Online shopping trend has catapulted to tremendous heights since its inception. There are plenty of industry giants and eCommerce businesses like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, Flipkart and so many more, but you don’t have to be overwhelmed by their presence. You can build your own presence and eCommerce business by launching your online store powered by WordPress and WooCommerce.

The platform offers almost all of the functionality you will need to sell products online, but learning how to actually set up WooCommerce is arguably the most complicated facet of using the plugin. So all you need to know to begin your foray into eCommerce is how to configure the platform, then add new products to it.

That’s the underlying reason why I decided to create this complete step-by-step guide to start an online store using WordPress and WooCommerce. In case you haven’t used WooCommerce or didn’t have enough time to experiment with it, you can get started with this in-depth tutorial. I’ll go through the necessary settings options and show you how to add products to your eCommerce site.

Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links, which means Affapress earns a small commission whenever you end up purchasing products we recommend. However, the opinions written are only based on our experience and not how much they pay. Please continue to support our work and learn more about our affiliate links policy.

Why Use WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an indisputable leader in online sales. In 2018, it’s powering more than 28% of all online store platforms, WooCommerce successfully became the most popular eCommerce platform on the internet.

Other popular eCommerce platforms besides WooCommerce as follows:

• Shopify (arguably the most popular after WooCommerce)
• BigCommerce
• 3dcart
• Ecwid
• Many, many more

There are many choices, but two services that currently dominate the landscape when it comes to do-it-yourself online stores: WooCommerce and Shopify.

WooCommerce is a full open-source eCommerce plugin that is built to seamlessly integrate with WordPress-based sites. Developed with love by a great team working in WooThemes, and offering a stable and secure platform that is fully responsive, WooCommerce makes it easy for you to build an online store.

Securely coded since it only using the best coding practices and audited by the industry leaders in plugin security, so that you can rest assured your online store and customer’s information is safe. In addition, WooCommerce is not a third-party plugin that hosts your eCommerce store. This means you stay in total control of everything.

• Sell Anything – With WooCommerce you can sell physical and digital products easily. Provide product variations, multiple configurations, and even instant downloads to your customers. You can even utilize WooCommerce’s free and premium extensions to add things like memberships, recurring subscriptions, and bookings to your website.
• Ship Anywhere – Having a global presence is crucial to becoming a successful online business. WooCommerce opens up the chance for you to ship your products anywhere in the world. You can set your shipping rates – free shipping, flat rate shipping, or even real-time calculations – and limit your shipments to particular countries.
• Accept Payments – WooCommerce makes accepting payments for transactions of your products a cinch. It comes bundled with the capability to be able to accept all major credit cards, PayPal, BACS, and cash on delivery. Moreover WooCommerce also includes over 140 region-specific gateways such as Stripe, Authorize.Net, and Amazon Payments that can be integrated into your online store easily.
• Customize to Your Liking – Equipped with hundreds of available extensions and the ability to scale as your business grows, WooCommerce can be designed to cover your brand’s look and feel with just a few clicks away. What’s more, WordPress has hundreds of WooCommerce compatible themes ready for you to use.

1. Setup Domain & Hosting

To create an online store or any other type of website, you’ll need the following three things:

• Domain Name – This is used as a unique address of your eCommerce store on the web. That’s what people type into their browser’s address bar when visiting your store online. For instance, my domain name is www.affapress.com.
• Web Hosting – Basically, web hosting is how you store your website files in a secure location so that other people can easily access them through their browser.
• SSL Certificate – An SSL Certificate functions to create a secure encrypted connection. This can help keep your customer’s personal information safe and greatly reduce the risk of cyber theft. This isn’t so necessary for non-eCommerce stores (yet), but when you decide to start an online store, you desperately need this.

From the many web host service providers on the internet, I personally choose to use and recommend SiteGround for your domain name and web hosting.

Why You Should Choose SiteGround?

SiteGround provides three shared hosting plans. For a new website, I would recommend the StartUp plan. When your online store starts to grow in popularity and start consuming more resources, you might be better of upgrading to a GrowBig or GoGeek account.

OK, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get signed up with SiteGround.

1. Account Information – Provide your email address and create a secure password of your decision.
2. Client Information – Input information about yourself such as your name and address, company, phone number, etc.

3. Payment Information – Add payment details you use such as credit card information. Check the box if your card details have the same address as you used above.
4. Plan Information – Choose the plan you intend to purchase, select the data center, select the period of hosting that is required to finalize the hosting price.

Once you’re all done, click the “Pay Now” button to finish the payment process.​

 

back to menu ↑

2. Installing WordPress

You have everything you need to start installing a new WordPress site. To finish this, you’ll use the “one-click install” feature which is a built-in feature that most web host providers offer today.

The “one-click” feature means you can install WordPress into your chosen domain name, via a hosting provider of your decision, with just a single click of the mouse.

Back in that day, you had to install WordPress via FTP. How annoying that was.

Today you can still do that thing, of course. However, it’s a bit technical to do as a beginner. Instead, you will install WordPress with using a single click of the mouse.

Let me show you how to easily install WordPress on a new domain name using SiteGround web host.

Step 1 – Log into your SiteGround account, then go to “My Accounts” tab and click the “Go to cPanel” button.

Step 2 – Scroll down and click on the WordPress icon located in “Auto Installers” section.

Step 3 – Click “Install” and then input the details for the installation. You should always choose the ‘https://www.’ protocol if possible, and then select the domain name in which you want to install WordPress.

Step 4 – Continue with the setup by giving information about your online store such as site name, site description, and admin username + password.

Keep these in a safe and confidential place since you’ll need them to log into your website after the installation process is complete.

Choose an admin email and default language, then choose the security plugins that you would like to have installed with your initial setup.

Check the “Limit Login Attempts” plugin checkbox since it’s highly recommended. It will help you to easily monitor and block brute force login attempts performed on your website, including the responsible IP addresses.

Step 5 – When you’re all done, just click the “Install” button and let the magic happen.

Once the installation is complete, you’ll get a notification. Then you should have the ability to log into your new WordPress site by going to https://www.yourstore.com/wp-admin/ using the username and password that you have created before.

Configuring WordPress

WordPress groups your website basic settings on the left sidebar in the “Settings” section. This section is broken down into several sub-sections for your website. In the following, I’ll make some recommendations for setting changes and explain a few things that I think are important and valuable.

General

In the “General” sub-section, you will see basic settings for your website. First, make sure the ‘Site Title’ and ‘Tagline’ you input are relevant to reflect you and your brand. Next, make sure your ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ match with the domain you have chosen in earlier steps. Input your main ‘Email Address’ which will be the place to receive website notifications (comments, updates, etc).

The following two fields are for if you want to have a website with a membership system that requires readers to create a user profile. On many websites that I have, ‘Membership’ is left unchecked, and ‘New User Default Role’ is left as Subscriber.

The next section contains settings for define ‘Site Language’, ‘Timezone’, ‘Date Format’, ‘Time Format’, and ‘Week Starts On’. Pick the most relevant settings to identify your online business and the readers of your content.

Writing

In the “Writing” sub-section, you can make changes to settings related to content creation. First, you can change ‘Default Post Category’ and ‘Default Post Format’ (this would be a good idea if you have a custom category intended to catch-all your content, also changing ‘Default Post Format’ would be helpful in unique and niche circumstances).

The ‘Post via Email’ and ‘Update Services’ are also used in some cases and leave it in their default settings for now!

Reading

In the “Reading” sub-section of the settings, you can make changes related to how your content is presented on your website. The first selection is ‘Your Homepage Displays’, this will determine the overall construction of your website. Precisely what do you want to show on the homepage? Would you like to display your blog-stream or a custom homepage? These decisions will specify your WordPress platform as either a BLOG (your latest posts) or a WEBSITE with a BLOG (a static page). I would recommend choosing the latter option (for an online business) because of the flexibility offered in a website format rather than a blog. If you decide to go with the Static Page setup, then you need to assign your HOME and BLOG pages.

Within this sub-section, you can also specify how many recent posts you would like to show and the summary displayed for every single (for most of my websites, the default settings here are precisely for the number of posts, another setting concern to RSS feeds even you can leave it as default for now).

The last setting in this sub-section is ‘Search Engine Visibility’ that is useful when you’re still building your website (pre-launch). It’s necessary that this is checked to ensure that Google doesn’t index and send traffic to your unfinished website. Before you launch, it’s crucial for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes to uncheck this checkbox.

Discussion

The “Discussion” sub-section consists of settings about how your audience can engage to your content. Being a large section and the settings eventually becoming preferences, I will present a few considerations which should be able to guide your selection of preferences.

First, comment management will be the main part of establishing websites. The interaction between you and your audience is one of the most fundamental factors for the success and growth of your brand. Establishing your comments be a big part of that success (or failure) to this effort. I would first recommend that you moderate ALL comments on your website. This will make sure that you do have a quality, interest-building discussion on your website (and prevent SPAM and other inappropriate comments that can end up on your website).

Overall the default settings are set up to allow you to be able to win with readers interaction. Only minor changes are necessary for specific conditions.

Media

The “Media” sub-section is related to settings up your digital content (how its displayed on your website and how its organized within the WordPress system). This section is short and doesn’t require any changes unless you feel it is needed.

Permalinks

In the “Permalinks” sub-section, you can change the URL structure from individual posts and pages on your website. I recommend choosing ‘Post Name’ for your structure, this will make sure better SEO and URL slug management. The other settings function to change the word ‘categories’ to something custom like ‘topics’ or ‘projects’.

Privacy

The “Privacy” sub-section is a new section that comes with new changes in internet privacy (GDPR 2018). This particular sub-section will help you to create and define your website’s Privacy Policy.

Set up HTTPS (Install SSL Certificate)

Next, ensure if your WordPress site is correctly configured for the address to use HTTPS.

This allows the SSL certificate that is included with your host subscription to work correctly. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means. It just means your online store will be secure and hackers will find it difficult to steal important information.

This should be done automatically, but if not, you can change it manually by changing http to https in the ‘WordPress’ and ‘Site Address’ boxes.

All you need to do in WordPress is to go change your settings so that your website loads with HTTPS (instead of HTTP).

To do this, you can navigate to “Settings > General” and below the ‘Tagline’ box change the following:

• WordPress Address (URL) – Update your URL from using http to https.
• Site Address (URL) – Update your URL from using http to https.

Click on the “Saves Changes” button at the bottom of the page to store your new settings.

Read a complete tutorial on Ultimate Guide: How to Start A WordPress Site.

Now it’s time to turn your blank WordPress site into a fully functional eCommerce store by utilizing the excellent WooCommerce plugin.

 

back to menu ↑

3. Installing WooCommerce Plugin

As with all WordPress plugins, the fun starts by navigating to your dashboard, then go to “Plugins > Add New”. Once there, type the keyword ‘woocommerce’ in the search field. Then you’ll see WooCommerce appear as the first search result.

Just click on the “Install Now” button next to the plugin.

The installation process is running, and after a couple of seconds, the text on the button will change to “Activate”. Go on and click it.

At this stage, you’ll see the WooCommerce launch/setup wizard on the screen. This thing makes the setup process uber-easy and takes you by the hand through everything in one go. To start, click on the “Let’s Go!” button.

Create the essential store pages

Online stores are a certain kind of website, and they need some specific pages to work properly. The first step taken in the WooCommerce setup wizard is about creating these pages for your website:

• Shop – A page dedicated particularly to displaying and showcasing your products.
• Cart – This is your shopping cart page that functions as a place for customers to add and remove products, edit their orders, view their cart, and start the checkout process.
• Checkout – On this page throughout the checkout process is done such as customers buy their orders online and choose their delivery and shipping methods.
• My Account – Customers who’ve registered an account in your online store can use this page to view their account details, their past orders, and other information.

All you need to do in this first stage of the WooCommerce setup wizard is to click on the “Continue” button. Then WooCommerce will set up those pages for you automatically.

Set up your store location

The locale is a crucial part of setting up your online store. Here you’ll add details about:

• Where your store is based?
• What type of currency will your store use?
• Whether or not you’ll be charging sales tax.
• Whether or not you’ll be entering product prices including tax.

This is a quick and simple, but important step.

WooCommerce automatically detects your location by utilizing your IP address and then selecting the suitable country, currency and tax rate.

The tax rates that apply might differ depending on the needs of your store, but mostly, you’ll choose ‘Yes, I will be charging sales tax’ and ‘I will enter prices exclusive of tax’.

Don’t forget to confirm your tax settings with an accountant or local authority to better grasp the taxation rules that be valid in your country. To find out more deeply about taxes and tax rates, read WooCommerce’s documentation on sales taxes.

For now, click on the “Continue” button. No need to worry because you can always update this information later (if needed).

Shipping setup

To be able to deliver goods correctly with no mistake, you need to have detailed and clear shipping information such as weight and dimension unit of your product.

With WooCommerce, you enable to offer both physical and digital goods to your customers. This means there is no limit on what products you want to sell, you can sell bobbleheads of yourself and digital downloads of your senior picture, if indeed you choose that. The world is your oyster.

In case your screen looks different than a screenshot shown above, it’s because some of those options are only displayed in the US and Canada regions.

If you live in the United States, you can enable ‘USPS Shipping’ for your store. Then for ‘Canada Post’ rates can you withdraw to calculate shipments if you’re based in Canada.

For convenience, I’d suggest you check the ‘Enable WooCommerce Shipping’ checkbox.

If your location is outside these areas, you’ll be required to answer if you will be shipping goods or not. If you decide that you’ll be selling just digital goods, leave this box unchecked. But in case you’ll be shipping goods, then you will need to check the checkbox which says ‘Yes, I will be shipping physical goods to customers’.

Remember that you can always change these settings later if required.

Once you’ve finished filling out all the required information on the shipping setup tab, click on the “Continue” button.

Pick a payment method

Having the capability to accept online payments is at the core of every eCommerce store. WooCommerce genuinely provides a lot with regards to the available solutions.

Here are some payment options that you can choose:

The two most frequently used payment options are at the very top – PayPal and Stripe – it’s strongly recommended that you integrate both with your website. To do this just by checking on their corresponding checkboxes.

You can choose other payment methods too if that look reasonable. In your WooCommerce settings panel later there will be even more options available that you can choose.

Note: To make online payments work correctly, you need to sign up with either PayPal or Stripe individually. The settings in WooCommerce are only for integrating your PayPal and Stripe accounts that already exists with your new eCommerce site.

When you have completed the payment setup, click “Continue”.

And…done!

At this stage, your website’s basic setup is complete – you’ve just built a blank online store with WordPress and WooCommerce!

OK, this is the time you’ve been waiting for, starting to fill up those virtual shelves with some real products. You only need a few steps away to become a kingpin of a virtual kingdom.

If in the future you need to rerun the setup wizard, you can always find this through your dashboard sidebar then click “WooCommerce”. At the top right corner of the page click “Help”, then go to “Setup wizard” and click the “Setup wizard” button.

 

back to menu ↑

4. Add New Products

Except if your business model involves customers giving you free money, you’re going to need to get some products to display in your online store.

To add a new product, navigate to your dashboard, then go to “Products > Add New”.

What you’re going to see after that is a classic WordPress content editing screen:

1. Product Name

This is precisely what it sounds like. Pick a title that could explain your product quickly to your online store’s visitors. The product name will mostly be used as the product URL too. So if your product name is “car phone mount”, WordPress will automatically generate the product URL from this phrase unless you update it.

2. Product Description

This section is a place where you can enter as much detail as possible about the product you’re selling. You can insert images, create columns, include sub-headings, add videos, and other additional media types.

3. Product Data

This describes the specifics of the product. You can add the price point and taxes, track inventory, shipping parameters such as dimensions and costs, etc.

This section also enables you to link your inventory and to show shoppers products which might have seen by other customers. You can easily add multiple product attributes such as different product colors, sizes or other variations too.

Be sure to check the appropriate checkbox so that WordPress knows if your product is a virtual product (such as a service) or a downloadable product.

In addition, you also need to choose one type of product through the drop-down menu in the top left of the product data section:

• Simple Product – Recommended for most physical goods and services.
• Variable Products – For products that have more variations, such as pants with multiple size options.
• Grouped Product – Used for grouping multiple simple products into one offer.
• External/Affiliate Product – Allows you to link off-site to another website.

You also get tabs to complement the various product parameters:

• General

In this first tab, you have a field for listing the product price. You also have an additional optional field for adding a product sale price.

Another useful feature is that you can choose to display the product sale price between specific dates, so you can easily automate the process of launching and closing an offer.

• Inventory

The Inventory tab allows you to add inventory details for the product such as SKU, stock status and more.

If you’re wondering what is an SKU? Well, it’s a unique formula that sellers use for naming a product type.

To better understand SKU, Shopify gives an easy-to-understand definition. They say:

An SKU is a unique code consisting of several letters and numbers that serve to identify the characteristics of each product such as manufacturer, brand, style, color, and size.

Here’s an example which Shopify shares:

An SKU for a pair of blue DC sneakers in the Casual style and size 8 might look something like this: DC-CAS-BLUE-08.

Basically, you need to come up with a specific format for naming each of your products.

In case you’re selling Chino pants in 3 different colors, your SKU could look like this:

• CHI-PA-RED
• CHI-PA-GREEN
• CHI-PA-BLUE

You understand it now, right?

Now, I’m sure naming your product is not as easy as naming a product such an example I took above. Therefore to help make it easier for you, I recommend you to use this cool free SKU generator from TradeGecko (requires signup).

After the ‘SKU’ field, the second option is used to choose whether you would like to manage the product’s stock.

When you choose to enable the ‘Manage stock?’ option, 2 additional fields will appear:

• Stock quantity
• Allow backorders

Here you only need to set the number of units you have for a product. With this information, WooCommerce can automatically find out when you’ll run out-of-stock.

In case you run out-of-stock of a product, you can set WooCommerce to ‘Allow backorders’ (a backorder is an order for a product that has run out-of-stock).

Take a backorder and notify to the customer about the stock status that you currently have (inform the customer that he has ordered the order but the product is out-of-stock and you’ll only ship it when available).

Next is the ‘Stock status’ field that you can utilize to set the availability of a product.

And the last preference is the ‘Sold individually’ option which serves to tell a customer that he can only buy one copy of the product.

• Shipping

The Shipping tab is quite simple. Here you only need to specify the weight, dimensions, and class of the product.

The value in the ‘Shipping class’ field can help in calculating shipping rates for the product. Thus, if you sell a product which can be categorized into classes such as bulky, moderate, and light-weight, these three can be used as your shipping classes.

After you’ve specified a shipping class, you can easily associate it with a shipping method. As an instance, you can choose a flat fee shipping method for products with a light-weight shipping class. Many shipping rate calculator plugins also utilize the value of the shipping classes to calculate the shipping rates, so you need to specify the correct shipping classes.

• Linked Products

The Linked Products tab allows to create up-sells, cross-sells and promote product groups in your online store.

Up-sells: Making up-sells means suggesting multiple products that are slightly better than the product a customer is currently checking out.

For instance, if a customer is looking for a $20 phone case, in your up-sell section, you should recommend multiple phone cases above that price such as $25 phone case, $30 phone case, etc.

Cross-sells: Making cross-sells means recommending multiple products that are related to the product a customer is currently checking out.

For example, if a customer is looking for a monthly planner, in your cross-sell section, you should suggest daily, weekly and annual planners.

Grouping: With this, you can bundle several related products and offer them into a package. So, if you sell photography equipment, you can bundle it with products such a lens, battery, tripod, SD card and more and offer this package to your customers.

• Attributes

WooCommerce allows you add custom product attributes for better describing your product.

For instance, if you sell a knife, you might want to add the material as a custom attribute.

• Advanced

In this last tab, you can add a personalized purchase note to the customer.

You don’t need to make any changes here since it’s optional.

4. Product Short Description

Same as your detailed product description in #2, this brief text gets shown on the product page right underneath the product name. This is where you provide a very brief summary of your product, make it as simple as possible but clear and can describe the whole product.

5. Product Categories

You’ll find this section on the right side of the screen. There will be an area that allows you to set categories on the product you’re selling. Go ahead and click “+ Add new category” to assign a new category on the product. This is useful for groupings your products such as shirts, smartphones, books, etc.

6. Product Tags

This functions just like what normal WordPress tags do. Tags allow you to set multiple extra descriptive words or search terms. As an instance, if you’re selling books, you might want to tag novels with romance or their genre.

7. Product Image

This is your main product photo used as a featured image. Make sure to pick an image that eye-catching and high-quality so customers are astonished and can see all the fine details.

8. Product Gallery

In addition to being able to set your main product image, you can also add multiple product images to absolutely show off your product. Use this option to display the different angles, colors, sizes, and the overall appeal of your product.

Once you’ve finished setting all of the above, click on the big “Publish” button and your first product has just been added!

After successfully adding a handful of goods to your database, the products section in your dashboard should look something like this:

Pro Tips: Descriptions and photos are everything in selling products online. Make sure the product narratives pop and also contain a lot of easily searchable keywords. For images, eye-catching and high-quality are the main key to presenting your products in the best way possible. Starting out, the do-it-yourself route is the right choice. Along with the growth of your online store, consider starting to hire outside help for both the copy and photos. In the long term, it’ll end up with a nominal investment that rewards you with a very high return.

 

back to menu ↑

5. Choose A WordPress Theme

Customizing the look and feel of your online store is indeed one of the most compelling and worthwhile parts in the journey of creating your eCommerce site with WordPress.

There are thousands of ready-to-use themes which you can install on your WordPress site. Most of them are free, while there are some paid.

To change your theme, you can head to your WordPress dashboard and then navigate to “Appearance > Themes”.

Go on and hit on the “Add New” button.

On the next screen, you can search from over 6400+ free WordPress themes available in the official WordPress.org theme directory. You can also sort by popular, latest, featured, and other feature filters (i.e industry, layout, etc).

You can hover over to a theme and the “Preview” button will appear immediately. Clicking on will open up the theme preview page where you can see how it would look on your website.

The preview of your theme might not accurately look as shown in the screenshot, which is normal since you will surely get to customize and set it up later. Indeed what you need to consider is design, colors, typography, and other elements.

The best tip for choosing the perfect WordPress theme is by striving for simplicity in design. This can help you to keep things clean and clear while providing a good experience to your website visitors.

Once you’ve found a theme you like, mouse over on it, and it’ll show the “Install” button. Simply click it and wait for the theme installation process to complete. Then the “Install” button will quickly be replaced with an “Activate” button. You should click on it to activate the new theme.

After you’ve successfully activated your theme, you can customize it just by clicking on the “Customize” link under the “Appearance” menu.

The Rules of eCommerce Store Design

Before I discuss further, I’ll tell you a handful of crucial aspects that you need to understand.

Notably – what makes an eCommerce store design good or arguably profitable? Here are the most important parameters:

• The design must be clear plus not confusing in any way. A visitor who’s confused won’t want to buy anything.
• The center content block needs to attract visitor’s attention as soon as they come to the website. It’s the place where you display your products.
• Adjustable sidebars. You should be able to choose how many sidebars you need and also disable the sidebar altogether for several pages.
• Responsive and mobile-optimized. Research shows around 80% of people who access the internet have a smartphone. Based on another research, 61% of your mobile visitors will forsake immediately and go towards your competitors when they have a frustrating mobile browsing experience. Therefore, making sure that your website is optimized for mobile is crucial.
• Good navigation structure. You would like clear and easy-to-grasp menus – so that your visitors can easily find the page they’re looking for.

Having the above in mind, here are a few of the best theme choices both free and premium for your eCommerce WordPress site:

Free Themes

From hundreds of free WooCommerce themes available, I recommend these top 5 themes:

Storefront

Storefront is the perfect theme for every WooCommerce project that you create. Designed and produced by developers from the WooCommerce core team, also it includes a bespoke integration with WooCommerce itself plus a lot of the most popular customer who is facing WooCommerce extensions. There are numerous layout & color options to customize your online store, multiple widget areas, a responsive design plus much more. Developers will love its lean and extensible codebase that makes it easy and fun to customize and extend. Looking for a qualified WooCommerce theme? Look no further!

Main Features

• Search Engine Optimization
• WooCommerce Integration
• Just Enough Display Options
• Responsive
• eCommerce-Focused Homepage
• Accessibility Ready

Download NowLive Preview
ShopIsle

ShopIsle is a perfect free theme built specifically for your WooCommerce store based on Bootstrap. Because of its versatility, ShopIsle can even be employed to create a one-page business website. It provides a simple, minimal and elegant style that will work flawlessly for clothing, electronics and almost all other types of stores.

Main Features

• WooCommerce Ready
• Responsive Design
• Easy Contact Form
• About Us Page
• Clean & Validated Code
• Browser Compatibility
• Theme Options Panel
• Localization

Download NowLive Preview

eStore

eStore is a clean, gorgeous and also fully customizable responsive WooCommerce theme. It contains many premium features and several custom widgets that can help to make your online store look professional and well organized. It’s fully compatible with WooCommerce along with its supporting extensions and plugins. By utilizing this theme, you as an online store owner will find it much easier to attract customers and sell products.

Main Features

• WooCommerce Compatible
• YITH WC Wishlisth Compatible
• Category Colors
• Collection Template
• Responsive Design
• Major Browsers Compatible
• Widget Areas
• Custom Widgets
• Search Engine Optimization
• Optimized for Speed
• Primary Color Option
• Awesome Slider
• WPML Compatible
• Live Customizer
• Incredible Support
• Custom CSS
• Well Documented
• Demo Content
• Translation Ready
• RTL Support

Download NowLive Preview

eCommerce Gem

eCommerce Gem is a free multipurpose WordPress theme which is ideal for eCommerce sites of any store type. It’s seamlessly able to integrate WooCommerce, the most popular eCommerce plugin today and perfectly designed for its pages. The main features of this theme are product search with category select, multiple sections on the front page, latest and featured product carousel, full width easy to use slider, call to actions, advertisement section, banners and more. eCommerce Gem is ideal for stores such as fashion, phones, books, medical, makeup, jewelry, construction materials and all kinds of other online stores. It has multipurpose layouts so can also be utilized for business, corporate, digital agency, portfolio, blog, and all creative web development.

Main Features

• Responsive Layout
• WordPress Standard
• Elegant Design
• Easy Customization
• Incredible Support
• SEO Friendly

Download NowLive Preview

Hypermarket

Hypermarket WordPress theme is all about design. Made with a look that is as beautiful and attractive as possible for your website, that is one way in which you can retain traffic. When you want to get started on an eCommerce site, the Hypermarket theme is one of the first things you need. The whole design of this theme is ultra-responsive and retina-ready, offering a website that can be accessed from any device, no matter the size of its screen.

Main Features

• Product Image Flipper
• Ajaxify Blog Posts
• Share Buttons
• Gallery Post Type
• Hero Slider
• Product Countdown
• Video Popup
• Homepage Control
• Extend Product Sorting
• Custom Related Products
• Automatic Updates
• Translation Ready

Download NowLive Preview

Premium Themes

Let’s now look at the top 5 premium WooCommerce themes you can buy:

WoonderShop

WoonderShop is a premium WooCommerce theme that meets the requirements of every type of eCommerce professional. Whether its fashions, gadgets, cosmetics, or grocery, this theme is a perfect choice for your eCommerce store. It’s gorgeously designed that doesn’t only look aesthetically pleasing but also provides a very professional feel.

Main Features

• Responsive Design
• Cross-Browser Compatibility
• SEO Optimization
• High-Quality Code
• Fast Loading Speed
• Advanced Security
• Drag & Drop PageBuilder by SiteOrigin
• 1-Click Demo Import
• 3rd Party Widget Integration
• Translation in 14 Languages
• Professional Support Team
• Comprehensive Documentation
• 1 Year Support & Update

Download NowLive Preview

eCommerce

eCommerce is a beautiful, modern and professional-grade WordPress theme that’s perfect for building eCommerce sites. Its stunning layouts will help you to to get started on making more sales immediately, while advanced features like Wishlist and Quick View options will provide you with even more ways to package your products and satisfy your customers.

Main Features

• Responsive Design
• Speed Optimized
• SEO Optimized & Ready
• Secured & Optimized Code
• Ad Management
• Translation Ready
• Options Panel
• Custom CSS Section
• Demo Data Included
• One Click Installation
• Updates for Lifetime
• Use on Unlimited Sites

Download NowLive Preview

Outfitter Pro

Built to integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce, and has a stylish masonry-style product display option for the homepage, Outfitter Pro theme will help you increase sales by inviting click-throughs to product pages and making the checkout process as intuitive as possible.

Main Features

• Theme Options
• eCommerce
• Theme Customizer
• Widget Areas
• Customizable Header
• Mobile Responsive

Download NowLive Preview

Capri Pro

Capri Pro is a clean and elegant WordPress theme, perfect to use for building a one-page online store with a little effort. WooCommerce ready, Live Customizer, WPML compatibility, contact form integration, and quality support are just a few of the main features which make Capri Pro the best choice for your eCommerce site.

Main Features

• SEO Friendly
• Optimized for Speed
• WooCommerce Support
• Live Customizer
• Custom Backgrounds
• Mega Menus
• 1-Minute Setup & Demo Content Available
• Translation & RTL Ready
• 1-Click Updates & Fast Support
• Video Tutorials

Download NowLive Preview

Loge

Loge is a clean, minimalist and lightweight WooCommerce theme that is specially designed to showcase and sell unlimited products online. Whether you wanted to sell a few or even a large number of products, it can help retailers to build their online store without needing to touch any code. Just learn the WordPress basics, and you’ll be able to start a professional goods store to sell anything online.

Main Features

• SEO Optimized
• Tight WooCommerce Integration
• Sophisticated Mobile Experience
• Speed Optimization
• Easy Customization
• Custom Elementor Modules
• Customizable Storefront
• Minimal Product Page
• Compatible With Popular Plugins
• One Click Demo Import
• Translation Ready
• Regular Updates

Download NowLive Preview

 

back to menu ↑

6. Extending WooCommerce

There is one more thing that makes WooCommerce such an impressive eCommerce solution, which is since there are dozens or even hundreds of extensions and plugins available ready to use.

WooCommerce Extensions

First, let’s start with the extensions – the official add-ons which have been reviewed and approved by the WooCommerce team.

To see a list of available extensions, you can go to this page.

That catalog is surprisingly impressive and extensive. I don’t want you to feel confused by the amount that is too much. You surely don’t need all of those extensions. Solely treat that list as a buffet – pick anything looks useful.

Here are some of the best and most useful extensions for WooCommerce:

• Payment Gateways – These extensions allow your online store to accept more payment methods besides using the PayPal standard. Generally, the more payment methods you can afford to accept (those gateways are often paid), the better.
• Shipping Extensions – These extensions will be helpful if you would like to integrate your online store with the official shipping rates from companies such as UPS or FedEx.
• Accounting Extensions – By using these extensions will help you to easily integrate your WooCommerce store with the accounting tool of your choice.
• Stitch Labs – Automatically sync inventory, orders, purchasing, and fulfillment into one operating platform.
• WooCommerce Bookings – Allows customers to book appointments for services without having to leave your website.
• WooCommerce Subscriptions – Gives customers the ability to subscribe to your products or services and pay on a weekly, monthly or yearly.
• WooCommerce Memberships – Gives members access to restricted content or products, at a charge or free.
• EU VAT Number – Collects the VAT numbers at checkout and removes the VAT charge for eligible EU businesses.
• TaxJar – Automates sales tax, multi-state sales tax calculations, collection, and filing.
• Smart Coupons – Expands your coupon options by creating gift certificates, store credits, purchase-based coupon and more.
• WooCommerce Product Search – Ensures customers find the product they want when they’re searching on your website.
• WooCommerce Checkout Add-Ons – Highlights the relevant products, offers and other upsells as long as customers are in the checkout phase.
• WooCommerce Customer / Order CSV Export – Export orders and customers data easily and quickly from WooCommerce to a CSV file manually or with an automatic schedule.
• WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro – Adds an advanced event tracking and enhanced eCommerce tracking from Google to your WooCommerce site without any hassle.
• Google Product Feed – Allows customers to find the products you sell when shopping for products through Google.
• Facebook for WooCommerce – Helps boost your sales potential by synchronizing your WooCommerce catalog directly to your business’s Facebook page.
• MailChimp for WooCommerce – Automates synchronization of your MailChimp account with WooCommerce.

Alternatively, if you want to save money from buying extensions, you can browse around in the free category. There are more than enough extensions to keep you fulfilled.

WordPress Plugins

Besides using the extensions, you can also take advantage of other WordPress plugins to further supercharge your online store. Here are some of the best plugins you might need:

Plugins for Security

• Wordfence Security – Provides free enterprise-class WordPress security, protecting your website thoroughly from hacks and malware.
• Sucuri Security – Offers its users a set of premium security features to protect their entire website, each designed to have a positive impact on their security posture.
• UpdraftPlus – Back up to cloud and store directly to Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects Cloud, OpenStack Swift, FTP, and email.
• BackupBuddy – An advanced backup plugin to back up all your WordPress installations, including media library, themes, plugins, widgets, content, settings, and even database.

Plugins for SEO

• Yoast SEO – The most complete WordPress SEO plugin that can handle all the technical SEO stuff your website needs & assists with optimizing your content.
• All In One Schema – Helps search engines and searchers to better comprehend your online store by adding schema.org structured data markup in recommended JSON-LD format to your website.
• WP Rich Snippets – An advanced schema markup plugin built with the latest guidelines and technology to help you implement schema.org structured data markup accurately.

Plugins for Performance

• W3 Total Cache – Enhances the user experience of your website by boosting your server performance, caching every aspect of your website, reducing download times, and giving transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
• WP Rocket – A premium caching and performance optimization plugin to significantly increase the loading speed of your WordPress site.
• WP Smush – Helps in compressing and optimizing images without reducing their quality.
• Autoptimize – Optimizes your website by minifying and cache styles and scripts, minifies HTML, injects CSS into the head of the page by default (but can also defer), plus moves and defers scripts to the footer.

Plugins for Forms

• Contact Form 7 – Manages easily multiple contact forms, and you can also customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup.
• WPForms – Builds stunning contact forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your website with an intuitive drag & drop form builder.

Plugins for Comments

• Akismet – An anti-spam plugin which protects millions of WordPress sites from various comment and contact form spam.
• wpDiscuz – An AJAX real-time comment system designed to complement WordPress’s native comment features with an ability to create custom comment forms and fields.

Plugins for Analytics

• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP – Enables you to track your website using the latest Google Analytics tracking code then view your Google Analytics stats directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Plugins for Marketing

• Icegram – Creates beautiful opt-ins and call-to-actions according to your choice easily then show them to your targeted visitors and convert them into customers and fans.
• OptinMonster – A premium lead-generation plugin for WordPress which enables you to easily create and integrate high-converting email signup forms on your website.
• WP Bitly – Enables WordPress users to easily and quickly generate shortlinks for each page, post or custom post type.
• ThirstyAffiliates – Allows website owners to add, manage, and insert affiliate links easily and automatically into their posts and pages.

Plugins for Engagement

• MashShare Social Share Buttons – Allows you to add some of the most popular social media sharing icons to each page in the style of the popular blog Mashable.
• GetSocial Share Buttons – A social tools and analytics platform that helps increase and analyze traffic, social shares, followers and conversions on your website.
• Yuzo Related Posts – Shows related posts as accurately as it can plus also has multiple features with over 60 customization options as structure as design.
• Yasr Stars Rating – Adds SEO-friendly reviews and testimonials generated by customers easily to your website posts, pages, and CPC without affecting its speed at all.

 

back to menu ↑

Ready to Sell Online!

Setting up an eCommerce store using WordPress and the ever-popular WooCommerce plugin is relatively easy to do even for beginners who have new stores. As among the best free WordPress eCommerce solutions out there, WooCommerce truly delivers an adequate online store. Packed complete with all the features needed by an online store to run, and being user-friendly on both ends, WooCommerce successfully built the perfect eCommerce platform. Plus, WooCommerce provides sufficient functionality to make most online stores can be launched quickly, all for free!

If you’re looking for a free eCommerce platform that has been trusted by millions of people, has extensions for each type of store imaginable, plus is simple and easy to use, then give WooCommerce a try. By following the complete guide above for configuring the plugin, you will be selling products in a short time.

As you move forward to continue building your business, then both your products and your marketing efforts become more advanced, so too with your store. Soon enough, it will gel together in a cohesive and eventually very successful endeavor.

In case you have any questions about how to setting up WooCommerce or regarding online selling in general, please inquire further in the comments section below, and I’ll get back to you to help as much as I can.