1-in-3 eCommerce sites across the internet are now powered by the free plugin, WooCommerce. With it’s amazing built-in features, and powerful extendability, it is your perfect choice for your online store.
If you have been thinking about building your online store with WooCommerce, or have just started using it, this post is for you. I will be giving an overview of the features and setup of this powerful plugin so you can get started selling online.
So get ready to dive in as this is probably the longest post you will ever see here on BobWP.
Installing WooCommerce
Installing WooCommerce is as simple as installing any WordPress plugin. Just go to Plugins > Add New and do a search.
Once you have activated the WooCommerce plugin, you can do some basic setup using their Wizard. I would recommend going through it and filling in the info you are able to at this time. It covers some basic stuff that you won’t have to remember to set at a later time. And of course, you can skip any step as well.
Page Setup
WooCommerce has some pages it will install that are specific to its functionality. You will most likely need them all, so I suggest you install them at this point.
Store Locale
These are settings for your location, as well as currency and measurement units that help you calculate shipping costs. At this point WooCommerce will automatically detect your internet provider’s location and fill in the blanks according to that.
Shipping and Tax
Here is where you get to start setting up all the fun stuff. You can choose some basic options initially. If you are unsure of any of this, skip this step and you can revisit it again.
In this screenshot, you see that when you tick some of these boxes, you are asked for additional information. For instance, a flat shipping rate for both domestic and international. Of course, if you have different rates for different shipping methods you will be able to configure those later. The same with additional tax rates.
Payments
There are many payment options and gateways you can use with WooCommerce. PayPal is offered here as it’s built into WooCommerce and is a default payment gateway for many people. At this point, you can also decide if you are going to use any offline forms of payment. There are a few other options that come with WooCommerce without additional extensions. These will be explained in the Payments lesson.
Installation Complete
The final screen lets you know that your store is ready to start setting up. You also have the option to allow WooThemes to collect a bit of data. This is not big brother watching you. It just helps them to see what is working and what isn’t.
You will also get some additional learning resources if you want as well as the chance to jump into creating your first product. And if you are ready to head back to your dashboard, you have that option as well.
It’s Not Always This Simple
You are going to find that all themes are not compatible with WooCommerce out-of-the-box. If this is the case, when you go to activate WooCommerce, you will get this message.
Now they will of course recommend that you consider using a WooTheme because they integrate so well with WooCommerce. But there are also other themes out there built specifically for WooCommerce. I talk about them more and revisit this issue in this lesson.
But if you do click through for theme integration, you will find this.
Now there are a few things to consider at this point.
Are you comfortable adding this code to your themes file?
If you do add the code, and your theme is not a child theme, then if your theme updates, you will lose this customization.
Another example is Genesis child themes. Some work just fine with WooCommerce and others need a plugin to help solve this. This plugin is for this specific reason.
But if you install this plugin and activate it, you will still get this message.
And you will still need to add some code. But at least you will be adding it to your child theme which should not be a problem.
Settings – General
Your general settings may have been partly set up if you used the Wizard after activating WooCommerce. It is broken into a couple of options.
General Options
These settings may have been already filled in when you first activated WooCommerce and ran the Wizard. Your tax rates will be calculated by your base location. You have the option to sell to just specific countries as you may not want to or be able to ship everywhere in the world. The customer address is determined before they enter their address. You have a few options—and can learn more about the Geolocate services— by clicking on the link.
The Store Notice is a site-wide notice that will appear at the top or bottom of each page, depending on your theme. A field to list your message will appear once you have checked the box.
You may choose to advertise some special, but you cannot format the text or have it link to a specific page. It might be more of a simple notice that your store is temporarily unavailable if you are having a technical issue. As you can see in these screenshots, when using it on the Storefront theme, it appears at the bottom.
But it appears at the top when using it with the Canvas theme.
Currency Options
These are straightforward: how the prices will be listed on your site and paid through your payment gateway.
Settings – Products
The Products Settings are separated into four areas: General, Display, Inventory and Downloadable Products. These are global settings for your products and you will set up individual products later in this post.
General
You may have already set up the Measurements with the Wizard. In any case, these will be used to calculate shipping if needed.
You have a few options to choose from for enabling Reviews on your store. By ticking this box you are enabling it storewide. If you plan on allowing reviews on most of your products, I would recommend activating it here.
But if you will have them only on select products, and just a few of them, leave it unchecked. In either case you can activate reviews on specific product pages as well.
You can also choose to require that the reviewer leaves a Rating or not.
Verified owners are customers who are currently logging into their accounts and have purchased a product. So you can opt in to show that a review is made by a verified owner,and only allowing reviews from them as well.
You may want to check out Product Reviews Pro, which allows you to accept product reviews in the same way that you do now, but you can also accept user photos and videos as part of the review, as well as add “review qualifiers”, which are questions about the product in a dropdown (how it fit, if it was comfortable, etc.).
Display
Shop & Product Pages
In the first section you will be controlling how your products display on your Shop page or archive page. This is one of the pages that is generated when you choose to install all WooCommerce pages through the Wizard. By default it will show all of your products.
As you can see in the drop-down menus you have several choices.
Shop Page – You can choose another page for your shop page. This is handy if you have created a unique shop page and want it to link to it instead of the generated one.
Shop Page and Category Display – Options are the same for both of these depending on what you want to display or if you use subcategories.
Product Sorting also gives you more options on how the products on the shop page are sorted.
Add To Cart Behavior
If you would like customers automatically taken to the cart page after they add a product, then check the Redirect to the cart page after successful addition. This option is good if you want your customers to focus more on single purchases.
The second option, Enable AJAX add to cart buttons on archives adds an Add to Cart option on your shop page. This may come in handy if your customers return and you want to give them the option of adding products directly to their cart without visiting the actual product page. Before you add this, think through if it is a good idea to add this or whether it is more of a distraction.
Product Images
This is where you control the product image sizes. Some WooThemes may recommend that you set these for another size, or you can choose to do it yourself. Anytime you do change one of these, as recommended on the page, install the and run the regenerate thumbnails plugin. This will help with image distortion or fuzziness.
Also, depending on other plugins or other themes you might be running, and whether you are showing products through various widgets other than the WooCommerce widgets, the thumbnail size may be controlled by it. So just double check your thumbnails throughout your site.
The lightbox is another option that may work for you. Give it a test and see how it displays with the theme you are using. Again, it may conflict or be overwritten if you are using a plugin that also controls a lightbox for your other images. As always, test to make sure.
Inventory
The Inventory settings are straightforward and give you more control over your online store. One thing here: you will also be able to control inventory on individual products as well. While you are setting these, also check out the single product inventory options so you have a good grasp on your final settings.
Downloadable Products
If you have products for download, you will want to check out these options.
The File Download Method does have some specific options you will want to consider. By default, most people use the Force Downloads. The files are only accessible to customers who purchase them and the direct links are hidden so they cannot share that link with others. This is as opposed to Redirect Only, where the files are not protected from external access. So if you don’t care who finds them and snags them, the latter might be your choice.
The other option is good if you have larger files and want quicker performance. But before using it, make sure your hosting provider supports either X-Sendfile or X-Accel-Redirect.
Settings – Taxes
If you are required to collect sales tax for your products, you will need to set this up. Taxes and tax law can be very confusing, especially when you are figuring out if how to collect the proper tax for where you are selling. WooCommerce has both tax options and the ability to set up these tax rates:
Standard Rates
Reduced Rate Rates
Zero Rate Rates
Tax Options
These are the additional settings you will have for your tax rates. These will be based on where your store is located.
Standard Tax Rates
As you can see from this screenshot, setting up your tax rates involves a number of attributes. You will note that since I gave my location in the Setup Wizard, my local tax is already inserted. You will need to add all appropriate tax rates here or you can also import a CVS file of the rates you need if available.
Reduced and Zero Rate Rates
The tax table for these rates are exactly the same as the Standard Class. But these rates are different and likely you will know if you are using them or not.
Reduced Rate Rates
Sometimes tax rates vary according to the policies of different countries. Reduced rates are offered for some specific items. A good example is grocery products.
Zero Rate Rates
There are also some products where a tax is not applied.
Get Help If Needed
Taxes can be complicated. If you just have a local tax or minimal taxes to collect, you can take the time to set them up in WooCommerce as it accommodates all taxes. But if it gets complicated, I would suggest reaching out to a service that can help you set your taxes and keep them updated as needed. One service that I hear recommended over and over is TaxJar. Check them out and find the best fit for your needs. And if you are selling to the UK and need assistance with the VAT laws, check out Taxamo.
Settings – Checkout
The checkout settings are not overly complicated, but you will need to decide how you are going to accept payments (and what payment gateways you will be using).
First, let’s look at the overall Checkout Options.
Checkout Options
Checkout Process
First, you will choose whether you are going to use coupons, and if multiple coupons are accepted on the same product. You will be setting up your coupons via WooCommerce > Coupons, which we will look at in a bit, but if for any reason you are not seeing the option to add coupons, it’s because the first box is unchecked.
You also can choose to checkout without having to create an account. In most instances you will want accounts created to collect information on your customers, to make it easy for them when they return to your store.
If you are using an SSL (Secure Socket Layer), you will likely need to check this box, which will give you another option.
Checkout Pages
Here you can assign your cart and checkout pages. By default, when you install WooCommerce and allow the Wizard to setup pages for you, these will already be selected. But you also have the option to create your own cart and checkout pages and assign them here.
You will need to create your own Terms and Conditions page. This is pretty obvious since you will have your own. Do a bit of research if you do not already have these put together because you want to make sure you are covering all your bases.
Checkout Endpoints
Endpoints are added to the end of the URL to handle certain actions during the checkout process. At one point, they replaced the shortcodes for WooCommerce. The details of endpoints and how to use them is a bit more complicated than I can give you in a simple explanation. I would recommend you check out the documentation on the WooCommerce site to learn more.
Payment Gateways
When you install WooCommerce, it comes with some basic payment gateways that you can easily set up. You will activate them on their own specific page. Here it will show you which ones you have installed, which are enabled. It also allows to you to drag and drop the order of them, which will change the display of their order on the checkout page.
One thing to note: WooCommerce isn’t limited to the payment gateways only. There are dozens of them available out there depending on your needs and where you are located. If you are using, or considering using, another gateway, check out the extensions here. Once you have installed additional payment gateway extensions, they will also show up here. You can see that I have added the Stripe extension to my own site.
BACS – Bank Transfers
You can easily set up bank or wire transfers with your bank information and share both a description of this payment service, as well as instructions.
Check
If you do accept checks, this gives you the fields necessary to share both instructions and where a person can send the check. This way they don’t have to hunt around your site for your mailing address.
As noted on this page, maybe you don’t take checks, but it can be a great option when you are testing order and order success pages before you go live.
Cash on Delivery
An option in case you do COD’s.
PayPal
PayPal is one of the most popular ways to take payments. It’s especially nice when you are just starting out, as the fees are straightforward and creating an account is quick and simple. There is the option of also using a Sandbox to text the process before going live. There will be some information you will need to get from your PayPal account in order to set this up, and there are advanced options, like being able to process refunds via PayPal.
Simplify Commerce
This is an easy-to-set-up service from MasterCard. Like PayPal, there are no monthly fees, just flat-fees based on the amount of purchase. You need to sign up for an account to use it. This service is only available to businesses based in the United States. So if you don’t see this as an option on your site, it’s because your base location is not in the United States.
Choosing Your Payment Gateway
There are many variables when choosing your payment gateway. Some established retailers who expand to brick and mortar may already have options like Authorize.net in place. But if you are starting a smaller online store, or selling just a few downloadable products or your services, you may want to start with an easier option.
When choosing a gateway, there are four major factors to consider:
Transaction Fees
Card Types
On-Form Payments
Recurring Billing
Be aware of the charges you may have to pay beyond the transaction fees (such as monthly and setup fees).
PayPal is widely known and used. There are people who say it’s not the best choice, but personally I have used it for years and have never had any issues. Things can happen and PayPal has been known to hold large payments or if your site is suddenly swamped with people purchasing in a short time span. But overall, I recommend it as a stable and reliable service.
I also use Stripe. It is a great PayPal alternative and works the same way as far as charging a percentage fee based on the purchase amount. But it allows people to actually make the purchase on your site without leaving it, as people need to do with PayPal Standard. To use it, you will have to have an SSL installed with your hosting for security. There is a yearly fee attached to this, depending on who you use and what your hosting offers. Contact your host for more details and assistance in installing it.
What Is the Difference Between a Gateway Payment and a Merchant Account?
Payment Gateways – For every credit card transaction online and in-store, a service must communicate with the customer’s credit card company to check for sufficient funds. In-store, typically, a POS (point of sale) machine performs this action. For online transactions, a payment gateway verifies the funds.
Merchant Accounts – A merchant account is a lot like a bank account, but its purpose is to collect funds from credit card payments until they are transferred to a normal business bank account.
Should I Have More Than One Gateway Payment Option?
This is a question many ask and you will hear different opinions. I am not talking here about the choice of cards to use, but the different actual payment options.
Here is a post where I share a story of removing PayPal from one of our sites.
Payment Extensions
Here are just a few of the payment extension available for WooCommerce.
WooCommerce Checkout Add-Ons – Easily offer free or paid add-ons and services at checkout.
WooCommerce One Page Checkout – Make it super fast for customers to purchase with your store. Create special pages where customers can choose products, checkout & pay all on the one page.
Intuit QBMS Payments – Allow customers to securely save multiple payment methods to their account for faster checkout.
WooCommerce Chase Paymentech – An advanced payment integration that provides easy setup & powerful options for accepting payments.
WooCommerce Authorize.net AIM – Take credit card payments directly on checkout using the Authorize.net (AIM) payment gateway for WooCommerce.
WooCommerce Braintree – Take payments via Braintree.
WooCommerce Authorize.net Reporting – This WooCommerce extension allows you to get daily transaction reports via email for your Authorize.net account.
PayPal Digital Goods – A gateway specifically for digital products.
WooCommerce PayPal Express – The PayPal Express gateway for WooCommerce lets users skip the WC checkout and use PayPal instead.
You can see all extensions here
Settings – Shipping
Depending on your needs, shipping can be as easy as determining a flat rate for a few products to the complications of hundreds if not, thousands of products that have their own shipping specifications. For the latter, WooCommerce extensions or 3rd-party shipping services may be your answer.
WooCommerce Default Shipping Options
Here you are able to activate the shipping options, how to display them, and designate where it will be shipped according to the information your customers fill out at checkout. In addition, you are able to exclude countries where you do not ship to.
Shipping Methods
These are the default shipping methods that come with WooCommerce. In this screenshot you will note that you can prioritize these as well as drag and drop them in the order you prefer to have them appear on the checkout page. As I mentioned before, there are several extensions that can help you with specific shipping methods which I will touch on at the end of this lesson.
Flat Rate
Flat rate shipping is a popular option and is perfect is you have fixed rate shipping.
If you want to charge it per item or on a percentage cost, you will need to formulate the math in the Cost field. Here is an example that I pulled from the WooCommerce documentation:
10 + ( 2 * [qty] ) – A base shipping cost of $10 plus $2 for each item in the cart.
20 + [fee percent="10" min_fee="4"] – A base shipping cost of $20 plus 10% of the order total, which is at least $4.
You can also used shipping classes for flat rates. These classes allow you to group similar products for shipping. You will find that they are very similar to categories that you use in your WordPress posts, and, of course, categories in WooCommerce. Shipping classes will be added in their own area, under Products > Shipping Classes.
When you edit a shipping class, it looks like this. If you have added any Shipping Methods through an extension, such as UPS or FedEx, they will also add their own options on this page that you will be able to set for specific classes.
Now going back to the shipping options in your WooCommerce settings, if you do have shipping classes those will be appended to the bottom of your Flat Rate shipping with all the shipping classes you have created. Now you can add the flat rate shipping costs for those specific classes.
Lastly, when you are in creating a product, you will have the option to choose a shipping class for that specific product.
Free Shipping
Free Shipping can be site site-wide, and you have the ability to choose the Specific Countries so you can limit it so you don’t have to provide free shipping across the globe. Also, there are limitations that you can set such as minimum or maximum amount and coupon as variables.
International Flat Rate
This is the same as the Flat Rate shipping, but giving you the option to create a flat rate that is for international delivery separate from your other flat rate setting. I will also included Shipping Classes as well.
Local Delivery
This is an easy shipping method for local delivery and gives you three options for how you will calculate the fee and, especially important, listing the zip codes that you allow delivery in. Taxes for local delivery will be based on your store location and if you need to set different sales taxes for different zip codes, you will need to set up some tax rules in the themes function.php file.
Local Pickup
Local Pickup is very similar to local delivery in the settings. And like local delivery, the tax will be based on the stores location and will require some code customizations to add variable sales tax.
For More Complex Shipping
Table Rate Shipping Extension
If you need more advanced flexibility with your shipping, this extension may be exactly what you need. You will be able to set shipping rates based on location, price, weight or item count. You can create zones for target shipping destinations and multiple rates per zone. It include numerous table rate calculations such a per order, per item, per line and per class. You will be able to add rules based on weight, number of items and number of times by class and price. Lastly you can add costs per row, per item cost, a percentage or per unit weight. Click here to learn more about this extension.
Another related extension is the WooCommerce Print Invoice & Packaging Slips where you can print your WooCommerce invoices and packing lists.
Shipping Third-Party Services
Depending on the number of products you have and the inventory that is needed to keep things in stock, you may choose to go with a service that will handle shipping for you. This can often be the case not only in the number of products you have, but also worldwide delivery. ShipStation and Shipwire are two services that work seamlessly with and are recommended by WooCommerce. And if you don’t want to hassle with shipping refunds, check out Refund Retriever.
Settings – Emails
There are several different emails that can be sent out through WooCommerce to customers. And you have options for all of them. You may find additional email options added here from extensions that you are using. A good example is the Subscription extension.
And if you were to click on New Order, these are the options you would get which are very similar to the other emails as well.
Email Options
Besides what you see in each specific email, you will have these global options as well. As you can see, customizing an email easily is pretty limiting.
The only way to customize your emails beyond what WooCommerce offers out-of-the-box are HTML templates as you can see above at the bottom of the previous screenshot. But unless you know what you are doing, I would be careful customizing these templates. If you click on View Template, this is what you will see.
Extensions and Plugins for Customizations
There are numerous plugins that offer customization for your WooCommerce emails. In this lesson I’ll share a couple with you that I have used myself.
WooCommerce Email Customizer Extension
This extension gives you more options for customizing your emails via the customizer in WordPress. These customizations are global and will affect all emails that go out. You can see a post on this extension here.
Receiptful
This is a greatly useful service created by one of the original WooThemes founders. It’s a free service and has paid options if you want unbranded receipts (meaning it won’t say Powered by Receiptful).
It allows you to create upsells on your receipts. For example, let’s say someone purchases one of my online courses and I would like to offer them a discount on our eBooks—or perhaps a discount on their next online course purchase. That’s exactly what this does.
It also does follow-up emails. You can set these automatically by time delay or event. So, using the above example, I could send a follow-up email one week later reminding them to use the discount coupon on the purchase of our eBooks and/or telling them when the coupon expires. To learn more about it, check out their site.
Creating a Product and Product Types
You can sell many different kinds of products with WooCommerce. But when adding products to your store, they will be assigned specific product data. Here are the four default types that come with WooCommerce.
simple product
grouped product
external/affiliate product
variable product
When you create a product, you will see that the page looks very similar to creating a post in WordPress. But this is what is called a custom post type, so it has additional options.
Product Descriptions
Each product you create will have two descriptions. Creating and formatting a description is no different than creating a post or page in WordPress because you use the same editor window.
Product Short Description
This description will typically show up next to the product image, price and add to cart. It’s a teaser to lead them into the full description.
Product Description
This is where you can list longer descriptions of the product. It will appear lower in on the product page and in some tab format.
Product Image
This is similar to the featured image for your WordPress posts and pages. The size of this image is determined by the settings you have set in your WooCommerce > Settings > Products >Display > Product Images > Single Product Image.
Product Image Gallery
You can also create a product galley to show all the images that are attached to a specific product. The Featured Image will show as the primary image by default. This is a great feature if your products has some variations such as different colors.
Final Product Page
You can now see how your final product page will look. As you can see in this screenshot, if you have Reviews activated on the product, they will also appear in a tab. The layout of your product page may look slightly different depending, on the size you have the product image set at and the theme you are using. But the standard layout will be the same.
Product Data
WooCommerce comes with four Product Types by default. If you wanted to add extensions for additional products, such as a booking extension, they would be placed here.
Simple Product – this is a single physical product that has no variations.
Simple Product Virtual – an example of this would be a service, such as hourly consulting.
Simple Product Downloadable – this is both virtual and downloadable, such as an ebook or a music file.
Grouped Product – A collection of products that are related but can be purchased separately. An example would be different models of the iMac from Apple.
External/Affiliate Product – A product you add to your store but buyers will be sent to another site to purchase it. Affiliates work well for this or products you may make a commission on.
Variable Product – Some products will have different variations and multiple images. For example a t-shirt, that comes in different sizes and colors, with different prices.
As you can see in these screenshots, the options for each product type will be different.
Simple Product
Here you will get all the basic settings which include General, Inventory, Shipping, Linked Products, Attributes and Advanced. You will learn more about all of these in other lessons.
Simple Product Virtual
Obviously, if you choose virtual for your Simple Product, you will no longer have the shipping option.
Simple Product Downloadable
When you also choose Downloadable, and likely you will also choose Virtual, you get some new options of the General Setting tab.
Grouped Product
When creating your Grouped Product, you will see that the General tab no longer exists. This is because yo