March 10, 2017

Creating a Store with WooCommerce

So you want to create a WooCommerce store to sell physical and/or digital products on WordPress? WooCommerce is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It was designed for small to medium-sized online sellers using the WordPress CMS Platform Launched in 2011. WooCommerce quickly became the number one e-commerce platform on WordPress because of its simplicity to install and because it wasn’t a ridiculously large complicated mess like most of the others, because it allowed users to install for free, the core plugin and pay annually for add-ons. In 2015 Automattic (The primary creator of WordPress) purchased WooCommerce and have been making improvements ever since.

What Can you Sell with WooCommerce?

With WooCommerce you can sell Physical Products, Digital Products, and Downloadable Products. Pretty much anything. Wat works best is unique products, because you are not hampered by competition.

Types of Products

Physical Products
Digital Products
Downloadable Products

Minimum Requirements

With any e-Commerce platform, you will be required to have a minimum amount of content for each product. In this case, you will need to get together the following for each product.

Title: Name of Product (100 characters or less)
Description: Description of the product (for good SEO you should have around 300 words for the main description)
Short Description: The short description of the product should be one short paragraph that best describes the product people are looking to buy.
Pricing: What is the pricing of the product? You can also have timed Sale Prices (expire ofter certain date and time)
Product Feature Image: Images are extremely important to how your store will look, and you should make sure all images for every single product are exactly the same dimensions. You can also have a gallery of images with each product for people to browse through.
Purchase Note: This is what the user will see for each product after they make their purchase. You can have a generic one for each product of you may customize each product with a special note. An example maybe. “Thank you for purchasing our Flumolox Hair Kit. You order has been received and will be processed for delivery. Please allow 10 working days to receive this purchase”.

Shipping

WooCommerce has overhauled the Shipping System and although it is still complicated (easier than before) you can quickly learn how to setup shipping. One thing you have to understand the primary reason people leave shopping carts is because of surprises. So, I always recommend no shipping costs (included it in your price) for shipping within your own country. You can set up shipping prices by country, by product type, and even local shipping by Zip (Postcode)

Payment Processing

PayPal Standard and Stripe come pre-installed with Woo Commerce. So you will need an account with either one of you want to use these processing types. Users do not need an account with either to make a purchase (although it is easier) by credit card. You can also purchase an array of add-ons (annual fees of around ($30-90 USD) for each. Add-ons support most major banks (they charge you as well) and credit card processing organizations like Authorize.net.

Add-Ons

You can purchase add-ons for almost anything like Accounting Systems, Shipping, Payment processing, Labels etc.

Some Sample Stores