Advice on one-product e-commerce setup

Destry · 2015-12-01 13:36:47

I’m helping somebody (a nice guy I know… an old expat like myself in my area) out with a quick site setup to sell a single product via PayPal transaction.

He had another designer who sold him a WordPress solution with WooCommerce and Themler tied into it, but the collaboration didn’t work, and here I ended up.

Anyway, I got handed the mess with the idea that I just needed to assemble all the pieces. Just today I’ve discovered that the Themler tool in this setup was added under the account of the other designer, so completely useless as I can’t edit the owner’s templates with it. And Themler, if you’ve not had the pleasure, is a frickin’ nightmare to use anyway. On top of WooCommerce and WP, it all seems like total overkill for a single product site that needs nothing more than three pages and PayPal integration. He has no plans for blogging, or anything like that, for example.

I’d rather not use WP, but I’m happy to stick with it to facilitate the situation. The owner is already agitated about time/budget (which is not in my favor). And though he’s clueless in WP’s dashboard, he’d be even more lost if he had to think about FTP-ing anything. I just want to get it up and going, hand him some basic instructions, and be done with it.

We don’t care about pretty code and custom presentation here. It just needs to be a workable site, mobile friendly (theme-powered if possible), and can integrate paypal for a single-product commerce setup.

Any WP theme suggestion? Anyone know a Txp/PayPal example floating around? If it’s quick and dirty, the price is right.

springworks · 2015-12-01 13:42:46

Sounds like an ideal candidate for Shopify?

gaekwad · 2015-12-01 14:34:27

Take a look at PayPal’s shopping cart – if it’s one thing and he’s not tech savvy, the CMS is largely unimportant.

Destry · 2015-12-07 13:14:41

We’ve decided to go with Txp on this, because he’s already paid for several years of web hosting and wants to keep extra tech costs down (e.g., monthly Shopify fees), at least until his web hosting nears needing renewed and a possible tech simplification is reassessed. And he wants to sell in three languages. So, Txp seems like a decent direction if I can get MLP and yab_shop working together.

bici · 2015-12-07 18:20:34

gaekwad wrote #296909:

Take a look at PayPal’s shopping cart – if it’s one thing and he’s not tech savvy, the CMS is largely unimportant.

Agreed. Paypal is easy for a simple item. You can also upgrade to a Business Account for some additional features. Choice of CMS is a non issue. … except that in your case having the MLP option makes TXP a great choice.

Destry · 2016-02-11 12:30:43

Just to follow up. I went with Txp on this project because the client already had paid for his hosting resources for the first two years and he eventually wants his site in three languages. That seemed like a call for Txp. We are indeed using PayPal cart. The site will launch soon in the first language only (French), and the multi-lingual stuff will roll out later as phase 2. This project is more an exercise with having patience with a non-techie friend than a real client/provider situation, though it is both. I don’t recommend such an exercise if you’ve got better things to do. ;)

bici · 2016-02-22 04:11:20

rianna wrote #297953:

Shopify is the best option for you, IMHO.

i have setup a friend on shopify. after 2 months in he ain’t pleased. beware before jumping on the shopify bandwagon

Bloke · 2016-02-22 16:04:37

bici wrote #297956:

beware before jumping on the shopify bandwagon

I concur. Same with Magento. For some people with limited products or very basic needs, they’re both great tools. But anything slightly out of the ordinary (e.g. products in multiple categories, re-categorising products, drop-shipping from multiple suppliers, thousands of products, … ) and you find either the interface becomes unmanageable or you end up doing a tonne of custom dev work to work around the limitations. Last time I tried Magento category management it was utterly tedious to configure for even a medium-sized portfolio.

Not Invented Here is good to avoid in a lot of cases, but a client who doesn’t quite know what they need, or hasn’t planned sufficiently for growth, often means a bespoke solution that can cater to their whims is better out of the gate.

I liken it to speccing a computer or laptop for a relative. When asked what they’re going to use it for, 9 times out of a 10 they’ll say “just a bit of browsing, email and office documents”. The temptation is to get a sub-£200 machine as it fits their needs now. But since they’re not going to maintain the computer, in three months it’s an unusable wreck. And it turns out they also wanted a drawing package, but the on-board graphics card isn’t up to the task. And it takes ten minutes to boot after they loaded AVG onto it. And so on.

The devil’s in the details. Always.

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#1 2015-12-01 13:36:47