Configuring Simple Seller is actually pretty simple, but it’s a few steps long. Each step is simple. Really.
Settings Page
From your blog’s Administration page, click on the “Settings” menu on the left. The menu will open up; from there, select “Simple Seller.” You’ll get a page asking for three configuration settings.
- Slug: This is the item that will appear in your URLs. So if you choose “products” for the slug, then all your sellable items will appear under (for example) http://www.your-site-name.com/products. Select this with care. In this version of Simple Seller, once it’s selected it can’t be changed. You should NOT have a page by this name already!
- Category: This is what WordPress calls a “Taxonomy” and is a “heading” under which all your sellable items may be categorized. This category is another type of slug, or URL component. So if you were using “clothing” as your category, “shoes” would show up under http://www.your-site-name.com/clothing/shoes, for example. DO NOT use the same name here as you used for the slug, above!
- Disclaimer: Simple Seller will append whatever you enter here to every sellable item’s page. This is how you can disclaim responsibility for whatever everybody else may be selling on your blog.
Enter those items, and then hit the “Save Changes” button. Now, you’ll see a new menu option near the top of the page, just under “Posts” called “Sellable Items.” Use this button to add, edit or delete items for sale, just like you’d do with a post or page on your blog.
Edit and Publish your Items Page
Simple Seller creates a normal page for you under the slug you provided above. This page has some placeholder text on it to start, but you’ll want to edit this. Simple Seller will automatically append a list of your most recent items for sale to whatever you enter on this page. The page will be in “Draft” status by default, so you will also have to Publish it if you want it to show up.
Capabilities Configuration (optional)
When you first activate Simple Seller on the plugin screens, it will add a “Seller” role for you to assign sellers to. It will also add capabilities to the Administrator role so you can mange (and sell) items, and to the Subscriber role so folks can read your items’ pages.
However, if you need more flexibility, we recommend you also install the Capabilities Manger plugin. Then you can use that to assign seller-related capabilities to other roles, or alter the Seller role to allow it to do other things, like post normal blog entries.
Add the Simple Seller Categories Widget (optional)
Simple Seller provides a simple widget you can add to your widget-capable theme, which will list your “Categories” and provide links to see all the items under each of those categories. Just go to the “widgets” page under the “Appearance” menu, and drag it to where you want it. Configuration of the widget is, um, simple. You can see an example of the widget in action under the “Service Categories” in the sidebar of this site.
What Next?
Next up, you should Configure your Seller Accounts.