AP 0844: How Can I Incorporate Ecommerce Solutions Into My Website?

AskPat 844 Episode Transcript

Pat: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 844 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.

We have a great question coming in from Michael, but before we get to that I want to let you know that, and I've mentioned this not too long ago, there's a brand new course on the horizon from Pat Flynn and Smart Passive Income, and it's a podcasting course called Power-Up Podcasting. If you want to join yourself on the wait list, we already have 160+ students going through it; and it's honestly one of the coolest things to see their shows come to life, and I'd love to do the same for you in the future when it reopens. If you want to go to there and sign-up for the waitlist, go to PowerUpPodcasting.com.

All right. Now, here is today's question from Michael.

Michael: Hi Pat. I was wondering if you had any recommendations for how to incorporate ecommerce into a WordPress website, or WordPress.org website, and any recommendations for what to use to take payment, whether that be Square, PayPal, Quicken. So, just wondering what your thoughts were on those things.

Pat: Hey, what's up, Michael? Thank you so much for the question. You know, the answer that I feel that would be best for you, I mean, there's, gosh, there's hundreds of different ways to do this. You could incorporate something called WooCommerce on your website, which allows you to enable ecommerce stuff happening on your website. You can sell products and what not. It integrates really nicely with WordPress I know for a fact. But there's also Shopify, which is a very well known shopping cart platform. It allows you to build your own store. Plus, I know there are WordPress plugins, so that you can integrate that into your website as well, and then you kind of use Shopify. I've actually done that before. Not on my own site. Actually, no. We've kind of integrated a little bit of ecommerce on this site with some t-shirts and stuff that we've been selling for more charitable reasons. But there's going to some more potential ecommerce related things coming to SPI in the future.

But I worked on a website way back in the day, back when still Shopify was around, and I had set up a WordPress website. I used that integration to set up a store to sell goods for a movie that I had worked on. So, I had helped a movie start their own website, and set up their ecommerce platform. I even set up an affiliate program for them as well, and it worked out. It worked out really well, and it was done with Shopify on a WordPress website. And you basically go into Shopify and that's where you manage your store, but you're just, your storefront if you will, happens to live on your website.

So yeah, that's what, actually, what I would do. I mean, it can get very complicated, very fast. But start simple, start with solutions that you know are proven to work, and that's where I would start. So, Shopify or WooCommerce, I would research those two, and decide whether or not, which one works out better for you, depending on what it is that you are serving and offering.

Hopefully that helps, and in terms of the way that you would accept payments, I mean, I would offer, on all of them, PayPal, because PayPal's sort of a very universal, and also international, sort of way that you can collect money and also accept credit cards. But what I would actually recommend is what I have experience with and that's Stripe. Stripe seems to work out really well, has fees that are very much like the others, but it's also something that's very interconnected. It's a great growing company as well. I've done some research on the company, because you obviously want to make sure that these things you set up are with companies that are reputable; and so I've done some research on Stripe, and I just really love their business model and the way that they work. They're also something that's integrated with a lot of the tools that I have access to and purchased. So, Stripe would be a good one to go for as well. And their analytics and their data is actually quite insightful too.

So, there you go. Thanks Michael, I appreciate you and I wish you all the best, and I want to offer you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page.

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat, which is actually going to be in a few days next week. But until then, I have a quick, quick simple request for you, if you're interested in starting a podcast soon, head on over to poweruppodcasting.com, and then finally, if you have a moment, and you're just kind of searching, surfing around iTunes, just type in AskPat and leave a quick review and rating for he show. I would really appreciate that. And that's it. Thank you so much.

And here's a quote to finish off the day by Henry Ford, and that is, “It is not the employer who pays wages, he only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages.” Boom. Mic drop. All right, take care, guys, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.