Bluehost has announced a new point-and-click solution that makes it easy for virtually anyone to create an eCommerce store with WordPress.
This is an opportunity for companies for which the complexity of the technology was a barrier to entry.
It’s also a door opener for agencies to now more easily serve smaller clients and help them grow into bigger, more successful businesses.
Bluehost highlighted the following benefits of its new e-commerce solution:
- Easy – Set up your beautiful online store to suit your needs, even without prior website experience, and with the ability to rely on in-house experts to build it for you if needed.
- Customizable – Flexible, powerful, high performance and suitable for beginners. The new custom Wonder theme, which comes with the product, is highly customizable to your look and feel.
- Organized – Bluehost simplifies the WordPress experience. Enjoy the power of WordPress without having to browse over 59,000 themes and plugins. Handpicked and designed by WordPress experts, Bluehost provides all the plugins you need, not the ones you don’t.
- Powerful – Integrated with WooCommerce capabilities and YITH plugins, two well-known brands in the WordPress arena, it’s the only product that offers this combination of capabilities.
Point, click and done
For some, 90% of the battle to start selling online is technology.
Even though one of the guiding principles of WordPress is to make the software easy to use and it only takes five minutes to install, WordPress is really just a core of what a website can be.
To complete a website, the core WordPress must be extended with plugins like WooCommerce and connected by an Application Programming Interface (API) for further functionality to occur.
What Bluehost did was take all of those parts of the upload and turn them into point-and-click steps.
Getting started starts with an onboarding process where necessary components like WooCommerce, Yoast, and block themes are installed in the background.
The user then clicks through a series of steps such as connecting a payment processor to make the website functional.
This is accomplished through a tab-based menu system.
The tabs correspond to the following steps:
- general settings
- Add products
- Customize your store
- Advanced features
- Launch your store
Screenshot of the General Settings page
The image below shows the second step of creating a new store, which includes necessary information such as payment processor, shipping label setup, and e-commerce tax calculations.
All a user needs to do is click on the tabs on the left to proceed to the next step in an orderly fashion, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.
There is also background documentation to help users who might need information.
The screenshot below shows the product data upload/import interface, with a link to the documentation below.
Creating important pages on the site is done using pre-made block template templates.
Blocks is the terminology for the non-coding visual design interface of WordPress.
Just select the type of page to design and click on the button.
There are also optional advanced features such as customer wishlist functionality, product filters, gift card sales, and a customizable customer account page.
Each store starts with a starting point template that can be customized to look exactly like the site owner’s wishes.
This part is probably where it might be useful to learn how to customize block themes to add background images, change fonts and colors for different sections of the web page.
This part of launching a site may be the part that some users might stop at.
But WordPress blocks are designed with intuitive, clearly labeled context menus.
Below is a screenshot of how an e-commerce site will look after the starter template has been customized.
Here is a screenshot of the block interface to customize a web page:
Close-up screenshot of the WordPress block interface showing the context menu to edit the block:
Bluehost Ecommerce WordPress Solution
WordPress is a popular way to build an e-commerce site, but it’s difficult for a site owner to do it themselves.
This difficulty is one of the main reasons why site-building platforms with proprietary technologies are becoming increasingly popular.
What Bluehost has done is remarkable because they’ve taken a content management system that’s widely loved but not easy to point and click and made it intuitively easy for almost anyone to build an e-commerce site with advanced functionality. like the ability to sell gift cards.
According to Ed Jay, President of Newfold Digital, the parent company of Bluehost, YITH and Yoast:
“With the launch of Bluehost’s new commerce solutions, our team is addressing the needs of small businesses looking for the flexibility and power of WordPress, but want the go-live and selling experience to be simple.
The curated experience we provide strikes the perfect balance between security, reliability and functionality by taking the power of WordPress and putting it in the hands of users in an intuitive and native way for each of our clients looking to grow their business. ”
Bluehost has achieved the goal of making it easy to build advanced e-commerce websites.
This is important not only for business owners, but also for web developers and search marketing agencies, as it provides an additional way to serve small businesses that may not be ready for a bespoke solution. and help them begin their journey to greater success.
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Read the blog on Bluehost
How our new e-commerce solution will make your life easier
Featured image by Shutterstock/Tirachard Kumtanom
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