How To Test Membership Access Without An Active Payment Gateway

1. Log into your WordPress Admin
2. Navigate to the PHPurchase Settings Panel and configure the Authorize.net / Quantum Gateway settings so that the PHPurchase subscription features will be activated.
   • For the gateway URL you can enter the test Authorize.net URL
     https://test.authorize.net/gateway/transact.dll
     It doesn’t matter if you have access to a test account or not because no data will be sent. PHPurchase just needs these settings populated in order for the subscription functionality to be activated.
   • For the username and transaction key you can just enter “test” and “test” – these values don’t matter either since you won’t be connecting to the remote system.
   • Leave the vault key blank and you probably want “Use SSL” set to “no” for testing
     
3. If you haven’t already, create a subscription product in the PHPurchase Products Panel
4. Navigate to the PHPurchase Members Panel and create a test member
   • Click the “Create New Member” link to reveal a small form to create a new member
   • Provide an email address and a password then click the “Create Account” button.
   • Once the account is created you will see a screen that says “Name not set” at the top and the email address you used to create the account directly under that. Don’t worry about editing any account information such as the billing or shipping address – that won’t work anyway if you don’t have an active gateway account.
   • Under the “Establish New Subscription” heading
     • Select a subscription product in the drop down list
     • Enter a date in the start billing text field. The date doesn’t matter because we won’t be automatically charging credit cards in this test
     • Set the payment type to “Manual” so that PHPurchase does not attempt to auto-charge the customer
     • Click the “Save Subscription” button
   • You will then see that your test Member has an active subscription to your subscription product
     

Now you can use this test member to test your membership access privileges. If you haven’t already, create a page on your WordPress membership site that includes the shortcode [account-login] which will render a login form where members can log into your website. Enter the email address and password for the test member you just created. After successfully loggin in, take notice of wether or not your subscription pages are showing up in the navigation. Also check any pages that are using the phpromote and/or phprotect shortcodes.

For more information on how to set up a WordPress Membership website with PHPurchase please see the PHPurchase Documentation.

• Use the full power of WordPress to customize your store
• Unbelievably flexible design options
• Sell digital and physical products
• Recurring payments for subscriptions, memberships, and payment plans.
• Easy PCI Compliance – Safe and Secure
• Extremely fast and efficient
• Fully integrated shopping experience
• Backed by prompt and professional support

The Full Power Of WordPress for Ecommerce

PHPurchase is not the only WordPress ecommerce plugin available but it is unique in the way it let’s you take advantage of the full power of WordPress to configure your store anyway you like it. Whether you have 2 products or 200 products, with PHPurchase you can set up your store any way you like.

Organize Your Store With Custom Post Types

Many ecommerce systems force you to display your products in a grid or list them by category. But, if you only sell a small number of products, that format doesn’t make any sense. With PHPurchase, you can use the full power of the WordPress editor to configure the layout of your site anyway you like. You simply place an “Add To Cart” button anywhere on any page or post you want. You can put as many products on a page as you want. Take advantage of WordPress custom post types introduce in WordPress 3.0 and set up a special page layout for your products.

Organize With Custom Taxonomies

Taxonomies may be a confusing word but it is just a way to group things. Up until WordPress 3.0 the taxonomies WordPress used were Tags and Categories. Now, WordPress allows you to create your own taxonomies to further categorize your content. WordPress provides a very robust editor and powerful content organization features giving you unbelievably flexible design options with PHPurchase.

For a more detailed review of the custom taxonomies in WordPress including an example of how you can use custom taxonomies in an example T-Shirt store, read The Essential Guide to WordPress 3.0 Custom Taxonomies. Another excellent resource for learning about Custom Taxonomies is Introducing WordPress 3 Custom Taxonomies where you will find a detailed tutorial on how to set up custom taxonomies to organize content about computers. This article goes into setting up multi-level taxonomies for even more specific control organizing your content. Since PHPurchase let’s you put products on any page or post, it’s easy to set up your store with products categories in any format you want.

Sell Digital & Physical Products with WordPress

Use PHPurchase to sell any sort of digital product you want – MP3 music files, PDF books, Spreadsheets, Software, etc. PHPurchase will protect your digital files so that it is impossible to access them without getting them through PHPurchase. You can specify how many times you want your buyers to be able to download your product and you never have to worry about anyone sharing their download link or directly linking to your digital products.

Of course, you can also sell physical products or services. Optionally collect shipping information, charge tax by state, zip code, or zip code ranges. Once an order is placed you can assign internal labels to your orders such as “new”, “shipped” or “canceled” to keep track of the status of your orders.

Recurring Payments For Subscriptions and Payment Plans

No other WordPress shopping cart makes it this easy to set up recurring payments. Using either Authorize.net or the Quantum Gateway, with PHPurchase you can set up payments for ongoing services like web hosting, or monthly contracts with your clients. Specify how often you want to bill and the amount you want to charge. You can even set up free trial periods. Just specify how long you want the trial period to be, then PHPurchase will start billing your client’s credit card after the free trial has ended.

Easy PCI Compliance

PHPurchase never stores any credit card information in your WordPress database. Instead, PHPurchase will use either the Authorize.net Customer Information Manager or the Quantum Gateway Secure Vault to store all of the sensitive billing information. This makes PCI Compliance easy since you are not storing any sensitive information on your own server. In addition to that, PHPurchase passes the McAfee Security Test for PCI compliance.

Extremely Fast and Efficient

PHPurchase does not clutter your WordPress database with any unnecessary information. PHPurchase does not make it’s own Posts or Pages for each product, there are no heavy image gallery scripts, and only the products that are currently being rendered on the screen are pulled from the database. Since you use the full power of WordPress to design and organize your store, you are free to pick the exact image gallery plugin that works for your needs or simply place images in your page or post using the standard WordPress editor features. If you are looking for an easy and delightful way to add an image gallery to your WordPress store, take a look at either WordPress Lightbox 2 plugin or the NextGEN Gallery plugin.

Why Is PHPurchase Better Than Just Using PayPal

At first glance, it may seem like PHPurchase is not much different than simply placing PayPal Buy Now buttons on your website. PHPurchase, however, offers many benefits over just using PayPal alone. Of course, you can still let your customers pay with their PayPal account when using PHPurchase but you can also take credit cards right on your own site using PayPal Pro, Authorize.net, Quantum Gateway, or the eProcessing Network.

In addition to being able to offer multiple payment methods, PHPurchase gives your customers a fully integrated shopping experience. When using PayPal without PHPurchase, every time a customer adds a product to their cart they are either sent to the PayPal website or a pop-up window appears. This is confusing, introduces complexity to the buying experience, dramatically increases cart abandonment rates, and decreases conversion rates. With PHPurchase, your buyers stay on your site all the way up to the point where they are ready to check out. Only then do they go to the PayPal website to Pay. Also, you can accept credit cards directly on your own Checkout page if you also have a PayPal Pro account or another payment gateway account such as with Authorize.net.

PHPurchase Let’s You Offer Coupon Codes and Promotions

Offer dollar off or percentage off coupons. Set minimum cart values that must be exceeded before the coupon applies. For example, with PHPurchase it is easy to offer 10% off all orders over $50. Or offer Free Shipping on all orders over $50. PayPal Website Payments Standard (without using PHPurchase) does not offer the ability to accept coupon codes or promotional discounts. With PHPurchase, however, you can offer a variety of different types of coupons and discounts. Then, when checking out, PHPurchase will automatically adjust the amounts in your buyer’s shopping cart so that they can checkout with PayPal and still use the coupons and promotions you offer. Without PHPurchase you would not be able to offer coupons to your customers.

Backed By Prompt, Professional Support

Perhaps the best feature of PHPurchase is that it is backed by friendly and prompt support. We constantly monitor our Get Satisfaction Customer Support Forum and can usually provide an answer within an hour during normal business hours. We will also help troubleshoot issues that you may encounter with your theme. We frequently find that WordPress themes have jQuery conflicts or Javascript errors and we can help you hunt down and fix those problems. Or, if you get stumped with some CSS styling problem, we can help with that as well. Also, keep in mind that we do custom WordPress development. So if you need a custom plugin, theme, or if you would like us to design and build a WordPress ecommerce store and train you on how to manage it, we can do that too. Just let us know how we can help.

Money Back Guarantee

We know that sometimes you just need to try something out before you are sure if it’s going to meet your needs. That’s why we offer a complete 60 day money back guarantee. If PHPurchase does not work for you for any reason, just let us know and we will refund 100% of your money.

Video: See how powerful and easy PHPurchase make ecommerce with WordPress.

• Sell digital and physical products
• Collect recurring payments for subscriptions, memberships, and payment plans.
• Set up coupon codes for promotions.
• Build a complete membership site with PHPurchase
• And much more…

Watch Video About Digital Products

Sell Digital Products

With PHPurchase you can upload any type of digital file such as MP3 music files or PDF eBooks and sell them. Once a sale is complete you customer will be able to instantly download the product. PHPurchase will also send your customer an email with a link to download their digital product later. PHPurchase will never reveal the true location of your product and you can limit the number of times the product may be downloaded.

Watch Video About Setting Up Products

Sell Physical Products

Whether your are selling digital products or physical items it’s easy to create an online store in WordPress with a beautiful, integrated shopping cart.

• Place as many products on a page as you want
• Add products to any page or post on your entire site
• Track inventory
• Higly customizable shipping options including live UPS rates
• Charge for sales tax base on state or zip code
• Accept international orders

Promotions and Coupons

PHPurchase makes it easy to set up coupons

• Create percentage off coupons such as 10% of your order
• Create dollar off coupons such as $10 off your order
• Setup shipping related promotions such as free shipping on orders over $50
• Set minimum cart values for your coupons such as 10% off orders over $100

Watch Video About Subscriptions

Watch Video About Memberships

Subscription & Memberships

It’s never been easier to use WordPress to manage subscriptions and memberships. Easily set up:

• Members’s only section of your WordPress website for premium content
• Wholesale website where members get access to products with lower prices
• Hide entire pages of you WordPress site from non-members
• Hide parts of pages from non-members showing a teaser at the top of the page but to view the rest of the content you must be a member
• Unlimitted numbers and levels of subscriptions
• And much more…

Sell Products On A Payment Plan

Do you have an product that you want to let people pay for in installments? With the PHPurchase WordPress Ecommerce plugin and an Authorize.net or Quantum Gateway account you can set up payment plans for your customers. All of the billing information is stored securely with the payment gateway, not in your wordpress database so you don’t need to worry about storing sensitive data on your website.

More Ecommerce Features

• Track inventory
• Real-time UPS shipping rates
• Use PayPal, Authorize.net and more
• The most customizable WP Ecommerce plugin
• Great documentation and support
• PCI Compliant: Passes McAfee Security Test

Learn more about PHPurchase Features

Javascript Errors Breaking Inventory Tracking

If you click on an Add To Cart button and nothing seems to happen the most likely cause is a javascript error in your theme or one of your active plugins. When an Add To Cart button is clicked, PHPurchase issues an ajax call behind the scenes to see if you have enough inventory on hand to fulfill the order. If you do, then the product is added to the cart. If not, then an inventory message is displayed to your customer. If, however, there is a javascript error on the page then the ajax call will not complete successfully and it will appear like nothing happens when you click the Add To Cart button.

The best way to fix this problem is, of course, to resolve the javascript errors in your theme. If you are using Firefox you can install the Web Developer toolbar and/or Firebug which will be helpful in tracking down the javascript errors. If you are using Safari you can use the Web Inspector feature, also extremely helpful in debugging javascript problems. Safari has some excellent developer resources built right into the browser.

Other Possible Causes

If you do not have any javascript errors on your page, there are a couple other things to look for.

• Mixed Domains: Make sure that your product page is on the same domain as your WordPress installation. Ajax will not pass data between domains.
• SSL Certificate Problems: If you are using an SSL certificate, make sure it is installed correctly and you are not getting any warnings about expired certificates or mismatched sub-domains.
• jQuery Missing: Make sure you have jQuery installed. PHPurchase tries to make sure jQuery is linked into your WordPress site but some poorly coded themes do not have a head() function call in the header.php file of the theme. Without that function call, WordPress will not include the scripts enqueued by PHPurchase. Without jQuery, PHPurchase will fail.
• jQuery Conflicts: jQuery conflicts can also cause javascript errors. Often times inexperienced theme developers or plugin developers do not realize that it is a bad idea to use the $ variable for jQuery unless the jQuery code uses one of the magic shortcuts.

Last Resort, Disable Inventory Tracking

If the javascript errors are too overwhelming or you can’t figure out what the problem is and you don’t care about inventory tracking, you can simply turn off the inventory tracking feature (as of PHPurchase version 2.5.7). To turn off inventory tracking, log into your WordPress admin and navigate to the PHPurchase Settings panel. In the Main Settings box select “No” for the Track Inventory setting and click Save. With inventory tracking turned off, PHPurchase will not need to use javascript to add products to the cart and will work even if there are javascript problems on the page.

Setting Up Your Digital Product

Log into you WordPress Admin and navigate to the PHPurchase Products page. When entering the information for your product, select Shipped => No to tell PHPurchase that this is a digital product and does not require a shipping method.

When you specify the location of your digital file, it is best to provide the absolute path to the digital product (like: /var/www/mysite.com/products/myfile.pdf) rather than a URL (not like: http://www.mysite.com/products/myfile.pdf).  This way you can store your digital product in a folder that is not accessible via a web browsers. This prevents people from directly linking to your digital file and bypassing PHPurchase. If you keep your digital products in a folder that can’t be accessed via a web browser, the PHPurchase can completely control who downloads your product and how many times they download it.

You can control the number of times a customer is allowed to download your product by specifying a max downloads value. If you set this value to zero, there is no limit to the number of times the product can be downloaded by your customer.

How To Figure Out The Correct Path

To provide security to your digital product, it is best to use an absolute filesystem path to your product rather than a URL. That way you can store your digital product in a folder that is not accessible via a direct link in a web browser. To figure out the path to your digital product, create a PHP file with the following contents and upload it to the root directory of your website – this will be a folder named something like public_html, httpdocs, or web/content. It is the directory that also probably includes the index.php file for your WordPress installation.

File Name:  path.php
<?php echo realpath('.'); ?>

Once you have the path.php file created and uploaded to your website, access the file in your browser by going to http://www.YourSite.com/path.php The script will print out a path that will look something like this:

/var/www/yoursite.com/httpdocs

Where httpdocs is the document root for your website. Then log into your web server via FTP (SFTP or however you connect to your website) and create your products directory and upload your digital product. The path to your digital product will be something like this: /var/www/yoursite.com/products/myFile.pdf

Then take this path and enter it into the product’s download path on the Products page in the PHPurchase admin panel. Save you changes and your product is ready for sale.

Get You API Information

Log into your PayPal account and click on the profile link in the PayPal navigation.

On the profile page click the API Access link.

Next, request your API credentials using Option 2 – to create your own API username and password.

You will then need to copy the API Username, Password, and Signature into the PayPal Pro and Express Checkout Settings panel in the PHPurchase settings page.

Configuring Your Checkout Pages

The last step in the process is to configure the pages in your WordPress site to use PayPal Website Payments Pro and PayPal Express Checkout. In your WordPress Admin, navigate to edit the store/checkout page and type in the shortcodes for PayPal Pro Checkout and for PayPal Express Checkout. This will give your customers the option to choose between entering a credit card on your website or paying with their PayPal account. Of course, you may include any other information on your Checkout page that you like. A common scenario is to have a checkout page that looks like this:

cart mode="read"
expresscheckout style='float: right;'
paypalprocheckout

Using those shortcodes will produce a screen like this:

For more information on configuring your checkout process, see Working With Shortcodes.

10. WP FollowME Twitter Plugin

WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allows you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog. It’s a beautifully elegant way to add a Twitter badge to your site. You can customize virtually everything about the badge – the colors, the font, and even the Twitter icon. This is a very simple plugin and that is the beauty of it. It’s the best Twitter badge and gets the most click throughs from any Twitter badge we’ve found.

Visit WP FollowMe Twitter Plugin

9. Wickett Twitter Widget

To help build up a following on Twitter, one thing you want to do is broadcast your tweets in as many ways as possible. The Wickett Twitter Widget is an awesomely simple way to get your most recent tweets on your WordPress site. It installs as a sidebar widget and you can specify the number of tweets to display and whether or not you want to hide “reply” tweets. There are several other Twitter related plugins, but this one makes the top ten list because of it simplicity and elegance. You go to alot of trouble to find interesting links and comments and so it is great to be able to share your tweets on your blog.

Visit Wickett Twitter Widget

8. WP Logic

Perhaps a tad technical, but well worth mentioning, the WP Logic plugin gives every widget an extra control field called “Widget logic” that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on. Suppose you have a WordPress site that acts as both your main website as well as your blog and you only want to show your blog categories on your “posts” and not on your “pages” – it’s easy to do with this plugin. This is one of those plugins where your friends will be saying, “Wow! How did you do that?”

Visit Widget Logic

7. Page Mash

This is a simple WordPress page management plugin. The Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output. You can also see the id of the page which is often helpful for theme developers. If you have a WordPress site with more than just a handful of pages, PageMash is extremely helpful.

Visit PageMash simple WordPress page order management.

6. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engine by allowing you to fine tune things like your page title and meta tags. This plugin is extremely easy to use as it works great straight out of the box. If you are an advanced user, you can customize virtually everything. And if you are a developer, this plugin has an API so your themes can access and extend the functionality of the plugin.

Visit All in One SEO Pack

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Perhaps the most downloaded WordPress plugin, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin not only automatically creates a site map linking to all your pages and posts, it also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com when you make changes to you site. If you want to include pages that are part of your site but not part of you WordPress managed content, you can do that to./p>

Visit Google XML Sitemaps Generator

4. WP Super Cache

If you have a popular WordPress website you should seriously consider running WordPress Super Cache to improve the performance of your website. If you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really become a problem. WP Super Cache will store a copy of each of the pages on your website so that after the page has been assembled from the database once, WordPress can rest and just keep serving the static html copy of the page. This might be a bit techie, but the idea is you can dramatically speed up your site and reduce the load on your server by using WP Super Cache. If for no other reason, use this plugin so you don’t have to panic when your friend says, “I just Dugg your site.”

Visit WP Super Cache to make WordPress faster

3. NextGEN Image Gallery

If you want to display a photo gallery, show a series of product images, or just publish a slide show from your most recent vacation, the NextGEN image gallery is the plugin for you. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Among the many features, NextGEN Gallery includes a thumbnail generator, sortable albums, and a water mark function. There are also plenty of add-ons as well including the NextGEN FlashViewer and NextGEN ImageFlow.

Visit NextGEN Image Gallery

2. cformsII Form Plugin

If your looking for a free form management plugin, cformsII is an extremely powerful plugin for setting up contact forms on your WordPress site. You don’t need to know any PHP or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. Then, navigate to the page or post where you want to use the form and there is a button in the WYSIWYG editor that you click and up pops a list of forms that you have made. Simply click on the one you want and your form is inserted into your page. Update your page and you the form is live. You can specify required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form blend in perfectly with your site.

Visit cformsII WordPress Form Plugin

1. Gravity Forms

If you want the best forms plugin WordPress has to offer, you need Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is an amazing plugin for managing online forms. Some of the incredibly useful features include conditional form fields which means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field. You can pre-populate form fields using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks.You can even schedule when forms are available by assigning a start date and end date for when your form is live on your site. Supposed you want to run a contest where the first 50 people that fill out the form win a prize. Gravity Forms lets you set a limit on the number of entries a form can receive. Pretty much anything you ever wanted a form to do, Gravity Forms can do it.

Visit Gravity Forms

Add To Cart Button

[cart-button item="EX-29"]

This is the basic syntax for displaying an add to cart button, which when clicked, will add the procuct with the specified item number to the customer’s shopping cart.

This shortcode supports the following optional attributes:

style: CSS style information to be applied to the add to cart button

showprice: Either yes or no enabling you to show or hide the price associated with the product.

img: The URL to the image to be used for the add to cart button. This lets you specify any image you want to use for the add to cart button.

An example of using the cart-button shortcode with all of the optional attributes would look like this:

[cart-button item="EX-29" style="padding: 5px; float: right;"
showprice="no" img="http://www.site.com/path/to/img.jpg"]

The Shopping Cart

[cart]

The shopping cart listing all of the products the customer has added to their cart can be displayed on any page allowing you to customize your checkout process however you like. For example, you could include the shopping cart and the checkout form (short code below) on the same page to create a one page checkout process for your store.

The cart shortcode supports the following optional attributes:

mode: read – this puts the shopping cart in read-only mode which displays the products and their quantities in the shopping cart but does not let the user modify the contents of the cart. This is a good way to display the shopping cart on the checkout page so that your customer can see exactly what they are buying.

tax: The amount of tax you will be charging the customer. Usually tax is charged during the checkout process because the buyer’s location is not known. In the case of PayPal Express Checkout, however, you will know the buyer’s location when they return to your website after having logged into PayPal. So, PHPurchase will display the amount of tax that is goingn to be charged to the order in the shopping cart view. The Express Checkout page that PHPurhcase uses is already setup to show the tax, you don’t have to do anything. It is very rare that you will ever need to customize your site with the tax attribute, but it is there if you need it.

An example of using the cart shortcode with the optional mode attribute looks like this:

[cart mode="read"]

PayPal Website Payments Pro

[paypalprocheckout]

PHPurchase is integrated with PayPal Website Payments Pro which requires a PayPal Website Payments Pro account. This will allow you to use PayPal as a credit card processing agent, letting your customers pay with their credit card without ever leaving your website.

Please note that if you use PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal also requires that you include PayPal Express Checkout as well. To do so, navigate to your store/checkout page and included the following two shortcodes:

[express]
[paypalprocheckout]

PayPal Express Checkout

[expresscheckout]

PayPal Express Checkout supports the following optional attribute:

style: CSS style information to be applied to the Express Checkout form.

This is a very popular shortcode and very useful. You can put a Check Out With PayPal button anywhere on your site to allow your customers to checkout with PayPal Express Checkout. Using PayPal Express Checkout let’s you keep control of the checkout process while letting your buyers pay with PayPal. This is a great way to sell digital products.

You can specify CSS styles to your express checkout button which gives you powerful control over where and how your Express Checkout button is displayed. For example, you may want to float the button to the right.

[express style="padding-right: 20px; float: right;"]
[paypalprocheckout]

PayPal Website Payments Standard

[paypalcheckout]

PayPal Website Payments Standard supports the following optional attribute:

style: CSS style information to be applied to the Express Checkout form.

PayPal website payments standard is a simple and easy way to start selling products on your website. You can put a Checkout With PayPal button anywhere on your site. For example, you may want to configure your store/checkout page with the cart short code and the paypalcheckout shortcode. To do so, navigate to the store/checkout page that was created for you when you installed PHPurchase and enter the following two shortcodes:

[cart mode="read"]
[paypalcheckout]

Note: Make sure there is at least a space between your two shortcodes. WordPress will get confused if you put two shortcodes back to back without at least a space or a line break between them.

The paypalcheckout shortcode accepts an optional style attribute so that you can provide CSS styles to the checkout with paypal button. For example you might want to float the button to the right, which you can do as follows:

[paypalcheckout style=”float: right;”]

Authorize.net or Quantum Gateway Credit Card Checkout Form

[authcheckout]

PHPurchase can be used with any payment gateway that implements the Authorize.net API. Of course, this includes Authorize.net but it also includes that Quantum Gateway which we recommend over Authorize.net because it offers more features, better functionality, and a much lower price. Whichever payment gateway you choose, you can display the checkout form using the authcheckout shortcode.

Also note that you can use BOTH the authcheckout shortcode AND the paypalcheckout on the same page providing multiple payment options for your customers. For example, a checkout page that offers both PayPal and Credit Card payments could include three short codes. Navigate to the store/checkout page which was created for you when you installed PHPurchase and enter the following three shortcodes:

[cart mode="read"]
[paypalcheckout style="padding-right: 20px; float: right;"]
[authcheckout]

The Receipt

[receipt]

This is the shortcode to display the customers receipt, you probably won’t use this shortcode often because it is automatically installed for you on the store/receipt page when you install PHPurchase. To customize the receipt page, the best thing to do is navigate to your store/receipt page in your WordPress admin panel and configure the page however you see fit. Include a thank you message, instructions, etc. Then put the receipt short code at the bottom of the page.

Instant Payment Notification

[ipn]

PHPurchase integrates with PayPal Website Payments Standard and is alerted to sales processed through PayPal via PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification system. When you install PHPurchase the store/ipn page is created for you and includes the ipn short code. You should probably never have to modify this page. When you are configuring your PayPal account you should provide the URL to your store/ipn page to PayPal so that PayPal can save the sale to your PHPurchase order management system.

You do not have to use PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification system, but if you do not, then PHPurchase will not know about the sales that are processed through PayPal. This may not be a problem as PayPal will send receipt emails to you and your customer and you don’t have to use the PHPurchase order management panel if you don’t want to.

Manually Adding Shopping Cart Sidebar

You can put the shopping cart sidebar widget anywhere on your WordPress site including in the header, the footer, any page or post, and you can manually add it to the sidebar. To include the shopping cart widget manually in your page or post content simply use the shortcode:

[shoppingcart]

If you want to include the shopping cart widget anywhere other than in your page or post content, such as if you want to manually place the shopping cart widget in your sidebar or if you want to include the shopping cart code in your theme’s header, you need to use the PHP code snippet:

<?php echo do_shortcode('[shoppingcart]'); ?>

There are other solutions available such as Olark which offers a free plan including 20 conversations per month or SightMax which offers a one operator system for $299. But, for most of our clients, including ourselves, the best and easiest solution for adding a Live Chat component to a website is to use integrate Google’s Chatback Badge. Best of all, Google’s Chatback Badge is free! If you are using WordPress there is a plugin to help you add a Google Chatback widget (Google Talk Widget) to your sidebar.

Adding Live Chat To Your Site For Free

To get started, you are going to need a Google account. If you already have a Gmail email address then you are set. Once you have your Google account, here is how to add Live Chat to your website for free.

1) Download the Google Talk Widget for free from the library of WordPress plugins.

2) Go over to Google’s Chatback Badge page and get the iFrame code for your badge. When you are there, you can configure your badge to your liking by selecting the title, style, and your nickname (screen name) for the badge. For the nickname, you can choose anything you want, so you do not have to reveal your Gmail username or your own real name. For example, you could use the nickname “support” or “live help” for your badge.

3) Navigate to the Appearance –> Widgets page in your WordPress admin panel and drag and drop the Google Talk widget onto your side bar. Give the widget a title, perahaps something like Live Chat and paste in the iFrame code that you copied from Google’s Chatback Badge page. Then click the “Save” button and you are finished!

PHPoet Tip: We also use the Widget Logic plugin to be able to control which widgets appear on the various pages of your WordPress website. For example, perhaps you only want your Live Chat link to appear on your “web pages” and not your “blog posts” – you can control that using the Widget Logic plugin.

Now, when a potential customer is on your site, they will be able to chat with you. When they click your Live Chat link, a new, little chat window will open and they can initiate a live chat session with you. You don’t have to buy any software to monitor the live chat. You just use the Instant Messaging client you already have. This will work with any IM client that supports Google Talk – we use Adium.

Using Google’s Chatback Badge is not limited to WordPress,  if you are not using WordPress you can still use the Chatback Badge. All you have to do is drop the iFrame code on any webpage of your site. Please feel free to contact us if you need help  installing Live Chat on your website. Whether you use WordPress or not, we are happy to help.

7 Additional Benefits of Live Chat

In addition to helping your customers get answers to their questions, there are several other benefits for using Live Chat on your WordPress store, or any e-commerce website. Here are some tips and ideas for additional ways you can benefit from using Live Chat on your website.

• Having Live Chat available improves customer satisfaction by 90% while shopping  according to an internet e-commerce study.
• Increase the trust your visitors have in you and your company. If people can get in touch with you easily they will feel more comfortable shopping on your website.
• Use the feedback to further optimize your website. If a bunch of people are all asking the same question, create an FAQ page that answers the question.
• Faster and more accurate than phone support. It is much easier to share FedEx tracking numbers and links to web pages via chat than it is to try say it over the phone.
• Use the live chat sessions to get ideas for other products or services you may want to offer.
• Take the questions from the chat sessions and use them for blog post or newsletter ideas.
• Decrease product return rates. Well informed customers are much less likely to return a product. Handling product returns is expensive and you can dramatically reduce this cost by making sure your customers make informed decisions before they buy.

Configure Your PayPal Email Address

Log into your WordPress Admin Panel and navigate to the “Settings” tab of PHPurchase. Scroll down and enter in your PayPal settings. There are three fields you will want to complete.

PayPal Email Address: This is the email address of your PayPal seller account

Shopping URL: This is the URL to the main page of your store. PayPal customers will be directed to this page if they click “continue shopping” from the PayPal website.

Return URL: This is the page on your website where your PayPal buyers will be sent AFTER they have successfully purchased your products. This is where you can display a special message or instructions to your customers who pay with PayPal.  The return URL field is highlighted below.

Create A PayPal Thank You Page

Create a page on your website to display a special “thank you” message to your PayPal customers. You may wish to include any instructions or additional information you wish to share with your customers who pay with PayPal. We suggest creating this page as a sub-page of the “Store” page which is created for you when you install PHPurchase.

NOTE: Please do not rename the “Store” page or any of the other pages that PHPurchase creates. Read the help article for more information about the store pages created by PHPurchase.

Turn on Auto-Return In Your PayPal Account

PHPurchase integrates with PayPal via Website Payements Standard. Your customers will shop on your website, add products to your PHPurchase shopping cart, and then, when it’s time to pay, they will be transferred over to PayPal to securely handle the financial transaction. After a successful payment, PayPal will send your customer back to your website where you can display a special thank you to your PayPal buyers.

To configure PayPal to send your customers back to your site you need to turn on the Auto-Return feature in your PayPal seller account.

1. Log into your PayPal account and click the “Profile” link
2. Under “Selling Preferences” click the “Website Payments Preferences” link
3. On the Website Payments Preferences page select the “on” radio button next to Auto Return. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the save button.

Turn On Instant Payment Notification

The last thing you need to do is turn on IPN. From your profile summary in your PayPal account:

1. Click on the Instant Payment Notification link
2. Click the “Edit Settings” button
3. Enter the permalink of the store/ipn page on your WordPress website into the Notification URL field in PayPal
4. Enable the “Receive IPN messages” radio button in PayPal
5. Click the “Save” button to save your changes

Enabling IPN tells PayPal to alert PHPurchase every time the process a sale for you. This causes the sale to be stored in the Orders panel in the PHPurchase admin.