Dear Friends, in today’s article, we will cover points that will help you to build an eCommerce store from scratch. The only pre-requisite for this task is to have a WordPress website. We have already covered how to purchase a domain and hosting in our How to start a blog post. We have also covered how to install WordPress on cPanel in our How to install WordPress on cPanel post. You can go through these posts and set up your WordPress websites in just few minutes.
Table of Contents
Make an eCommerce Store using WordPress
The star of today’s article will be the Woocommerce plugin. For starters, it is an addon plugin for WordPress which helps you set up and run an e-commerce store on WordPress.
Woocommerce is responsible for over 90% of e-commerce stores using WordPress and over 29% of e-commerce stores throughout the internet. This makes it an ideal plugin for us to use and recommend to you all too.
Basic needs of Build eCommerce store
The very first thing to know before Building an eCommerce store is all things you will need to make a complete store. The very basic pre-requisite is only a WordPress website but these are the points that will make your store go from beta stage to production. A few of the important points out of that are listed below:
Payment gateway setup
In order to accept payment from customers in your store, it is important to set up a payment gateway. Payment gateways are just like middle agents which take the money from the client and pass it on to you. Gateways promote standardization and win the trust of users and hence they are really important to be set up and used in place of any direct form of payment.
There are many gateway providers like Stripe, PayPal, and Indian users: Razorpay, Instamojo. Generally setting up gateways simply means creating an account on their website, entering your details, very the details and that should be it.
Plan out on features you need
It is important to be clear from the start on all the features you need in your e-commerce store and what all you will need to incorporate the features in the website. This point is specifically important as many features need a custom workaround and can add up to the cost.
For better understanding, by features, we are pointing out things like:
- Taxes
- Discounts
- Sale
- Affiliate
- Wallet based system
- Shipping rules
Overall, getting these 2 points clear will not only help you complete your store but also avoid your rework time and provide you clarity towards store development. In the upcoming points, we will learn more about woo-commerce.
What is Woocommerce
Woocommerce is a WordPress extension that helps you convert your website into eCommerce. It is free, feature-packed and one of the most supported plugins of the biggest CMS community i.e., WordPress.
woocommerce provides all the basic user pages you need like
- Shop Page: Page to show all of your products
- Product Page: Page for each product with a buy now link
- Cart Page: Page to show users all the products in their cart
- Checkout Page: Page to fill in the shipping, user details, provide payment, and proceed to buy the product
- Thank You, Page: A page that acknowledges user along with providing users order details
- My Account Page: Array of pages that help them to see their order history, change their shipping address, change their saved payment methods, etc.
Woocommerce has many more core features for both admin and user which we will cover in our next point
Features of Woocommerce
Some of the important features which woocommerce provides help you to Build eCommerce Store that are:
- Interface to add/edit/delete products with multiple images and variations
- Online payment handling for products and services.
- Interface to add and manage taxes, shipping with different rules.
- Product rating and review system.
- Support for multiple payment gateways.
- Inventory management.
- Support for digital products and services.
Woocommerce also has over 2000 feature addon plugins which you can use to add new features out of this 2000, more than 1400 are free of cost. In our next step, we will see how you can install Woocommerce on your WordPress website.
How to install Woocommerce
Steps to install Woocommerce on your website are:
- Login to the WordPress admin dashboard of your website.
- Go to Plugins-> Add New and search for ‘woo commerce in the search bar.
- Click on install now for ‘WooCommerce’ and wait for some time to let it install.
- After installing, the button will prompt to ‘activate’ the plugin, click on activate and you will get a screen similar to the one shown below.
- Provide your store details throughout the 5 steps and that’s it. Your Woocommerce store is now good to go!
How to add products to your Site
You can add new products to the store by following the steps mentioned below:
- Go to the admin dashboard and click on Products -> Add New
- Fill in the title and description for the product as shown below
- You can further fill in the prices, sale price, add product images, add inventory amount as shown in the image below
- For a basic product, title, description, prices are the only required fields, you can fill in these details and click on the ‘Publish’ button
- Once you click on ‘Publish’, you can either click on the link below the title bar or ‘View Product’ on the top black bar to view the front-end view of the product.
- Well, that’s it! You have created your first product too! You can further try around all the features for the product and view it in the front end to see on how they look.
Conclusion:
With all the information given in the article, you can Build an eCommerce store on a WordPress website and start right away to sell your products.
If you want to do some advanced setup and learn more about Woocommerce, you can find this amazing article written by the admin team of OnlinewithWP on What is Woocommerce: Everything you need to know to understand and set up Woocommerce in more depth.
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