WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add an e-commerce store to your WordPress website. Using the WooCommerce plugin, you can sell products and services on your WordPress website.
It helps you with making things like products, sales, and services affordable and accessible. You can sell digital and physical products, manage inventory and shipping, take secure payments, and sort taxes automatically.
It’s by far the best-designed and most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress and is the most popular eCommerce solution across all websites.
Install and Setup WooCommerce in WordPress
Our woocommerce expert team has prepared step by step guide on how to install WooCommerce in WordPress.
WordPress Setup
First, you need to make sure that WordPress is up and running before proceeding with the WooCommerce setup. It’s really easy to install WordPress on any web hosting. You just need to download the latest WordPress version from here WordPress.org and follow its simple steps which literally take five minutes.
Many of the hosting providers also give their customers features like one-click WordPress install where their hosting control panel can install and set up WordPress for you with ease. Once it’s ready you need to check if the server requirement for WooCommerce are met.
WooCommerce Installation
Go through these simple steps to install WooCommerce:
1. Log into your WordPress site and go to Plugins -> Add New
2. On that page search for ‘WooCommerce’
3. Now click on ‘Install Now’ button which will install the plugin
4. Once it’s installed you click on ‘Activate Now’ and it will bring you to ‘WooCommerce Wizard’ to help you setup your online shop
5. From here you can go through WooCommerce’s key settings using which you can define and set criteria you want for your online shop. You’ll want to go through the guide straightaway and fill in all the details relevant for you and you are ready to create products for your store
WooCommerce Setup
There are many tailored options available in WooCommerce so that you can boost conversion rate of your online shop by configuring your site visitor’s checkout process.
- Payment Gateways – You can take payments with methods like checks, cash on delivery, bank transfer or PayPal & Stripe which supports credit cards with WooCommerce.
- Custom Checkout Process – You have complete control over your store with country specific selling options, guest checkout and forcing checkout to secure page only to customize checkout process.
- Default Currency – There are wide range of currencies available for you to select the default currency for your online store. You can setup your store with multiple currencies as well.
- Redirect Cart – Redirect customer to shopping cart page to review products after they have added a product to the cart.
Inventory Control of Products
You can easily set up products with multiple options like colors and size, each product with its own specific attributes, images, and details that are visible on the front pages. You need to hire WordPress experts if you need any customization done on product pages.
- Product Types – WooCommerce supports Simple Product, Grouped Product, External Product, Variable Product or Virtual/Downloadable Product.
- Inventory – It has all the options for inventory management to help you streamline your catalogue management such as Stock levels, allow backorders, hide out of stock products, email notifications when any product’s stock level is low or item sold out and much more.
Easy Shipping
With help of WooCommerce you can easily get your products to customer’s doorstep. There are many shipping options available for you to setup shipping of products to your customers with very minimum efforts possible!
- Shipping Options – WooCommerce provides shipping options which are built-in to provide Flat rate, International Shipping, Local delivery, or Local pickup. And you can also provide lowest shipping rate automatically based on your customer’s address.
- Shipping Calculations – Based on customer’s address it can calculate shipping rates automatically once a shipping destination is entered with help of in-built Shipping Calculator in shopping cart. Also your customers can choose to ship to their Billing Address or to a different Shipping Address.
Tax Management
Applying correct set of Tax can be very stressful for online shop but WooCommerce can simplify that process for you with wide range of options which are designed to make handling taxes very easy for you.
- Tax Management – WooCommerce has in-built functionality to handle all taxes on your sales. You can define the tax rates and also control all the tax rates assigned on your shipping charges with variety of options like custom tax rates, tax rates by zones and geo-location tax rates.
Search Engine Optimization
You need to stay updated with current trends of market and generate more traffic and sales on your online shop to stay ahead of the competition. With help of WordPress SEO you can optimize your web shop for SEO.
- WordPress SEO – As WooCommerce is based on WordPress, you can use available options in WordPress to get all the benefits of WordPress SEO. With key SEO options, your WooCommerce store can get a significant SEO advantage when you hire woocommerce SEO experts.
- Coupons and Discounts – You can easily add coupon codes for your customers to get pretty discounts.
- Reviews – It will help to increase conversion rate so you should have a strategy to receive maximum positive customer reviews on your website. Woocommerce has default product review functionality so that you customers can easily leave reviews.
Statistics & Reports
Once you start selling products you will need reports for your sales. WooCommerce provides you advanced reports for you to track what you’re selling, identify trends and help you analyze your sales data so you can plan your online shop’s growth.
- Store Dashboard – With built-in dashboard you can take a quick look on your traffic, sales, orders, and sales summary.
- Reports – Easily get your gross and net sales and print reports with WooCommerce reports.
- Analyzing – Plan your shop’s growth by analysing sales trend on your web shop. You can add google analytics and webmaster tools to your website to gather detailed data.
Customer Management
With WooCommerce’s customer management tool you can bring your new customers to become regular customers by simple signup options available on checkout pages.
- Accounts and Passwords – WooCommerce inherits WordPress registration to provide your customers easy signup with auto generate passwords and use customer’s email address for username for smooth and better shopping experience.
Your customers will be encouraged to create accounts which make it easy to access previous orders, reorder, order from saved wishlist and save unlimited addresses.
Easy Mobile E-Commerce
Approx. 1.2 billion people are in habit of using their smartphones to access the internet daily. Trinity Digital Marketing publication reports that in the US, nearly half of the population uses smartphones to connect to the internet. It has been gaining popularity with time but still a vast majority of ecommerce owners and retailers are unaware of its tremendous influence.
With responsive WooCommerce themes, you can make sure that your customers have a great shopping experience on your website regardless of the devices they are using to shop from.
All the great woocommerce features we just mentioned and many more are features are bundled with core plugins of WooCommerce which are capable to help you set up your own e-commerce online shop from scratch.
WooCommerceTheme
Now that you have set up your online shop with the help WooCommerce it’s time to bring your customer experience up to one level with the theme for your store.
WordPress has its own themes available for WordPress and WooCommerce compatible both of which are WooThemes. You can easily find themes by going into Appearances -> Themes and there you can search for themes in the WordPress theme collection or upload your own theme and then just need to activate it.
It was really easy, right?
If you need any further assistance with your Woocommerce website, contact us today.