WooCommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress websites, with over 5 million active installations and a 4.5-star rating. A lot of this popularity is because it allows you to easily set up an online store on your WordPress site.
This tutorial will provide you step-by-step instructions on how to set up WooCommerce, and you’ll also learn about our WooCommerce marketing automation platform, which can help you drive revenue for your online business.
How to install and activate WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful ecommerce plugin designed specifically for WordPress websites. It seamlessly integrates with WordPress, leveraging its core functionality and infrastructure to provide a robust online store solution. As a plugin, WooCommerce cannot run independently and requires a WordPress installation to function properly.
In this comprehensive WooCommerce tutorial, we’ll walk you through the essential steps to configure your WooCommerce store:
Step 1: Choosing hosting and server setup — Learn how to select the right hosting provider and configure your server to ensure optimal performance for your WooCommerce store
Step 5: Choose your theme — Discover how to select and customize a theme for your WooCommerce store
Step 6: Add Shipping Costs — A guide through the WooCommerce shipping setup. Set your zones, rates, and options to ensure smooth product delivery to your customers
Step 7: Set up tax — Configure tax settings for your WooCommerce store
Step 8: Pick your payment processors — Choose the most suitable payment gateways for your store and learn how to set them up
Picking the right host and server is crucial during your Woocommerce setup. It’s key to your store’s success. When choosing a host, consider the following factors:
Make sure the host meets WooCommerce’s minimum requirements. It needs PHP version 7.4 or higher, MySQL version 5.7 or newer (or MariaDB version 10.4 or newer), and a WordPress memory limit of 256 MB or greater.
Look for hosts that offer free SSL certificates. This is vital for securing your customers’ data and building trust.
Consider the storage space and bandwidth your store needs. This is especially important if you plan to host many products or media files.
Choose a host with good uptime. Any downtime can cause lost sales and harm your store’s reputation.
Several types of hosting packages are available. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages:
Shared hosting is the most affordable option. Your website shares server resources with other websites. This is suitable for small stores with low traffic.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a step up from shared hosting. It offers dedicated resources and more control over your server. This is ideal for growing stores with moderate traffic.
Dedicated hosting is the priciest option. It provides a whole server for your website. This is best for large, high-traffic stores that require maximum performance and control.
Managed WordPress hosting is a specialized hosting solution. It’s optimized for WordPress websites and often includes features like automatic updates, backups, and enhanced security.
Here are four WooCommerce-recommended hosting providers to start your research with:
SiteGround offers managed WooCommerce plans. They have premium features that include daily backups, free SSL certificates, auto-updates, free CDN, and enhanced security.
WooCommerce’s all-in-one ecommerce offering includes solid hosting. It also includes priority support and tools to help you grow your business.
Step 2: Install and activate the WooCommerce plugin
Before installing the WooCommerce plugin, it’s essential to have a functioning WordPress website. If you use a recommended host, the setup will include a basic configuration already. However, if you’re using a host that isn’t specific to WordPress, you’ll need to install the full package first. You should also create an account at WordPress.com so that you can benefit from tools like Jetpack.
How to setup WooCommerce in WordPress
Once your WordPress site is running, follow these steps to install and activate the WooCommerce plugin:
Log in to your WordPress dashboard
Navigate to “Plugins” in the left-hand menu and click on “Add New”
In the search bar, type “WooCommerce” and press Enter
Look for the official WooCommerce plugin by WooCommerce. Click “Install Now”
After the installation is complete, click on the “Activate” button to activate the plugin
Congratulations! You successfully installed and activated the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress website.
As you build your online store, you may find that you need more plugins. They can improve your website’s functions and user experience. To find trusted WooCommerce plugins, go to the official WordPress plugin repository and search for “WooCommerce.” You can also use our list of the best WooCommerce plugins for ideas.
Keep in mind that plugins can greatly enhance your store. But, it’s essential to choose them wisely and only install those that are necessary for your needs. Too many plugins can slow your website. They may also cause compatibility issues.
Step 3: Configure WooCommerce onboarding wizard and setup checklist
Once the activation is complete, you will need to configure the WooCommerce setup wizard.
While this step is optional, it’s important to get it done to ensure all the WooCommerce settings run smoothly on your store.
There are five actions needed to complete the WooCommerce setup wizard. These include:
Store profiler
The first page of the setup wizard requires you to fill in basic information such as location, address, accepted currencies, and the type of products that you offer. It looks like this:
Remember that the information provided at this step of the WooCommerce setup tutorial is flexible and can be changed later.
Get a boost with free features
Based on the information you provided in the previous steps, WooCommerce will now recommend free business features that can be beneficial for your store. These features are designed to enhance your ecommerce journey, and the best part is that there is no commitment required.
You have the flexibility to remove any of these features at any time throughout your journey, ensuring that you have complete control over your store’s setup and customization.
Jetpack connection
In this step, you will connect your WordPress.com account so you can take advantage of Jetpack and its benefits.
Profiler completion
The setup wizard steps are now complete and the system will begin to roll out your new WooCommerce website.
Setup checklist
After completing the Store Profiler you will be able to access a checklist for the most important tasks that must be completed to get your WooCommerce store running. This checklist is convenient and will help you keep track of the remaining steps on our list.
Step 4: Add your first product
In this step, you’ll be guided through the process of adding your first products using WooCommerce manually.
You have several options when it comes to products to sell on WooCommerce:
Physical product: a tangible item that gets delivered to a customer. This product type will be labeled as “Simple Product” in the product editor
Variable product: a physical product that has variations in color or size
Grouped product: a collection of related products
Digital product: a service, downloadable, or locked content
External product: a link to a product on an external site
You also have multiple options for entering your products into WooCommerce:
Add manually: create a product manually using the WordPress editor with WooCommerce features
Start with a template: you can choose to start with a pre-filled template of different product types: physical, digital, and variable products
Import: you can import your product data from a CSV
Migrate: if you are migrating from an existing ecommerce platform, you can use Cart2Cart to help you move your data
Step 5: Choose your theme
Some of the best-performing WooCommerce themes include Astra, Shoppe, and OceanWP, which come highly optimized with easy-to-use templates and provide a modern touch to your store.
Always remember that the theme is what controls the aesthetics and layout of your store.
If you don’t like a particular theme, you can always edit it and customize it to your requirements later.
Verify the location of your store that you specified in step 2 of the Store Profiler. Here, you can configure shipping costs for your country and internationally. By default, international shipping costs are turned off. But, you can turn them on during this step.
If your store is in the US, you can install WooCommerce Shipping. It lets you link your store with WordPress.com to print shipping labels from home.
Step 7: Set up tax
WooCommerce has four options for managing the taxes for sales through your store:
WooCommerce Tax: WooCommerce’s system for automatically calculating how much sales tax you should collect. It has information on city, state, and country sales tax requirements.If you have Jetpack installed, you can start automatically calculating taxes by connecting your store to WordPress.com
Avalara: A more robust solution for tax compliance. The system calculates taxes, but also helps manage tax returns and can help you manage tax rules across large product sets
Set up taxes manually: You can manage your own sales tax percentages and obligations
No sales tax: You can opt to not charge sales tax if your product is exempt
Step 8: Pick your payment processors
Next, let’s review how to setup WooCommerce payments. You can select from various options to receive online and offline payments.
On selection, WooCommerce automatically installs and activates the option.
Remember to consider transaction charges, recurring expenses, and availability in a region before settling on a payment processor.
Square allows you to accept payments via WooCommerce or in person. This makes it a solid option for brick-and-mortar retailers that have an ecommerce presence.
Square also gives you the flexibility of accepting Cash App payments, Square Gift cards, and payments from digital wallets like Apple and Google Pay.
If you’re looking for a deeply integrated payments processor with a strong team behind it, then WooCommerce Payments is a good choice.
Its strength is a better checkout experience compared to the others.
WooCommerce can be slightly more expensive due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model. You should research the costs associated with international payments.
Depending on your store’s location, you can also go for offline payments, cash on delivery, or direct bank transfers with compatible countries.
Step 9: Adding product add-ons and extensions
At this point your WooCommerce store setup is ready for use. However, WooCommerce provides users with additional free or paid tools that help run your store smoothly.
They include checkboxes, gift wrapping, and custom-made drop-down fields. Additionally, you can add external plugins that will help simplify your operations. Some of the best WooCommerce plugins and extensions to add are:
Its SMS functionality is also a great way to add SMS to campaigns or automation workflows and reach your customers via text message, which can help increase conversions and sales.
With several pre-set automation workflows and email templates, you can easily send ecommerce emails to welcome customers, alert them about an abandoned cart, and communicate any other relevant information.
Another great feature is the audience sync for ads which synchronizes your existing subscribers or customers to Facebook’s or Google’s ad platforms for better ad targeting.
Generate up to $6.30 per email with our WooCommerce email marketing plugin
This plugin from Google is a powerful tool that can help you dive deep into the analytics of your WooCommerce store. It brings the power of Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google AdSense to your store.
With it, you can understand where you stand in terms of SEO, page experience, and traffic generation.
The detailed insights you get from the plugin from within WordPress can help inform your store’s marketing strategy too.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, used by over 3,000,000 website owners. It comes with an ecommerce addon that lets you easily track your WooCommerce store’s conversions.
MonsterInsights is simple to set up and use, even for beginners. You can view your website stats in easy-to-understand reports right from your WordPress dashboard. So, you don’t have to search through complicated Google Analytics reports to discover valuable insights about your business.
In MonsterInsights’ ecommerce reports, you can view your revenue, transactions, average order value, conversion rate, top conversion sources, items added to cart, time to purchase, and more, at a glance.
Plus, you can also use MonsterInsights’s Popular Posts feature to find out what your top-selling products are. Then, you can easily display those popular products anywhere on your WooCommerce site to boost sales.
Adding Zapier to your list of WooCommerce extensions during your store setup is a no-brainer. This versatile platform helps connect your WooCommerce store with 7000+ cloud apps and services, which, in turn, can help in adding to your online store’s functionality. However, this is a paid extension.
Step 10: Store management
After you finish the Store Setup Checklist (or opt to hide it), the Store Management widget will take its place. This widget provides convenient links to the most frequently used WooCommerce pages for store management.
Step 11: Verify all is working well
Now your ecommerce store is almost ready for launch. All you need is to re-check whether all the pages are up and running.
Thankfully, WooCommerce makes it easy to launch your store as it automatically generates all your store pages for you.
And now onto the verification bit.
Visit your website as a customer would and go through your shop, cart, payment, and checkout pages.
Touring the skeleton pages should help you verify the entire configuration and whether it incorporates your preferences. You could also place a few test orders to understand if the entire system is functioning well.
And if certain changes are needed to your WooCommerce store, you can make them by heading to the “Settings” tab.
Here, you’ll be able to modify your shop pages, inventory, and more. It’ll also help you modify the payment and shipping-related options of your ecommerce store.
How to add products on WooCommerce
Now that you’ve installed and set up your store, let’s review how to use WooCommerce to add products.
If you have used the WordPress editor before, you’ll find that the process is similar to that on WooCommerce.
To add a new product, you should click on the “Products” tab on the left-hand side of the dashboard and click on “Add New.” A screen similar to the one below will appear.
Proceed to add the title of your products as well as a product description, detailing the key features of the product.
However, unlike in the standard WordPress editor, you’ll need to add a lot of data about the product.
Product management
Managing your products is a vital part of running your WooCommerce store. Knowing how to properly enter, categorize, and label your products is key. It will lead to better product visibility.
Product types
WooCommerce allows you to sell multiple product types. It’s important to understand the differences between simple, grouped, and variable products:
Simple product: Items sold without variation, such as a one-size-fits-all hat
Grouped product: A group of similar items, like a bundle of a pillow and a weighted blanket
Variable product: Products with various qualities, such as size or color (e.g. clothing and footwear)
Product categories
Product categories help group your products. For example, if you sell gym equipment, you would have categories for “weights,” “treadmills,” and “exercise bikes.” They allow customers to locate products in the same category quickly. You can create as many categories as you want and change them anytime.
Product labels
Labels help filter products. Size, color, and material are common product labels that help users find products. You can assign labels independently to each product or set up a global label.
Product data section
This is the section that holds almost all the critical information about your product. At this point in our WooCommerce set up tutorial, we will look at the various sections on the Product Data page.
General data
To start, you will need to add general information about the product’s price. Indicate the regular price, and if there’s a sale price enter the discounted amount. It’s also necessary to show the product’s tax status and its tax class.
Inventory section
This important section helps you manage products individually, including allowing backorders. Here’s where you allow customers to choose products and add them to the cart.
For better inventory management, you’ll need to enable stock management.
Once you enter Stock Quantity, WooCommerce will auto-manage the store’s inventory and auto-update the status to show if an item is in stock or out of stock.
Better yet, there’s the option to indicate the Low Stock Threshold. This sets the number at which you’ll be notified if a product is running low in your inventory.
Shipping section
Here, you’ll have to enter information such as the weight and dimensions of the product — both of which are important details when it comes to shipping.
You may also need to enter the shipping class since some shipping methods prefer to group similar products.
Advanced section
If you so wish, you may add some advanced details to enhance the customer experience on the site.
There’s an option to include a Purchase Note which is sent to the customer after a purchase. You can also enable or disable customer reviews.
Customizing your WooCommerce store
The beauty of having WooCommerce is that you get to customize your store in an easy and functional manner.
So far in this WooCommerce setup tutorial, you’ve already learned how to set up your store and add new products.
Now let’s look at a couple of customizable features necessary for the smooth running of your site.
Advanced WooCommerce settings
WooCommerce lets you change some default settings. You can also integrate with their API. To access these options, navigate to the “Advanced” option under “Settings.” Here you’ll find the ability to modify Page Setup, REST API, Webhooks, and Legacy API.
Page setup
You can set pages other than default options as your Cart, Checkout, My account, and Terms and Conditions pages.
Cart Page – This page shows items in your customer’s cart
Checkout Page – This page is where your customer will enter their payment information and submit orders
My Account page – This page is where registered customers will go to view their orders or update their account details
Terms and Conditions – This page shows terms and conditions
Making changes in this section should be done with care. For instance, if you set a page without checkout as your checkout page, customers will not be able to buy.
Rest API
You can create API keys to enable the use of the Woocommerce Rest API. This will allow developers to connect the WooCommerce platform with external applications. This is valuable for more technical users who want to manage their own integrations across their marketing tech stack.
Coupons
Coupons are a great way to boost sales on your site. To add coupons, go to Marketing on your WooCommerce dashboard, then click on “Create New Coupon.”
Add the coupon code and a short description of the coupon.
In the General section, you can add basic information such as the type of coupon, its value, and the expiry date.
There are also the Usage Restriction settings, which allow you to set the minimum spend necessary to validate the coupon.
You can also click on “Individual Use only” to limit usage on other orders. Once set, publish the coupon and let customers know about it.
Accounts and privacy
Another important section that you’ll need to customize is the Accounts and Privacy tab which helps guide a customer’s experience.
By ticking Guest Checkout, you can allow customers to buy products without creating an account. This can play a major role in helping you boost your conversion rate as some customers might bounce away at the prospect of filling out a registration form.
You can also control account settings and personal data settings from here.
Maintaining your Woocommerce store
After you complete your WooCommerce setup, you need to keep the store safe, secure, and running smoothly. This is vital for the success of your online business. You need regular maintenance, updates, and security to protect your reputation and income.
Here are some tips to help you maintain your WooCommerce store:
Update all software regularly
You must keep your WooCommerce store’s software up to date. This is crucial for security and smooth operation.
Update WordPress core, WooCommerce, your theme, and any extra plugins when new versions are released
Keeping everything up to date protects your store from security threats and ensures smooth functionality
Consider using automatic updates or check your site frequently for available updates
Use a staging site to test software updates before applying them to your live store
Perform regular backups
You need regular backups. They protect your store’s data and let you quickly recover from issues.
Regularly backup your WooCommerce database and files to avoid losing critical data
Use reliable backup solutions. For example, Jetpack Backup makes real-time backups of your site’s data and information
In emergencies, a recent backup lets you quickly restore your site
Monitor site performance and analytics
Monitoring your store’s performance and analytics helps you make informed decisions. It also lets you identify areas for improvement.
Keep a close eye on your store’s performance using WooCommerce Analytics
Track metrics like sales, orders, and refunds. Also track discounts, taxes, and more. This will help you make informed decisions
Run speed tests often. Fix any issues that slow your site, as this directly impacts user experience and sales
Ensure top-notch customer support
Providing excellent customer support is key to maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Provide prompt and helpful customer support to address inquiries, issues, and concerns
Handle refunds and returns efficiently to maintain customer satisfaction
Regularly update your FAQ section. Provide self-help resources to help customers as this will reduce support requests
Performing these regular maintenance tasks and prioritizing customer support will keep your WooCommerce store secure, efficient, and user-friendly. This proactive approach will help you keep a good reputation and build customer loyalty. In the end, it will drive your WooCommerce store growth.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that WooCommerce is the best ecommerce option on WordPress. It has the power to transform your site into a thoroughbred online store with terrific sales.
The WooCommerce store setup process is easy once you install the plugin. As covered, you will need to configure the WooCommerce setup wizard, pick your payment processors, enter shipping information, and install any extensions or plugins.
With the right marketing tools and the power of WooCommerce, there’s no reason your store shouldn’t scale and conquer the heights of ecommerce.
Start here to set your WooCommerce marketing on autopilot with Omnisend’s automated features and insights.
Generate up to $6.30 per email with our WooCommerce email marketing plugin
Bernard is the Sr. Director of Communications & Creative at Omnisend, with a passion for good research, helping ecommerce businesses with their marketing automation needs, and beating absolutely everyone in Mario Kart 64.
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