When we at iThemes say we love and use WordPress, we really mean it …
As you might expect, we use WordPress to power the entire iThemes site and to manage our ecommerce storefront (with the help of E-junkie, Paypal and Google Checkout).
And WordPress has been more than capable of handling it all … with some stretching of course!
We’ve even created an Ecommerce WordPress Theme specifically to help others do it too. But we use WP for our store and website because it’s the easiest way we found to manage a website! (Check out our WordPress as a CMS tutorial site for more information.)
So I thought I’d offer some insight into some of the ways we’re leaning on WordPress to use it for ecommerce:
1. Heavy use on WordPress pages
The WordPress Page component is THE reason we’re able to use WP as a robust CMS. Using dropdown menu navigation throughout all our themes and our storefront, we can make Parent pages (Main Level ones) and Child Pages (Sub Level ones) to do a lot of things.
2. Hard-coded Purchase Pages
Our theme purchase pages have a ton of details and moving parts, so we hard-code those as theme-specific Page Templates. Although this could mostly be done with Custom Fields (adding screenshots in the sidebars, etc), it’s just quicker for us to hard code them, give them a unique Page Template name, and create a WordPress Page with that template.
3. Custom Buy Now purchase buttons
E-Junkie handles the backend of our products (extremely affordable solution, by the way, and Robin K, the developer, is great to us), and they offer standard Buy Now buttons, but we wanted to build our own unique look. It’s a minor detail, but makes the site look more uniform and unique.
4. Blogging and Search Engine Optimization
I’m a BIG believer in search engine optimization and blogging. We created a 7-part video tutorial series on how to optimize WordPress for the search engines. So we use the WordPress blog component to give updates on new themes, post tutorials on how to do stuff, and much more. At first, we had the blog on its own subdomain and separate WP install, but we’ve since rethought that and consolidated it into one WP install and the main domain.
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That’s just some odds and ends I was thinking about as we continue to stretch the underlying functionality of WordPress … if you’re interested in using WordPress for an ecommerce store, check out our Ecommerce Theme here.
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