Visitors to this craft blog will by now have realised that I’m quite a fan of blogging.

Great for communicating with your prospects and customers, loved by search engines, a huge range of plug-ins are available to expand it’s capabilities… what’s not to like?

The only thing that’s been something of a stumbling block has been using a blog for an online store. As somewhere to sell your crafts from directly.

There are lots of ways to do it with a traditional website, but turning your blog into a shop for your crafts hasn’t been easy. Until now…

The way E-Junkie handle it works very well if all you need is a “buy” button. Working in tandem with a Paypal business account it’s an easy and low-cost solution ($5 a month) that works very well and has the added advantage of letting you run an affiliate program if you want to. I use E-Junkie on this site, so I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.

It’s not the full online craft shop though. Until now that’s been rather more difficult to achieve and has required custom programming which is expensive - and then some!

Now though we have WP-Ecommerce from Instinct. A plug-in that really is superb. It’s been around for a while but I couldn’t honestly have recommended it before because it had one or two occasional faults depending on the theme you used.

That’s all fixed now, and I have to say the latest version is superb. It’s comprehensive yet simple. Just upload it to your Wordpress plug-ins folder and fire it up - it has everything your online craft store needs and integrates with Paypal so you can take people’s credit cards or they can pay you from their Paypal account.

Given it’s power and flexibility you’d have to be wondering how high a price tag it would have. Well it doesn’t. It’s free. You can extend its functionality further with a few bits and pieces that do cost, but in really I think you can start your online craft shop with the free version and then buy the add-ons if and when you need them - from profits you generate. That’s pretty much an ideal situation if you ask me!

Full details here: Instinct.co.nz

E-Junkie is still a simple solution if you have just a few products and definitely my preference if you’re selling a craft ebook. Their details are here.

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