Build an Online Store Using Shopp

Difficulty Level - Intermediate

Filed Under Topics - Shopp

Listed Under Lesson Subjects - General

This is the main page for a Live Seminar Series that we held in December 2011 through January 2012 on creating an Ecommerce website using WordPress, the Thesis theme and Shopp. Below is a description of what we accomplished during the course and links to each of the lesson pages where the video tutorials are shown.

A Fully Functioning Online Store using WordPress, Thesis and Shopp

We created a store that sells educational products. Those products include physical books, ebooks, audio CDs, downloadable audio and DVDs. The unique elements of this store are:

Selling both physical and downloadable products
Providing secure download links from Amazon S3
Complex physical shipping calculations – including speed of delivery and distance using real time US Postal Service data.
Authorize.net as the payment provider
Dedicated SSL certificate – hosted at Bluehost
Product Catalog search
Product sorting by type and category
SEO for the products – including configuration of sitemap

Shopp and the Thesis theme are a Perfect Combination

Ecommerce plugins for WordPress have a long history of compatibility issues with themes and other plugins. If you look at their FAQs you’ll routinely see the disclaimer that they do not promise that their plugin will work in all conditions. Some popular plugins, like WP eCommerce make assumptions about templates that don’t apply to Thesis. Others hard code styles with their markup that can throw off the display of the site. Still others fail to follow WordPress’ recommended coding standards and can run havoc on your site.

Shopp to the rescue! Shopp and Thesis work flawlessly together. They are both very carefully designed and coded and they are designed to be customized. Those familiar with customizing Thesis using hooks and filters will feel comfortable with Shopp’s system of hooks and filters. However, the good news is that most of the customization you may be interested in doing only requires a little HTML and CSS.