How to do it

1. Create a product as you normally do in eStore
2. Specify the minimum amount your customers can pay in the “Price” field of the product. Payment Gateways do not allow $0 product checkout so you need to specify a minimum price value of the product.
3. Check the “Allow Customers to Specify a Price” checkbox from the “Additional Product Details” section and that should do it.

Allow customers to specify a price

Now, when you place an “Add to Cart” button for this product it will have a price field next to the button so the customer can specify how much they want to pay for it.

Special Note:

• The minimum price that you can set for a product can be as low as 0.01 but please keep in mind that the payment gateway (for example PayPal) may not like it as they are not getting any commission from these transactions.
• If you want to offer a product for free then use the squeeze page form option to do so.

WP Shopping Cart Quick Usage Guide

Video 1

Video 2

How to Hide a WordPress Page So It Does Not Appear on the Navigation Menu

How Revenue Sharing Works

PayPal doesn’t allow you to split a payment to go to two different account at time of purchase so the WP eStore allows you to setup a revenue sharing site with the help of the WP Affiliate Software. Basically, you setup your authors as an affiliate then specify the affiliate ID of each author to their corresponding products when setting up the product in eStore (this links the author with a particular product). When a product sells eStore checks to see if this product is using revenue sharing. If revenue sharing is used for that product then it awards the appropriate amount to the corresponding author of the product in the form of affiliate commission. The commissions will keep accruing whenever this product sells. You can then payout all the outstanding commission (the authors cut) at the end of the month or week or whatever.

How to Use the Revenue Sharing Feature

Step1: Enable the revenue sharing feature from the “AddOn” settings menu of WP eStore

Enable Revenue Sharing

Step2: Create an affiliate account for each of your authors/product creators (You can create affiliate account from the “Add/Edit Affiliates” menu of the WP Affiliate Platform plugin)

Step3: Specify the corresponding affiliate ID in the “Author ID for Revenue Sharing” section of the product when configuring the product in eStore.

Linking an author with a product

• Use the built-in tax feature of eStore
• Use the PayPal’s profile based tax feature

Using the Built-in Tax Feature of eStore

Simply enable the tax calculation option from the settings menu and specify the tax rate for your store and that’s it.

WP eStore Shipping & Tax Settings

Sometimes you maybe selling product(s) where sales tax is not applicable or you may want to charge a different tax rate for a particular item. With eStore you can achieve that by overriding the tax rate for a particular product from the individual product’s tax option:

Overriding Sales Tax for an Individual Product

The sales tax is displayed in the shopping cart when the tax feature is enabled (the following is an example screenshot of the shopping cart with tax feature enabled)

WP eStore Cart Screenshot

Using the PayPal Profile Based Tax Feature

Please see the how to use regional or international sales tax when selling via PayPal post for this option.

To integrate GetResponse with eStore simply go to the “Autoresponder Settings” tab from the Settings menu of eStore and set it up.

GetResponse Integration Settings Menu

MemberWing Plugin Integration Steps

Step 1: You will need one piece of information from the MemberWing plugin. So browse to the “Integration with other systems” menu from the “MemberWing-X” section of your WordPress Dashboard:

Admin dashboard => MemberWing-X => Integration with other systems


Step 2: Copy the URL from “MemberWing Universal Paypal Postback URL” field. It will look something like the following:

http://www.your-domain.com/wp-content/plugins/memberwing-x/mwx-notify-paypal.php?mwx_api_key=dfb0e9e3b9359541&skip_postback=1

Step 3: Browse to the “3rd Party Integration” tab from the WP eStore’s settings menu and paste the above URL in the “MemberWing Integration Settings” section:

MemberWing Plugin Integration

All done, now when someone makes a purchase using a payment button configured using eStore, it will automatically create a membership account for that customer.

Please note E-Commerce tracking does not work for “Subscription” payments as the recurring payments take place in the background.

How to Add Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking on eStore

Step 1: Make sure you already have a Google Analytics account and are already tracking visitors through Google Analytics (everyone with a serious online business should be doing this already)

- if you don’t already do this, then open a Google Analytics account today and get the  Google Analytics For WordPress plugin

Step 2: Enable E-Commerce Tracking on your Google Analytics account from the profile page. This presentation explains how to do it if you are not sure.

Step 3: Simply check the “Enable Google Analytics Tracking” checkbox in the setting menu of WP eStore plugin (Look under the 3rd Party Integration Tab)

WP eStore Analytics E-Commerce Tracking

Stylish Product Display 1

Demo 1 and Demo 2
This is a test description. This description is here to show how the description of this product looks like. You can insert plain HTML in this field too. Some more text to fill the shopping cart product description.
Available Qty: 50
Price: $15.99

Stylish Product Display 2

Test Product For Fancy Display

Some test description of the product to show how this description field looks like. You can insert plain HTML in this field too. Some more description of the product goes here. Damn! This product display looks good.

Stylish Product Display 3

Test Product For Fancy Display

Price: $59.95

Stylish Product Display 4

Fancy Display Test

Price: $29.95

View Details

Some test description of the product to show how this description field looks like. You can insert plain HTML in this field too. Some more description of the product goes here. Damn! This product display looks good.

Stylish Product Display 5

Fancy Display Test

Some test description of the product to show how this description field looks like. You can insert plain HTML in this field too. Some more description of the product goes here. Damn! This product display looks good.

Price: $29.95

How to Use the Stylish Product Displays

To display a product in any of the above styles you simply have to use a Shortcode (to display it on a post or page) or use a line of PHP code (to display it from your theme files e.g. footer.php). All the available shortcodes and PHP function references can be found here.

• WP eStore and NextGen Gallery Integration Instructions

Why is that the preferred method? The simple answer is security of the digital asset. The following link explains this in detail:

• Why configure every product separately

The only issue with that integration method is that you manually have to configure every product separately which can be a tedious task. So for people who are not really that concerned about the security of the digital image (e.g. if you are selling prints of wedding photos) there is an alternate way of integrating NextGen Gallery with eStore whereby you don’t have to manually configure every product.

The Aim

The aim of this integration is that you will configure one product with the price, variation, shipping etc options that you prefer and then use that product’s information as a template to create a “Buy Now” button for every image in your gallery. The name of the product will be dynamically changed to the “alt text” of the image on a per image basis and upon purchase the “image url” for that image from the NextGen gallery will be given as a download.

The Integration Steps

Step 1. Uploading the Gallery Template File

There is a gallery template file named “gallery-wp-eStore-auto.php” in the “view” directory of the WP eStore plugin. You need to copy it and upload it to the “view” directory of the NextGen Gallery plugin (nextgen-gallery/view).

Step 2. Configuring a product to be Used as  Template

Add a product from the “Add/Edit Products” menu of the eStore plugin. Specify the price, variation, shipping etc options that you prefer for your images appropriately (the product name doesn’t matter as it will be dynamically changed to the alt text of the image).

Step 3. Specify the Template Product ID in the Settings Menu

Browse to the “3rd Party Integration” tab of eStore’s settings menu and specify the product ID configured in step 2 as the template product.

NextGen Gallery Settings Screenshot

Step 4. Displaying the Gallery with Buy Buttons

Use the following shortcode/tag to display the Gallery in a post or page.

nggallery id=1 template=wp-eStore-auto]

The gallery id is 1 in this example.

Using the “template=wp-eStore-auto” option will show display a “Buy Now” button below every image in this gallery that the visitors can use to make a purchase.

What Happens When You Upgrade the NextGen Gallery Plugin?

After you upgrade the NextGen Gallery, you need to put the template file (gallery-wp-eStore-auto.php) back in the ‘view’ directory (nextgen-gallery/view) and all done.

This is because, when upgrading, WordPress completely deletes the folder of the plugin that is being upgraded then downloads the new version. So the previously uploaded WP eStore template file gets deleted in the process.

Can I Use “Add to Cart” Buttons Instead of “Buy Now” Buttons When Using This Integration?

No, to use an “Add to Cart” button you need to have the product configured in the eStore. This integration method uses one product as a template and cannot be added to the shopping cart.

With that said, WP eStore sits between the actual file and the browser creating a shield (this is how eStore keeps the true location of the file hidden). However this means that eStore has to read the file and serve it to the browser (meaning the file will be temporarily loaded in your server’s RAM). If you are selling large files and your hosting plan has a limited RAM available for you to use then this could create a file download issue (the file won’t be downloaded fully).

There are a few possible workarounds that can be tried:

• You could break the bigger file into multiple parts (e.g. each 50MB) and use the multi-part download option of eStore.
• I can provide you with a tweak for the downloader script of eStore (there are a few different ways to get around this depending on your server’s configuration but it may not work on all servers).
• You could uncheck the “downloadable” checkbox for the products with bigger download (this will force eStore to let the browser handle the download but it means that the customer will be able to find out the real location of the file).
• You can upgrade your hosting to a plan with enough RAM.

The bottom line is… Please make sure to check with your service provider about any upload/download restrictions or the available server RAM your hosting plan may have before you purchase the eStore plugin.