On today’s episode, we are going to how to build and eCommerce or Membership Site, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast episode number 337.

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Speaker: Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we are going to be continuing the series of how to build certain types of websites. And we’re going to explore the money-making sites. The ones that you either have a shop or you have some sort of membership page on your website and so that’s what we’re going to dive into in just a couple minutes.

The first thing that I want to tell you is though in the way of announcements is that WordPress 4.8 Beta 1 is now available and released to the wild. I played around with it a little bit and it is pretty cool. There’s some neat new things that are coming that are little subtle changes but I think that they are going to be welcomed by the WordPress community. A big one is the revamped dashboard news widget that will bring in any nearby events. So, typed Dayton in there since that’s where I live, Dayton, Ohio, and I was able to get some of the meet up information that is coming from Cincinnati. There’s nothing really going on in the Dayton community right now, but it has information about the Cincinnati area.

I typed in Columbus just to see and there was the Columbus meet up and the word camp that is happening in Kent. So, it’s just nice that that information is all right there on your dashboard based on your geographic location and so if you are interested in community events whether they’re the WordPress meetups or they’re the word camp events in the area, that is just really, really nice.

The next feature that I was excited to see was the new media widgets that cover audio, images, and video. These three new widgets have the ability to drag and drop the media content into the widget itself which is nice. It’s a big step up from having to go to another page and upload it to the media library and then from the media library, grab the URL and then put the URL in the right spot. Like this is, I mean, this just makes sense. It has that little area where you can just drag the image right from your computer and put it exactly where it needs to be.

If you want to add a YouTube video, you just add a, there’s a place in there where you can just say “add media” and then you can add the specific link. And if you want to link any of these images to actual URLs you can do that in the widget as well. Another great upgrade is the text widget. The plain old text widget that’s been around forever, now has the ability to have rich text in there or, I mean, I think it had rich text before, you just had to use HTML to do it. Now, it has the ability to go in there with, you can use the bold text and you can use bullets and just a WYSIWYG editor, which is nice.

Then the other piece of news that, it says in the release notes is there’s an improved visual editor experience, using the new tiny MC that allows you to navigate more intuitively in and out of inline elements. I have no idea what this is. It says here in the release notes that you need to try it. It’s hard to describe. I tried it. I could not find anything that it could do. Like, I couldn’t figure out what it was doing. And I have no idea. So, maybe with a little bit more playing and a little bit more explanation we might be able to figure out what is happening there.

I also have a link to an article on WPbeginner.com that has some of the screen shots of what’s coming in WordPress 4.8. If you don’t want to quite install it on your own installation, then you can just come and look at some of the images of what’s to come. So, that’s something that I wanted to share today.

Then the other thing, which is really kind of timely based on today’s episode and we’ll talk about Easy Digital Downloads in a little bit but Easy Digital Downloads is an extension that you can sell digital goods on your website. And this has an all access membership area. This is out in the news in this past week. And so basically you can have different membership levels. Maybe you have a gold and a silver and a platinum or you know, whatever levels you may have. And from there you give people access based on how much they pay for.

Well, the all access pass is the extension you’ve been waiting for that people can have access to everything within your site, whether it be products or just the membership area or whatnot, so, if you are, if you use Easy Digital Downloads, this is definitely something for you if you are, if you need this type of functionality on your website. So, there’s only [inaudible] [00:03:55] for the article. And then you can go and purchase this extension as well. So, those are the things that I wanted to cover this week in the news section.

Moving on over to the Is There a Plugin for That? section, I wanted to, I normally share plugins but today I just wanted to share a book that I finished reading. And it is called, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software and Developer Best Practices. And this is a book that I have a link to in Amazon and it is a really carefully researched book that will appeal to anyone that wants to understand how a computer works. And I thought it was going to be more about code and like, actual code and how to write code and how to write good code and things like that, but as I started exploring, like it just started out very, very basic.

It talked about initially, like how a telegraph works, how braille works, how hexadecimal numbers, how, it runs the whole gamut and it’s a lot of information that is, it’s kind of hard to read and consume but it’s made, the book makes it really, really easy. I told my wife, I was like, “I wish I would have had this book before I started electrical engineering school” because it, every section of the book, I was able to say this was part of my digital math class. You know, the analog plus zeros and ones and talk about NAND and NOR gates and all this stuff. And then this is my microprocessor class and this is my, you know, learning how to write assembly language class and all of these different pieces of the puzzle that I learned in college.

Like, this is the kind of, like a great overview of like the entire semester all at one time. So, if you’re interested in learning how a computer works and just the ins and outs of how, like we can do things on our computer from our keyboard and then see it on the computer, this is definitely a book for you. It is an older book. It was actually written in 2001, I believe. And it’s, the Kindle version is $10.00. So, if this is something that is interesting to you I do have a link in the share notes for this episode, which is episode number 337.

Okay, today, let’s dive in and talk about how to build an eCommerce website or membership website. Or this even could go with subscription websites; I didn’t include the plugins that you need for subscriptions. Mainly just the eCommerce platform and the membership website. And so, this is for if you’re trying to do this yourself or if you are building this for a client. Like just think about these things as you want to put this site together. So, the very first thing is, you want to decide what’s your song. Like that’s step number one, like you need to figure out, okay, am I going to sell a physical product, am I going to sell some sort of digital good, is it going to be a service that I’m going to sell through my website? All of these are perfectly acceptable offers and opportunities that you can make money by using your website. So, first off, you just want to think about what that is because some of these plugins do different things well, you know, so you want to make sure that you’re picking the right plugin. So, let’s go ahead and dive right in.

So, after you decide what you’re selling then you want to set up your basic WordPress site like normal. Or maybe you already have your WordPress set, you know, you have a site, like YourWebsiteEngineer.com and it’s off and running, it’s been running for years and now you want to add an eCommerce site to it. That’s perfectly fine, like, you just need to have WordPress running. And then, if you’re starting from scratch

I like to recommend using a kind of a basic theme. Like, we have store front over there for WooCommerce, but that will work with all of these different extensions. You just want to have a very basic theme. There are a lot of themes that maybe you wanted to do WooCommerce and it says, like this theme built for WooCommerce. And it’s probably not the best theme because a lot of times developers that have specifically generated a theme based on, you know WooCommerce or store, or Easy Digital Downloads or whatever the case may be, like, it might not be the most robust theme and it may cause other things to break when WooCommerce updates or Easy Digital Downloads updates. And so, I like setting up a basic theme. If you already have a theme, perfect, go ahead and get off to the races.

The next step in the process is selecting an eCommerce plugin. And there are three different ones I want to highlight today. The WooCommerce, of course. I’m going to highlight that one because that’s the one I work on day in and day out. Easy Digital Downloads, that’s another great extension. And then iThemes Exchange. So, those are the three extensions that we’re going to kind of dive into and think about and talk about today within this episode. So, with WooCommerce, if you decide to go that route, that is kind of the biggest name out there. It powers over 28 percent of all online stores. It’s got almost 24 or 25 million downloads.

And so, it is the premier plugin and is obviously owned by Automatic and it just has some really big players that are using WooCommerce and it’s got tons and tons of extensions and all of those good things. And so, it’s a free extension, along with the other two. They’re all free to get up and running. You’ll need some extension to continue to, to continue to build out your site. But WooCommerce is the best, I’m going to say the best one because that’s the one I recommend. But to use WooCommerce, you go ahead and you would install it and then you can work through the onboarding wizard and it’s going to help you really get that store set up very, very quickly. The other one, like I said, and I guess let’s say WooCommerce is great for physical products or digital products. So, if you’re selling a digital MP3 download or video or some sort of eBook, that’s perfect for WooCommerce. Or, if you actually have physical products that you’re going to ship to somebody’s house, WooCommerce and handle that as well.

Easy Digital Downloads, that is the next one. And it is another easy way to sell things online. Its primary focus is to deliver digital goods. I mean, it’s Easy Digital Downloads that kind of makes what it says. And, I really like this plugin and I really like the developing team behind it. They do a great job and Pippin Williams, the lead behind Easy Digital Downloads is just a phenomenal developer and I know that they really stress over the small details. And so, that is one of the big things about Easy Digital Downloads.

They’ve got over a million downloads and counting. They’ve got 135 extensions and themes. They’ve got 140 different people contributing to the product and the user reviews are at 4.9 percent. They’ve got extended functionality, like Stripe and MailChimp and free downloads, recurring payments, all those good things as well. So, that’s kind of another, I guess option two. So, you can do WooCommerce, you can do Easy Digital Downloads, or if you are part of the iThemes community, you can go with Exchange. And Exchange is a simple WordPress eCommerce plugin and you can download for free and there are lots of upgrades for this as well. It’s simple but extendable. You can do a lot of things. I really like this one as well.

I mean, all three of them are great extensions and plugins. They do things just a little bit differently each time but all of them seem to have the same ability to be able to sell things and get money from your customers. I mean, that’s the big thing. If you are, the Exchange probably has the best feature if you have the pro pack. If you have already purchased the pro pack or the plugin suite as part of iThemes. And iThemes comes with, they’re the company behind Backup Buddy. If you already have, like that all package set, there is a plugin suite for $247 and you get everything. So, you get all of the extensions and you get everything. Whereas with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, those two, you have to pay for the extensions that you need. And so, if you want to go, probably, I would say to get everything that you may ever possibly need, then iThemes Exchange will be the most economical value because you can get everything for $247. But again, to start selling on your website, you need absolutely zero money. You can get started really quickly by just installing the base plugins.

Okay, if you want to do a membership site, then all three of these extensions or all three of these plugins will need an additional extension to add a membership piece to your website. So, WooCommerce Memberships is an extension that starts at $149 for a single license. If you want multiple licenses it costs more. Restrict Content Pro, that is the one that goes with Easy Digital Downloads. Those two work together and that starts at $99. And then there is a membership add-on for Exchange. And that starts at $97. So, if you want to add memberships to Exchange from iThemes then you’ll need that $97 upgrade.

So, any way to get to memberships with using these plugins and, there’s of course, always third party plugins and ones that aren’t officially supported, but you’re going to have to spend some money to get into the membership game. So, those are the plugins or the extensions you may need and I recommend, like if you pick WooCommerce, then go with WooCommerce Membership. Like, you can use WooCommerce and Restrict Content Pro but they’re probably not going to work real, real well together. So, that’s something to think about.

Okay, once we’ve picked those, we’ve picked our eCommerce plugins; we’ve picked the membership products or membership plugins, if we’re going that route, now it’s time to add products to your store. And what I would recommend with WooCommerce, especially like, there’s a lot of tedium when you’re setting up the individual products and I would say really spend a lot of time and you can fill out as much as you can for the first product. And then you can duplicate products after that. So, if there’s some information that doesn’t change, then you don’t have to fill that out multiple times.

But, when I say add products to your store, you’re going to add the price. You’re going to add the dimensions if it’s a physical item. You’re going to add, if there is any sort of shipping classes. You’re going to add if there are any types of variations, so like if you’re selling tee-shirts, if you have small, medium, and large and the quantities, you’re going to enter all of this detail. You’re going to add the product detail, you’re going to add images. You’re maybe add a product gallery to show multiple images. All of this stuff is the next step. And, I definitely think that setting one piece up is a great step. If you have like hundreds of products, like, yes, it can get overwhelming, but with certain exporting, let’s see. Within WooCommerce, we have and extension that you can export product data and then you can import product data. So, you can see how the columns are and it’s all like an Excel spreadsheet and you can go ahead and import all that information instead of doing one at a time. So, that’s something to think about as well.

Okay, once we have at least one product in our store or one membership, you know, recurring or whatever, then we want to configure a payment gateway. These extensions come with PayPal. PayPal is built in and I think WooCommerce has Stripe built in and there’s a Stripe add-on within Exchange. And that Stripe may come packaged with Easy Digital Downloads. And, so you want to just set up this payment gateway to make sure you can accept payments.

And then you want to test the payment, so, the payment, you want to, you know, buy your product and you want to make sure that the payment goes through, that there is actually a success page. That you get, you see what that success page looks like, is there needing any formatting on that? Does it give the person all the details that they need? If they’re getting a download, do they get a download right on that page? Do they get an email with a download? Does the customer actually get an email that says thank you for your purchase? Does the store owner get an email that says there’s been a purchase on your site?

So, you’ve got to look for those specific things. That all is something that you could overlook very easily without testing that. You could just turn the store on and then all of a sudden you can’t get payments. And that is not a good thing. That is no Bueno for sure. Then, you also want to go through the same process for testing transactions to your store for memberships. So, if you have a membership site set up, test if those payments go through to see if you get those same payment notifications. Does the person get access? How do they get access? Do they get a username and password? Do they get a username and they have to set up their password? What’s that process look like?

With a membership site, you also have to go in and make sure there’s an easy way for them to reset their password in case they forget it. You want to make it easy for that piece of the process to happen. You also want to set the, see if the subscription automatically renews. This is a simple test that you could do, is like you could, you can purchase something one day and you can say it renews every day. You know, obviously, you wouldn’t have a membership site with a daily, I mean, I guess you could. You could have whatever charge daily, but you want to make sure that that automatically works, like you so you’re not getting to the end of the first month and all of a sudden nobody’s payments are taking, you have to manually re-charge everybody. So, that’s another thing to think about. And in a nutshell, those are the steps that it takes to set up a membership site or an eCommerce site in WordPress. There are a lot of pieces, there’s a lot more detail than what we talked about here in this 20-minute show, but there are, this is kind of the outline that I would go through when setting up a brand-new eCommerce site.

So, to start over and kind of our brief re-cap. Obviously, you need to start deciding what you want to sell. Like, if you don’t know what you’re going to sell then this whole, this whole exercise is pointless. And then you want to set up your eCommerce website or eCommerce plugin, decide which one is it going to be. Is it going to be WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or iThemes Exchange? After you have your plugins picked, then you want to add at least one product to the store.

Once that one product has been added, then you go through, configure the payment gateway, or at least pick what payment gateway you’re going to use, and then configure it. Because you could have multiple payment gateways. You could do PayPal and Stripe, you could do Authorize.net and have a merchant account, and having a merchant account, that takes a while to get set up, but if you want to get easy going, I definitely recommend PayPal or Stripe. Those are the two best to get going. Then you want to run those test transactions. Make sure that the payment goes through, that you’re, you know, from one PayPal account to the other one gets it. And you get payment notification.

As a store owner, you get customer email or the customer gets an email that says that this is what they’ve purchased and any other information. You want to test and make sure all those emails look good and that they’re formatted correctly. They don’t say, like “my store” at the top, they actually said, should say, like, Your Website Engineer or whatever and then the right color scheme and the formatting is right and all the pertinent details are there. Then you want to run test transactions for memberships and just make sure all the same things. Make sure those email sequences go if you’ve got them set up, there’s a plugin in WooCommerce that’s called “Follow-up Emails” and that is a way to follow-up after people purchase things or they’ve almost purchased things and so if you’ve got that piece of the puzzle, make sure that you test that and make sure those funnels are working right. And so, there’s just a lot of like testing once you get a product set up. And then, it’s, does the product look okay or the button is in the right place, you know is the “add to cart” button in the right area? All of these pieces, like, it’s a tedious process to get everything set up, but I recommend doing it one at a time, making sure the process works. Making sure all the pieces work. Because if you think about it, if you’re stuck, you’ve created, maybe you’ve created 100 products and you’re ready to launch.

But now, you have a problem with the payment gateway? Then you contact support and support may take a little bit to get back with you, now you’re just sitting here doing nothing. If you create one product and then you try to do the payment gateway and the payment gateway is not working quite perfectly, then you contact support and you’re waiting for support and then you can start adding multiple products and you can, you kind of build up the store and organize things and you’ve got work to do while you’re waiting on the support to come back.

All right, that’s what I want to share with you today. And we’re going to continue this discussion next week. Talking about eLearning and talking about how to set those courses up online. Kind of like a Udemy, so you can, can you build them out and you can have your own eLearning center so people can come on, they can purchase from you. They can buy from your eCommerce website and then they can have access to a portion of your website where it has videos and tutorials, and all kinds of other great information for, from, you know, some sort of eLearning, whether it be guitar lessons or how to build WordPress websites or whatnot. So, that’s what we’re going to talk about next week and until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye bye.