My First eCommerce Website!


Recently I've made my very first e-commerce website - BuvaShop, using WordPress. I used  Storefront theme which integrates really well with the Woocommerce plugin.  WooCommerce offers a lot of other useful plugins, such as Product Carousel Slider and PayPal Express Checkout.

They say that you learn the most by doing and I've learned a lot making this site: I've learned how to transfer a domain to another hosting company, got familiar with cPanel how to install WordPress on the server, how to add product variations for products, how to install an SSL certificate and how to setup PayPal as a payment gateway using their API.



Another important lesson I've learned is that too many plugins, especially if they are making a lot of http request to external resources, can slow down a WordPress site considerably. Also another thing to pay attention to is when using plugins for page optimization; caching, minification, compression etc. it's best to test settings for these kind of plugins to avoid conflicts and unexpected results. For example, I used W3 Total cache plugin and unwittingly made a few, what I thought, we minor changes to the .htaccess file, which crashed my site. Fortunately I made a backup before I started experimenting, so I had that going for me, which was nice! 



It took me a few days to properly configure PayPal, so the customers can pay either using their PayPal account or in case they don't have one to pay using PayPal guest check-out option, using their credit or debit card. As it turned out I had done everything right, the problem was with the store owner's PayPal account, after he upgraded it to a businesses account he was asked for additional identity verification by PayPal, a copy of his latest credit card statement and a picture of utility bill. Since my client was a person with a disability I helped him with all that but PayPal took their time to verify (they said up to 72 hours) and since the client was in a hurry to start selling stuff on the site, I advised him to try with another PayPal account, by registering for a businesses account straight away. He verified his credit card and address immediately and I made the first test sale and a test refund on the site straight away! Sometimes the simplest solution seems to be the best one...

It was more like 5 or 6 plugins...


Hopefully you've found the post interesting and thanks for visiting!





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