Is WP okay for E commerce sites?
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Do any of you out there use wordpress for an ecommerce site? I'm getting some mixed reviews on it (but it's the internet, so that's bound to happen). Is there any sort of site traffic or page limit that would make using wordpress a bad idea?
Thanks,
Ruben
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I use WP for our site strikemodels.com, with foxycart for ecommerce. It's not the best nor is it the worst solution. What are you trying to sell? Do you need to keep inventory? Deal with shipping? It's less of a great solution the more complex things get.
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It would be for redesigning this site: http://gaport.com/ They sell carports, sheds, portables, etc. They ship and have inventory, but if you look at their site, you'll see anything is a step up. Thanks for the response!
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Unless I missed it, the current site doesn't have Buy buttons or a Shopping Cart. So it's more of a portfolio site than an ecommerce site.
If you're not planning to add Buy buttons and a Cart, you could use almost any CMS. With the small number of pages there, you could even use hand-coded pages (I do that for my sites which have around 80 pages)
If you want a fast and inexpensive solution, there are probably a lot of themes for Wordpress and other CMS that are much nicer portfolio designs than the current site.
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WP is what I recommend to use for building ecommerce sites that really want to focus on SEO.
I have tried all the other "easy" solutions out there, Shopify, pixelspace, bigcommerce, 3d cart, magento, opencart etc.
They are great platforms - they build very sexy sites, but lack in the ability to build optimized pages. The only one that stands out among the pack is Magento and that thing is big and heavy. A lot of expensive development work is required to make Magento a suitable platform.
So what we are left with is Wordpress. Yes Wordpress does have a scalability problem but by the time any major issues arrive, you probably have the funds available to hire developers to customize and optimize the bottlenecks.
Hope that help,
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I agree with Keri and Richard
The short answer is yes of course but it depends on how big your website is.
I believe Woo commerce is one of the best plug-ins available to make WordPress work or ecommerce. I like either Woo themes, studio press themes and hundreds of other compatible themes able to run ecommerce very efficiently and the ability to create contents so simply to me makes it a great choice for many people.
It all depends though on how many items you are selling if you are selling something over 1000 items you may want to look into magento granted you will have to spend a lot more on your server and you will have to really put more work into building the site to make it search engine friendly and user-friendly which should be one the same.
However if you do go down the magento path I recommend fire host because if you're selling that many items. Want PCI compliance
If you are using WordPress I would recommend any of the managed WordPress hosting companies in addition to of course fire host.
If you run any of the demo themes on this website you are actually using an e-commerce website made out of WordPress.
Your ability to handle traffic is based on your host not the platform they are running on. Of course the developer plays a huge hand in your sites ability to load quickly and run well under strain.
However if you use a Web server like Nginx or varnish you can run a extremely high amount of people on your site at same time and everything is served from the cache.
You would want to look into a managed WordPress hosting company like WP Engine, Zippy kid, Pagely, Web synthesis or get flywheel. The first 2 companies mentioned run all sites from memory and are extremely fast in addition to being able to run as many people as you want without having to worry about something crashing or breaking.
I honestly think it's a great idea if you use quality developers and quality plug-ins.
Stick with Woo commerce the woo themes company is a good place to buy your theme as is studio press which makes Genesis in my opinion the best team/framework producer.
I can recommend some excellent developers and word press Greg Renidel http://gregreindel.com and web dev studios are both places I would look to for this type of work.
As far as making sure your server is locked down and PCI compliant. There are so many great pay gateways out there that utilize their own PCI compliant hosting so you really don't have to pay the extra money to have your server locked down because when a financial transaction happens it is being done on a separate server with a page that looks just like one of your regular pages however it's your checkout page. This is done all the time without people noticing.
Blue pay, Braintree, stripe and the list goes on are all excellent choices for payment gateways all of them host the payment gateway themselves.
I hope this has been of help,
Thomas
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You asked about making a step up from your current site. The current website is showing its age and I've given some examples in this of what you can use from a template purchased from some of the sites listed below.
you asked about changes to your current website the 1st thing that really stuck out was placement of the phone number very nice in the top right. However unfortunately it's a photograph making it impossible for users on a mobile device to click it and also for Google to index it.
The image found in the link below should be turned into text
http://gaport.com/images/navigation/garage.carport.shed.png
I strongly recommend changing that out for real texts and allowing it to be indexed and clicked on.
So the photographs are very small I would utilize a page that has a slider or a better way of capturing users attention. In other thing I would change about your current site is the page looks crowded at least to me the font if it was slightly larger I believe would be easier to read. Because everything is so condensed it makes it look like you're about to read a novel and puts people off from reading it. In addition to also making it harder to read for some people.
Allow the page to use the entire browser the current page has a lot of white space to the sides that is unfortunately just being wasted.
Your website states give us your $.02 and I don't see any method of doing that. Think about using calls to action in order to allow people to really leave feedback. You can utilize tools like user voice where people can vote on what they would like to see changed. In addition you can of course publish your FAQ and any support information about the structures you sell.
Make your social media buttons much larger and easier to see people have to scroll down halfway through your page before they see them.
Make the photos so they are in a light box and will pop out at the user.
Take the video section and utilize Wistia instead of using YouTube where YouTube gets the links and people are not really there for purchasing their there to be entertained
You appear to be using a content delivery network to stream your videos think about using a hosted tool like Wistia not only will you be able to convert your existing videos into .MOV's or any thing but flash only when you use .FLA you kill your mobile audience iPhones and extremely popular brand do not allow for flash at all.
http://www.gaport.com/videos/garage/orientation-2.html
On any e-commerce website navigation is very important I think that some of the themes labeled e-commerce in http://www.woothemes.com/ will show you how easy it is to get around a large site with the right navigation set up. I personally believe that sites built on this new platform are very well designed for e-commerce that does not mean that you should not consider a developer if there's anything about the site that you do not like. It is important to have everything that your business needs in your website. Because of the integration between studio press/Genesis and woo-commerce you can utilize any of the themes here however do not use one that does not have the HTML 5 logo on the top and less your seeking out or developer. The reason being is some of them are not responsive however I want to tell you studio press/Genesis may be the best framework on the market meaning the code is excellent.
http://my.studiopress.com/themes/
In fact if I were going to use the developer I would buy the studio press Geneses framework and use a recommended developer that I have spoken about in my previous post or one recommended in the studio press website.
http://my.studiopress.com/themes/genesis/#demo-full
http://my.studiopress.com/themes/executive/#demo-full
http://my.studiopress.com/themes/minimum/
Make sure the customer does not have to take too many steps to purchase anything and give them incentive.
Look for big savings on Woo themes and excellent WordPress hosting in
Some ideas of what I think are excellent e-commerce platform themes they are all responsive and are very good for search engine optimization considering they're made from WordPress. If you do use studio press and I encourage you to look at them make sure you do pick a HTML 5 theme it will tell you in the top right corner when you're looking at the themes if it is HTML 5 or not.
http://www.woothemes.com/products/superstore/
http://www.woothemes.com/products/peddlar/
http://www.woothemes.com/products/sliding/
http://demo2.woothemes.com/?name=sliding
http://www.woothemes.com/products/shelflife/
You may want to consider a content delivery network. The hosting companies I mentioned before all offer them. I would look at a plug-in called gravity forms it is truly excellent in a e-commerce setting because of its ability to create unique forms and also run the entire coupons, I number of items, cost etc. it really does a lot so does WuFu
I can't tell you how much I strongly recommend you very good developer.
I would have a look at the names have listed to do website development in the previous post. Keri brought up a fantastic piece of software for WordPress e-commerce that would've slipped my mind called foxycart is a outstanding method of building a e-commerce website on WordPress as well.
I hope these things are what you are looking for and are helpful.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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Great stuff Thomas. Made some notes to self.
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I've heard lots of people suggest that woocommerce is a great e-commerce platform to work with from an SEO perspective - is that the case in your opinion?
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Hi Guys,
In my opinion woo commerce is the best platform for e-commerce on WordPress by quite a bit. It is able to add abilities to word press that are amazing. Including being made from HTML 5 being 100% responsive for mobile, including schema for search, using Sucuri to test their code making sure there's no issue that will harm customers.
The woo commerce plug-in itself is free which gives you a lot of ability to add however everything you add on those cost money however I believe it's a fantastic deal.
It has the ability to do everything you can do a magento through plug-ins that go into woo-commerce only. You are able to create a fantastic e-commerce environment with the added benefit of being perfect for search engines.
There are other carts out there like the one Keri recommended and I have heard good things about those but from personal experience woo-commerce has never given me a problem. I would highly recommend it along with a developer that really knows what they're doing.
I'm sure you guys know that at the end of the day what keeps the site up is the code and the hosting. I think it is the best e-commerce edition to word press however those are my own feelings. But it's also the most used and I believe has by far the biggest third-party integration list.
The cost of the third-party integration plug-ins can be somewhat expensive but considering you buy them once and you have an e-commerce site it's actually a very good deal.
The end result is a very user-friendly secure environment that works wonders in search engines. Take a look at what it offers
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
Here are the extensions
http://www.woothemes.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/
Sincerely,
Thomas
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You're right. They are going to transition to that. They get most of their business through phone calls or emails from the site, but they want to change that when they redesign the site to add a cart and a buy button.
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Thanks everyone. I will pass this information along, and see what they want to do. Thanks again for the detailed points and recommendations.
Ruben
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Ruben,
Woo Commerce for Wordpress is a pretty good solution for a small eCommerce site. If you're going for a bigger site with more robust inventory needs, including integration of a Point of Sale (POS) system you might go for another solution, such as BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento... which will be more expensive but also more scaleable.
I think Woo Commerce will work for you based on what you've stated so far.
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