Costs affiliated with wordpress

Hi Joe,

Wordpress itself is free and open source and so are the plugins, though some do have premium upgrades available to unlock some more in depth features. Wp-e-commerce is one of these plugins but you can still do a hell of a lot with the free version.

I recently just got the wp-e-commerce plugin myself, but I think to make the most out of it you would probably have to sign up for an account with google checkout or a paypal business account or similar payment gateway. However if you just have a normal paypal account I think you can still accept payments. I haven't really had a chance to test it out properly so I can't say for sure exactly what the best gateway option is but I have to say, from what I've seen, it's a pretty full featured plugin with tonnes of options for payment gateways, taxes, currencies, how products are listed and lots more. It's pretty intense to say the least. But I'm sure Matt and Brandon and maybe some of the other community members can give you a little more in depth info then I can about it given my limited exposure to the plugin.

But definitely try out wordpress and that plugin, I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Vin is right about Wordpress being free. You'll need to buy web hosting, but you can get that for as cheap as $10 for the first year from Dreamhost. As for the e-commerce plug-in you have a couple options. The two most popular are Shopp and WP eCommerce. Shopp is $55 for the core, and $25 for each add-in, so you are looking at about $100 to get started with that. WP eCommerce is free, but charges $40-$100 for add-ins. I know it's kind of weird that each plugin has it's own plugins :)

One other thing to consider is the startup fees for a payment gateway (like Authorize.net) and merchant account. You can expect $50-$150 for that. You can start for cheaper if you use PayPal or Google Checkout which are free to get started.