In the beginning of January, I commenced on building an eCommerce site for my client, Goshen Coffee. The objective was to sell 3o different coffees, a line of organic tea and t-shirts on a boot-strapping budget. The site is up and working great. Now, we are working on various methods of online advertising to drive traffic to the site and convert to sales.

In the 6 years of working with Matt, we have evolved from a static HTML web site to a dynamic web site using WordPress to manage the content. I did not want to use another CMS or use a separate domain or sub-domain for the store. There are only a few shopping cart plug-ins for wordpress. The one I settled on was “e-Commerce Plugin” by Instinct. The reason is I have been following this one for over a year. It seemed to be the only one out there that was being developed. Now there is competition but this one seemed to have the strongest following and most community development.

The plug-in is free, but there are a few important add-ons that make life a bit easier. Known as Gold Cart items. The most important one I purchased is the “Grid View”. This formats added products into a title, thumbnail and price. Example of the: GRID VIEW. Knowing a bit about CSS, I was able to tweak the style sheets to look integrated with the design of the rest of the web site. Now, the shopping cart is seamless with the rest of the web site.

Instinct is based in New Zealand, but there is a guy in Texas who works closely with them to provide support here in the States. His name is Shane Sanderson and he has his own business called S-Tastic Design. He also started a wordpress help site called “WordPress Me“. The web site is growing with content and Shane knows what he is doing. I wish him luck.

If you are a small business/entrepreneur and would like a web site that you can manage and do simple ecommerce yourself, please contact me with your request. I am always looking for a unique challenge to work with start-ups that have a great product and don’t know where to start.