Wordpress is a blog, right? - Right!

Wordpress is designed for people to post new pieces of prose and pictures regularly, right?  -  Right!

Wordpress is not designed to be an e-commerce solution, right? - Right!

Wordpress can’t really be used as an e-commerce solution, right? - Wrong!

It seems that Wordpress can be customized into just about any kind of web site. The customization potential is enormous - it seems like it was designed to be taken and messed about with. Let’s take a look at what an e-commerce site needs:

1. A database to store the stock for sale. In our case this would be downloadable PDF courses.
2. A way to retrieve those database entries together with their illustrations. In our case this would be example pages.
3. An easily expandable menu system.
4. A search facility.
5. A shopping cart and payment system.
6. To be Search engine friendly with the ability to add metatags to pages.
7. To be able to easily facilitate the addition of new database pages and link to static pages.

Wordpress offers:

1. A database.
2. A way to retrieve those database entries together with their illustrations.
3. A flexible, expandable customizable menu/navigation system.
4. A search facility.
5. The availability of an e-commerce plugin.
6. Search engine friendliness - you won’t believe how fast a new blog post gets indexed by Google.
7. An easy way to facilitate the addition of new database pages and link to static pages.
8. Open source software with built-in permission to be modified.
9. Many other possibilities that I haven’t yet even discovered.

I found a wordpress demo theme for a clothing shop which uses an e-commerce plugin (recommended by one of those helpful Business Warriors), which with a bit of imagination could serve as a very good basis for Fundisi.

This is definitely the way to go. Notify the reverse-engineering department and let’s see how this thing works…

As promised, this blog now reflects current activities and developments in the saga of getting Fundisi.com on the road to a successful e-commerce site.

As of yesterday, Version-1 of the site is now history. (For interest’s sake you can still see what it looks like - but this will be temporary and will be replaced by something much better as soon as possible.)

Uppermost on my mind during the previous 24 hours has been what system to use for the new site. Do I begin DHTML/PHP/MYSQL programming from scratch; building the site pages; the secure shopping cart pages; and all the admin pages and consoles? Or do I piggy-back on an existing modifiable system as we did with Zen-cart?

Doing everything from scratch has the huge advantage that the programming is unique to the needs of Fundisi, while everything that we require can be realized exactly how we want it.

While there is much to be said for not “re-inventing the wheel”, we came up against some really awkward problems using Zen-Cart. Because we battled to get around the fact that it was not easy to create our unique “look and feel”, and to place the graphic elements and input forms exactly where we wanted to, we had to make many compromises. It made matters even more complicated when we attempted to implement the two-shopping cart system. (Click here for an explanation of our ill-fated two-shopping-cart system). I use the word “ill-fated” because, as of yesterday, the idea of the two-shopping cart system (as well as the site itself) has also been scrapped forever because it’s too complicated. The guinea pig site testers could not seem to come to terms with the idea.

On the other hand, yesterday I received lots of feedback from the Business Warriors Forum. (See my earlier blog post about this group). All the gurus giving advice emphasized the difficulty and time commitment involved in “programming from scratch”. They all suggested using Joomla, Drupal and other platforms as a basis. Having had exposure to Zen-cart, I was dubious.

Then, another possibility was mooted: Create the whole site using Wordpress as a basis.

More about this alternative tomorrow.

BTW, if you have anything that could assist my thinking and decision-making processes, please do not hesitate to comment on one of these posts.

The way that Fundisi handles money is similar to that of the casino. In the casino, you first go to a secure area and purchase your chips with real money. Then you move into the casino with “money” that is valid within the casino, but isn’t real outside the jurisdiction of the Casino. There are two reasons for this:

• Psychologically, you aren’t playing with real money so you tend to gamble away your money more easily.
• You have physical uniform chips that the different machines can recognize and operate with.

With Fundisi, the result is the same, but the reasons behind it are different. You first need to buy Tuskers with a credit card. Your currency may be different to the previous customer, so how on earth would we list price the courses? In 99 different currencies? Not very practical. So we needed a single currency which wouldn’t disadvantage or offend anyone. Our site currency is therefore called the Tusker and is exactly equal to 8 South African Rands, or, at today’s exchange rate, is approximately equal to ¾ of a US dollar or nearly ½ a British Pound or roughly …

Each Tusker buys one course. Your credit card banker does the conversion from South African Rands invisibly and all very accurately, so you never get ripped off. All our “real money” shopping cart pages are distinctively violet and yellow in colour and are of course located on the secure part of the site.

The second reason why we need to have two shopping carts is because the courses are so inexpensive. The bank-charges and commissions become proportionately too high when you are spending less than one US$ per transaction. So we have to make the minimum number of Tuskers at least three in order to be economically viable.

The third reason for this dual shopping cart system is so that we can offer discounts and specials for customers who wish to buy many courses.

So, having bought your Tuskers, we need a different Course Shopping Cart to enable you to buy the courses with Tuskers. This also takes place in the secure part of the site, but this time the pages are in the usual grey/orange/white combination that runs through the theme of the whole site. The unspent Tuskers are kept in the customer’s account for future use. The Fundisi Elephant won’t forget about them!

So, it’s a little more complicated than at first glance!