marketpress
MarketPress eCommerce
Sell everything from digital downloads to physical goods. MarketPress is the eCommerce plugin that does it all – no extensions required.
MarketPress offers the easiest way to sell anything online with tons of built-in core features and simple configuration. Whether you want to set up an individual storefront online or an entire eCommerce network for stores, MarketPress is the go-to solution for WordPress and Multisite SuperPowers. Guide customers through browsing your products to adding items to their cart, and then on to checkout and delivery. You can even provide updates on the status of customer orders.
Built With Your Feedback
MarketPress 3.0 is our most ambitious plugin update to date. It brings together hundreds of hours of development time, along with member requests and feedback. MarketPress has never been easier, from customer acquisition to checkout, and it keeps getting better.
Coupons is just one example of our growing catalog of add-ons.
Sell Anything
Whether you want to sell custom t-shirts you designed and screen printed yourself in your garage, downloadable copies of your band’s latest EP, or even your time as a consultant, MarketPress makes it all possible.
Variations are more powerful and easier to use.
All Shapes, Sizes, Colors And Materials
Variations have been written from the ground up, so now you can create unlimited and multiple colors, sizes and materials for any of your products and add unique product images to match. Then display your products in a beautiful, built-in gallery.
Bundled Payment Gateways
Accept payments using 15 popular payment processors, including Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net. Make it easy for anyone to pay you. Smooth transaction processing is essential when building trust and customer loyalty.
More built-in payment options.
2Checkout, Authorize.net AIM, eWay shared payments, eWay Rapid 3.1 Payments, Manual Payments, Mijireh, Mollie, Paymill, PayPal Chained Payments, PayPal Express Checkout, PayPal PayFlow Pro, PIN, Simplify Commerce by MasterCard, Stripe and WePay.
All the Core Features You Need
We provide all the tools you need to market your products the way you want – without the need to pay for pricey extensions.
Cart Behavior
Choose whether users remain on the current product pages or are redirected to checkout when they add a product to their cart.
Social Settings
Encourage customers to share your products with their friends and family with Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter shares buttons.
Manage the Checkout Process
Enable or disable guest checkout and even sell to specific countries or anyone in the world.
Limit Digital Downloads
Choose how many times a customer can download a file they have purchased.
One-Page Checkout
Did you know the average customer is 69% likely to abandon their shopping cart? With our simple new one-page checkout process you won’t become another statistic.
Automatic Taxes
Simple tax settings make it easy to set rates, create exceptions, apply taxes to downloadable products, tax before or after the cost of shipping and tax based on location.
Ship Anywhere
Ship anywhere in the world with confidence. Use flat rate shipping or cater to specific distribution logistics using table or weight rates.
Hide Out of Stock Products
When a product isn’t available, automatically set a product to draft so it doesn’t display.
Products Display
Display your products as a list or grid, choose how many rows, show images (or don’t), and make the most of the built-in image lightbox.
Google Analytics
We’ve made sure your entire site or network are both Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics eCommerce compatible.
Set Default Currency
Choose from 120 different currencies as your default currency. You can also allow customers to spend their points or credits with your store by default.
Show Related Products
Tempt customers to make more purchases by displaying related products. Choose how many to show, pick a list or grid, and select whether to relate products by categories or tags.
Shortcodes
A handy button in the post visual editor lets you quickly insert shortcodes into a product, page or post.
Inventory Warning
When you’re running out of any of your products, MarketPress can let you know when it’s time to stock up.
Get shipping right – tie directly into FedEx, UPS or USPS.
Simpler, Intuitive and Even More Powerful
MarketPress offers an effortless and user-friendly solution for setting up an online store, even for first-time store owners. From product and store settings to payment gateways, shipping and product display, setting up your store with MarketPress takes no time at all.
Quick Setup Wizard
Quick Setup gets your site ready to sell products and digital downloads in minutes. MarketPress walks you through setting up your store, step-by-step, so you don’t have to think about what’s going on behind the scenes (but if you do want to know what’s going on behind the scenes, you can still do that, too).
Get started selling fast with the Quick Setup guide.
Greater Functionality With Add-Ons
MarketPress 3.0 brings add-ons for the first time, with even more to come.
Coupons Attract new shoppers and increase sales with coupon based marketing campaigns.
PDF Invoicing Allow users to generate a good-looking invoice instead of – or in addition to – a standard invoice email.
The Complete Upfront Storefront
Use any Upfront starter theme to quickly set up a beautiful online marketplace or create a completely custom storefront with The Builder. Upfront includes all the MarketPress page layouts you need to drag, scale, and position your store in real-time.
Upfront has MarketPress styles built-in so you can set up an e-commerce shop in minutes.
Marketpress adjusts to fit your design.
Automatic Adaptive Design
Not only have we built our own themes for design simplicity, MarketPress is developed to work flawlessly with any well-coded WordPress theme. Shortcodes and built-in widgets let you display elements anywhere on your site.
Integration With WPMU DEV Plugins
Take full advantage of the 100+ premium plugins included with your WPMU DEV membership by pairing them with MarketPress. Plus, MarketPress includes special integrations with Appointments + and CoursePress.
Usage
To Get Started:
If you’re new to WordPress, you’ll want to start off by reading the Installing Plugins section in our comprehensive WordPress and WordPress Multisite Manual, so you can get MarketPress installed on your site properly. Once you’ve got MarketPress installed and activated, you’ll be presented with our Quick Setup wizard. You can skip it if you really want to, but we highly recommend that you follow it all the way through (as it’ll make the setup of your store easier):
We’ll start you off with the creation of the store pages, and from there, you’ll configure things like:
- The location of your store
- Your shipping preferences (where you will ship to, as well as your shipping methods)
- Your store’s currency, and tax preferences
- Payment gateways (we’ve got a bunch of those!)
Once you’ve configured all that, you’ll then be presented with the option to either create a new product, or go over the settings in more detail:
Before we go and create a product here, we’ll want to touch on some aspects of the settings first.
A stroll through the Store… Settings
Our friend, the Store Settings tab, houses all of the settings for MarketPress:
We provide inline documentation for all of the settings inside of MarketPress, but we’ll want to touch on a few points in particular, as we go through the setup of this new store. Digital Downloads If you’re planning on offering digital products in your store, you’ll want to review the “Download Settings” section inside of: Store Settings -> General
From here, you can choose to:
- Set the maximum amount of times a purchased file can be downloaded
- Enable MarketPress’s alternative download method (for large downloads, like files that are several hundred megabytes in size)
- Limit the amount of digital products per order
Google Analytics E-commerce Tracking If you’re already using Google Analytics on your site, you’ll be pleased to know that we offer integration with that inside of MarketPress, so you can track your e-commerce activity as well (with no add ons required)! The settings for this integration are also found inside of: Store Settings -> General
From there, you can configure MarketPress to work with the tracking code in use on your site (whether you’re using the old, new, or Universal tracking code). Store Pages If you skipped the step earlier in the Quick Setup to create the store pages, you’ll really want to head over to the “Store Pages” section inside of: Store Settings -> Presentation And get those pages set up. You can click the “Create Page” button for each store page, and MarketPress will automatically create a page for you:
Product Attributes Also known as variations within MarketPress (which we’ll cover later), this section will allow you to create & modify various attributes for your products (e.g. Color, Size, Weight, etc). You’ll also be able to adjust how they’re sorted, what they’re sorted by, and even add new options to an existing attribute. Product Categories/Product Tags As WordPress allows you to create categories & tags for your posts, so too does MarketPress allow you to do the same for your products, via the “Product Categories” & “Product Tags” settings pages. After all, when it comes to making products available, you want to make it easy as possible for a customer to find what he wants. Capabilities This section’s handy if you’re wanting to control how others could manage your store, or even allow someone to manage your whole store, without having to make him an Administrator on your site! Tip: If you’re wanting to create a special role for a store admin, you could use a plugin like User Role Editor to do just that (an easy way would be to duplicate the “Subscriber” role, and then just assign the desired permissions on the Capabilities page inside of MarketPress). We’ll be reviewing some other settings later on, but for now, let’s go create our first product!
Creating Products
In MarketPress, there’s three kinds of products available: Physical, Digital, and External. We’ll start off here with a physical product (a t-shirt in this example), walking through the various aspects of configuration, and then touch on the unique aspects of both Digital & External products. First on our agenda is the “Product Kind” section, where you can choose the type of product to create. We’ve already chosen the “Physical / Tangible Product” type here, for our example case:
Next, we’ve got the “Price, Inventory & Variants” section. Depending on the type of product chosen in the “Product Kind” section, the options displayed here will vary. Below are the options you’d see when creating a physical product:
Seeing as we’re setting up a physical product at the moment, there’s a few points to note in this section: Set up a Sale for this Product: If you’re planning to run a sale on this product, you’ll want to check this option. Plus, you can also specify the period of time that this sale goes on for! Special Taxes: If your product requires a different tax rate than what’s specified in your general settings, then you’ll want to enter the desired rate here. Charge Shipping: If you’re charging for shipping, you’ll definitely want to check this box, as you’ll then be able to specify the weight for your product (and an additional shipping charge, if you desire). Track Product Inventory: Here, you can set up a quantity for your product (and you can even allow customers to purchase the product when it’s out of stock). Now, a bit below this section, you’ll also see the “Product Images” section:
Here, you can specify one or more images for your product (the first image will be used as the primary image), which will then be displayed as a gallery on your product page. Variations Ah, variations… you’ll have fun with this one. :) With this, instead of creating several products for each type of a product (e.g. men’s shirts, women’s shirts, white shirts, etc.), you can turn them into variations inside of a single product! Continuing our t-shirt product example here, you could have one version that’s for women, and another for men. Or, to throw another variation type in there, you could offer men’s & women’s t-shirts, along with small, medium, and large sizes. Or to bring yet another variation type into the mix, you could offer men’s & women’s t-shirts, in small, medium, and large sizes, and in an array of color options as well! As you can see, there’s quite a few possibilities available! :) In the “Add variations for” box, you can create as many names & values as you wish (or choose ones already created, if you did that via the “Product Attributes” page, mentioned earlier), following the directions there:
Once the variations are created/chosen, you’ll notice that the “Price, Inventory & Variants” & “Product Image” sections will disappear, and will be replaced by the “Product Variations” section:
You’ll be able to edit all of your variations from here, from adjusting the inventory, changing the variation type, changing the prices, etc. On the far left of this section, you’ll be able to specify a product image for each variation listed. Inside the “More” section for a variation (represented by a blue grid on the far right), you’ll be able to adjust some additional properties for the variation, that you saw previously in the “Price, Inventory & Variants” section:
You’ll also be able to add in some additional content for the variation from this section, if you desire. Related Products Now, let’s look into the future here, and say that your customer’s on your product page, checking out those t-shirts of yours. But while he’s there, in the related products section, he’s seeing… a dress from your store show up there, along with a polka dot tie, and clogs! What if you wanted a pair of jeans to show up there instead, along with some sneakers, and a baseball cap? With this setting, you can pick specific products in your store to show up in the Related Products section, so that instead of a mismatched set of items, you’re now leading your customer towards acquiring a complete wardrobe:
Congratulations, you’ve just saved the future! (and all without a time machine) Categories & Tags Finally, you can assign categories & tags that you’ve created for your products, as well as create new ones to assign. Make your products easy to sort through and find, and your customers will thank you. On Digital Products With digital products, variations can be specified as well, but instead of having to deal with shipping details, we instead have to specify a file from your site to be assigned to the product. Like physical products, digital products can also have variations, with a separate file assigned to each variation. So if you were selling tax preparation software, you could offer Basic, Premium & Pro editions of the software, each edition as a separate variation. On External Products With external products, the sole purpose is to take your customer to an external location (e.g. an affiliate link, another store, etc.), so the options here are minimal. An SKU, price & product image can be set here, as well as a sale price, but the main focus is the “External Link” field, where you’ll enter the link to the page to send your customer to.
Shortcodes
Alright, you’ve got your products created, but… now you’re wanting to show them on more than just your product pages. Maybe you’re wanting to show a single product on a page of yours, or perhaps display a list of products that are in a certain category on a page of yours. Not to fear, we’ve got a handy shortcode generator available in the editor, available via the “Add E-Commerce Short Code” button highlighted in the screenshot below:
Clicking on that will display a popup, where you can choose from one of the available shortcodes via a dropdown menu:
When a shortcode is chosen, clicking on each of the “i” icon bubbles will provide additional info about an attribute, so that’s what you’ll want to be clicking if you’re not quite sure what a property does.
Order History
So, you’ve now got orders coming in from every Tom, Dick & Harry… let’s manage them! From inside of: Store -> Orders You can manage & review all of the orders that have been placed on your site:
By hovering over the star icon for an order, you can quickly change the status of an order:
You can also review an order in detail by clicking on the “Edit” link for a particular order, where you’ll see details like:
- Information about the customer
- The payment method chosen, and the associated details
- The shipping and payment history
- The shipping information (cost of shipping, the method of shipment, and the tracking number
Add Ons
Found inside of: Store Settings -> Add Ons You’ll see the add ons available in MarketPress, which will vary depending on whether you’re running a normal WordPress site, or if you’re running a Multisite installation. For the “Coupons” add on, you’ll see a new sub-entry in the “Store” menu item, from which you can create new coupons:
You’ll notice that when you create a coupon of your own, that there’s two notable features:
- How should the discount amount be applied? - for this, you can determine whether:
- a coupon should be applied to each eligible product, no matter what the quantity is;
- a coupon should only be applied once per eligible product (e.g. if you’re ordering 10 boxes of chocolates, only the first box will have the discount applied to it)
- Can this coupon be combined with other coupons? - Yes, we do allow you to determine whether coupons can be combined with other coupons! (and to further specify which other coupons a coupon can be combined with)
To configure the coupon message displayed to customers on the checkout page, you’ll want to click on the “Settings” link for the Coupons add on inside the Add Ons page. For the “Invoice PDF” add on, not only will you be able to automatically send out a PDF invoice with your order emails (and being able to choose emails it’s automatically sent out for), but you’ll also be able to manually download a PDF invoice for an order, as well as the packing slip for a order, from the Order Details page:
The Invoice PDF add on also has it’s own settings page, accessible via the Add Ons page, where you can configure things like:
- How the PDF should be viewed
- What emails should it be attached to
- Whether to disable it for free products, or not
- As well as template settings for the invoice itself
Using on WordPress Multisite
On Multisite, you can choose to activate MarketPress in one of two ways: Way #1: Activating MarketPress site-by-site You would take this route if you wanted to make it a Pro Sites premium plugin, or you wanted to limit it to specific sites. This means your users:
- Can choose to activate MarketPress in their subsite dashboards via Plugins -> Installed Plugins
- Can choose to activate any of the payment gateways available in MarketPress.
Way #2: Network activating MarketPress This is where MarketPress really gets to shine on Multisite. With this method of activation, you take MarketPress from being a shop-by-shop experience, and convert it into a network wide experience! You can do things like:
- Have a single, global shopping cart, so visitors to your network can add items from any shop on the network, and check out in a single place
- Charge a percentage of the profits on a sale, via the PayPal Chained Payments gateway
- Control access to gateways & CSS themes inside of MarketPress
You’ll find all the Multisite options in the Network Dashboard by going to: Settings -> Store Network
Where you’ll see the following sections:
- General Settings - limit the use of Global Widgets and shortcodes to the main blog and enable Global shopping cart
- Product Indexer - index all of the products on your network, so that they’re visible via the global marketplace
- Gateway Permissions - provide or restrict access to payment gateways for network stores (an additional Pro Sites option will be provided if the Pro Sites plugin is installed, more on that in a moment)
- Global Marketplace Pages - customize your global marketplace, category & tag pages
- Theme Permissions - provide or restrict access to MarketPress CSS themes for network stores
Important: If the Site Visibility of a sub-site in your network is set to “Discourage search engines…” (under Settings -> Reading), the products from that sub-site will not display in the global marketplace.
The Global Cart and Chained Payments
The global cart in MarketPress is designed from the ground up to allow each store to be a different merchant, accepting and processing orders independently, yet allowing for a single place on the network for customers to check out. However, it’s not designed for the same store owner to run multiple stores, you should just keep your products in one store in that case. Two things to bear in mind about the global cart are:
- Due to cross-domain security concerns, the global cart is not compatible with domain mapped sub-sites.
- When the global cart is active, only the PayPal Express Checkout gateway is available for use on the network.
Now, regarding chained payments (also known as parallel payments)… they’re what allows a customer to checkout/pay once for an order, and have the funds automatically distributed to multiple merchants on a marketplace. In the case of MarketPress, we provide this via the PayPal Chained Payments gateway, allowing you, the store network owner, to collect your share of the profits for a sale, while allowing your store owners to be sent the rest.
Important: Please note, that the chained payments functionality is only available through PayPal.
Pro Sites Integration
With the help of our very own Pro Sites plugin, you can control access to specific gateways and CSS themes inside of MarketPress in an finer manner, requiring a user to first have a certain Pro Site level. Simply install and configure Pro Sites on your network, setting up various Levels as you want them, as per our usage page. Then, once you’ve done that, you’ll want to into the Dashboard for the main site, and head to: Store Settings -> Add Ons And enable the Pro Sites add-on from there. From the Store Network page inside the Network Dashboard, you’ll now see more options inside the dropdown box for access, displaying the Pro Site levels you’ve configured:
Note on caching
If you are using a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache, or have another caching mechanism such as Varnish enabled on your server, you’ll need to add a couple of cookie exceptions for MarketPress to function correctly:
- PHPSESSID
- mp_order_history_
- mp_session
- mp_globalcart_*
If you are using W3 Total Cache you’ll want to add these to the “Rejected cookies” setting (one item per line), inside of: Performance -> Page Cache -> Advanced If your server’s using Varnish cache, please contact your hosting provider and ask them to add these exceptions.