WordPress is a fantastic tool for building a personal web site, but it works equally well as the foundation for an online store. Plus, it’s open nature and extensibility allow for limitless customization and modification.
The WP e-Commerce Plugin harnesses the power and flexibility of WordPress and seamlessly integrates a shopping cart into it. Anyone with an existing WordPress installation can quickly add the ability to sell goods and services.
The remaining chapters will walk through the process of creating and deploying an online store. To demonstrate this process, we will build a sample music store that publishes and sells sheet music in both in physical printed form and electronically via digital downloads.
Chapter 1 covers:

• WordPress’ capabilities and familiarity as a tool for both self-publishing and e-Commerce.

• Some business and website possibilities of the combination of WordPress and the e-Commerce Plugin.
• What you sign up for when you decide to use WordPress for e-Commerce: it’s free (in terms of money and speech) extensible, and widely used..
• A basic overview of the features included in the WP e-Commerce Plugin.
• How to upload and activate the WP e-Commerce Plugin into an existing WordPress installation.

Before we begin the installation and configuration of the WP e-Commerce Plugin, let’s make one thing clear: I strongly recommend setting up a test platform. You’re going to get your hands dirty during this process, and the last thing you want to do is break anything on your production server.
Setting up an e-Commerce site is much different from a personal web site or blog. Having a testing platform is especially important once we deploy the initial site. Without a testing ground, one little accident or mistake can make your site non-functional, and a broken e-Commerce site is of little use to anyone. I implore you not to ignore this warning – yes, it can happen to you, even through no fault of your own. Perhaps a newly installed Plugin disagreed explosively with an existing Plugin. Perhaps a WordPress update went awry. No matter the issue, test all changes and updates before rolling them out to the production server.
Appendix B covers the setup of a WAMP test server. You can set up WordPress and the e-Commerce Plugin on the test server and try all instructions covered in this book before making a single change to your production server.

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Created by the New Zealand-based Instinct company, WP e-Commerce is an easy and elegant way to integrate an e-Commerce capability into WordPress. The Plugin is free (released under the GNU General Public License), though some additional modules are available as part of a paid upgrade.
WP e-Commerce is the product of over four years of development and testing. With over 1,400,000 downloads to its fame (as of this writing) and featured as one of the Most Popular Plugins for WordPress, WP e-Commerce is the most tried-and-true way to build an online store with WordPress.
It’s an ideal solution for selling physical goods, services, and digital products online.
Downloads are available at http://www.getshopped.org

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Maybe you are attracted to WordPress because it’s free, it’s easy to use, or perhaps because you have a client who wants to add an e-Commerce component to an existing WordPress-based site next week. No matter the case, you need to know a little about what makes it special.

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There are lots of great reasons to build an e-Commerce web site. Perhaps you are a small business owner with goods or services to sell. Maybe you are an author or musician who wants to sell documents, audio files, or other digital downloads. Whether as part of a business or hobby, running an e-Commerce site can increase your sales, public profile, and your income.

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