Book Image

Instant E-commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop

By : Murat Yilmaz
Book Image

Instant E-commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop

By: Murat Yilmaz

Overview of this book

<p>For years, starting an e-commerce shop was considered a hard task with the need of a significant amount of money, time, and resources. OpenCart makes this process easier and enables anyone to create an attractive and profitable e-commerce solution. This concise guide will show you how to create a robust and striking online store with OpenCart.</p> <p>"Instant E-Commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop" teaches you how to build your own online shop with step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions. You will learn how to install, configure, and customize your own shop in order to create an attractive and fully functional store in no time. If you have always wanted to create an online shop, but don’t know how, then this book is for you!</p> <p>In "Instant E-Commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop", you will be taken through the required steps to create an awesome e-commerce solution. This book starts by showing you how to correctly set up and install OpenCart, before moving on to creating products and their attributes.</p> <p>If the world of payment gateways and shipping options sounds complicated, don’t worry. This guide will take you through the essentials required to set up and manage how your customers are going to pay for and receive their orders! Finishing with vouchers, templates, and SEO, this book will ensure you end up with a powerful, attractive, and profitable online store.</p>
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Preface

OpenCart is a very flexible and powerful e-commerce solution used to establish an online store with many useful modules and functions. At the same time, it can be hard to know where to start building an online business in a step-by-step manner.

This book will show you how to set up and run a fully functional e-commerce shop with useful, hands-on recipes in a very short time. Each recipe teaches a vital functionality about the products, product categories, payments, shipment, orders, coupons, and customer management, as well as customizing the user interface, affiliate management, and more.

What this book covers

Installation (Simple) shows us how to check the system requirements and install OpenCart correctly.

Adding categories and subcategories (Simple) covers the deletion of prepopulated categories and the addition of new categories and subcategories.

Adding products (Intermediate) shows us how to add a new product and configure different settings for that product.

Adding product attributes (Simple) shows us how to add two product attributes and demonstrates how they are useful to the customer for product comparisons.

Adding product options (Simple) demonstrates how to add extra product options and how they change the final price of a product.

Adding tax data (Simple) explains tax classes and how to configure them for different geo zones.

Configuring general shop settings (Simple) shows us how to customize the front page, available price options, and stock options.

Configuring payment models (Intermediate) teaches us about implementing PayPal integrations.

Configuring shipping methods (intermediate) covers the different shipping methods and how to configure them.

Offering coupons and discounts (Intermediate) teaches us about the different coupon types, how to configure them, and how to launch discount campaigns.

Managing orders (Intermediate) shows us how to process orders and manage them.

Managing customers and users (Simple) shows us how to categorize and manage customers in groups, and demonstrates the ways in which backend users can be created for different management tasks.

Localization (Simple) shows us how to set up a multilingual shop with multiple currencies.

Managing affiliates (Simple) shows us how to set up an affiliate marketing system.

Offering voucher codes (Simple) shows us how to offer gift voucher codes to the customers.

Learning to use modules (Simple) shows us how to set up useful modules such as Banners and Specials.

Implementing SEO for our shop (Intermediate) teaches us how to implement basic SEO to increase search engine visibility.

Changing layouts and templates (Intermediate) teaches us how to change the overall look of our store with a sample template and layout style.

Managing shop backups and restores (Simple) teaches us how to securely back up our shop's data and how to restore it, if needed, in the future.

What you need for this book

Basic computer and IT skills are enough to follow the book easily. All extra information regarding the usage of several online services and tools has been provided with clear illustrations and step-by-step recipes.

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at individuals who want to develop a professional online store without any programming, and store owners who would like to manage their product inventory, shipping, and payment systems with an easy-to-use administration interface.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Let's log in to the cPanel administration tool. It is usually located at http://yourwebsite.com/cpanel.".

A block of code is set as follows:

<li><a href="<?php echo $affiliate; ?>"><?php echo $text_affiliate; ?></a></li>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Let's open File manager under the File section and click on the Web Root option".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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