Until a few years ago setting up an online store was not something you could easily do yourself. Sure, there were solutions available on the market such as osCommerce and Virtuemart for Joomla, but they never offered the functionality and ease of use we were all waiting for.
Since 2009, this started to change. WordPress was becoming more and more popular and soon people started to use the platform for more than just a blog. We also saw several plugins passing by, which offered e-commerce functions for WordPress. Some good ones, some buggy ones, and some never got out of the beta stage.
In 2011, the WooCommerce plugin became available in the market, developed by the popular creators of Woothemes.com, where you can buy premium WordPress themes. WooCommerce was an instant hit and reached over ten thousand downloads in the first couple of weeks. A few years later the plugin was downloaded almost 1.4 million times and it received a complete makeover during 2013 with the release of WooCommerce 2.0.
The reason the plugin became so popular is that it is so easy to use. Millions of people were already using WordPress for their blogs and websites and were looking for an easy way to be able to sell products and services directly on their website. WooCommerce made that possible for all of us.
This book will explain you how to setup WooCommerce, create products, and use payment and shipping methods. It will help you learn how to create and run your own online store in a very easy and straightforward manner.
It's time to get started!
Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce, explains that WooCommerce is a free but versatile plugin for WordPress, that you may use to easily set up your own online store. Using WooCommerce, setting up your own web shop is finally within reach for everyone, even if you have no coding experience at all.
Chapter 2, Creating Your First Products, explains that WooCommerce gives you the possibility to quickly set up your store and add products to it. In this chapter we'll do just that to get you started.
Chapter 3, Other Product Types, describes that using WooCommerce it's also possible to sell other product types, such as downloadable items and products with options. This chapter helps you learn how to use those WooCommerce possibilities.
Chapter 4, Payments, Shipping, and Coupons, describes taking your store to the next level means that you need to get familiar with payment and shipping methods. This chapter helps you learn how to do that. We'll also discuss how to use WooCommerce capabilities of giving discount to your customers to increase engagement and sales.
Chapter 5, Working with WooCommerce Themes, discusses how every WordPress website needs a theme. The theme determines the look and feel of the site. WooCommerce requires some additional markup as well. This chapter helps you learn how to select a WooCommerce compatible theme and how to install it.
Chapter 6, Customize or Create a WooCommerce Theme, discusses about creating a WordPress and WooCommerce theme is worth a book on itself. In this chapter we'll give you a brief introduction in this topic to get you started.
Chapter 7, Running Your Online Store, explains how to use WooCommerce to make sure everything is handled correctly? Time to bring your store online and start selling! But what to do when the first orders flow in?
Chapter 8, More Possibilities Using Plugins, discusses that WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress, but you may add additional plugins to it to expand its functionality. We'll show you an overview of the top and not to be missed plugins.
In this book we're assuming that you're familiar with using WordPress. You do not need development skills, but just basic user level knowledge of WordPress should be sufficient. Your WordPress website should be a self-hosted one. Using WordPress.com is not an option, since that solution does not offer the possibility to install your own WordPress plugins.
If you're not yet familiar with WordPress we highly recommend reading one of the WordPress Beginners books or tutorials first.
If you're already working with WordPress we also assume that you know how to work with an FTP tool, for instance the free Filezilla.
Besides that it's handy to have an image manipulation software available, such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Fireworks, or Gimp.
Finally, you'll need a code editor if you want to be able to change or create your own WooCommerce themes, a topic that we'll cover in Chapter 6, Customize or Create a WooCommerce Theme. The well-known editors are Notepad++ for Windows users, and Coda for Mac users. But there are plenty of alternatives as well, just use the tools you like.
This book has been written for everyone who wants to learn how to expand an existing WordPress website with e-commerce functions using the WooCommerce plugin.
WooCommerce is easy to use, but fully functional e-commerce plugin that will turn your website into a fully featured online store. The book is suitable for marketers, e-commerce (project) managers, web design agencies working with WordPress. But first of all, this book is meant for everyone willing to run their own online store on a small budget.
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