Sell Your Own WordPress Themes with MarketPress and GridMarket

WPMU DEV Members have been so excited by the recent update to MarketPress. Once of the great new features is that you can now sell digital products through your eCommerce store. Today I’m going to show you how you can easily sell your own WordPress Themes using MarketPress with our brand new FrameMarket Child theme, GridMarket (yes, I know – how many times can you get the word “Market” into a sentence?)

This is pretty darn easy to do so it’ll be a quick one.

1) Install MarketPress

2) Install FrameMarket

The GridMarket child theme comes as part of the FrameMarket Bundle. You’ll find it in /framemarket/themes Make sure you copy the GridMarket Folder to your main themes folder:

3) Activate MarketPress

4) Activate Gridmarket

5) Permalinks

Go to Settings > Permalinks and set up pretty permalinks (MarketPress won’t work without them):

6) Theme Options

Go to Appearance > Theme Options

Unsurprisingly, this is where you set up your theme options. You can use a logo or just use your site name. GridMarket has some great typography so I’m just going to use my Theme shop’s name:

GridMarket also has a whole lot of style settings so you can style your theme however you want.

For now, though I’m going to stick with the dark orange theme.

7) Set up MarketPress

Time to set up MarketPress! Go to Products > Store Settings:

Let’s go through the tabs one-by-one:

a) General settings:

• Location: Where are you?
• Tax: What’s your rate of tax? You’ll need to look into your local tax laws for this. I ain’t no expert on tax worldwide
• Currency: Choose your currency
• Misc: There’s a new setting here particularly important for download able products. It’s here that you can decide how many times someone can download a product. This can come in helpful for restricting distribution.

b) Coupons

This section will come in helpful if you want to create coupons in the future. You can hand them out as part of promotions and special offers.

c) Presentation

• Store Theme – decide which CSS settings you want to use. For now we’ll stick with the default
• Single product settings – You can choose “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now”. If you choose “Buy now” this will direct your customer straight to checkout when they purchase. Unless you’ve only got one product to sell you should choose “Add to Cart” as it lets your customer continue to browse your site after purchasing your product.

• Product list settings – same as for single product settings but you can also decide how many products appear on the page and how they are ordered

d) Messages

Here you can set up all of your custom emails for orders and shipping. You can also add text to each of the MarketPress pages that your eCommerce site uses.

e) Shipping

Choose the countries that you will ship to here. You can either choose a flat rate or no shipping. Since we’re selling digital products we can choose “No shipping”

f) Payments

Choose your payment gateways. The recent MarketPress update saw the inclusion of two new gateways – Moneybookers and Google Checkout. Once you’ve selected your gateways you’ll need to fill in all of your details:

g) Shortcodes

Gives you access to all of the awesome MarketPress shortcodes.

Note: If you weren’t using GridMarket, but another theme, you would now want to add your shopping cart, product categories and product tag cloud to your sidebar. But they’re already built in to FrameMarket so you don’t need to!

8) Add Your Product

Go to Products > Create New

a) Add the name of your Theme and its description

b) Add your product to a category

c) Add your product details

d) Set your featured image – this is important to make your product page look pretty

e) Upload your product

f) Publish!

Pretty easy, right? That’s pretty much all there is to it. Now just add the rest of your themes and you’re page should end up looking something like this:

Awesome!