EP360 – Quick ways to sell online with WordPress

Episode Transcription

Jason Tucker (00:00):
If WPwatercooler, episode number 360. Let’s see here. Today’s topic.

Sé Reed (00:09):
Gone Full Circle!

Yeah. Full circle. I.

Steve Zehngut (00:10):
Get it. I get it. Three, I get it. Yes.

Yeah.

I’m going to be talking about the quick way to sell sell things online using WordPress. Oh, I was gonna say the quick way.

Quick ways to do it before.

Quick way? I’m out..

We do make local WordPress development easy. Go check them out over at serverpress.com. They’ve been doing some fun stuff over there with their WPsitesync product, which works great with awesome.

It’s Awesome.

Sé Reed (00:45):
Steve, right here. You’re going to get,

It’s good stuff. So check them out.

So let’s go around the room real quick. Get everyone introduced. Mr Cosper, how about you tell us about yourself.

Jason Cosper (00:58):
Well, Hey, I want to wish everyone a happy three 60 [inaudible] three 60. That guy came to party just here to talk some word press talk. Some quick ways to sell shit. Let’s get into it.

Sé Reed (01:19):
The man bun up in here.

Russ tell us about yourself.

Russell Aaron (01:24):
Yo, what’s up? I’m Russell Aaron. I’m in Las Vegas and you know, I’m with Steve. I thought, you know, we were talking about holding the sign on the side of the freeway and it says bicep that like, you know, I was going to sell roses. It’s I, that was my advice. So I don’t think I’m fit here, but Hey everybody, how’s it going?

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Sé, how about you tell us about yourself. My name is Sé Reed and I make make WordPress teacher WordPress preach WordPress. I’d Sé Reed Media on all the things. That’s all I have to say today.

You sing that last part of it on all the things.

She has her own on jingle.

New Speaker (02:03):
Purge the beverage really closely to the little mermaid. I know somebody who’s been watching some cartoons lately.

Steve, how about you? Tell us about yourself.

I’m Steve Zehngut. I’m the founder of Zeek interactive and I run the OC WordPress meetup or whatever. Yeah, yada, yada, yada.

I’m Jason Tucker. [inaudible] Him on Jasontucker.blog And WP wonder going, Hey, we’re on Patreon Jason Tucker. Can you tell us about Patreon more we’re on Patreon.

Sé Reed (02:38):
Why do I find this stuff out on the air?

Sé Reed (02:41):
Why you’re the best?

Because it’s fun. That’s the way I, that’s the way you, you know, that’s what did you got to do it? But yeah, we are on Patreon you go over to our website over a Patreon.com/wpwpwatercooler. I did a, I did a fun thing with that. I actually named everything based off of the water type of things. “small Water cup”, “medium water cup”, “large water cup”. I have a “water bottle”. Things as they are sizes of water cups.

Because the wpwatercooler and the like, our logo has a big jug so.

Sé Reed (03:13):
Like Dixie cup solo cup.

We don’t have the trademark to use Dixie cup and pillow.

Sé Reed (03:22):
It’s fine. You don’t have to ask me for any creative input.

It’s not like we’re a small business with a website that needs help. You know,

Sé Reed (03:34):
I wanna know, what are our rewards?, We’ve got tiers and everything.

Sé, you haven’t received your paycheck yet?

No. I mean, Oh sorry Jason.

I’m just trying to make this thing happen guys.

Did you get direct deposit yet or are you still cashing paper? Like you know, I’m waiting for it. I went for direct deposit over here.

Jason. Jason pays me under the table.

Oh, I actually asked for bitcoin.

Sé Reed (04:04):
These pledges and to see it be like “Sé will do…” Excellent. I was wondering, I was going to have to do for this oil. How loyal you Sé, how far are you willing to go?

All right, so now that I’ve sold the ourselves, it’s like about selling the some stuff online for just anyway.

Yeah. But let’s, let’s kind of discuss this. So give you a little bit of a, a point of reference. You know, a lot of you folks work intimately with eCommerce solutions, Woo commerce, big commerce, large commerce, small commerce, like all of those things. I want to talk about commerce, E commerce. I want to talk about like, you know, I have like a tee shirt I want to sell or how do.

Sé Reed (04:59):
I use Sharknado commerce? Do you use Sharknado commerce? Oh, okay. Yeah.

You have some product that you’re trying to sell and you want to sell it. You don’t want to build up this whole crazy, huge thing. You just need to quickly sell it. What are some solutions that people could do in order to be able to do that?

Sé Reed (05:20):
Should we just rattle this off real quick and then be done and go drink,

I know a bar, I know a bar in Vegas that can handle a lot of the drink that you just described. So I’m down

So I can, I can start us off. So one of them that that I’ve used in the past would be Gravity Forms. So if you get your sell just like one or two items, something like that, it gives you a total, you can tie it into PayPal and then build a, sell it. You can do something like that.

You can go in, you can go into Stripe, you can go into to a merchant ACF, like they have a lot of addons. So whatever it is, how you take money, whether it’s a or you want to set up a PayPal kind of thing, you know, they do have an extension for that.

Sé Reed (06:01):
If you’re spelling loading that shit on there is going to be a pricey, you better be selling a lot of that one thing.

I, yeah, and I was going to say, so I think the difference here we’re talking about is, is items that don’t require a shopping cart, right? That’s what we’re talking about, right? That’s the distinction, right? So if you don’t, it doesn’t require a shopping cart. The solution you’re talking about Jason is perfect perfect. Right? You just got one, one or two things. Spray products, downloads, right. An ebook, something like that.

Sé Reed (06:29):
Technically not all of that requires a shopping cart. It was just a matter of if you want your client to be able to purchase multiple things for your customer in this case, to be able to pull purchase multiple things at once.

I mean I, I mean I’m using the gravity form thing as we talk. Like I’m doing things where I’m offering my time for a small amount and I have a gravity form that I send people to and via PayPal.

Sé Reed (06:50):
Oh really? I’m offended by your price point.

I’m not even, I’m not even helping. Like I’m not like physically coding, like I’m just talking about it. It’s just, you know, helping people get started.

What Sé , yeah, I agree. I saw it as well. It’s too low Russ.

Sé Reed (07:05):
I was like $10 raise your prices, raise your prices.

If anything. Now they did. Now they just dropped by 10% Hey, use my coupon code called Zeke.

Yeah, well if you apply, if you enter the coupon code Zeek, it’s good. The price is going up.

Don’t do that.

This is a good example here. So like for instance, the type of thing we’re talking about here probably doesn’t have an affiliate link set up tied into this. This is where it’s like I want to go to the website, I want to buy a thing and I want to know

She just didn’t want to sign up for Calendarly or anything where I have to use a service to re to schedule some time. If you just want to get with me, I have, I’m capable to put a form on my website and you can book it and we’ll go from there.

So what else is there? What other things can people use that would do this?

You could do a donation form so you could set up like a give WP. That could be a thing.

So you, but real quick, you talked about gravity forms, all of the form plugins have something like this Ninja forms, right? So your form plugin doesn’t matter all that much as long as, as long as.

Does a contactform7 one that maybe your mileage varies.

I was talking about the premium form plugins.

Sé Reed (08:23):
There was a security issue with contact form seven over the past couple of weeks. Not, not that I.

[Inaudible] Sé what said.

Sé Reed (08:37):
Terrible plugin. It’s like from like 2000. No, it’s like from like 1990, 1988. I don’t know what year was a long time ago. And it’s terrible. However, I still have some legacy site client sites where we’re trying to get to the point where we’re able to do the, the turnover of a new site and they’re

Sé Reed (08:56):
They were recently compromised at re really compromised as opposed to just, you know, mildly compromised as it has been for the past 10 years. So I only compromise. We compromise this, I don’t know. Sure. Yeah.

I mean, you could go just straight up PayPal and, and put a PayPal link on there. And directly go to their, you know, it, it takes, they, they’re going to take a small percentage of every transaction. That’s just how every thing online rolls.

I actually, I actually think it’s, it’s important to talk about that piece of it, right? So we talked about gravity forms, but you still need a payment processor, right? You, you need to have Stripe or PayPal or authorize.net but you know, one of those. Yeah. But one of those systems, you have to have that to take the transactions and then you need a bank account. Right. And I mentioned that because a lot of people think, Oh, just set up Stripe, right? Yeah. No, you need a bank account to actually get the money into. Right. And I know that sounds crazy, right? But I have clients that just come to me. They say, yeah, we’ve got Stripe set up.

Even on the other end, even if you have Bitcoin, it still has to be pulled out into whatever monetary bank that you live in and you have to go get know whatever it is. Yes, it’s true. Yes.

Sé Reed (10:12):
I want to, I want to follow up on that commitment. You’re making note Steve, because I think the title of this is like what quick things, right? So even setting up the gravity form to do the PayPal thing, that’s actually not in terms of that quick. It may be simple where you’re just selling one thing. So simple and quick, not the same thing in.

A very quick way to do this is to set up a PayPal site, right? Or Stripe site and just link over there, right? So you can, you can link over to the site. It gives you a place to process transactions without embedding it into your WordPress site. That’s the quickest way square.

Square will let you do that.

Thank you. Yes,

Very easily. The a bar in town here that’s selling drink kits is just selling their stuff through square and it’s super simple. They just wink like, okay, we’re selling the strength link in bio and then you go over and you hit the Stripe page and there you go.

Sé Reed (11:09):
Yes. Yeah.

You could also like square has their embed codes that you can use as well to kind of embed stuff as well if you wanted to do something like that.

Yeah. Well and I think, I think that’s important because you businesses that haven’t been online that are watching this episode need exactly that right there. You don’t have to have a lot of technology to do this stuff. A lot of those things are just provided by your existing payment processor. Right.

Sé Reed (11:36):
And that’s actually something that I think is really underrated because everyone is always like, Oh, you gotta ha, you want to sell something, here’s woo and woo woo is an involved process. Even just a set up wizard, I dread, I dread the setup wizard. Right. You should never load.

It’s like taken it the SATs.

Sé Reed (11:59):
There’s some other ones like easy digital download and whatnot, but there’s still a little bit involved in terms of, I mean,

And then be a, there’s going to be a barrier to entry. Like, you know, you’re always going to have to require your ID when you set up for something and you’re going to have to set up your bank account. There’s time involved with that, you know, and I think that that’s going to be normal for anything that you use.

So let’s, so let’s talk about WooCommerce because you make a good point here. Sé that it is difficult to set up, but there are options. There are sass options that are out there where you don’t need to use WooCommerce. You can set up a Shopify site for your store.

You send that with a lot of SaaS,

You can set up big commerce there. There’s, there’s other sites you can set up and just link to those sites for the store portion of your site. You don’t have to have everything self-contained.

If you want to get even you could do like Jason Tucker’s doing, is that a Patriot? And, and you could do a monthly thing. Give me $5 a month and then you can call me, you know, between three and five, like $5 a month.

Russ. Just cut his hourly rate in half. Yeah, use coupon code. Y.

You have to at least get minimum wage. Russ, come on dude. At least minimum wage.

You know, like all I’m doing, all I’m really doing is I’m offering my WordPress support knowledge and my WordPress knowledge and I’m taking those little dollars and I’m just dropping him over to cryptocurrency. So that’s really what’s happened. It’s not like I’m funding it to like run a, as I’m just investing all of that

Sé Reed (13:28):
Really doesn’t mean that you should be charging the minimum amount that you are, but maybe free enterprise.

Sé Reed (13:34):
So call Russ, people don’t call me cause I was so [inaudible].

So in the spirit of being all over the map on this episode, I want to talk about something completely different. Right? So with the payment, with the payment processors, you need to be careful about what you’re selling, right? And so not, not all things that you’re selling are created equally. And so the payment processors, Payment processors have specific guidelines as to what you can sell and what you can’t sell. And each payment processor is a little bit different. So depending on what you’re selling, you may want to be careful and you really need to read up on that because your payment processor may just block you, right? So you may go through ev- all the steps that we’re telling you and your payment processor may shut you down on day one because you’re selling something that’s questionable. You need to be careful with things like pharmaceuticals, CBD, right? Certain certain types of, of of service.

Adult entertainment, objects. Yeah, for sure. Like that, that was a big thing for a while.

And it went in Vegas, you know?

Vegas that they have that happen. Like they were not able to use PayPal because that was the thing. We had to switch over to Stripe.

Well and I actually wasn’t, I w I actually honestly wasn’t going there, Russ. But since, since you brought it up, it’s actually up to the payment processor to deter, to determine what you’re, if what you’re doing is questionable, right? So you may be, you may have something that is adult,

They’re going to deem essential or not essential.

And they, they, it’s all subjective. They may just shut you down because they determined you violated their terms of service. So I just want you to, I want everybody to be careful about that.

You know, and that’s not a bad thing because there was a service that we saw online a while ago that was trying to fund like negative rallies and stuff. And so PayPal stepped in and shut those down. So I’m all for those kinds of rules, you know, well, that’s something that they want to and they want to help.

And so the [inaudible], the medical space is under scrutiny because I, and I’ve gotten a lot of requests for people wanting to sell PPE equipment, testing kits, things like that. The payment processor, the payment processor will just shut you down, right? If you start selling that kind of stuff online.

Sé Reed (15:48):
Well, yeah, I mean even even selling on Amazon and stuff, you’re getting shut down at that point right now.

Absolutely. So the point I’m making is just going and setting up a WordPress site to try to do this yourself. Right? It doesn’t work like that.

There are people, there are people in this space that have pushed those boundaries. I remember when you couldn’t do anything with CBD and Woo[commerce], and like a few weeks like later now that now you’re able to do it. Like, you know, there, there is chance for change, but you know, I would read those little fine lines.

Just be careful.

Sé Reed (16:21):
I want to go full circle back to where we were before.

360 baby.

Sé Reed (16:29):
And talk about the payment processors again because I I’ve had the typical ones I use, but recently I set up a helped a client set up a thing for buying tickets because they’re doing live web event because they can’t go on tour. And we used a new plugin that I actually really liked and it was so lightweight and easy and they’re like, Oh, well let’s switch over to WooCommerce. And I was like, actually can let’s switch the rest of your stuff over to this plugin because we had had this plan to introduce WooCommerce and now I’m like, no, I actually really liked this plugin. It’s it’s not to be confused with the Stripe plugin, which I think Cosper was going to talk about, but it’s actually called the Stripe Payments Plugin, which is, you know, this much different. But it’s got a, it’s an in between. It’s in between Stripe. It’s like a third party. It’s not from Stripe, but it’s really great.

Would that be by Sandhills development. Sé?

Sé Reed (17:25):
A it’s WP tips and tricks. I don’t even know. Oh yeah, right. I was like, where’d you come from? I don’t even know who this is. What it is, it’s super lightweight so you can actually create a products page and whatnot, but it’s basically a click and buy. So you click the link and you can, you can attach this link to any button or anything. So you can build out your own product page, you don’t have to use their embedded product page even though they have one. And then you can stick that link on any button. And all it does is bring up a the credit card thing. It’s like boom buy right here there’s no like, Oh I’m putting stuff in a cart and we’ll, it’s like an instant buy.

Sé Reed (18:07):
And especially for tickets, that’s super great. And we have it all hooked up automated to like, you know, MailChimp or whatever. So it sends out all the things. It’s really quite beautiful. But the, I just really liked the instantaneous of it. You click the button, it’s like here’s your information. You’ve clicked send and you’re done. And there’s no like second guessing. There’s no, you know, give us all this information. You can ask for addresses and stuff. You can totally strip down what you want. Like you don’t have anything except for a credit card and make one payment. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. It’s so lightweight. I, I’m, I’m really into it.

Steve, I have a question for you and, and my question is, you know, advising a company, like if they were coming to you today to say, Hey Steve, we have this thing and we want to do, you know, would you, would you recommend one way? And then saying, when you get to a volume, then we’ll switch you to WooCommerce. Like you, you know, what, what are your thoughts on that as saying, use this today. This gets you off the ground. You know, you’re making money, you, you know, good is better than perfect. But at the same time, you know, my advice I want to tell people is, what’s your long run? If this turns into a business, how are you going to migrate? You know, and you’re my migrate guy.

In a normal environment. My advice to my clients is always plan for the longterm, right? So let’s build it right the first time, right? So that we don’t have to keep rebuilding because it may cost you more now. It may cost you more now, but you’re going to save money in the long run because we’re not going to build, we’re not going to have to migrate.

Sé Reed (19:40):
It is, it is. It is so many reasons beyond just money

In a normal environment. The calls I’m getting today are “I need to get up and running in an hour” and so, so, so now because it’s, it’s chaos. Everybody needs quick fixes. And so, so my advice has shifted a little bit just temporarily to tell people how to get something up and running, knowing that we may have to migrate later on down the road. And so a lot of the solutions that we’re talking about on this call are solutions I’m recommending or even sad, I’m recommending SaaS products like Shopify or Big Commerce or other solutions that we may ultimately migrate later.

Sé Reed (20:24):
Let’s be real though. Shopify and big commerce are not quick setups either.

They’re, no, they’re not. I’m not saying they are. I’m just saying they’re there. They’re hosted you. You click something and you’re, you’re setting up stuff right away rather than a full loop commerce build

[Inaudible] hosting and a domain on top of that. Sending an email. Yeah, all of that other stuff. Or go click this button and a little bit of money.

I’m not saying, I’m not saying they’re any easier from a, sorry

Sé Reed (20:55):
If I’m just saying square is the easiest one from that perspective because they do, they spin up the site, you can put in products and you can connect it to in live things later. Like it square is the easiest in terms of spin up with nothing else attached to it.

Totally. Absolutely.

But for a lot of people who are out selling stuff at markets and things like that, who can’t go out to these markets anymore, they already have their stuff in square ready to sell. They just convert it into a product. Yeah. Or products that they can sell on their website.

And that’s the other thing I was gonna say is to just to mirror what costs were just said. Right. A lot of these places have their POS system, square toast or whatever they’re using at, at the place that square is.

Square toast.

New Speaker (21:41):
Yes. As opposed to around toast. No, Toast, there’s, there’s a lot of them. There’s a lot of those POS systems that you see like at a coffee shop. And those, those already have a way to process payments. And so what was, what I was seeing is a lot of the shops that are getting creative or are just linking over to the pages that are already available to them in their POS system. And so that’s the other thing I’m recommending is use the tools that you have.

Or if you didn’t know that square has a webspace, now go click that button and you know, whatever you gotta do. But you can have a store tem today. Just click a button and it can happen if you didn’t know that.

Sé Reed (22:17):
I know you guys are giving me like super advice, but I wanted to make a total equip that’s not relevant. And you guys were like over here, like saying all these, you know, relevant things. But as soon as you said the square toast, you know what my head said? It said there’s like border radius, border radius on that is a three pixel ordering.

I was telling Jason Tucker earlier. I was so in Tucker, my computers that are set up earlier and I was describing the padding around like my old Dell monitors and it was like 40 pixels a Patty, like I was doing the same thing. Anyway.

That’s fine. Just to finish off that point, Russ brings up a really good point and I don’t want to make sure that this doesn’t get lost. The conversation and it is about migration, so if you do, anytime you put in a quick fix, right, you need to know that once you’re ready to grow or build the real solution, there may be a migration effort and right now that’s okay. People just need to keep selling and so that’s okay. Just know that that you may, you may have to do a larger migration down the road and there are,

There are contract to, there are things that say you might have to use this or if you, you know, if you’re not sure, like do the, do the monthly instead of the annually. That way you can cut ties when you need to or, you know, think about the longevity of that kind of stuff.

So one of the, one of the migration systems I want to mention, I just want to finish this off with a migration systems I want to mention. So if you are migrating from one of those systems over to WooCommerce or over to another system look it up, a site called cart2cart, the number two. It, it, it does it, it handles those migrations pretty flawlessly.

That was the name of my single in the 90s. “It Was cart two cart. I’m done.”

I’m off my soapbox.

Sé Reed (24:04):
No, you’re not. I, I just, I was looking to make an actual real comment, not a equip about CSS and my brain. But now I’ve forgotten it. So my real comment was that if you, when you do these quick setups, I actually think, you know, even in a normal situation, these can be really helpful because you could be trying to set up the whole big thing. And a lot of clients, even though Steve and I and probably rest try to get our clients to think about the big picture and the long term, they can’t, they like are stuck. They don’t really know what it is they’re going to need or what they need and they can’t envision it. Like sometimes when you’re talking about a website with someone until you spin something up, they are like, I can’t see it. And then you spend something up and they’re like, Oh, now I know what I need and I want.

Sé Reed (24:50):
So this is actually a great opportunity to get some of your stuff up there. And then you can be like, Oh wow, this sold really well and this didn’t sell at all. And so I know I need to be able to, and people ask for customizations on this and I wanted to be able to do X, Y, Z. And so by implementing this kind of quick fix solution, you can actually make plans for the long term and the longer migration based off of what you are lacking in that initial quick setup.

As your proof of concept.

Sé Reed (25:21):
Exactly, exactly. And you can also you know, stay somewhat in business for the next, I don’t know, month?

Well, Steve, like you were talking about earlier regarding the POS systems. You know a lot of these point of sale systems have API APIs that have integrations that are already being built out on all of these different types of eCommerce solutions. So if you’re looking at like my point of sales system is taking care of my inventory, then you should be able to look and see can this inventory stuff be tied into something else and so that that quick solution may just be, I need to turn on this one thing like we were talking about with square. If you already have your inventory in there, just have at it, you’re, you’re good to go turn on square marketplace, send everybody to that link and then you’re solid. Then down the road you can go and say, this thing has an API, there’s a WordPress plugin for it. I want to now have it live on my WordPress site and you don’t have to do anything extra other than just turn on.

Due, I’m just, I’m just trying to sell tokens over here and you’re talking about API APIs.

Sé Reed (26:27):
There is just will be the taxes and shipping, which is something you need to be aware of because if you’re just doing right out of the and, and you know, you might be like, I don’t care how much it cost me to ship, but in the longterm that can really eat into things in short term. Maybe it’s better to sell the thing than it is to worry about how much shipping is going to cost you or adding that on or worrying about if it costs more to send to Kansas or you know, Maine or whatever. But that is something that really still needs to be considered. And some of these lightweight solutions don’t incorporate that or may not incorporate taxes which you are going to have to pay. They’re not, they’re not taken away sales tax at this time, although that would be a really good idea for stimulus.

Something. Yeah. Something that I dropped into the chat kind of early in the episode and we’re just kind of getting to now because everyone was going off on their tangents. There is something there, there is a plugin that’s in the repository called “Stripe payments a WordPress plugin WP simple pay.” It’s a mouthful. The little slug for the plugin is just Stripe. It looks like it might be the official Stripe plugin, but it’s not. It’s by Sandhills development who does EDD, affiliateWP and is just very simple and easy way to take an item, put it up on your site and sell it. There’s no carpet, there’s no anything else. It’s just one click. And they have an upgradable pro version because of course they’re great at the the up upsell over at Sandhills, a very nice and affordable pro version as well. But lets you do things like add coupon codes and stuff like that. So basically if you want to sell stuff, you’re not worried about coupon codes or anything else. I mean honestly from this conversation I’ve taken away that maybe doing it with square and embedding stuff using the Iframe is probably the easiest way. But if you’re not comfortable with that and you just, and you don’t already have things in square, this is a good solution to

That one that Sé shared. Like I’m looking at one right now and it looks so like these are both good solutions right now, man.

Yeah, I’ve seen that in the past. It’s a, it’s a pretty sweet solution cause it just uses a modal, the pop up, you type in the stuff, you hit submit and you’re good to go.

And that’s, that’s really I don’t know the company behind or the developers behind the one that Sé does. But I know Sandhills development, I know that they’re responsible for, for EDD, for affiliate WP, they do solid good work. So I know that if I trust my sales to this plugin, it’ll probably go well from longterm. Yeah.

Sé Reed (29:23):
Short term.

I can’t believe they got /stripe. Like what a URL man. They got that early on in the day. Go Pippin. Go Pippin.

All right folks. Well that’s it for today. I want to say thank you very much for all of you for coming to hanging out with us. We really appreciate it. Go over to our website, WPwpwatercooler.com/subscribe to learn how to subscribe to this content. If you want to become a patron on Patreon goober today, pur cooler’s Patreon page at Patreon.com/wpwatercourse.

Sé Reed (29:53):
I’m not doing any of the things he said I would do.

I gotta run though. I’ve got some square toasts waiting for me.

Some square toast with avocado.

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EP360 – Quick ways to sell online with WordPress

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