Using a shopping cart with WordPress.com

December 26, 2012 5:57 PM

Need a shopping cart that will work with the free version of WordPress.

For various reasons, which I will not go into here, someone wants to keep a free WordPress.com blog but also have a shopping cart. Although WordPress *claims* you are allowed to sell your own work on your free blog, they also disallow any "Add to Cart" or "Buy Now" PayPal buttons, allowing only "Donate" buttons. The code for PayPal buttons does not work, and there are no Plugins allowed of any type.

Is there a shopping cart that this person can simply link to, and have all the choosing and buying of items happen on that separate site? Would be great if they could keep some sense of their own branding, by being able to include their own logo, product images, etc.

I am of course expecting that this will cost. In this case, a percentage would be much better than a flat monthly or yearly fee, because this is a new business and I'd anticipate few online orders starting out.

P.S. Please don't advise to switch to WordPress.com, that's not going to happen at this point.

posted by parrot_person to computers & internet (9 answers total)

So basically you just want a standalone ecommerce site? I'm not clear on what Wordpress has to do with it if you're not going to host it there anyway. You can make a link to any site from a Wordpress blog, so any hosted ecommerce solution would work. Yahoo! and Amazon both have hosted ecommerce products (of varying complexity depending on your needs), and there are dozens (probably thousands, really) of others.
posted by primethyme at 6:03 PM on December 26, 2012

It apparently matters, because we cannot use the "Add to Cart" or "Buy Now" PayPal buttons--WordPress does not allow the code to work. For all I know, they prevent you from linking to ecommerce sites as well, since they state that they don't want WordPress.com blogs used for ecommerce (even though they state elsewhere, contradictorily, that you are supposed to be able to sell your own work on your free site).

I'm aware that there are bunches of ecommerce products. I'm asking for something that definitely works with Wordpress.com (the link doesn't just disappear, as the PayPal code does); that allows for some branding; and that preferably allows payment in percentages of orders.
posted by parrot_person at 6:09 PM on December 26, 2012

According to Wordpress.com you can put in a PayPal donate button, so it stands to reason you can put in other paypal things - it all works pretty much about the same.

FWIW, our nonprofit uses Google Checkout/Wallet on our Wordpress installation (via an iframe that is generated via Google Checkout) and we've had no issues. I don't know if wordpress.com will strip that - cursory search indicates it's been an issue in the past but Checkout/Wallet got a big overhaul recently so who knows.
posted by Medieval Maven at 6:16 PM on December 26, 2012

What kinds of things? I mean, you could open an Etsy or Ebay or Big Cartel or Digital Whatsit store, depending on what you sell. Or just use Shopify and link to it from your WP blog.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:22 PM on December 26, 2012 [1 favorite]

Medieval Maven: As I have stated, PayPal Add to Cart and Buy Now buttons do not work with WordPress.com sites.

DarlingBri: The people in question sell dog treats.
posted by parrot_person at 6:59 PM on December 26, 2012

I would just link to a Shopify Store as @DarlingBri suggests. If it's a simple link there couldn't be any possible issues with it. And as long as you "theme" it similarly, you should be OK. You could also set up an Amazon shop, but those are not as configurable.

It's not unreasonable for me as a user to see the link go to a different "shop" site. It's a fairly common occurrence.
posted by pyro979 at 7:14 PM on December 26, 2012

Shopify charges an arm and a leg ($29/month for the basic plan) in addition to the percentage of items sold. I seriously doubt this business will even sell enough online anytime soon to pay for that monthly fee.
posted by parrot_person at 9:30 PM on December 26, 2012

So sell them on Etsy. They are handmade, I'm assuming.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:19 AM on December 27, 2012

or list them on Amazon
posted by pyro979 at 6:42 PM on December 27, 2012