WordPress is among the easiest and most flexible content management systems to build your website with. The customizability and extensibility of WordPress has resulted in it being a favored choice to create business websites. It’s not just companies with a simple information site that are using WordPress as their CMS. A lot of businesses use WordPress to implement an e-commerce website as their storefront.
In order to use WordPress as your CMS to build an e-commerce site, you will need three things:
1. Domain Name and Hosting
Any web presence will require you to purchase a domain name and web hosting space before anything else. You don’t necessarily have to purchase web hosting and the domain name from the same service provider. While purchasing a domain name, you should consider doing some research to identify what the most profitable keywords for your niche would be. Alternatively, if you are choosing a generic domain name, you might want to buy an aged domain name as it tends to perform better than brand new domain names in terms of ranking in the search engines.
2. The WordPress Script and a WordPress Theme
WordPress can be downloaded for free and easily installed on your server. In fact, your web host might already have provided a simple way to install WordPress on your domain with a single click. As for a WordPress theme, you can either choose one of the hundreds of free themes or get a theme custom developed exclusively for your e-commerce website.
WordPress makes it easy for any person to create and manage a website efficiently without any technical knowledge. It uses an intuitive interface that makes the administration and content management extremely fast and simple.
3. A Payment Processor
Any e-commerce website, regardless of the platform it is built on, will require a payment processor to streamline the process of accepting payments for goods sold online. WordPress plug-ins are available that provide the functionality of a shopping cart for your website and integrate your website with a number of popular payment processors like PayPal, 2Checkout, etc.
Out of the three requirements mentioned above, a WordPress theme is perhaps the most important component. A good theme and website design can make a huge difference in the conversion ratio of the website. Ideally, you want an e-commerce theme which can give the website a clean and professional look and make the shopping process extremely intuitive and simple.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular e-commerce themes for WordPress:
1. Ecommerce themes
Ecommerce theme is a premium theme available at a small price which has been optimized to give better results in the search engines. A large number of e-commerce store owners use this theme to help their websites attract more free traffic from the search engines. A working demo of this WordPress theme can be found at demos.ecommercethemes.com.
2. Store
Store is another WordPress e-commerce theme which has a number of useful features for the store front and the administrative back end. Users can completely customize the way their products and services appear on the website using this theme. An active demonstration of this theme can be found at templatic.com/demo/store
3. eShop
eShop is an e-commerce plug-in offered by the same company as the Shop template mentioned above. If you like the user interfaces that Apple provides you will love this theme. A live demonstration of this theme can be found at templatic.com/demo/eshop.
Evaluating the above mentioned options will help you zero down on the best e-commerce solution that you can use with WordPress to establish a professional looking, search engine friendly online store.