Tips and Tricks WP eCommerce

eCommerce Solution for WordPress Blog

How to Allow Customers to Specify a Price For a Product (Name Your Price)

WP eStore plugin allows you to create products whereby your customers can specify how much they want to pay for the product (pay what you want).

This feature can be helpful for accepting donation amount or selling a product for charity work.

How to Use “Offer Your Price” Feature

  1. Create a product as you normally do in eStore
  2. Specify the minimum amount your customers can pay in the “Price” field of the product. Payment Gateways do not allow $0 product checkout so you need to specify a minimum price value of the product.
  3. Check the “Allow Customers to Specify a Price” checkbox from the “Additional Product Details” section and that should do it.

Allow customers to specify a price

 

Now, when you put an “Add to Cart” button for this product on a page, it will have a price field next to the button so the customers can specify how much they want to pay for the item.

name-your-price-feature-example

Using it with a Product Display Template

If you are using a fancy product display template to show the product then it will look like the following:

Customer Specifies a Price Demo
Customer Specifies a Price Demo
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like.
Price: $2.00
Your Price: $ 

Note:

  • The minimum price that you can set for a product can be as low as 0.01 but please keep in mind that the payment gateway (for example PayPal) may not like it as they are not getting any commission from these transactions.
  • If you want to offer a product for free then use the squeeze page form option to do so.

WordPress eStore List of All Products Display Demo

Demo Product One
Demo Product One
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like.
Price: $1.00
Demo Product Two
Demo Product Two
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like.
Price: $1.00
Demo Product Three
Demo Product Three
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like.
Available Qty: -133
Price: $9.50
Demo Product Four
Demo Product Four
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like.
Available Qty: 12
Price: $1.75
Demo eBook
Demo eBook
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like.
Available Qty: 37
Price: $1.50
123 ... Last Go to page:

Enter the following text in a post or page to display a list of all products in a stylish way similar to the one shown above.

display_all_products_tag

See the Product Categorization post to learn how you can display a list of products from a specific category.

How to Use Buy Now buttons Using the WordPress eStore Shopping Cart Plugin

WordPress eStore allows you to create “Buy Now” type button functionality so your customers don’t have to add items to the cart. The “Buy Now” type buttons take the customers directly to the payment page for payment when clicked.

Creating a PayPal Buy Now Button

Adding a “Buy Now” type button is similar to adding an Add to Cart button. The main difference is in the shortcode that is used to place the button on a post or page. To insert a “Buy Now” type button add the following shortcode in a post or page:

[wp_eStore_buy_now_button id=PRODUCT-ID]

Replace ‘PRODUCT-ID’ with the actual product id of the product you are selling. For example:

[wp_eStore_buy_now_button id=1]

Try clicking on the following Buy button to see how it works:

product image audio selling
Name: Demo Product Four
Description: Demonstrates the
‘Buy Now’ type button
Price: $1.00

Each ‘Buy Now’ type button can have a unique return URL. When the return URL is used the customer is sent to the specified URL after Payment.

Customizing the “Buy” Button Image

You can customize the buy button image with your unique custom designed image by specifying the image URL in the “Button Image URL” field of the product.

For example I have used the well known “Belcher Button” image for the following buy button. It looks a lot like what you may have seen on may other sales pages, doesn’t it? 🙂

Using a Fancy Display with the Buy Now Button

Demo Buy Now button
Demo Buy Now button
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like when used with the WordPress Shopping Cart.
Price: $1.00

Enter the following shortcode to display the product like the one above (1 is the product id of the product in this example):

[wp_eStore_buy_now_fancy id=1]

Display Buy Now button from Any WordPress Theme File

You can also use the following PHP function if you want to show the ‘Buy Now’ type buttons from your wordpress theme’s template files (eg. on the sidebar ‘sidebar.php’):

print_eStore_buy_now_button(PRODUCT-ID)

So adding the following line to a PHP file will display a Buy Now button for the product who’s product id is 4:

<?php echo print_eStore_buy_now_button(4); ?>

Creating a Buy Now Button For Other Payment Gateways

Check the following documentation to learn how to create a buy now button for the other eStore gateways:

How to Show Add to Cart buttons Using the WordPress eStore Shopping Cart Plugin

This is a step by step tutorial to setup an ‘Add to Cart‘ button for a Product using the WordPress eStore plugin to accommodate the selling of products from your WordPress site.

After you read this tutorial, you will be able to easily create “Add to Cart” button(s) on your product’s sales page and sell your products.

Setup a Basic ‘Add to Cart’ Button for a Product

Step 1) Think about the name, price and a little description for the product you want to sell.

Step 2) Configure the product using the ‘Add/Edit Products’ interface of the WordPress eStore Plugin. Take note of the ‘Product ID’ after you add the product (all the product ids can be found on the ‘Manage Products’ page).

Step 3)Design however you want to display the product on a Post or Page (the landing page of the product) where you want to sell the product from. I want to keep it very simple for this tutorial. So I am going to use the following as my product information:

Name: Demo Product One
Description: Demonstrates the Add to Cart button
Price: $1.00

Step 4) Now, all I need is the ‘Add to Cart’ button next to the product information so a customer can purchase it. To insert the ‘Add to Cart’ button that goes with this product, add the following shortcode below the line ‘Price: $1.00’

[wp_eStore_add_to_cart id=PRODUCT-ID]

Replace ‘PRODUCT-ID’ with the actual product id of the product you are selling in my case it’s 1 because this is the first product I just configured. So I am going to add the following text

[wp_eStore_add_to_cart id=1]

Step 5) The completed product display looks like the following:

Name: Demo Product One
Description: Demonstrates the Add to Cart button
Price: $1.00

Step 6) Finally, I am going to add the following shortcode in the post that displays the shopping cart when items are added to the cart. You can also use the sidebar widget to display the shopping cart. This will allow the customer to view their order and complete the checkout:

[wp_eStore_cart]

Feel free to hit the above ‘Add to Cart’ button to see how the shopping cart appears below this line and allows a customer to purchase the product.


You can copy and paste all the available eStore shortcodes from the shortcode references PDF file.

Common Pitfalls

The most common mistakes people make when using the ‘Add to Cart’ button’s shortcode and hence the button doesn’t appear are as following:

  • Use of hyphen (-) instead of underscore (_). Use wp_eStore not wp-eStore.
  • Use of lowercase ‘s’ instead of uppercase ‘S’. Use wp_eStore not wp_estore.
  • Forgot to activate the plugin from the plugins menu (Yes it does happen 🙂
  • Didn’t replace ‘PRODUCT-ID’ in the shortcode with the actual number.

How to use a Custom image as the ‘Add to Cart’ button

If you want to make the ‘Add to Cart’ button look nicer then you probably want to use a custom image for the button. WordPress eStore plugin allows you to specify a custom button image for every product. This way you can have nice call to action buttons on your product’s landing page.

When you configure the product, there is an optional product settings field called ‘Button Image URL‘ that you can use to specify a custom button image for the product.

wp_estore_button_image_url

I have uploaded a custom image to my site and used the URL of that image in the ‘Button Image URL’ field of the product settings and now the ‘Add to Cart’ button looks like the following (I have also embedded a picture in the post so the product display looks nicer):

Name: Demo Product Two
Description: Demonstrates Customized ‘Add to Cart’ button
Price: $1.00

The WordPress eStore plugin comes with a few different ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Buy Now’ button images that you can use. All the images are included in the ‘images’ directory of the plugin. More style to the button can be added using CSS (stylesheet).

How to Display the Product in a Stylish Way

WP eStore comes with a few product display templates that you can use to display your product in a stylish way. Here is an example product display template:

Cool Test Product Two
Cool Test Product Two
Some test description of the product to show how this description field looks like. You can insert plain HTML in this description field too.
Available Qty: 44
Price: $50.00

Enter the following shortcode to display the product like the one above (9 is the product id of the product in this example):

[wp_eStore_fancy1 id=9]

Cool Test Product Two
Cool Test Product Two
Some test description of the product to show how this description field looks like. You can insert plain HTML in this description field too.
Available Qty: 44
Price: $50.00

Or Enter the following shortcode to display the product like the one above

[wp_eStore_fancy2 id=9]

You will have to fill out the Product Description and the Thumbnail image URL when configuring the product for this type of display.

More stylish display options are explained on the stylish product display documentation page.

How to Sell Limited Number of Copies of a Product

WordPress eStore plugin allows you to limit the number of copies of a product you sell. In order to sell limited copies of a product, simply enter the number of copies you want to sell in the ‘Available Copies’ field of the Product when you configure it.

The plugin will decrease that number every time that product sells. When the ‘Available Copies’ number reaches ‘0’ the plugin replaces the ‘Add to Cart’ button with a ‘Sold Out’ image like the following preventing further sales:

Demo Product Three
Price: $9.50

If you are having any problems please leave a comment below.