Experiment: Merging a Store With a Blog
Yesterday, I did some research into some business development strategies. One of the things that crossed my radar was the idea of merging an online store with a blog. My situation is this…
PCMech gets a lot of traffic. The online store, however, is linked in the top menu but is otherwise a completely separate system. Being that there is already so much going on on the main PCMech site, the store gets lost. While the main site sees thousands of people every day, the PCMech store sees only a few daily. That definitely affects sales.
So, the idea is to bring the store into PCMech itself. Into Wordpress. The traffic to the store would most definitely increase. Also, being inside a blog means I can use all the standard blog features for the store, including the flexibility that Wordpress allows. And trust me, Wordpress is infinitely more flexible than X-Cart (the store software I’m using).
Two store options that have gotten my attention are:
- 1ShoppingCart. Has a wide following and offers a nice, integrated package of store, affiliate management and email list. I would not move my mailing list into 1ShoppingCart, but it would be nice to have a better system of automated followup.
- E-Junkie. I cannot find any evidence of large mainstream blogs using E-Junkie, but the service looks pretty good. It is nowhere near as powerful as 1ShoppingCart, but their setup for integrating with another website (such as a blog) is much more automatic.
I will, then, probably set up a new category in Wordpress for the online store. Perhaps I will use static pages. It will be more manual labor at first, but since I’m not managing a large catalog, I think it would be fine.
So, that’s my ramble on what I have in mind. Blogs are powerful mediums. Hosting ads seems to be the de-facto way to make money with a blog, however there are MUCH better ways to do it. Integrating it with a store and shopping cart system is definitely one of those ways.
I will follow up as I proceed with this concept. Stay tuned.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...
- Post Affiliate Pro - Experience So Far
- Shopping for Shopping Carts
- Exporting USPS Orders From X-Cart to Endicia
- My Blog Was Hacked (I Think) - The Story
- Wordpress Borks My Server? Dealing with High Server Load
I’d like to offer some feedback on E-Junkie. While the $5 monthly fee is nice, it certainly leaves something (a lot) to be desired compared to 1ShoppingCart. Having used both, I’d say if you can afford 1ShoppingCart, go with it.
E-Junkie is limited to selling only. If you want to offer a free download to help drive sales you can’t do it with EJ. It doesn’t allow you to track clicks on links. Although if you buy the Ninja Link-Cloaker plugin, I guess you’d get the same info…not sure.
1ShoppingCart provides excellent technical service, in my opinion. E-Junkie has probably the crappiest forum I’ve ever seen for a commercial enterprise. I sell very little of my e-book (something I’m trying to remedy). That’s the only reason I’m staying with E-Junkie.
I work for a company in the fitness industry that wants to get into online selling and the first website I showed them was WordPress.com. The second was Marketer’s Choice (1ShoppingCart).