How to setup e commerce site using woocommerce

How to Setup E-commerce Site Using WooCommerce WooCommerce is a free and open source WordPress plugin, developed by WooThemes developers in 2011. With the report that 30% of the online e-commerce website employed WooCommerce on their site, we can say, it has become one of the most popular and the most customisable platform for e-commerce.

Online buying and selling of the goods have been simplified with the introduction of WooCommerce in the market. You can use your ideas to create an aesthetic online store. With the use of WooCommerce, you can manage and measure the performance of your store more conveniently. Hence, if you are thinking of starting your own e-commerce website, stop hunting here and there, and quickly download the WooCommerce WordPress Plugin.

How to get started with WooCommerce?

Making your own e-commerce website will be easier if you are familiar with WordPress.

Don’t freak out if you are a complete beginner. Here, we have prepared a complete guide to commence your online store without a fuss.

Choose Your Host and Domain Name

You have to contact a company that provides a domain name and host your site. WordPress.org is all about the self-hosted site.

Install WordPress

WordPress installation process is just a 5-minute process if followed properly.  

Install WordPress zip file from org Follow 5 minutes install (step 2) instruction

Select a suitable theme

You have to pick a suitable e-commerce theme. You can find both free theme or WordPress Premium theme (paid).

You can download storefront theme, storefront child theme (developed by WooCommerce) or any other e-commerce theme, WooCommerce supports.

The Storefront and storefront child are also free theme but, you have to pay for their extended functionality.

You can get a number of WooCommerce Themes on the internet.

Activate WooCommerce

Next step is to activate your WooCommerce plugin in WordPress. But, how? Let’s go through these simple steps. 

Create a free WooCommerce Account

Sign up to create a free account at WooCommerce.com. 

Download the plugin

Download a zip file of WooCommerce. Then, go to your WordPress dashboard to install your plugin. Go to: Dashboard> Plugins> Add New> Upload. After that select your downloaded file and install on WordPress. Finally, click Activate to initiate WooCommerce on your site. 

Search your WooCommerce Plugin within your website

At first, visit your site and go to your dashboard. Then, search for the downloaded plugins by Plugins> Add New> Search Plugins. Type “WooCommerce” to search and finally, install and activate the plugin.

Now, your WooCommerce plugin is ready to use.

Extend WooCommerce Functionality

For the user’s compatibility, WooCommerce is provided with inbuilt features. However, these features are not fully sufficient. The user needs to install the extension for advanced functionality. WooCommerce extended features are Subscriptions, Bookings, Memberships, Product Add-Ons, Product Pricing and discounts, Shipping, Payment Gateways and much more.

Subscriptions

It allows you to maintain relation with your customer and to analyse the behaviour of your customer. Some popular subscription plugins are WooSubscriptions, WooCommerce Subscription Download.

Bookings

This plugin allows the customer to book services or reserve appointments. The user’s favourite booking plugins include WooCommerce Booking,

Memberships

It allows full access to the member to use service that is restricted for free. WooCommerce Memberships and Group for WooCommerce are the popular ones.

Product Add-Ons

It helps the customer to customise their purchase with a few clicks. Product Add-Ons is a popular plugin.

Shippings

With the use of this plugin, you can provide better international shipping and delivery services to your end user. Plugins like Shipping easy and ship station are free. Paid plugins are United States Postal Service, Ups, FedEx, Australia Post, Per Product Shipping and much more.

Payment Gateways

You can easily sell your product through online and receive money from the corresponding customer with the use of payment gateway plugins. PayPal, PayPal Powered by Braintree, Authorize.Net, Stripe, Amazon payments, PayFast and Klarna are the popular WooCommerce free plugins.

For more WooCommerce plugins you can visit WooCommerce Extensions.

Features that relate WooCommerce with E-Commerce WooCommerce is a good platform for any online store. How can we say that?

We don’t have to search its reason because the features of WooCommerce speak itself about that fact. Let’s have a look on WooCommerce’s features.

Mobile friendly

WooCommerce is built for WordPress platform. So, it also beholds responsive features. It ensures the look of any product on the mobile is same as that on the desktop. This feature supports user to manage their online store from anywhere at any time without much effort from the phone.

Sell anything, anywhere

WooCommerce made the selling of products much easier. You can sell any products from real goods to software products. You can set up your store using your fingertips and sell your products. You can easily take an online order of the product and provide international delivery of goods through shipping (extended feature) with an easy gateway payment system.

Good Customer support

WooCommerce provides dedicated customer team to support their customers. The customer can ask any question on the forum and developer are there to help them. Besides that, they provide

documentation that covers basic topics like how to convert your website into an online store, how to customise the store, WooCommerce cookies, SSL, etc.

Flexible

WooCommerce provides flexibility in terms of managing products, payment accessibility, template customisation and much more. The user can easily add new pages and categorise them.

They can include any kind of product and categorise them accordingly. WooCommerce POS solution provides purchasing flexibility to the buyer by accepting different kinds of payment.

The user can easily add their required feature through customisation of templates/design.

Scalable

Scalability means to scale up the size of the website as your requirement. And, WooCommerce attains this feature. You are free to add your goods from hundreds to thousands and sell them per your customer’s need.

Easy to Analyse

Analysing data is the best way to track the behaviour of the site and its customer.

WooCommerce integrates the feature of Reporting and Analyse data.

You don’t have to put an extra effort on tracking your website since WooCommerce provides a clean pie chart of total sales. This data helps you to analyse net and gross revenue you’ve earned.

You can also integrate your site with other third party analytics like Google Analytics, KissMetrics, and Zapier.

SEO for WooCommerce website

SEO is the popular term that we hear from small business website to huge business website.

Because more traffic attention makes your website to add value on the web. Then, is it possible to have a good SEO for the website using a WooCommerce plugin?

Definitely, yes.

Since WooCommerce also uses WordPress platform which is SEO-specific, we can say your site will be SEO-friendly. You can use Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress and change every detail of your website to be more SEO-friendly. With the use of this plugin, you can easily optimise the content and boost the performance of your site.

Good SEO means a high rank in the search engine which eventually results in the rate of the customer.

At the end, Having a thought to start your own business is very good. Your will along with your creativity leads to be a successful person. So, why don’t you try it with the e-commerce website?

I hope, this article gives you an idea of establishing your e-commerce site using WordPress plugin “WooCommerce”. If you have any trouble of using WooCommerce you can ask me in the comment section.