WP e-Commerce: Plugin Configuration

Setting up the WP e-Commerce Plugin

This article explains how to setup the WP e-Commerce plugin.

It is primarily for use on our sites – we deploy the plugin to all OM4 websites by default – but you may find it useful for WP e-Commerce sites in general.

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:

Activation

Activate the plugin (WP e-Commerce) as you would any other plugin using Dashboard, Plugins. If you don’t have the plugin in your plugin list, you’ll need to download and install it first.

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 to start with.
  • 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 published an Australia Post shipping extension into the core plugin, so if you are shipping from Australia this may be useful.
  • 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. One way to manage GST is:

  • 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 you’ll need to test the tax settings, paying close attention to how tax is presented for products and during checkout.

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;}

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.

Managing Your Online Store

See the managing your WP e-Commerce online store page for more information on managing products and categories, etc.

Return to eCommerce How To Articles.