Need an ecom blog, is WordPress for us?

  • Resolved lindstroml

    (@lindstroml)


    8 years, 2 months ago

    Hello
    I’m writing from an ecommerce website, where we use WordPress as our blog.
    Unfortunately, we’ve come to a point where our WordPress account / theme is so buggy that linking no longer works, posting updates is unnecessarily complicated (having to empty the cache each time).

    I understand that our version is probably quite out of date, so I’m taking the opportunity to evaluate whether WordPress is the right blog solution for us. I would be very grateful for any advice or thoughts on this by the community.

    Our requirements are:
    – Being able to run different blog content by country
    – Being able to host it on our own domain
    – Being able to make each post shoppable – not just linking images, but ideally featuring modules where we can list products mentioned in the blog post, and link through to relevant product pages. Maybe there is a template out there that allows us to do this but from a search of templates I didn’t spot one.
    – Integrated with on-site search, so that blog posts can show up in results

    Would be great to know from the WordPress community, if we can achieve this with WordPress.

    Many thanks,

    Lena

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    You can achieve almost anything. Whether you can do it “out of the box” with existing plugins and themes is an open question and requires a bunch of research and negotiation.

    I recommend that you find a developer with deep woocommerce experience who can advise you and maybe build out the site for you.

    Do not post jobs here, though. Try https://jobs.wordpress.net.

    WooCommerce is a well supported and fully functioning Ecommerce engine for WordPress, which then provides you with the ability to have your WordPress Ecommerce site AND your blog under the same domain. The blog is just another PAGE in the site.

    Under Settings > Reading in the WordPress Dashboard, you will find the ability to set your home page target to, for example, your Shop page listing all your featured products and your Blog page to a page you create called “Blog” that is then assigned the responsibility of running your Posts in reverse chron.

    The site visitor would engage with your Ecommerce home page and maybe see a link in the top bar or main site navigation that clicks through to the “Blog” page.

    I’m confident you can add WooCommerce products to a blog post and have the item added to the cart in a sidebar or on the “Cart” page.

    All of this can be done very easily, but there are always caveats to everything.

    Here are answers to your other questions:

    – Being able to run different blog content by country

    You could do something like have separate blog categories by Country and publish into country category.

    Your posts on the blog would then end up at something like: https://mysite.com/blog/usa/post-title

    In a sidebar for primary navigation, you could set menu links for each country category and when a user clicks the category, they return all posts by category.

    Or, you could create a custom post for each Country, i.e. Post Type = USA, Post Type = Canada. You could also have a Post Type and taxonomy listing out each Country, but that really would be the same as creating the above. Again, in a sidebar or primary navigation menu, you could then set each Country post type and return all posts to that Country and insert your products.

    I wouldn’t advise setting up a WordPress Multisite network with countries by subdomain like usa.myiste.com, canada.mysite.com, etc…, because then you are separating each site in the network into its own database schema. You’d have to find a WooCommerce plugin that can post products to networked sites and I don’t know if that exists.

    – Being able to host it on our own domain

    Of course, you can. You should do all your development on your local desktop using MAMP Pro or equivalent for PC, then use a service like GitHub to push your changes to a staging site (staging.mysite.com, then when tested, push to your live site, mysite.com. This is the recommended development method. You shouldn’t develop on your live site.

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