Set up WooCommerce Book Store with Amazon

[arielsvn]

TODO

• Edit site image to make it shorter

---

I recently embarked in the task of helping some friends set up their website. They own Ediciones La gota de agua, an editorial whose main goal is to promote cuban literature. I didn’t had much free time, so the main goal was to implement a simple site that could be re-designed later. The decision to use Wordpress, specifically with WooCommerce, was fairly straight forward, as I already had some experience with it. At some point we wanted to list the books on the site on Amazon automatically and that’s when the issues started. This post explains some of the challenges we faced.

For reference here’s a screenshot of the home page:

It's pretty basic and it will probably be re-designed soon, but setting it up, proved me once more how powerful is the WooCommerce + Wordpress combination. The site is using the Storefront theme, which offers a lot of options to customize the end look. We considered buying Bookstore, which is another theme designed specifically for a book shop, but from my point of view it didn't offered enough functionality to be worth it. And I was able to extend Storefront and add the features needed for a book store. Specifically:

• I changed the number of elements and the columns displayed in the home page as described here

• For each book I added three new fields to the configuration page: ISBN, Author and Publication Date. Details here. The Author field had to be displayed on the product page, and the ISBN and the Publication Date were used when publishing the book to Amazon.

Besides those there were a few cosmetic changes but nothing major.

Integrating Amazon was more complicated, the first issue was deciding what plugin to use. A quick search returned 6 options, each with their own configuration particularities.

I tried the ones by ExportFeed.com and by ChannelUnity and neither of them worked. At the time of writing the Wordpress version I was using was 4.9.4, WooCommerce version was 3.1.2 and the plugins versions were 3.1.8.1 and 2.7 respectively.

I ended up using WP-Lister Lite for Amazon which at first seemed simpler than the other two I had tried, but it surprised me in the end. Its very well implemented.