My Mum and Step Father run a skin care business in Australia called Skinglow. They are the Australian distributors for a Canadian company, Metrin. I’d been meaning to write about setting up their new website with a store in WordPress, so here it is!

The product lines are quite straight forward with Metrin for Men, Metrin for Women and some professional hair and body products. Therefore, there was no need for a complex catalogue and shopping cart combination. This pushed me towards WordPress and a plug-in called MarketPress.

There was a bit of trouble getting the tax situation to work correctly, as the plug-in is not Australia specific. However, we managed to get a working solution. While not ideal, it seemed that the developers were not able to manage exactly what we needed in the time frame we had.

The whole setup of the site was quite straight forward apart from the tax problem. I had a graphic designer create the header and my Step Father entered the product information. The total elapsed time was about 3 weeks, but the actual effort it was more like 1 week. We hosted the site on Amazon Web Services with the server running Amazon Linux.

Overall, I’d say that WordPress and MarketPress provide an adequate solution to get a web store up and running. At least it is working quite well for an Aussie skin care company called Skinglow!