WordPress is the most common website builder online, and they often have very useful plugins that add features to your website or connect your website to third party systems. One of our clients, Chris James Cellars, had a WordPress website, but also had a completely separate site for their OrderPort website. This meant that their website was almost completely on the OrderPort domain name, which is not great for their website’s ranking in Google.
OrderPort: Shopping Cart for Wineries
OrderPort.net provides a comprehensive suite of software solutions specifically designed for wineries to enhance their direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales and operations. Their offerings include point-of-sale systems, wine club management, eCommerce solutions, and reservation systems. These tools are aimed at improving customer experience and operational efficiency within the wine industry.
OrderPort’s platform supports modern payment solutions, including split payments and card-on-file capabilities, making transactions smoother and more versatile for winery customers. Additionally, the platform integrates seamlessly with various CRM systems to streamline customer management and enhance engagement through loyalty programs and targeted marketing efforts.
Moreover, OrderPort provides robust compliance features, ensuring wineries adhere to sales tax regulations and other legal requirements. The integration with partners like Vinoshipper further simplifies the DTC sales process, allowing wineries to maximize their reach and efficiency.
Why Do You Need a WordPress Plugin?
Unfortunately, OrderPort’s largest shortcomings stem from their limited customization capabilities and subpar SEO settings. One of the most significant issues is that website pages hosted on OrderPort must reside on an orderport.net subdomain, which severely hampers your main website’s SEO potential. Additionally, OrderPort’s API is cumbersome, making it difficult to retrieve and display product details seamlessly on other platforms. These limitations restrict the flexibility and effectiveness of your online presence, impacting both user experience and search engine rankings. Our custom plugin addresses all these problems by integrating OrderPort information directly into your WordPress site, enhancing customization, improving SEO, and ensuring a seamless display of product information.
Goal: Integrate OrderPort Information into WordPress
Our goal with this project was to take as much information that is stored in our Orderport account, and display it on our WordPress website. This had quite a few challenges, but we succeeded in displaying almost all of their important product information on their website! The client continues to use OrderPort for the shopping cart system, but all of the product information has been added to the WordPress website.
OrderPort WordPress plugin features:
- Detailed Individual Wine Product Pages: Automatically retrieves and displays comprehensive wine information from OrderPort, ensuring product pages are always up-to-date.
- Full OrderPort Category Pages: Syncs category pages from OrderPort to WordPress, providing a consistent and comprehensive browsing experience.
- Robust Search Functionality: Allows users to search for wines and products easily, with search results dynamically updated from OrderPort.
- Useful OrderPort Widgets: Includes shortcodes that display dynamic content such as featured products and special offers, enriching the user experience with relevant, current information.
- Customized Design: Tailors the plugin to match your existing theme or brand, ensuring a cohesive and professional look across your site.
Here are the various issues that our custom plugin was able to solve:
What Our Custom OrderPort WordPress Plugin Does:
Individual Wine Product Pages
In our solution for Chris James Cellars, OrderPort remains the primary platform where the client uploads pictures, text, and detailed information about their wines. Our custom plugin automatically retrieves this information from OrderPort and displays it on the WordPress site. This seamless integration ensures that the WordPress site always has the most current product information without requiring duplicate data entry. This includes product quantities, stock settings, shipping settings, etc.
By dynamically displaying detailed individual wine product pages, we provide customers with comprehensive descriptions, images, and specifications directly on the main website, enhancing user experience and improving SEO by hosting rich, relevant content.
OrderPort Category Pages in WordPress
Our system allows for full OrderPort category pages to be integrated within the WordPress site. The client manages categories and updates content within OrderPort, which our plugin then automatically fetches and displays on the WordPress site. This setup ensures that category pages are always up-to-date, providing a seamless browsing experience for users. By consolidating all category information on the WordPress site, we maintain a consistent and comprehensive user experience, improving site usability and supporting better SEO by keeping all relevant content within the primary domain.
Robust Search Functionality
To enhance the user experience further, our custom plugin includes robust search functionality that integrates directly with OrderPort. As the client updates product details in OrderPort, our system automatically retrieves and indexes this information, making it searchable on the WordPress site. This feature allows customers to quickly find specific wines and products, improving site usability and satisfaction. The integration ensures that search results are always up-to-date with the latest product information, enhancing user engagement and reducing bounce rates, which contributes positively to the site’s SEO.
Useful OrderPort Widgets
In addition to the primary features, we developed useful OrderPort widgets to enhance the functionality of the WordPress site. These widgets, implemented as shortcodes, display dynamic content such as featured products, special offers, and upcoming events. By pulling information directly from OrderPort, these widgets ensure that the displayed content is always current and relevant. The widgets are flexible and can be easily placed on any page, enriching the website with engaging and informative content, thereby improving the overall user experience and keeping the site vibrant and up-to-date.
Example of OrderPort Shortcode in WordPress:
- Weekly Wine Flight: The “Weekly Wine Flight” section was not rendering properly, causing a significant disconnect between the client’s offerings and their website presentation. Our custom plugin resolved this, ensuring that the Weekly Wine Flight is displayed just how the client wanted it. This can be easily customized by our developers:
Before, on OrderPort: we were unable to display the weekly flight of wines along with other page content.
After, on WordPress: We created a WordPress shortcode to easily display OrderPort Categories on WordPress pages!
Get this Plugin for Your WordPress Website
We are custom developers who created this plugin specifically for Chris James Cellars. If you are a winery using OrderPort and would like to integrate your OrderPort information into your WordPress website, we invite you to contact us for implementation. This plugin can streamline your operations and enhance your online presence by automatically syncing your OrderPort content with your WordPress site. For more details, please reach out to us.
We are available for new projects.
