“Customer is king!” they say, and rightly so. The main purpose of setting up an eCommerce store is to make your products accessible to the users. Every store owner constantly strives to enhance the end user experience and create on-going relationships with the customers. Maintaining a customer information database plays a crucial part in achieving this goal. Having the customer’s contact, shopping pattern, order history, etc. enables you to tailor your marketing strategy effectively. You can create coupons, schedule sales, send out updates on new arrivals, and much more. For an end user, on the other hand, having an account means faster checkout. Since all the billing/ shipping addresses are in place, precious time is saved. It also makes it easier to track current orders and view order history.

wooCommerce offers a host of options related to user registration. You can enable registration either on the Checkout or My Account pages. I prefer to go with the Checkout page since it blends in with the rest of the process without having to go to a different page just to create a login.

The account creation itself is a simple task of checking a box and keying in a password. You have the option of automatically generating the username as well as the password. Not all users would be interested in creating an account. Having a mandatory account creation in place can be a big turn off in such cases. The checkbox allows users to proceed with shopping without having to login or creating an account. This is what we popularly refer to as Guest Checkout.

Ever wondered where the registered users are stored? Just like any WordPress user, the customer registrations are also saved in the wp_users table of your WordPress database.

With that we’ve covered all the wooCommerce customer registration settings. Go ahead and feel free to play around with them to figure out what works best for your site. If you have any suggestions/ queries, please drop me a note.

Shipping is one of the key aspects of any eCommerce store. Even while setting up your wooCommerce store, it is very important to have the right shipping strategy in place. In our earlier tutorial Getting Started with wooCommerce we learnt how to setup a complete eCommerce store using the wooCommerce plugin. With this tutorial, we will explore the various Shipping options that wooCommerce provides.

wooCommerce Shipping Options

Let’s get started with the basic set of options to set up shipping on your store. This is where you can choose if shipping calculator should be enabled on the cart page, the default shipping destination (i.e. billing vs. shipping addresses), specify a list of countries, and configure different shipping methods. Phew, that’s quite an exhaustive list, isn’t it? But the fields are so intuitive and easy to fill that you only take a few minutes to go through it.

Shipping Classes

wooCommerce provides you the option of creating shipping classes to group different products together. You can then use these classes to associate different shipping methods and costs to different product groups.

Flat Rate Shipping

The flat rate method covers almost all the regular shipping strategies of an eCommerce store. Using this method you can configure the shipping cost per item, per order, or per shipping class.

Just as in the case of the base shipping options, you can specify the countries for which you’d like to apply the flat rate shipping costs. There is a Cost per order, which is the basic shipping cost for an order. You can include additional rates for priority deliveries. In this example, I have added two additional rates:

Priority Shipping (1-2 days) | 1.00 | order

Guaranteed 24 hours Shipping | 4.00 | order

You can add more or fewer rates in the same format, i.e. Name | Cost | Type, where type can be order, class, or item.

Lastly, you have the additional costs table using which you can add any added cost for a specific shipping class, including handling fee. There is also a provision to enter an overall minimum handling fee at the bottom of the page.

With all these costs keyed in, the cart page will look as follows:

For each shipping type, you have the additional cost included. So for an item worth 175$, priority shipping will cost –

175$ (product price) + 5.99$ (basic shipping cost) + 1$ (priority shipping) + 1.2$ (additional cost) = 183.19$

Per Product Shipping

Most online stores have shipping cost for an entire order. However, some products (heavy or large products) may require special shipping. You may want to have a different shipping fee for a particular product based on the customer location. To handle such cases wooCommerce allows you to enable per product shipping using a premium extension. Apart from including cost per product, you also have the facility of defining costs per variation of the product.

Table Rate Shipping

wooCommerce has another shipping related premium extension known as the Table Rate Shipping. This is suitable for stores that cater to different parts of the world. Using this extension you can create shipping classes, geographic zones, and suitable rates pertaining to these classes and zones. The extension brings a great deal of flexibility by allowing you to configure rates based on number of items in the order, weight of the products, and lots more.

Conclusion

There are many ways to setup shipping on your store. It is strongly recommended that you are 100% clear about your courier rates and shipping locations before setting this up. That way you can come up with the most cost effective solution for your store.

In the tutorial Getting Started with wooCommerce we learnt all about adding a simple product. As the name suggests, a simple product is the one that has no options, like a box of chocolates. But wooCommerce doesn’t limit you at this. It provides a many other product types that give you lot flexibility while creating your product catalog. You can add variations in sizes and colors for a given product, group similar products together, or list an external product that’s sold by another company on your site.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to add different wooCommerce products to your ecommerce site using the wooCommerce plugin.

The wooCommerce Product Types

Before adding a product to your catalog, you must first decipher its type. wooCommerce supports four types of products –

1. Simple Product – A basic type that doesn’t support options, e.g. a pen

2. Grouped Product – A collection of related, simple products that can be purchased individually. For e.g. a USB drive that comes in sizes 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, etc.

3. Variable Product – The product that has variations in size, color, etc can be classified under this type, e.g. T-shirts

4. Affiliate Product – Promote products through affiliate marketing.

Let us now look at each of these product types in detail.

The Simple Product

Adding a simple product is quick and easy. Each product is added using the Products-> Add Product page from the dashboard with the type Simple product. Once you’re here, you must fill details such as Name, Short and Long Descriptions, Set the Product Image and Categories.

The Product Data tab set comprises of the bulk of the product information. Most of the fields are intuitive, making the plugin very easy to use without having to go through pages of documentation. A special mention here about the Linked Products section. You can key in the Up-Sells and Cross-Sells over here which are extremely helpful in promoting your products.

The Grouped Product

A Grouped Product comes in handy when you want to promote ensemble products on a page. For example, you have a bedroom set with sheet, comforter, and pillow cases grouped together. Each item in the group is a simple product with a unique ID and can be purchased individually.

The process of adding a Grouped Product is exactly similar to that of a simple product. The key point is to note is that all the items that are to be grouped together should’ve Grouping set the parent product.

The Variable Product

The variable product type is required when you want to offers variations in your product, e.g. sizes – small, medium, and large. Each variation can have a different price.

The key to creating a Variable Product lies in using the Attributes and Variations tabs. You can either use global attributes or create custom ones specific to your product.

The Affiliate Product

Affiliate marketing is an integral part of any ecommerce business today and a great way to generate extra revenue for your business. The wooCommerce plugin renders itself perfectly to this model by allowing you to promote external products on your site.

Apart from these types, there are other factors associated with a product that are worthy of mention. Let’s have a quick look at what they are.

Virtual and Downloadable Products

wooCommerce also supports virtual and downloadable products. With these options you can sell e-books, music, and other intangible products. Quite naturally these subtypes are restricted to simple products as no variations come into play here.

Featured Products

Most ecommerce sites showcase their featured products on the homepage. You can achieve this on your wooCommerce site using an appropriate theme like Wootique that supports the slider feature to display the featured products. All you’ve got to do is toggle the  for a given product from the Products listing page and the rest is taken care of by the theme.

With that we now come to the end of the tutorial that covered all the wooCommerce product types. If you have any questions, please send me a note.

Tracking, Analytics, and Customization are 3 pillars of your wooCommerce site. In this article we will learn all about how you can use them to the best possible extent and boost your business.

Apart from providing you the flexibility of configuring a host of options, wooCommerce also includes excellent tracking tools. You can track orders, manage coupons, and view detailed reports.

You can track all the orders from the Orders page on your dashboard.

You also have the option of viewing reports based on orders, customers, stocks, and taxes. Each of these report types can be filtered further. For example, the orders report can be generated based on date, product, or category.

Customizing the Look and Feel

We’ve reached the last section of this tutorial where you can finally view your site. To do that, we need to first choose an appropriate theme. It is best to go with a theme that supports wooCommerce so that a lot of time and effort can be saved. There are many free as well as premium wooCommerce friendly themes available. The wooStore itself offers hundreds of themes, the free ones being Wootique, Artificer, and Mystile. I’ve picked the Wootique theme for this tutorial. The main focus of the theme is to showcase products and fits in perfectly with setting up an online store.

To get started with the Wootique theme, you must first download it from the wooStore. Once you have the compressed file ready, upload it to the themes section using the dashboard. Lastly, install and activate it to start using the theme.

Setting the Theme Options

The Wootique theme supports various options such as adding a logo, displaying breadcrumbs, slider for your featured products, etc. Let us look at some of the important ones.

General Settings

If you have a customized logo for your store, this is the place to upload it. It is also a good idea to check the Display Breadcrumbs option which makes navigating through your site really easy.

Homepage Settings

This is where you have the Slider settings. You can choose between Slider and Static grid for your featured products along with the number of products that you want to display.

Styling Options

Under this tab, you have all the color and background image settings. You can change the default color and background images here to suit the store that you’re setting up.

Customizing the Sidebar and Footer

You can select the widgets that must appear on your sidebar and footer(s) from your dashboard. You have options such as AdSpace, Shopping Cart, Product Categories, Customer Reviews, etc to choose from.

And here it is…

… our very first wooCommerce site that we created from scratch. Now, wasn’t that really easy?

Hope you enjoyed reading through our 3 part series on setting up a wooCommerce site from scratch. If you have any questions, please drop me a note.

wooCommerce configuration is organized under 7 different tabs making it an exhaustive list. This is only to give you all the flexibility while creating a site. To begin with, however, you don’t need to worry about them all. Most of the default values work perfectly well.

The fields under General and Product tabs can be left unchanged except for the Redirect to the cart page after successful addition option. Though an optional step, it is known to improve your conversion rates.

Setting up the Tax Rules

So you’ve set up your product catalog and ready to market your products online. An important part of sale is the taxes associated with it. Each region has different laws pertaining to how you should tax your products. It’s best to have a complete understanding these laws to ensure to that your ecommerce site is 100% compliant.

wooCommerce has a dedicated section for taxes. You can specify options such as the following –

• if the product’s price is inclusive of tax

• if tax should be calculate based on shipping or billing address

• tax class that is applicable

• if should taxes be included while displaying the price in the shop and checkout pages

Make sure you check the Enable taxes and tax calculations option before you change anything else.

This is only half job done. You still need to add the tax rules for all the regions that you sell to. wooCommerce supports 3 different classes – Standard Rate, Reduced Rate, and Zero Rate. Apart from setting the default class in this tax section, you can also assign these classes in the add product page.

Checking out

wooCommerce offers a comprehensive list of payment options for your eCommerce site – Net Banking, Cash on Delivery, PayPal, Cheque, and Credit card. Each of these payment types has a separate form reserved for it. Remember to check the enable option right at the top of each section before proceeding with the other settings.

Shipping Options

The shipping methods that you set up for your store depends on your eCommerce model. Do you support international delivery? Do you offer local pickup in case of returns? These are some of the questions that you’ve got to answer while setting up shipping.

wooCommerce’s shipping methods include free, flat rate, local and international deliveries. Each can be set up using a dedicated form just like the other settings for tax and checkout. You can also associate shipping methods with payment options. For example, you may want to enable cash on delivery only for local shipping.

Want more details about shipping? Read our tutorial wooCommerce Shipping Options.

 With this we come to the conclusion of the second part of the series for setting up a wooCommerce site. In our next part, we’ll look at the other benefits of using this plugin – Tracking, Analytics, and Customization.

WordPress started as a blogging platform and has now evolved into one of the most popular CMS that we have today. The other online entity that has seen a massive growth over the years is e-commerce. When these two biggies come together, what can we expect but a big boom?

WordPress + eCommerce = Opportunity

With the introduction of the wooCommerce plugin by the team at wooThemes, building a WordPress eCommerce site couldn’t get any easier. You can create an engaging online store from scratch, in a few hours, without having to write a single line of code. Ain’t that awesome?

Though we have many popular eCommerce platforms like Magento and Shopify that offer a host of features, using WordPress has its own merits. The familiarity with WordPress coupled with your experience with plugins simplifies your learning curve. You don’t have to forego your comfort zone and learn a whole new platform to build your ecommerce site.

Apart from being integrated with WordPress, the plugin has a very intuitive interface which means you don’t have to go through pages of documentation while setting it up. It also brings a great deal of flexibility to the users. Using the plugin you can categorize products, schedule sales, manage coupons, track orders, and so much more. You can also sell different types of products including virtual and downloadable ones. To top it all, the basic plugin is totally free.

Installing the wooCommerce Plugin

The first step to getting started with wooCommerce is to install the plugin. The process is similar to that of any other WordPress plugin. So go right ahead, install and activate the wooCommerce plugin. Once you’ve completed this step, you will see a notification on top of your Plugins page asking you to install wooCommerce Pages.

Clicking the install button will automatically install Shop, My Account, Cart, and Checkout pages.

• Shop page lists all the products in your catalog.

• Cart page provides details of all the items in your shopping cart along with total cost that includes shipping and taxes

• Checkout page includes details about your billing and shipping address, mode of payment, etc.

• My Account page is where you can view your recent orders, manage your address information, change your password, etc.

Since we definitely require these pages on our site, let’s go ahead and add them.

That’s it! Your wooCommerce plugin is ready for use. You should see new additions on your dashboard’s side panel – wooCommerce and Products.

Setting up the Product Catalog

Creating your product catalog is perhaps the most important step in this tutorial. After all, isn’t that why we are setting up the site, to sell our products? This step is also most time consuming as you need to add each product with details such as name, description, price, etc.

With wooCommerce’s easy-to-use categories and product pages, creating a product catalog is a very simple process.

Categories

A well structured and organized product catalog goes a long way in enhancing the user experience. It will also help your customers locate the desired products quickly. The wooCommerce plugin provides a Categories page to set up your taxonomies.

Products

Each product is added using the Products-> Add Product page. All the fields in the product creation form are self-explanatory, making it very easy to fill. The key part here is the Product Data tab set which forms the bulk of the product related information such as price, dimensions, stock status, etc. Don’t forget to associate the product with an appropriate category, which we created in the previous step, before publishing it.

The product type that you just added is called the Simple Product. As the name suggests, it is a basic product with no options, like a can of soda. The plugin, however, doesn’t limit you to this. If you want to add products that come in varied sizes and colors, you have the option to do that too. For more details, refer to our tutorial All about wooCommerce Products.

Now that you’ve successfully added a product, I’m sure you are very eager to see it displayed on your site. But let us quickly go through the rest of the settings in the next part – Configuring the wooCommerce plugin.