Yes, this is that famous wordpress plugin. If you type woocommerce as the keyword to search the plugin on your website’s wordpress admin/Add Plugin page, it appears as the first plugin with 5 million+ installations.
But frankly speaking, this plugin is not easy to use at all. You may have known that you can use it to sell products on your own website, so that you do not reply on big platforms such as Amazon to do business. You must have visited some websites that install WooCommerce. On their website, you must remember a shopping page, i.e., a page list a product with its price, image, description, even review, and a buy button. You click the buy button, the product would be brought into a cart. You click the “view cart” link to see all the products you have added. You can remove some of them from the cart, then you can click the check-out button to the check-out page, where you need to fill your billing information. Somewhere on the check-out page, there is a pay now button. Click that button will take you away from the current website and to a new web site(payment gateway, where you complete the payment). This is the whole process of buying a good from a website powered by WooCommerce.
But how does WooCommerce do that? Does the WooCommerce plugin present itself as a widget that you can drag&drop to the sidebar of your website? Not really. Here is the what’s added on the left column of the wordpress admin page after you install/activate WooCommerce. It is not a widget. Also, you can not write a short code to put it somewhere in your post. It is far from a usable stuff till now.
To use WooCommerce to sell products, you have two things to do: create some products and complete settings for store.
Creating a product is like creating a wordpress post or page, but it is independent from wordpress posts/pages(your exiting wordpress posts/pages are still there, no change at all). The Products/Posts/Pages are in parallel. You cannot see products in the Posts/Pages on the dashboard. The created products take a url like http://domainhostseotool.com/product/test-product/. On this url, you can see the information you filled when creating the product, and you can buy that product from there. If you want to sell products on websites with existing posts, you need to add the product links in the existing posts to bring potential customers to the product web page(s) to start the purchase process, otherwise, people may never see the products you created. Note that the product slug in the url is not a category name. Although you can specify/create the category of a product when creating it, the category name is not shown here.
WooCommerce does create some ordinary pages automatically after activation. You can see them in Pages on the dashboard.
Specifically, how to create a product in WooCommerce?
Click Products/Add New.
There are so many fields to fill, but do not get dazzled by all bells and whistles. As a newbie, you only need to fill the product name, its price, its category and give it an image, and if you sell a virtual product, tick the Virtual box, then click the publish button. After publishing, you will get the product url I mentioned above, and you can put the link on your exiting posts/pages to bring customer to the product page. You can also see the created page on Products/All Products:
After you adding a product, you will see the tooltip “You’re doing great! 5 steps left to get your store up and running. Continue setup” showing up on the top of dashboard. Now let’s click the “Continue setup” link in the tooltip to finish the part II of using WooCommerce:
Set up your WooCommerce store
Here you need to fill much information to set up your store.
After going through all the above pages, we just completes the first step of the whole 5 steps. Now continue:
The second step is to choose your theme. Most of you may choose not to change the current wordpress theme, but you still need to click the step 2 button to let the system know you have completed step 2. Click the navigate back button of your browser, you can see we’ve reached the step 3:
Setting up payments is the most important step of the 5 steps. After all, you need to receive the money by selling your products.
Here lists 2 available payment methods. Click the “Enable” by a payment method to enable it(you will the see the “Enable” button becomes the “Manage” button, which you can click to set up that payment method further). We show here what you can see after clicking the “Manage” button for the Cash on Delivery method:
The two payment methods may not cater to your needs. There are plenty of wordpress plugin providing additional payment methods such as crypto payment for WooCommerce, Paypal gateway for WooCommerce, etc. After installing those plugins, you will see more payment methods on this page. You will need to set up each payment method if you enable it.
Step 4 is Add tax rates:
The confusing stuff here is Configure tax rates:
You must click “Insert row” to insert a line, but you don’t need to fill anything such as the Country code/State code, etc. here, just use the default values(*). You only need to click the “Save changes” button.
Now comes the last step of 5 steps:
This step is actually some ads promoted by WooCommerce. You can safely skip this step and your store is already set up.
Now, we have accomplished the 2 parts of using WooCommerce: creating products and setting up store. If you visit the url of a product, you will see like this:
Note the category name we created for the product. Click the “Add to cart” button to add the product to the cart.
Click the “View cart” link to see the cart page(yes, it is the page you see in the dashboard/pages)
Click the “Proceed to Checkout” button to see the checkout page(you can see it in dashboard/pages).
Fill the billing information and click the “Place Order” button to bring you to the order-received page:
This is the whole story of using WooCommerce to sell a simple product. We also simulated the purchase process of the product.
