Adding a plugin like WooCommerce to your WordPress website can be an effective and logical way to sell your business’ products. WooCommerce, now newly known as “Woo” according to their recent rebrand, allows you to push your products to website visitors, allowing them to easily make online purchases.
WooCommerce (Woo) is a great e-commerce plugin due to its frontend simplicity, and general proficiency in regards to selling products on your site. WordPress can sometimes complicate the process of adding plugins. Regardless of the tutorials provided, business owners can still find themselves confused. If you’re running low on time, feel free to give us a call or schedule a meeting with us, and we can add WooCommerce to your website for you! We’ve worked on dozens of e-commerce websites with a variety of businesses over the years. We’d be happy to help! In the meantime, let’s clarify some issues you may be having when it comes to adding WooCommerce (Woo) to your WordPress website!
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Step 1: Get Started with WooCommerce
After activating WooCommerce, an on-screen launch setup will appear, making the setup as easy as possible. There are several pages necessary to add to your website in order to have a fully functional and operational e-commerce platform on your website. The pages that are necessary, which WooCommerce assists you in creating automatically, are Shop, Cart, Checkout, and My Account. After this, WooCommerce will prompt you to set up store locale, which essentially is filling in demographic information such as where your store is based and which currency is used in your store. Once powering through the initial setup, it is time to select a payment method.
Step 2: Choose Your Payment Method
If you want to have a truly operational online store on your website, being able to accept online payments is absolutely crucial. When it comes to WooCommerce, there are two common options to choose from: PayPal and Stripe. WooCommerce provides other options as well, which are industry-specific platforms to accept payments, so it is important to research which is right for you.
When we created a WooCommerce website for Huckleberry’s Candies’, we also implemented Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay as payment options. You can see how Google Pay pops up at the top of the billing page below.
This gives customers flexible, convenient options for payment when they checkout. Having several payment options makes the customer journey simpler more the client and encourages users to fully convert.
Step 3: Setting Up Shipping Options
Here is where you’ll add your shipping zones (regions to which you’ll ship products) and shipping methods (for the customer to choose from when checking out). On the front end of the website, customers will only see the shipping methods once they check out. You can decide if you want to offer free shipping, a flat rate, expedited shipping, or a shipping cost based on the weight of the package. WooCommerce offers an integration that calculates the shipping cost for the customer based on the weight and dimensions of the products in the customer’s cart. Once you have the shipping methods decided, it’s time to add your products!
Step 4: Add Your First Product
If you are adding an e-commerce element to your site, it is quite obvious you are going to need products to sell! To add a product to your storefront, go to the dashboard of your website, then click “products” followed by “add products”. From here, you will see a standard WordPress content editing screen. From here, fill out your product’s information accordingly, keeping in mind each category of products you sell. Once you are done setting up your product’s information, hit the publish button and just like that you have added your very first product!
By using WooCommerce you will have fully functioning product pages that include prices, image of products, and an “Add to Cart” button. Here is an example of a product page that we created on the Woodmans of Essex website:
This page also includes price ranges for products and quantity choices.
As you can see on the Polcari Coffee’s WooCommerce website pictured below, using WooCommerce still allows you to keep your website’s branding:
Though Woodman’s of Essex and Polcari’s are both using WooCommerce, it is customized to look different on each website. You will see that we also included a Related Products section that appears on every product page, recommending similar products in that category to customers.
Work with Compete Now for Your New WooCommerce Website
Adding an e-commerce element can take your business to the next level, giving you the capability to sell products online, as opposed to simple in-store transactions. At Compete Now, we’re no strangers to e-commerce website development. For the past decade, we’ve worked with clients to design their websites from the ground up and upgrade clients’ current websites with new features. For help implementing your WooCommerce plugin, reach out to us today!
