With 30% of the web powered by it, 10 times higher than its nearest rival, WordPress is the pre-eminent CMS. You can create pretty much any type of website using the platform. However, you want to build an ecommerce store using WordPress you’ll need to use an plugin to setup your ecommerce website. Step forward, WooCommerce.
Not only is WooCommerce the most popular ecommerce plugin available on WordPress, it’s the market leader in online store building, with 42% of ecommerce websites built using WooCommerce.
This should come as no surprise because WooCommerce is:
If that isn't quite enough, you’ll get access to a library of free WooCommerce themes, one of the slickest digital commerce interfaces of any platform out there, and a whole host of training videos, documents, and articles to help you out if your starting your ecommerce business from scratch.
So it’s simple: if you want a successful online business then you can’t ignore WooCommerce.
Are you a budding entrepreneur or seasoned business owner looking to expand your portfolio? Well, you’re looking for a way to join the hugely profitable world of online selling then look no further than the globe’s most adaptable open-source ecommerce platform – WooCommerce.
WordPress owns the internet (almost) and if you want to get access to the enormous earning potential that comes from selling goods/services online then you’ll want to use the number one ecommerce plugin for WordPress.
WooCommerce makes it easy to build an ecommerce website and has a catalogue of benefits:
Whether you’re based in the United States, India, Spain, Indonesia, or the United Kingdom, WooCommerce is there for you to set up your WordPress supported ecommerce business. So, join a global community today with WooCommerce.
While there are so many benefits to selecting WooCommerce to get started in the world of online commerce, our top pick is its relationship with WordPress.
If you’re already familiar with WordPress then it’s a breeze to turn your prowess on the CMS into a WooCommerce store. Of course, if you’ve not used WordPress before it will take you a bit of time to get used to it. However, whichever CMS you choose to set up your store you will still need to familiarise yourself with the system’s quirks and WordPress is extremely beginner friendly.
Check out the video below for more information on the how you can use WordPress and WooCommerce and WordPress to set up an ecommerce store…
It’s important to know that your ecommerce solution is within budget. The price of ecommerce website builders ranges wildly, from free all the way up to many thousands of pounds. Thankfully, WooCommerce is at the lower end of the pricing scale.
WooCommerce is totally free to install and WordPress is completely free to sign-up to.
As this is a self-hosted platform, there are a number of features you will need to pay for in order to start an ecommerce store with WooCommerce:
| How much? |
---|---|
Domain Name | From $0.99 per year |
SSL Certificate | From $3.99 per year |
From $0.99 per year |
GoDaddy is one of the many great sites you are able to buy both a domain name and SSL certificate from, while Tsohot is one of the options for web hosting.
Other costs that you may have to consider are:
WooCommerce is free and you simply can’t argue with that. What that costs you, though, is the need to spend your time and money selecting the features that come as part of package with an online store builder.
As you’d expect from the number one ecommerce platform available through the most popular CMS on the planet, there are a huge range of features that come with the WooCommerce plugin, including:
Before you decide if WooCommerce is the right option for your business, check out the full list of features available.
One of the great plus points about WooCommerce is that you get access to an enormous amount of plugins which can add new features, as well as improve the functionality and performance of your store.
However, this plus point can also be considered something of a downfall. This is because will the base features that come with WooCommerce make it easy to set up your ecommerce brand, if you want to take it to the next level you’ll need to make use of the additional features available and this could cost you.
You’ll be spending a lot of time on your dashboard; it’s the index page for your website and the hub of activity for your ecommerce store.
As it’s so important, the last thing that you want is for your dashboard to be indecipherable. That’s not a problem with WooCommerce, as the WooCommerce dashboard is easy for people at all levels of IT knowledge and experience to grasp.
As a WordPress extension, WooCommerce uses a WordPress dashboard. If you are unfamiliar with how this looks, check out the screenshot below to get a feel for it…
Credit: WooCommerce
While this dashboard has been a staple of website and ecommerce store building for quite some time, there’s nothing dated about it and it remains one of the best examples of what the gold standard is for a simple, flexible, intuitive, fluid, and friendly dashboard looks like.
The standard admin URL for WooCommerce follows the same, simple, set pattern that is used by WordPress: the URL for your website then /admin/
For instance, if your business is www.iloveWooCommerce then then admin URL would be this: www.iloveWooCommerce/admin/
Once you’ve got your WooCommerce store up and running what you’ll find is that, while the dashboard is easy to use, the default reporting features leaves a little to be desired. The reporting options allow you to look at a number of things, including:
Where it misses out is by letting you look at things such as:
All of this is great and a hugely useful feature of WooCommerce.
To be a truly online business you need to access the global market and in order to do this you need an ecommerce store that is accessible for people of various languages. As with many things related to WooCommerce, you can make your website multilingual, as long as you install a plugin.
That plugin is WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML). There three main packages for WPML, offering an ascending scale in pricing and features, along with whether you will need to pay a renewal fee:
You can see the full details on each package by visiting the official WPML website.
WordPress makes it extremely simple to add other team members to your WooCommerce store and there are 4 categories of user that you can add:
If you want to add new team members to to your WooCommerce store and give them their own profile, there is a free plugin which allows you to add team members to your website.
Simply download Our Team and then follow these simple instructions from WooCommerce and you
Credit: WooCommerce
First impressions count[1] and if your ecommerce store doesn’t look the part then you’ll turn your visitors away before you’ve had a chance to convert them into customers. Selecting the right theme is essential if you want to make a good impression and WooCommerce has plenty of themes.
WordPress is the most popular content management system on the planet. Fact. As a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce’s major selling point is that it allows for seamless integration with WordPress and this gives you access to a vast array of content management features . Among the major features are:
It’s extremely easy to add a blog post. Simply head to the blog section of your dashboard, then add in the content. You can preview before you publish it, along with adding your own categories and tags to personalise the content.
For example, you can add a category for blog posts that fall under the banner of marketing, then include tags for details featured in the blog post – such as digital marketing. You can set up your blogs so that they can receive comments from users and you have the option to restrict these comments from being published subject to your approval.
Adding images to your WooCommerce store is a simple process:
Setting up the pages for your WooCoomerce store can be tricky if you don’t have some prior programming knowledge. W recommend that you add on of the number of page editor plugins that you are able to download.
WPBakery Page Builder is an “intuitive drag and drop builder” which makes it easy for you to create the pages you want. However, as with many of the very best plugins and extensions for WooCommerce, it’s not free and will set you back around $54.00 (£41.05).
Your products are what makes your ecommerce store a business. While adding them to your store is pretty straight forward, it is an in depth process and one which requires you to spend time running through the guidelines made available by WooCommerce. This article covers everything.
Where you really get the full functionality from WooCommerce is through the enormous number of plugins and extensions, which cover pretty much everything you could possibly need to run a successful ecommerce business.
There are pages and pages of easy to add extensions available through WooCommerce. Read this article to get a feel for which ones are most popular. However, the best thing to do is to make your way through what’s listed on WooCommerce and decide what you need for your store.
Yes you can and WooCommerce have given clear instructions on how you go about building your own plugin and/or extension.
In order to install a plugin or extension, you will first need to download it. Once you have done this head over to the plugins section in the admin login for your store. You then click add new, then upload plugin.
We spoke earlier about the control that WooCommerce give you over the checkout process and there’s plenty of it. There are lots of details you need to know and these are the most important:
WooCommerce doesn’t charge you a fee when goods are sold through your store. However, that doesn’t mean you definitely won’t be charged a fee each time you sell a product. This is because the payment gateway provider you chose may charge a fee.
These providers are available through WooCommerce and charge the following fees:
For full information on the charges levied by individual providers, review the payments page on WooCommerce’s website.
This will depend on the payment gateway provider you select.
One of the very earliest things you are asked to do when setting up your WooCommerce store is to configure your tax options. You are then able to select whether you want the fees shown during the checkout process to be inclusive or exclusive of taxes.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) are rules that have been put in place by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. This is in order to have a unified and universal standard for data security. It largely relates to transmitting credit card data.
There are two crucial points to be aware of when establishing the PCI-DSS compliance required for your WooCommerce store:
SSL is not provided by WooCommerce. You will need to arrange your own SSL certification.
WooCommerce comes with anti-fraud prevention software. In order to activate it you simply have to follow these steps:
WooCommerce has a simple process for setting up a manual refund:
In order to get your shipping set up with WooCommerce, you need to head over to the Shipping tab in your WooCommerce plugin. Once there, you have a number of steps to complete:
This article covers the full process.
There are are range of different providers that you can select to fulfil your shipping orders, including:
In order to use there services you will need to head to the WooCommerce extensions store and then download the plugin for that provider.
Overall, the process of setting up shipping with WooCommerce is pain free and the options available are good. You also have the facility of adding dropshipping to your store, putting the responsibility of shipping your goods on to the third-party dropshipping company.
Managing your WooCommerce is possible if you are a small operation, one whose inventory can be counted in single digits. In order to do this you will need to enable stock management.
However, in order to manage your inventory this way you need to manually check your products and their stock in order to keep on top of your numbers.
In order to have an efficient system for inventory management, you will need to install a plugin in order to automate the process. As would expect, WooCommerce has a series of options that are able to do this for you, with some of the most popular being:
The range of products the WooCommerce enables you to have in your inventory is very broad and is suitable for basic level ecommerce businesses, all the way up to larger and niche operations. The basic products types available fall into the following categories:
Products are organised via taxonomy and there is no limit set for the number of products that you are able to add to your ecommerce store.
If you have existing products that you need to import (for instance, from a previous ecommerce store you have set up) all you need to do is create a CSV file and then import it into your WooCommerce – it’s that simple.
And if you want to get involved with marketplace selling that’s not a problem, as you are able to sync with Etsy, Amazon, and eBay, so long as you download the right plugin.
While there are plenty of great things about WooCommerce’s inventory management, the most important thing you will need to do is get the select the right plugin to help manage the process for you, as trying to do it manually just won’t work.
Keeping (within the terms of the GDPR) and maximising the data that you have on your customers is an essential part of evolving your ecommerce business. The reporting facility for WooCommerce has 3 sections of data:
The customer section breaks the data down into two segments:
You can also get your customers IP address via the Customer downloads segment of the Orders section of your reporting.
While this might not seem like a lot it does offer value in helping to manage and market to your customers, with the following being just two examples of how you can use it:
Furthermore, the lack of phone number in the data fields means that you will have to offer your customers email support.
What it also means is that while you have some data available to you, the functionality to carry out marketing and segmentation using the basic WooCommerce profile just isn’t there. Which means that you need to install plugins and extensions. More on that in just a moment.
If you sign-up for the basic WooCommerce and add the minimum of apps and extensions, you’ll find that it’s nowhere near as marketing centric as you need it to be. However, you can add marketing functionality in a range of ways: [1]
why?
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Many more customers abandon their carts then complete their sales. WooCommerce allows you to combat this through a range of options for cart abandonment software that you can add to your ecommerce store, such as:
This plugins don’t come cheap but they could help you to save a fortune in lost revenue for your ecommerce business.
WooCommerce also enables you to add a range of discount codes to reward your customers and entice them back to your ecommerce website, some of the best are:
They are available at a range of prices and can be easily added to your ecommerce business.
While WooCommerce has the functionality in the basic package to add reviews to your ecommerce business. All you need to do to enable this is to follow these steps:
This lets your customers leave both reviews and star ratings of your products.
However, if you want to get even more out of your customer reviews (and you do because your customers trust the recommendations of their peers), there are loads of well reviewed plugins you can add to your ecommerce store, such as:
WooCommerce makes it extremely easy for your customers to review your ecommerce products, all you need to do is make it easy for your customers to leave their reviews.
Because WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, it has a few valuable SEO features that comes as part of the package via the WordPress editor, which makes it easy to manage the following:
Be aware, though, that while meta descriptions can now be 300+ words, WordPress will cut them off after 160 words.
While these things are useful, you won’t get anywhere near making the most of the SEO for your online store if you don’t get the Yoast plugin.
In addition to this, there are a couple of initial SEO weaknesses that you’ll need to fix:
As with other ecommerce options, PPC is available for your WooCommerce website. While there isn’t core integration, the usual channels will integrate with your store. This means that you can add PPC in the form of:
There are a legion of agencies that offer bespoke PPC packages for WooCommerce. However, as with all forms of marketing for you business, do your research carefully before you make any commitment.
While WooCommerce doesn’t come with ready-made social media functionality, there is a lot that you can do with it to make it so. There is an array of extensions and plugins which will help you get a lot more from your online store, such as:
Nothing is closed off as far as social media goes with WooCommerce, you just need to put in the effort and add the functionality to your store.
Email remains the marketing tool with the best response rate. WooCommerce doesn’t have it’s own email marketing software but (you’ve guessed it) there are loads of plugins that can give your ecommerce website this.
It is compatible with:
It’s easy to sync with this software and each allows you to automate your email marketing, along with bringing a range of analytics that you can use to improve the performance of your ecommerce store.
WooCommerce is a self-hosted ecommerce platform. As such, you will need to sort out the hosting and SSL yourself.
WooCommerce have a recommended list of providers they trust based on your ecommerce requirements:
This means that the storage and bandwidth available for your ecommerce website will depend on the provider you select for your hosting solution. It also means that you will need to sort out your email hosting and your DNS.
As we discussed earlier, there are 3 sections to the reporting offered by WooCommerce:
This provides you with some decent data on the products that you’ve sold and the customers who have made a purchase from your ecommerce business. However, what it really lacks is data for your site visitors, along with the in depth reporting capabilities you need to take a granular approach to your business. To achieve this, start with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics syncs seamlessly with WooCommerce, once you have added the plugin to your ecommerce store. You have the option of the free or pro version and WooCommerce have summarised the difference between the two in this comparison report.
If you want to go further than that with your reporting, there are a huge number of plugins available and it’s just a matter of selecting the right one(s) for your ecommerce business.