eCommerce: WP e-Commerce Plugin Configuration

Setting up the WP e-Commerce Plugin

This article explains how to setup the WP e-Commerce plugin on your OM4 website.

WP e-Commerce is a shopping cart plugin with many features so you’ll need to be prepared to get familiar with the plugin. If you get stuck you might want to:

At this stage we do not support the Gold Cart Shop extensions, as we haven’t included API access.

Activation

Activate the plugin (called WP Shopping Cart) as you would any other plugin using Dashboard, Plugins.

Activating the plugin will create a new “Products Page” page (as well as several sub pages). Do not delete this page. If you don’t need it (ie you are displaying your products in a customised or manual way), move it to a to a page under the /admin/ page.

Overview of the setup process

Adding an eCommerce capability to an existing site involves
Preparation, Backend Configuration and Frontend Configuration

Preparation

  • Compile product list (SKU, name, description, price, weight, length, height, width, taxable/nontaxable)
  • Compile category and product images – make sure you have decided how big these images should be so you can have a consistent set of product images.

Backend Configuration

Configure your settings using Dashboard, Store, Settings

There are 7 tabs to setup your cart.

  • General – set up your country, tax settings (10% for Australian GST), currency and sign.
  • Presentation – default settings are fine.
  • Admin – set up your email and name, terms and conditions.
  • Shipping – disable for digital downloads. If you are shipping physical products, see the section below discussing this area.
  • We have recently published an Australia Post shipping extension for OM4 clients. This retrieves the shipping price from the Australia Post API. We hope this extension be patched into the core plugin soon.
  • Payment Options – unless you know your way around other options, you should start with PayPal Payments Standard.
  • Checkout – you can configure what fields appear in the checkout.

After configuring the WP e-Commerce settings you need to:

  • Add categories for your products
  • Add products (including product images)

Frontend Configuration

Create your category pages by adding the appropriate category shortcodes or product shortcodes to your category pages. You may need introductory category images and text before displaying your products.

Australia and GST. In Australia retailers are in most cases required to display prices including GST. If you want to make things easy on yourself and get the best out of WP eCommerce, do this:

  • setup your products with tax inclusive prices and set your Tax Rate in Australia to 0%. In other words, display your prices including GST, don’t ask WPEC to add tax.
  • when you sell products, create a tax invoice using your accounting system and send the Tax Invoice to your customer with the goods.

If …. you can’t do that for some reason and want WPEC to add tax, then read on.

If you define a tax rate, the tax module behavior in WP e-Commerce is to display prices ex tax and then add tax at checkout. To display prices including tax (to comply with Australian GST rules), you need to manually display prices for products on your WordPress pages and provide product shortcodes that enable Add to Cart. Once in the shopping cart, prices are displayed automatically showing the pretax price, the tax and the total price. If the destination country is different to the base country, tax is not added in the shopping cart, which means that GST is not added when products are shipped outside Australia. You need to use the Lock Tax to Shipping Country option in Settings to achieve this.

When using product shortcodes, you need to add each product individually and include its shortcode. To find the shortcode for a product, click the ? next to the product name from the Edit Product page.

This is how a product listing looks:

Product description and image
Price: $120 AUD
[wpsc_add_to_cart_multiple items="27:ProductName" showqtyfield="true"]

Clearly this approach misses out on some of the automation available using the category shortcodes, which automatically display all products in a category including images. But until we fix the price display to support Australian conditions, this is the best workaround we are aware of if you want to set up prices ex GST and have WPEC add GST. The easier option (described at the beginning of this section) may work better.

Product Images

WPEC will automatically generate product thumbnails for you from product images that you upload.  We suggest:

  • come up with a standard aspect ratio for your product images e.g. 1: 1 (square) or 4:3 (rectangular)
  • make sure your full size images AND your thumbnail settings in WPEC use the same aspect ratio to avoid squashing/stretching effects in your thumbnails
  • for example, if your full size product images will be 400px wide by 300px high, make sure your product thumbnails use the same ratio, such as 100px wide by 75px high

Shipping

WP e-Commerce has a number of choices for configuring shipping rates.

You can choose:

  • Weight Rate (develop a table of costs based on weight)
  • Flat Rate (Continent) – lets you set a flat rate for North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Pacific.
  • Table Rate (by Price) – lets you set up a table to charge shipping at a varying rate based on total price
  • UPS and USPS – integrates to external shipping price calculators
  • Australia Post – for Australian clients we added a module that interfaces with the Australia Post shipping calculator to get real time prices based on weight or length/height/width (volumetric weight). The Australia Post service calculates the shipping cost from your base postcode to any postcode in Australia, or from Australia to any country supported by Australia Post.

Testing out your cart

If you want to try out your cart on a live website without members of the public seeing it, you’ll need to add these CSS rules to your Custom CSS rules in Dashboard, Appearance, Site Design. These rules will mean the shopping cart in the sidebar is only seen by logged in users. If you keep your product page off the menus, you should then be fine for testing.

/* Shopping Cart Development Setup */
#shopping-cart {display: none;} /* Only show shopping cart to logged in users */
.logged-in #shopping-cart {display: block;}

Product Variations and Shipping Weights

If you are using product variations together with product weights (for example, if you are using the Australia Post shipping module), then you’ll need to use this setup method to avoid getting an error.

  1. Add the product without any variations. enter the weight in the normal product weight field.
  2. Save the product.
  3. Scroll down to the variation control section, then tick the appropriate ones.
  4. The default weights for each variation will then be taken from the actual product’s weight. This means it doesn’t have to be re-entered lots of times.

If you set up the variations BEFORE you save the product to the database, then the default variation weights will be zero, and if zero weights are passed to the Australia Post interface an error will result.

WPEC and PayPal – Shipping Details and the Address Override

During the checkout process, WPEC will request the visitor enters their billing address and shipping address.

PayPal is aware of shipping addresses, and there are a few settings that control the interaction of WPEC and PayPal in this area.

The settings are controlled here:

  • Dashboard -> Store -> Settings -> Payment -> PayPal

If you set Send Shipping Details to No, then WPEC won’t transfer any information to PayPal about shipping address.

If you set Send Shipping Details to Yes, the following table describes what happens.

PayPal Account Address Override = YES Address Override = NO
Registered Account Paypal sets shipping address to WPEC billing address. NO shipping address is displayed during checkout.
No Account Billing/address details screen is pre-populated with the billing details from WPEC checkout page. Then after entering cc details, the next screen (paypal confirmation screen) shows the WPEC billing address as the shipping address (and doesn’t allow it to be changed). The billing/address details screen is pre-populated with the billing details from the WPEC checkout page. Then after entering the cc details, the next screen (paypal confirmation screen) does NOT show the shipping address at all.

If you don’t want Paypal to mention or care what the shipping address is, and you just want the shipping address from WPEC used, set the Address Override to No.