Selling + a beautiful online store on WordPress for $ 269 "from scratch" - our experience
This longread will be friends and quite frank, but for some reason I have not seen such articles. There are a lot of experienced guys in terms of online stores (development and promotion), but that nobody wrote how to make a cool store for a nominally $ 250 (or maybe $ 70) that will look great and work great (sell!). And you can do all this yourself without a programmer. Well, it's generally nice to have a programmer next to you who will gently breathe in the back of your head and correct your clumsy hands, but because I myself, not being a programmer, made an online store, I know what I'm talking about. Once again - the programmer has never helped me for this store.
So, they drove. This store is here - we cleverly sell spam bases. Yeah. For spam. Iâll write a separate article on how we do these databases ... we donât spam ourselves, but sell the databases (by the way, if someone thinks that itâs enough to simply parse 2GIS and Iâll disappoint with the hat, itâs a lot more complicated and it works for us 3 programmer in this direction fulltime by the way). The article is in the work and will be fun :). Weâll share the results of spam from our clients there - by the way, unloved spam works by the way.
What made me write this article? Today, a publication was published on VC, where the guys compared Bitrix and some other development environments. The guys wrote in the comments saying they forgot WordPress? The answer is interesting - well, there are so many holes there as in Swiss cheese. And they brought a link to the report ... (there, find it yourself in the article). And yes, I saw this report from the manufacturer of a great plugin for Wordpress protection :) they famously scared to buy their plugin. But if you work a little (slightly, without sweating) (the latest version, updates + a free plug-in for protection such as Wordfence) then the probability of hacking should be minimized. The fact is that 80% of Wordpress sites are made on their knees - there are millions of them and, of course, the hacking rate is large compared to magenta, which is already being implemented by more experienced specialists.
Our task was to make an online store selling bases. By the way, this is a little more complicated than selling physical goods (although there may be certain nuances because of the delivery calculator, I admit I did not pick it here). Why? Our company bases are stored on Amazon S3 (why - I will write later) and had to tinker with a bunch. If you have the same shipping cost for all regions and goods (well, or the logic is very simple) - then it will even be easier for you to run everything out of the box.
Well, let's take the steps, it will be easier for everyone to understand how to make a good Internet store for $ 200 (and I will give you an example of how to do the same for $ 50 without losing quality).
Hosting
Hosting - we have hostland.ru. The link is not a referral, I donât know anyone there. Yes, just normal guys, doing a normal job. Ah ... if you hear me there - drop a couple of sweets on our balance or something - the advertisement is native :) Wordpress hosting costs about 300 rubles plus 50 rubles, I donât even want to double-check). Your personal account is simple, everything is clear, the first time in a couple of hours you will make a typical WordPress.
Domain name
And my friends forgot - the domain name! :) This is step # 1 - well, we bought on nic.ru (I generally recommend these guys), although now our hoster gives us free domain bonuses and we take new domains from them. Can I not consider the cost of buying a domain in the RU zone? Probably it costs the same to get here and there in the Moscow metro, only there is a payment there for a year :) Step 2 - you need to send the domain name to your created Wordpress website with the hoster. Well for these purposes we use Yandex.Connect. Honestly, you need to tinker, but if you have a head on your shoulders, then you can do the following bunch:
nic.ru -> Yandex.Connect -> DNS editor and there to register IP addresses -> host.
But if you are too lazy to do this, then the hoster gives free domains (sometimes, I still do not understand the whole logic of bonuses) in the .RU zone and it prescribes everything, or support will help.
Well, what do we have in balance? 300 rubles for hosting (Iâll continue in dollars, itâs easier - about $ 5) + 0 rubles (I donât want to count) for domain name registration. Well, while the business is pulling these costs :) we creak, but pull.
Topic
We need a theme. I chose the theme SAVOY - $ 50 worth. Why? Well, she's so cute :) and simple, without compromising on functionality. There is documentation in English (everything is clear too). And with the theme comes immediately woocommerce with demo content. What is woocommerce? And this is a plugin that allows you to make an online store from scratch. He is free.
So what we have there - we spent $ 55.
By the way, the purchase of the topic includes 6 months of support. Believe me - they help with answers to stupid questions even in Pidgin English. The theme is put easily and quickly, it puts the necessary plugins itself.
After installation, you can already start in woocommerce to edit your products. Delete demo products, add your own. There is nothing to write at all, there are a million how to do it, everything is simple and clear.
Spam :) after purchase
What's next? What do smart uncles and aunts say from the high stands of e-commerce conferences? They advise you to âtortureâ you with letters with reminders after the purchase. OK, do we follow the recommendations of adults? And how to do it? And we have an excellent plug-in for these purposes costs $ 99. If you suddenly find it expensive (I thought so myself, oh well, we live once), then welcome here , here it costs as much as $ 5! Before writing angry comments that I am promoting stolen software, read the essence below.
Need to translate the text in the picture? In short - WordPress plugins are released under the GPL, which means that after purchasing the plugin, anyone can distribute it as they like. What are these beauties doing? They buy the plugin for $ 99 and then sell for $ 5 to everyone. And note this in the legal field. And I was there, drinking beer-honey - I will say this, it works. Minus? There is no support, so if you want to make your store a prospect, it is better to buy it officially from the developers. And if you test the hypothesis, it is necessary-not-so-successful-not-get -it is possible here. But, again - this is not propaganda of theft, it is a given that can be accepted and used or not. You decide, but I'm for official sources.
It took me about 2 hours to figure out the follow up plugin and configure the âcatch-upâ letters. Well, of course, the functionality there is just huge, there can be a lot of triggers. It looks like in the pictures below. It can be seen that there are two âcatching upâ letters and there are already scheduled mailings to those who downloaded the database. Everything is clear and works clearly.
Well, how much have we already spent there? Well, let's assume that 55 + 99 = $ 150. By the way, there are many plugins I offer a subscription for a year - I do not advise, bought installed and that's it. A year will pass, you can buy updates, well or not.
So what's next? BUT! How do I send trigger letters? Yandex.Mail to help you. It is free, you can connect to it via SMTP and that's it. I use the plugin for this purpose (it is free too)) WP Mail SMTP. Understand, everything is simple there.
We really have now switched from Yandex.Mail to SendGrid, because began to send 1000 trigger messages a day, and Yandex.Mail considered us to be spammers (if that is Yandex, we are not spammers, we create spam bases, but no way, these are honest trigger letters). SendGrid doesnât care about the distant Petersburg guys, and he gives us 40,000 letters for $ 15 a month :) and surprisingly, the above plugin for sending letters from WordPress is just great friends with him (1 touch and it works).
Oh well, set up mail, spent $ 150. Let's go further?
Payment
Do we need to accept payments for credit card companies? It should be. There is a Yandex.Kassa plugin for Woocommerce. Free. Works. What is all for free? Miracles, but it's true.
Affiliate
We went further and made a referral affiliate program, because the bases are expensive, you can pay a lot. I'm not sure that all owners of online stores make their affiliate program (they often connect to services such as admitad), but if all of a sudden - check here affiliatewp.com/pricing $ 99 and mighty (I'm not joking, you can do EVERYTHING there) the tool in your pocket. The balance is $ 240 (we walk ...).
Analytics
What is the store owner without analytics? No. Like a blind kitten - I didnât say it, these are uncles and aunts from the stands. Let's connect Google Analitycs + Yandex.Metrica. Full plugins, free. I donât even want to write anything else - everything works out of the box. But! After all, we have an online store, we need to track conversions, funnels,
SEO
So, the balance has not changed, we drove on. What do SEO Masters say? Pictures must be compressed, so that it is good, if you do not compress, it will be bad. By the way, I believe, therefore, we install the FREE (female) SMUSH plugin. You will find it yourself, that's enough for you, believe me.
For a site to rank well in search, it must work quickly (I didnât say that). Well, in general, I donât know how else I can speed up my site on a hosting for 300 rubles per month (for me it is already very fast, although stop is wordpress, am I saying something?) But as in that joke - (caching ) does not hurt us. Therefore, we put a plugin for caching.
WP Fastest Cache (a couple of clicks and it is located and put). I probably wonât surprise anyone if I say that it is also free. There are a lot of some muddy settings, I didnât configure anything at all, turned it on (activated and turned on caching) and thatâs it. Specialists can grab onto smart heads - but to me itâs OK. Like this:
There were some default settings in it, I didnât even touch them. Then I read in one article (it was a big one, which means useful and smart) that itâs worth installing the Autoptimize plugin for the website to work even better. Well ... itâs said done, set, poked checkmarks and thatâs it. Works. There, by the way, there is a cool option - lazy load for pictures. What is the point - he loads pictures a little later after downloading the text, itâs so pleasant for a person (he checked it himself, fact) - that is, you are already reading it, and the picture smoothly appeared like that. Moreover, he knows how to compress something there - but this is already the highest mathematics, well, nafig - we have the goal of selling the spam base, rather than delving deep into the bowels of PHP.
What does this give in the end? Well look, without a programmer, I achieved a good result in the Google analyzer. There is an opinion that this affects the ranking in the search, I believe therefore I am happy. On the desktop, the result is close to 100, but the mobile (78) let us down, let us down - but here we need dexterous and slightly hairy hands of the programmer, because I do not know how to improve. Picture for proof:
Well, the cost balance has not changed, and the site is already working and looks good. I remind you, this is all out of the box, including design, etc. Yes, we have designers in our staff, they helped and made beautiful pictures for our products (company databases) and banner. There is a fact, it is impossible to argue. But if you have physical goods - you will find pictures anyway.
Delivery
We do not sell physical goods, but Excel files (their uncles upload to CRM and spam if someone forgot) and therefore we need to store these files somewhere. By the way, if I did not say - woocommerce sells both physical products and virtual ones (downloadable). We decided that we would store the databases in the cloud, update them there and from there people would download them.
No sooner said than done. We found a plugin that integrates with woocommerce and allows people who bought the base to receive it from S3. As much as $ 29 costs, but we mastered creaking. And it works great. This is how the databases are stored (see picture below). The storage price per year is close to a cup of coffee, too, I wonât even count. There are nuances that I recognized by banging my head against the settings wall, but if you have a head on your shoulders, you can handle it (however, there are hardly a lot of those who sell downloaded products - you wonât even have to do this).
What is our balance sheet? 240 + 29 = $ 269.
Backup
I almost forgot to back up the site - there are plugins, free, I'll copy wherever you want to the clouds. However, why am I? The hoster makes backups himself within the framework of the tariff. But if suddenly someone needs - look for backup plugins for Wordpress. I configured DropBox in the cloud and it works :). And yes, it's all free too (including DropBox).
SSL
Does the site need SSL? Oh come on - Let's encrypt certificate plus the free Really Simple SSL plugin = everything works. By the way, the developers of the Really Simple SSL plugin did not lie - there are no settings :). As for the certificate, the hoster gives it to us automatically and renews it every 90 days. Everything works, they didnât pay a dime.
Oh her, I forgot the important Cyr-To-Lat plugin - it automatically converts the Cyrillic alphabet to Latin, including the names of image files, etc. He is free, bow to the author. Do not forget to put it.
Yandex Market
What is it that everything just goes so with us, donât you? Maybe you need to torment yourself with feeds for Google merchant + Yandex Market? Well, you want to somehow advertise your products on these sites? If so, the free (here's bastards, no words) plugin Product feed Pro does everything with a bang. It supports some inconceivable number of different types of feeds, including Yandex :). Works out of the box, verified. Here's how we, the feed for Yandex, are updated daily:
Someone may ask - why do you need a feed on Yandex.Market, because you are selling a virtual product. I answer with a picture:
I thought it wonât hurt :) and I did. In general, looking ahead, I note that the base of companies is an absolutely legal product. We simply analyze sites (in the Russian Federation or about 9 million) in order to classify companies (Internet shops, Medical centers, etc.) and collect contact information, although âspam basesâ sound very aggressive or something. Therefore, we have no problems with Yandex and Google in general, as it is in the legal field. Iâm definitely categorically against collecting the contacts of physicists with AVITO (cell phones), etc. telephone spammers tortured me.
Well, so what do we have with balance? But it hasnât changed, $ 269 and the store is already working and very good. What else? Everyone scolds WordPress security (more precisely, its lack) - The FREE WordFence plugin works wonders. What are you missing there? I am sure that itâs enough, there are a lot of settings in the free version, you can tighten the nuts very tight.
Work speed
It is often said that with a large number of products (pages), WordPress starts to work slowly. This is not true. Verified by my experience. In general, Iâm distracted, in my company there are about 10 .NET programmers, we also make large portals and applications, but we ourselves very actively use WordPress for projects where you can do it, although no one knows PHP. Cause? You can do a lot of things out of the box, yes, it will not be so âkosher" as if a designer, UI specialist, layout designer, etc. had worked. - but you yourself believe that you can make an online store that is already working (!) And makes $ 269 profit âfrom scratchâ without ready-made components? I do not believe, because I know how much the development costs. If WordPress "out of the box" becomes small for you, then believe me, there are a large number of specialists who will screw you plugins + theme to your needs.
Well, I digress, in conclusion - about performance. Here, for the sake of business experiment, we make a site one site, it means about 3 million records (pages). The portal is so funny. And we tried to make it on WordPress (more precisely, we still do it, you read the article - and we still do it, fill the content). I asked a friend of DevOps to set up a virtual machine running Ubuntu so that WordPress would work with so many posts quickly. It cost 4,000 rubles - the work of a specialist (there he said a lot of words like redis, memcache, nginx, etc.) and 300 rubles a month for VPS (I took the simplest one - here ). So, we have uploaded about 15,000 posts in WordPress so far, it hasnât even farted - it flies (for those who donât believe - siteprofile.ru - the data is still poured there while I 'm writing). I am sure that he will digest 1 million. Actually, if your online store will have a conditionally 500,000 items - then believe me, WordPress will work even on the cheapest hosting, well, if it starts to go stupid, instead of 300 rubles a month, pay 600 rubles a month :) and you will get resources.
How to import data into Wordpress? There is an excellent WP all Import plugin that just works wonders - proven by experience. It's not cheap, but I told you where to find 95% cheaper, huh? :) (once again, itâs not quite right to use plugins for $ 5, but the resource is very popular, from there they take if not all, then many are ourselves developers, and I understand how it is when your product is sold for $ 5 instead of $ 100 and there's nothing you can do). This plugin will be required if you decide to fill in bulk goods, it, by the way, imports pictures perfectly.
That's all. Output? We spent $ 269 (or less if you bought plugins for $ 5) and launched an online store. By the way, it looks very decent and, more importantly, it works stably. And yet - he is handsome, even I myself am surprised that âout of the boxâ everything turns out very neatly.
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