Ready to sell your products online? It’s fun and wonderfully convenient to tell your customers, “Go online and you can buy my products!” But there’s quite a bit to learn when you want to set up an E-Commerce WordPress website.
As many of you know, we are WordPress Enthusiasts! HOWEVER – when it comes to e-commerce, we’re not overly convinced that WordPress is the CMS to use. The reason we say this is most of the themes that are e-commerce ready are very heavy and cluttered with widgets and code that you just don’t need. Then if you’re trying to load over 25 products into a WordPress site – you’ll spend days or even weeks trying to get every items’ details listed.
How to Set up an E-Commerce WordPress Website
There are some good points to using WordPress such as:
- It’s open source and free to use
- You don’t have to be a professional nerd coder
- You can have a blog and shopping cart in one website
- If you’re a little savvy – you can have your store open within a few hours.
That being said – if you’re determined to use WordPress for your E-Commerce solution and you’re a little computer savvy, it’s doable. Follow these steps to learn how to set up an E-Commerce WordPress website.
Getting Started
What you’ll need to get start to set up your WordPress E-Commerce Website
- Register a domain name (Example: YourDomainName.com) You shouldn’t spend more than $12/year on this domain name, but it will be a fee that is annually renewed.
- Hosting for your website. Every website online has to buy monthly hosting for their website. The size of your website and the amount of traffic your website sees is what dictates this monthly expense. You can use GoDaddy or another regular hosting company, but we highly recommend WPEngine. (Affiliate link) A lot of these hosting companies have a “One-Click WordPress” install; meaning that you can easily and quickly get a database and temporary WordPress theme installed on your domain name within minutes.
- Secure Server License. An average website does not require security, but if you’re taking payments on your website, you’ll be required to have a Secure Server License to secure the buyer’s credit card information. This is also a renewed fee annually, and can be purchased from your hosting company.
- Payment Gateway. This one also is required if you’re going to accept payments directly on your website. You can choose from many different companies like PayPal or Authorize.net, WePay, Stripe and many, many others. We suggest you doing your research on which service offers the best options for you with their fees and rates.
- Product List. You need to have all of your product names, descriptions, pricing and details typed up in either a spreadsheet format or at minimum in a word doc. You or your web developer will need these details when adding products. Having this created will also give you a number of products. Some developers charge by number of products.
- Product Photos. There’s nothing that will sell your products better on your website than great photos of them. Be sure not to use a cellphone or some cheapy camera here. You’ll want to invest to make these amazing and to show off the details of your products. Try to have different angles or to show all of the products’ options. Having images that can enlarge for customers to see all of the details is key in shopping cart sites.
- Shipping Methods / Pricing. Something that you might not think about right away is shipping methods. How are you planning to ship these purchased items? Do you know what company or costs are involved? How heavy are your products? Do they need additional services because they’re fragile or perishable? These are all details that must be worked out before you “open” your virtual e-commerce WordPress website.
Choosing a WordPress E-Commerce Theme
Choosing a WordPress E-Commerce theme will be one of the most tedious and yet important steps in this process. You’ll want to keep in mind your logo and brand colors. You’ll also want to keep in mind what sort of features you’ll want on your store like: responsive design, coupon codes, cross-marketing, and the ability to put items on sale. Will your products be virtual and be able to be downloaded? You need to have a list of the required features so that as you look for themes, you’ll be thorough.
At the time of this article Woo-Commerce is the best in the WordPress world for E-Commerce and it’s free to plug into a theme, but we actually suggest purchasing a theme that already has this plugin customized for you allowing the nerds to handle all of the nerd code for you.
You can purchase a WooCommerce theme by visiting www.woothemes.com or find some through Themeforest.net.
NOTE: Really pay attention to the theme reviews. These can help you from many, many headaches.
Setting up your WordPress E-Commerce Theme
For the sake of this tutorial – we’re going to use Flatsome from Themeforest.
Now that you’ve selected and installed your new e-commerce WordPress theme (follow the theme’s instructions for the installation process as each theme is different) – you’re ready to set up the theme and all of its options.
Every theme has unique options that the author has allowed you to make. These vary per theme so be sure to follow their instructions. However there are some typical WooCommerce options that will be the same no matter what.
- Set up store options giving attention to the shopping cart pages, size units, shipping options, gateway setup and how you’ll handle tax calculation.
- Take time to create a flowchart for your website’s navigation. Explained further in the video.
- Set up your product categories and category photos.
- Add your Products, Photos and Details
- Set up your Secure Server License and be sure your website now sites on https
- Set up your Auto Responder Emails
Actually Order Something
One mistake people can make is never actually going through the entire process on their own website to buy a product. You should take a moment to buy something. Actually type in your credit number and make a complete purchase. This way you know exactly what your customers go through, and you’ll be confident that all is set up correctly.
Don’t forget the details
Sometimes in the process of setting up your store you forget about some legal stuff that you should be including in the site like: terms of use & privacy policy. You should also include a sitemap page and a returns policy page.
What CMS do we recommend for 25+ products?
Great question! We highly recommend having a professional team help you get your online store up and running. There are several commercial solutions that can work for your online store, but you really need to weigh out all that you’re wanting in your store, and be sure that your check list of desired features is thinking “big enough!” for the future. This means – have you kept in mind that you’ll want to add product lines? Have you considered what it would look like to run an advertisement in your local town and how your server space would handle that kind of traffic. All of these are little things that will make a big difference if you don’t have a professional helping you consider them and plan for them.
Magento is one of the industry leaders for E-Commerce, but will require a pro helping you more than likely.
Big Commerce is another solution – but you do not own your website’s code so you’re always locked to them.
Shopify is pretty great, but this could be quite comparable to WordPress / Woocommerce.
