Starting an e-books store

Okay, folks, your feedback would be nice here. We’d like to use an install of WP (or more precisely, a network blog on our MultiSite install) to start an ebooks store. Please note that we don’t want to sell our own books – plenty of plugins, including fabulous MarketPress, do that; we want to set up a site where *others* can upload and sell ebooks, and then collect a percentage of their sale price (after we take our prescribed cut).

We also don’t want a *network* of stores – like Marketpress can do; we want this all to happen on one site. It would be completely fine if the sellers have pertinent dashboard access; but the buyers cannot. In our perfect world, the buyers would not even have to register to make a purchase.

I’m wondering if some of you would know what combination of plugins we could use to accomplish this. Please also note that we are willing to pay reasonable amounts for any plugins and/or functional themes that would assist in accomplishing this task; so if you know of any commercial plugins or themes that can do any part of this, by all means mention them. My thanks in advance for what you know —

  • DavidM
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    Hiya conkhead,

    I’m afraid I’m not aware of any non-network solutions for WordPress. The only ones I know of are like MarketPress and require Multsiite, where users create stores on sub-sites.

    I think it would be possible to give the appearance that it’s all on one site, it would just be a matter of serious customization.

    As an example, you could use the same exact theme network wide and customize that theme to always include certain things, like a sitewide header logo and a featured global products widget. You could use the Global Cart feature in MarketPress to make the checkout process seamless as well.

    You could use New Blog Templates to have all new sites start with the same general design and features too.

    https://wpmudev.com/project/new-blog-template

    Restricting buyers from the back-end should be fairly simple using a plugin like the following.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backend-user-restrictor/

    However, with MarketPress, users need not create an account in order to purchase.

    Those are just a few thoughts. I’ll run this by a few of the other guys over here too though, in case they have ideas to that effect.

    -David

  • conkhead
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Actually, David, that is a very innovative solution to this problem that would probably work in our case. I have to give this some thought; but like you said, it’s not really necessary that all sellers are on one site but rather that they *appear* that they are. I had thought of the Global Cart feature in Marketpress for this, but couldn’t think of any way to make it work. What you proposed might very well work.

    I’ll post back to this thread with our solution when we decide how we go forward with this. Thanks mucho for the suggestion; I don’t know if I would have thought of it —