How African Cartel Tripled Art Listings with WooCommerce

Background

African Cartel launched with a focus on highlighting the work of talented African artists. The initial build used the Listings theme by WooThemes and relied on the Cart66 plugin for selling a small number of art pieces. In the first eight months, the team tested several e-commerce add-ons, including WP Commerce and Jigoshop. While each option offered certain advantages—like simple setup or robust carts—they all fell short in one area or another. Managing product variations, handling shipping rules, and creating a smooth user experience were constant challenges. As the number of artworks increased, the limitations in bulk importing and interface efficiency became more visible, and the site owners needed a more flexible solution that could grow with their vision.

Choosing WooCommerce

When WooCommerce emerged from beta, the project leaders opted to test it on their own site. They could push code to a development server without risking user experience, and receiving feedback from real users helped refine the interface. Rather than migrating dozens of items, they started small: only the handful of products already live. Early tests proved the plugin handled product variations cleanly and supported multiple extensions. Soon, with the CSV product importer extension, importing hundreds of new artworks became trivial. This shift allowed the site to expand its catalog rapidly, moving from a limited test set to a vibrant marketplace of dozens more pieces overnight.

Theme Migration and Customization

The team then set out to refresh the site design. The Listings theme was ideal for showcasing artists, but it separated people and products awkwardly. Switching to the Argentum theme offered a fresh, clean look and responsive layouts. To avoid losing the custom “Artists” post type and taxonomies, the developers wrote a simple plugin that reactivated the content builder schema even when the Listings theme was offline. With that in place, they copied over archive and single templates into Argentum. The consistent file structure across WooThemes products made it easy to port navigation elements from the Emporium theme and define new page templates. meshing ease-of-use with solid features is what sets this setup apart.

Design and Styling with LESS

To speed up style tweaks and maintain consistency, the team adopted LESS for dynamic styling. Instead of hand-editing long CSS files, they defined variables and mixins to control colors, spacing, and responsive breakpoints. This approach let them adjust the site’s tone—from a colorful background fitting township art to a more minimalist palette—by changing just a few lines of code. Within hours, they had built new page templates that looked great on desktop and mobile. The streamlined workflow saved time on each release and kept styling errors to a minimum.

Building Custom Extensions

As real-world traffic grew, so did the need for specialized shipping rules. The team used the WooCommerce Shipping Table extension to define weight-based rates by region, but entering dozens of rates in one big grid was slow. Using feedback from their live store, they optimized the interface in version two of the extension and added row duplication features to speed data entry. Next came the Product to Media Link extension, a small plugin that lets editors attach art portfolio images directly to products. This bridged the gap between blog content, artist profiles, and the shop. Plans are under way to display each artist’s available works directly on their profile pages.

Results and Next Steps

With WooCommerce powering sales, African Cartel has nearly tripled its range of artworks. Product management feels smooth, and site visitors can view and purchase pieces with fewer clicks. PayPal remains the primary payment gateway, and the team plans to integrate a South African option once a reliable currency converter is available. The move to LESS for styling and the adoption of custom plugins has given them confidence to grow farther. Upcoming features include tighter content-to-product links and on-page purchase calls to action for each artist. The project continues to evolve, but the current stack scales and adapts in ways it could not before.