Wordpress And A Shopping Cart, Is there a way to have them integrated? Options

[A.N.Onym]

Hello there.

While I adore WordPress for the ease of publishing information and consider using it for a single product website, I'd love to have both a blog and a shop on a site.

For now, I use WordPress for blogging, but if the other CMS offers the same functionality and ease of use, I can use it for a new site.

Currently, I can expect a couple of ways to get a blog and a shop:
1. Have a WordPress blog (the homepage is the blog) and link to Zen Cart from the blog

The drawbacks are that I'll have to work out how to operate Zen Cart and I'll need a designer to make the shop look the same as the blog (or visa versa).

(How do I link from the top navigation if the pages are generated using a PHP function?)

2. Install Zen Cart and use a WordPress module.

The drawback of this is that I might have to use Zen Cart as the main CMS. Also, I don't want to tweak any plugins for Zen Cart to integrate recent posts and comments in Zen Cart.

3. Another way is to have Zen Cart and link to a blog from the top navigation

In this case, apart from still having to manage Zen Cart, it will be a separate entity from the blog and will have its own homepage.

(Also, how do I do that?)

4. Use Drupal for both blogging and shopping carting

Though it'd be great to have them both integrated in one another, I heard (and have read the manual) that Drupal needs quite some effort to manage.


Ideally, I'd want a WP plugin with the same functionality as Zen Cart (which will mean easy maintenance).
Also, I'd love to use the three page optimization technique for the online shop.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Your advice will be highly appreciated

Thanks.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Oct 13 2006, 06:43 AM

[Ruud]

Hm, something like this would have been nice. Maybe if you approach him he has something you can use.

Another solution could be the WordPress PayPal Shopping Cart plugin.

Or install LiteCommerce and use it's checkout desk mode:

you can turn off LiteCommerce front-end completely by enabling special "Checkout desk" mode and add shopping cart functionality to existing product web sites by putting "Add to cart/Buy now" links and buttons on product pages.

[A.N.Onym]

Thanks for the advice, Ruud.

Unfortunately, I'd like to use any payment system, like ShareIt (which accepts payments from all countries and doesn't need a PayPal account), so using PayPal as the only option isn't going to make my day.

I'll contact Semilogic to see if there's anything worthy, though.

I guess I'll use WordPress for Zen cart module with zen cart for e-commerce websites and use the E-Commerce lite plugin for a small blog webshop, if I don't install Drupal, that is.

The question remains, though. Has anyone used the "Three page optimization technique" for the e-commerce websites on any e-commerce system?

Thanks again.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Oct 15 2006, 04:10 AM

[Vizualbod]

This post is quite old. Anyway, Yak Shopping Cart works really well for me. It integrates nicely with Wordpress. Just use a custom field for a price and you can turn any page or post to a product.

[mod edit - link drop removed]

This post has been edited by cre8pc: Jun 12 2008, 10:37 AM