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.

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, Products, 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. The default behavior in WP e-Commerce is to display prices ex tax and then add tax at checkout. To display prices including tax, 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.

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.

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;}