin does a good job of creating a thumbnail and uses AJAX to display the full size image when a customer clicks it. (choose your thumbnail size or upload a seperate thumbnail if you want)

Product download is for digital items.

Click ‘add product’ to save your product settings:

If you don’t want tax added to each item or it is already included in the price then select the option to ‘do not include tax’.

wp_list_pages('exclude=4,5,6' ); 

Once ‘checkout’ is pressed, the customer is presented with the screen to add their address details:

Once that is filled in, they click ‘make purchase’ and will be sent to the paypal login page where they can use their paypal account or pay by credit card if they don’t have an account already:

You will be able to see a record of what purchases have been made on the first tab of the ‘ecommerce’ section:

Wow! what a busy week I have just had, I have barely been able to keep up with comments here and I’ve sorely neglected my blogging brethren by not popping in for a cup of tea, sorry about that everyone but I’ve been busy with some commercial projects for work which turned out to be great fun!

I have been working on some ecommerce sites and CMS scripts to get a ‘proof of concept’ site up for a client and it went really well, one of the proofs turned out so well that I think it may become the one that we use! (that’ll save some time when it comes to launch day!)

Part of the ecommerce research I did to see what would work led me to trying lots of different things, one of them being a simple wordpress theme with an added shopping cart which turned out to be a very simple and cheap solution. It worked really well and was up and running in a couple of hours so that got me thinking about writing a series of posts later explaining how to sell products direct from your blog with the minimum amount of fuss.

I also bought a book about AJAX called “The AJAX construction kit”. I bought it after browsing through it’s pages in the local book shop, a nice place where you can sit down and read through any of the books on display before you buy…. or do as I do and use the free wifi provided to get my PDA online and type in the ISBN number on Amazon and then order it for 1/3 of the price of the shop! (teehee)

So far it’s been a great read and I particularly like the way it teaches you how to do things with the construction kit rather than try and teach you every single nut and bolt of Javascript and PHP. It’s a much better way to learn how to get AJAX scripts running on your site and I can see some very useful plugins coming this way when I’ve finished the book. In fact, a way to get me to read more will be to share what I learn with a series of AJAX tutorials here!

I am also considering getting a professional redesign done for here, I think a few hundred dollars will get me a fine looking site. I’m not even sure what I want yet and I had to abandon my idea of doing it all myself since the new work projects came in. Anyone out there use a professional designer and could recommend them?