Can I use a real blog with Big Commerce?
For all the great things that Big Commerce do – a blog isn’t one of them yet. It has article and news functionality but you really need to bash them around if you want to do any serious blogging – and nearly every social media plan includes some blogging component.
Thankfully you can very easily integrate your blog and Big Commerce shopping cart without too much effort.
Using sub-domains we can easily separate our WordPress website/blog form Big Commerce and have them live quite happily on different servers in different locations. To ensure that user’s enjoy a consistent experience it is a good idea to style your blog and shopping cart the same – or at least apply consistent branding to both.
Getting Started
Before we can set up you need to decide whether you want your shopping cart or your blog to be the main part of your website. That is when people visit yourdomain.com do you want them to see your blog homepage or your Big Commerce shopping cart homepage. For most people this will be the shopping cart.
Setup Big Commerce
Head over to the Big Commerce website and sign up, go through the simple walk throughs to get everything working the way you like. I won’t go into detail in this post there are plenty of others that do a better job. Search this site to find one of my How to setup Big Commerce posts. Unless you registered a domain with Big Commerce when you signed up you will need to move your domain to Big Commerce. Do this by clicking Tools -> Move to Domain and following the instructions.
Organize Hosting for WordPress
I have found the easiest and cheapest way to get hosting for WordPress is to head over to Hostgator and grab a shared account. If you don’t know, get the cheapest you an easily upgrade at anytime if you find you need more space or bandwidth.
Install and configure WordPress
Setting up the sub-domains and redirects
Once you have moved your domain to Big Commerce log in to the admin area and click Tools -> DNS Records and click a green plus sign ( + ) to add a new record.
Add blog.yourdomain.com as the host, A as the Type and the IP Address of your your Hostgator account. Click the Save Changes button and you are away.
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Tags: Big Commerce, Wordpress
Your subdomain solution is a good one. I recommend mirroring the layout of the store in the blog design so that people feel there’s continuity between the websites.
For further integration, I released a new WordPress plugin called Interspire & BigCommerce that allows simple linking of products in your WP blog from the WordPress editor.
You can click a link and see a list of all your products at once.
Check it out and please let me know if there are improvements you’d like to see.
Will do Zack, great advice and the plugin looks like it is on the money – I will definitely check it out i the next few days, that’s for letting us know about it.
Do you think you could give an example page of what the plug in will look like and work like. I am interested and have a WP site that I use Paypal on and I have a BC store but really would like to pull the two together, but I have downloaded and learned so many carts and even paid for some. each time the plug ins seem to be lacking something would be soooo nice to actual see what this one does before I go though all the hoops of installing and learning etc…
Lisa you can see Zacks excellent plugin at http://www.seodenver.com/interspire-bigcommerce-wordpress/ for some reason the link in his reply is clubbed – I don’t kno what I did but I will get it fixed.
Yeah, Zack’s plug-in is very broken and very unsupported. He doesn’t respond about problems anymore. I’m not sure why he doesn’t just pull it and revisit it later instead of having people continue to download a plugin that doesn’t work. I’ve installed at least 3 different releases of this plugin and neither have worked. All of them give an error that the API is not configured correctly. Other users on the WordPress site and on Zack’s page are inquiring about a fix for the same error with no response. At least with Joomla, crap, unsupported plugins get pulled from their site.
I am trying to get this to work but it will not even allow me to load my products. This is the error message I get:
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 47710208) (tried to allocate 44 bytes) in /home/myintdec/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1028
Help?
If you have a paypal account integrated into your wordpress site, why do you need bigcommerce?
Shipping provider integration, gift cards, discounts, customer management, order management, more than 2 option sets per product, more custom fields, more advanced pricing structure and tax settings …
The list goes on but in short if Paypal buttons are working for you stick with them, there is no reason to complicate something that needs to be simple
I am setting up a website to sell fashion and tech gadgets. I want to have a store (I am probably going to use BC, hosted by BC) and a blog (WP, hosted by godaddy) where I write about the articles I sell with links to the store section. I want the blog and the store to use the same domain, which I registered through godaddy.
Which of the following solutions is the best for commercial, SEO, and reliability purposes?
1) Blog on main page and store on subdomain
2) Blog on main page and store on subdirectory
3) Blog on subdomain and store on main page
4) Blog on subdirectory and store on main page
5) Simple introduction on main page with blog and store in subdomains
6) Simple introduction on main page with blog and store in subdirectories
Also, would it be better to use the store or the blog as landing page of my google ads and other banners?
Thanks a lot and compliments for the blog!
If the shop if the primary focus of the site put it on the main domain with the blog on a sub domain.
Don’t bother with a simple introduction (splash page) unless there is a valid reason – take users straight to the products you want them to buy
Use your store as the landing page for adwords (assuming the adwords are for your products) because the whole point of them is to get people to buy your products not read your blog. Ideally you should create specific ad’s for specific product and land directly to the product detail page with a prominent add to cart button
Thanks for the quick answer!
Hi,
I have had a Big Commerce store for awhile and would really like to get a wordpress blog on a subdomain. I am very familiar with wordpress as I use it for another site of mine.
When I signed up for Big Commerce I did everything through them. I’m still a little confused on how to integrate a wordpress blog though.
By what you say, I need to host a wordpress blog using a hosting service such as Hostgator. That’s easy. Then what domain do I tie the hosting account to and install the blog to?
I did the following already as well: Add blog.yourdomain.com as the host, A as the Type and the IP Address of your your Hostgator account. (in big commerce). Please let me know if you have any advice. Thanks! – Pete
When I signed up for Big Commerce I did everything through them. I’m still a little confused on how to integrate a wordpress blog though.
By what you say, I need to host a wordpress blog using a hosting service such as Hostgator. That’s easy. Then what domain do I tie the hosting account to and install the blog to?
I did the following already as well: Add blog.yourdomain.com as the host, A as the Type and the IP Address of your your Hostgator account. (in big commerce). Please let me know if you have any advice. Thanks! – Pete
Use the contact form or email me Pete and i will take a look for you