One strong recommendation is to create a testing ground in which to install WordPress and the WP e-Commerce plugin that is independent from your production server. That way you can test, and re-test, any changes without fear of breaking your live site.
Turning your personal computer into a testing platform is simple. We only need a few different tools in order to create a development environment, including:
A web server, such as Apache
A database server, such as MySQL
PHP
Supporting libraries
Fortunately, a few free software packages exist that bundle all of these tools together into one centralized program. For the Microsoft Windows operating system, these packages include:
WampServer (http://www.wampserver.com/en)
Microsoft Web Platform (http://www.microsoft.com/Web/)
In this section, we will discuss the installation, setup, and basic usage of WampServer.