How to work with WooCommerce in 2019

WooCommerce has become one of the most popular choices to go with WordPress if you want to sell online. Since it is open-source it can be downloaded and added for free but there are additions you can purchase to add onto WooCommerce to make your life easier or give you an option that WooCommerce does not have. So if you want an inexpensive alternative to having a shopping cart on your website then use WordPress (which is great for marketing) and WooCommerce.

To install WooCommerce first log into your WordPress account and click on Plugins > Add New like below.

Next, type in ‘WooCommerce’ into the keyword search in the upper right-hand corner (1). Then click the ‘Install’ button (2).

Then click on the ‘Activate’ button to activate it.

Once you activate WooCommerce you are taken to the store setup page where you can enter in the following. Don’t worry you can skip this step if you like and enter it in later if you don’t have all of the information on hand.

• Where is your store based?
  (enter in the country where your store resides)
• Address
  (Enter the address where your store is located so your shipping calculator is accurate)
• What type of products do you plan to sell?
  (You are given three choices, [physical, digital, and both]. For physical they are products that you can handle with your hands. For digital they are products that you can download like music and software.)

The next step is to set up what you will use for accepting payments. As of 2019, the choices available to you are Stripe, PayPal, and offline payments. Click on the little slider icon to the right to enable or disable the option.

Step Three takes you to a screen where you set up what type of shipping to hookup. Out of the box for WooCommerce in 2019, there is only free shipping and flat rate shipping where you can choose how much to charge for shipping depending upon the zone (location) that you want to ship too. If you want to use FedEx or USPS there are extensions that you can get for free or pay for to enhance WooCommerce.

Below this is the option to print shipping labels at home if you want. If enabled it is recommended to install the plugin ‘Jetpack’ which is a very useful all-in-one plugin to help secure your website, crunch images to save space, automatically post to social media accounts, etc.

The next screen that shows up is the ‘Recommended’ portion of setting up WooCommerce.

Here you can choose to install these other programs to help with your WooCommerce store.

• Storefront Theme
  (Highly recommended from me! Create a ‘Child Theme’ of this template so that when it updates to the latest version you do not lose any of your work. The layout of a shopping cart is already set up for you with this them.)
• Automated Taxes
  (Let WooCommerce and Jetpack do the work for you.)
• MailChimp
  (If you plan to have a newsletter or want to start an email campaign then MailChimp is the way to go. Although MailChimp can be confusing at first it is powerful to have on your side.
• Facebook
  (Woocommerce sets up pixel tracking for marketing, messenger, catalog, syncs, etc.
• Instagram
  (Instagram is not available as of May 17th, 2019 yet.)

When you click on ‘Continue’ at the bottom the checked selections will be automatically installed for you.

If you chose to use JetPack as one of the options you will be asked to create an account by signing up or you can just use your Google Login to make things go easier and faster.

After that your WooCommerce is ready. You will be taken to the screen below where you will have the following options available to you.

• Sign up for a newsletter with WooCommerce
  (Receive emails for tips and the latest updates.)
• Create a single product
  (Manually create your first product.)
• Import several products
  (Use a spreadsheet to upload several hundred or even a thousand products at once.)
• Visit Dashboard
  (This is a quick overview of products sold, awaiting payments, customer information, etc.)
• Review Settings
  (Take a look at how you set up WooCommerce and extra settings that you can do to fine-tune things.)
• View and Customize
  (From here you can customize the look of the store by choosing colors, adding a logo, etc.)

I will go over how to add a single product in Woocommerce in a future post. Also, I will show you how to import several products as well.

Save this post and come back when I update it with links on how to do the steps in more detail such as adding products.

Michael