How businesses can gain ecommerce capabilities to increase sales

Continued growth in ecommerce and digital channels

The recent pandemic has resulted in irreversible shifts in customers’ behaviors. Customers’ buying habits have shifted to digital channels and this has resulted in small and medium sized businesses losing revenues and potentially those customers forever. Despite customers returning to physical retail stores, digital channels still top customers’ preferences for research and buying. Traditional brick-and-mortar business need to re-think how they can use online channels to attract and retain new customers.

The Guidance for Launching a Simple Ecommerce Website with WordPress on Amazon Web Services (AWS), provides you with prescriptive, reusable code and architecture. The guidance creates a WordPress website with ecommerce and analytics capabilities in a few minutes. The website is deployed on Amazon Lightsail and comes with affordable, predictable pricing per month.

How can I launch an ecommerce website with WordPress on AWS in minutes?

The guidance employs an AWS CloudFormation template so you can setup your website in minutes. A popular open-source website platform plug-in (WordPress) is used so you can customize your website (without learning how to code) and leverage popular themes. If you need more control over your website’s design, the guidance also installs a plug-in for Elementor—a website builder which provides more flexibility on WordPress themes and layouts.

To enable online sales, the guidance automatically installs a plug-in for WooCommerce—a popular open-source ecommerce platform. It can be used to create product catalogs, manage inventory, accept payments and integrates with most suppliers. Lastly, the guidance installs a plug-in for WP Statistics so you can track website traffic and user data.

Additionally, the guidance is configured to provide you affordable, and predictable monthly pricing—website instance is priced at standard $5 USD/month, with 1 GB of RAM, 1 virtual CPU, 40 GB of storage, and 2 TB of data transfer. These costs do not account for any additional WordPress plug-ins you may install. If you need more capability, you can customize the CloudFormation template to pick the next size of Amazon Lightsail instance (for example, $10/month with 2 GB of RAM, 60GB SSD, 3 TB of data transfer). The above prices are subject to change, please refer to Lightsail pricing for the latest updates.

How does it work?

Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and AWS Partners that serve SMBs can use the Simple ECommerce Website guidance to quickly setup an ecommerce website presence with predictable monthly pricing. The guidance comes with code assets you can modify or use as-is. Additionally, you can use the implementation guide to get started. The guidance deploys the following architecture into your account that enables your website and ecommerce capabilities.

High-level Architecture Overview

1. Website content is served through an Amazon CloudFront instance hosted in Amazon Lightsail (Lightsail). Amazon CloudFront reduces latency and improves security.
2. All resources are managed in Lightsail, including compute and storage, and comes with predictable pricing per month.
3. WordPress Administrator credentials are created, stored and retrieved from AWS Secrets Manager. AWS Secrets Manager securely encrypts and protects your credentials.
4. Custom domains and secure socket layer (SSL) can be configured in Lightsail and the customer’s domain registrar.
5. WordPress plugins (WooCommerce, Elementor, and website usage analytics) are automatically installed and activated in the customer’s WordPress instance.
6. The website instance is now created. The website can be logged into with the username and password created in Step 3.

For more details on bringing in your own domain review the step-by-step workflow. You now have a website on AWS through Lightsail with ecommerce capabilities. You can login and start to customize your website.

Conclusion

With the Guidance for Launching a Simple Ecommerce Website with WordPress on AWS, you can now create digital channels for selling and interacting with your customers. This guidance automatically setups the website instance, login, and plug-ins without manual technical work.

Get started with the Guidance for Simple Ecommerce Website on AWS now and create your online presence today.

Learn more from your SMB peers in industries such as travel, healthcare, media, finance and more. Seek inspiration and get exclusive offers in the AWS Connected Community.