The moment you define your first product using the Admin Control Panel, it is ready for sale on your shop. This chapter describes the features of your shop and tells you how to link to it from other web pages of yours or your affiliates.
Note: The screenshots below are from the Pro version of . In the standard version, the Pro features and options will not be presented.
Your shop front generated by is shown in the image below. You can access it by browsing to your installation in the standalone versions. In the WordPress plugin versions, you will use the so-called shortcodes to access the shop front, as described below.
Once a product is added to your repository, your e-shop is ready to be
displayed on your blog. The display is controlled using WordPress
ShortCodes. In order to show the whole shop, create a new page or post
with the short code [ezshop]
. This will present your whole
e-shop in a neat tabular form within the page or post.
Note that by default, a page with the slug ez-shop is created for you. Please do not delete this page even if you create other e-shop pages. This page is used as the IPN listener, which will receive the messages from PayPal. This page also serves as your digital goods delivery portal. In other words, if you delete this page, your e-shop may not work at all.
Note also that you have to use pretty permalinks for the auto-generated shop front to work. Take a look at the URL address of the shop front (in the address bar on your web browser). Does it say something like http://your.blog/?p=123? If so, go to your WordPress dashboard, Settings -> Permalinks and select any setting other than the (ugly) default one.
Each product can be displayed as a "Buy Now" kind of link with the
short code [ezshop buy='prodID' link='yes']Buy this product
now![/ezshop]
. This will insert a link, which when clicked, will
take your reader to a PayPal page to buy the product.
If you drop the link='yes'
part, the page will transfer
the reader to PayPal without waiting for user click.
You can display your product links using [ezshop show='prodID'
link='yes']Buy this product now![/ezshop]
. This part is not fully
developed yet, but it will show page describing your product benefits,
with a count-down timer which will take your reader to PayPal in fifteen
seconds.
In standalone verions, both the Pro and the Lite (also called the Standard) editions, you can access your e-shop by simply browsing to the location where you installed . If you are logged in, you will see the following screen, giving you all the actions you can take as the administrator.
If you are not logged in to your , you will see your e-shop directly, which is the view your customers will be presented with. Note that even in this view, there is an easy access link to your admin page. Clicking on it, while not being logged in, will bring up a login request.
Similar to the WordPress plugin version, the standalone version also
has the "Buy Now" and the count-down links. The format for a "Buy Now"
link would be http://yoursite/?buy=product_code
, which takes
your customer directly to PayPal site. And
http://yoursite/?show=product_code
takes them to a product
information page, which redirects to the PayPal payment page in 15
seconds. The customer can abort the count-down if they so choose.
The basic shop front generated by may not be fancy
enough for your purposes. It is possible to develop fancier presentations
of the shop front. In my own
e-shop, for instance, I make use of the product_meta
table to generate the following e-shop.
While this shop front may not look much fancier than the basic one,
note how products are grouped together based on their categories, and how
links to product description pages are presented. Furthermore, the product
information page (http://yoursite/?show=product_code
) also
uses the information in the meta table as shown
below.
Setting up an advanced shop requires some PHP programming and database
manipulations. If you want to get it done by your in-house team, you can
start by making a copy of ez-shop.php
, modifying the product
rendering part to make use your product_meta
table, and then
point your website to use the modified version instead of the original
one.
I can help by providing the code that generates my own e-shop as an example. If you would like me to customize your shop front, get in touch with me through Support Portal.
I plan to make the customization process accessible to my end-users by
providing a template where they can define how their e-shop and product
information pages will look like. They will also have an interface where
they can add and modify their product_meta
table.