Creating an online store to sell whatever physical or digital products you want to peddle has never been easier. There are new e-commerce platforms and plugins popping up every day that make adding a t-shirt store to, for example, your Wordpress site, a half day project.

I sat down with e-commerce expert Sabir Semerkant, who has led e-Commerce initiatives for both large and small companies for the past 10 years and is now growing his own e-Commerce / social commerce company focused on the vitamin industry.

At ScribeLabs, our services business, we’ve recently completed two e-commerce projects.

The first project was for a joint venture project we’re working on with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). We’re developing an online professional development portal for media and advertising professionals.

While longer term we want to create a social e-learning / eCommerce platform where media and advertising industry professionals can subscribe to an all you can eat buffet, or purchase a specific course, and then log in to consume course content, take tests and interact with Subject Matter Experts and other learners, the short term goal was to get something up quickly that allows industry professionals to find, purchase and download our 3 hour long video courses right to their desktop. That was a fairly straightforward initial goal – build it quick, get feedback from the market, see what the demand is, and then invest in developing something more robust.

We were looking for a relatively simple solution that would allows us to process payment through PayPal, and give us simple WordPress shortcodes that we could integrate with an existing design template. We chose WordPress eStore for the IAB project.

Another project we’re finishing up right now is for KnowledgeSource, a healthcare research company that wants to reinvent its business and scale for growth in the digital age. The overarching project was to help Knowledge Source reinvent its business strategy, its brand identity, and to implement a technology and business foundation for the future. The heart of the technology roll out is a new Content Management System (Wordpress Multisite) and an e-commerce platform that is easy for non-technical users to work with. One of their existing pain points is the frustration of needing to rely on technical professionals every time Knowledge Source wants to add a new research report to the catalog.

We chose GetShopped.org for the KnowledgeSource project.

Originally, we looked at the GetShopped plugin for the IAB Professional Development project, but it blew out the existing design template we have for the e-commerce site, so we would have had to redo the site design to work with the GetShopped shopping cart.

When we built the KnowledgeSource store, we designed the site from scratch, with that specific shopping cart in mind.

The GetShopped e-Commerce solution is stronger and more flexible than WordPress eStore. It has different pricing levels, depending on your needs. A free, basic version allows you to accept payment via paypal and google checkout. The Gold Cart plugin works with GetShopped and allows you to use a payment gateway, such as Authorize.net, which was a requirement for this project. You can sell individual products, including variations, such as sizes and colors for t-shirts.

KnowledgeSource sells healthcare industry research reports. Prospective customers can either buy a full report, or a section of a report. Adding new reports (products) and product information and pretty graphics to the catalog is straightforward for non-technical users.

Sabir chose Volusion for his e-commerce software platform.

Sabir mentions a few e-Commerce solutions during our interview, including,

Feel free to add other solutions in the comments section below.

Here’s a good reference list of various Word Press shopping cart plugins. They all have their pluses and minuses.