A few years ago, building an online store used to be an incredibly complex task. You had to install bulky software onto your own website and pay expensive developers a significant sum of money to customize even the simplest elements of your store. Luckily, nowadays, adding e-commerce functionality to your existing WordPress-powered website can be done by installing a single plugin. In this chapter, we'll go over the settings that you'll need to configure before launching your online store with WooCommerce. Most of the recipes in this chapter are simple to execute. We do, however, add a relatively complex recipe near the end of the chapter to show you how to create a plugin specifically for WooCommerce. If you're going to be customizing WooCommerce with code, it's definitely worth looking at that recipe to know the best way to customize WooCommerce without affecting other parts of your site.

The recipes in this chapter form the very basics of setting up a store, installing plugins that enhance WooCommerce, and managing those plugins. There are recipes for official WooCommerce plugins written using WooThemes as well as a recipe for unofficial plugins. Feel free to select either one. In general, the official plugins are better supported, more up to date, and have more functionality than unofficial plugins. You could always try an unofficial plugin to see whether it meets your needs, and if it doesn't, then use an official plugin that is much more likely to meet your needs.

At the end of this chapter, your store will be fully functional and ready to display products. In Chapter 2, Adding Products, we will learn how to add products to our store.