Back in the early days of WordPress, the platform was mainly used to create and run blogs. Soon plugins became available to add functionality to the platform. A couple of e-commerce plugins became available as well. However, often they were incomplete or buggy.
In 2011, the WooCommerce plugin became available on 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. Meanwhile, the solution has become mature and is even used for larger online stores.
The reason that 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 own website. WooCommerce made this possible for all of us.
This book will explain you how to set up WooCommerce, create products, and use payment and shipping methods. You will work with themes and add plugins to expand the functionality of WooCommerce. It will teach you how to create and run your own online store in a very easy, straightforward manner.
It's time to get started!
Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce, shows you how to set up a test environment and install WooCommerce. After that, you'll learn how to set up WooCommerce and work with taxes.
Chapter 2, Creating Your First Products, helps you create your very first products. You'll learn what the minimum steps are to get your products available and be able to start selling them.
Chapter 3, Using Downloadable Products and Variations, offers various other possibilities when creating products. In this chapter, you'll create downloadable products, learn how to work with attributes, and create variable products.
Chapter 4, Payments, Shipping, and Coupons, shows you how to set up payment and shipping methods for your store. You will also learn how to use discount coupon codes for marketing purposes.
Chapter 5, Working with WooCommerce Themes, shows you what you need to pay attention to and where to buy or download good themes. Having a solid WordPress theme available for your WooCommerce store is very important.
Chapter 6, Customizing a WooCommerce Theme, gives you a brief introduction to themes to get you started. Creating a WordPress and WooCommerce theme is worth a book by itself. You'll actually make code changes to your theme and find some practical examples.
Chapter 7, Running Your Online Store, starts with explaining how to bring a development store live. What do you do when the first orders flow in? How do you use WooCommerce to make sure that orders are handled correctly? We'll also show how to manually create an order and speak about reporting. Time to bring your store online and start selling!
Chapter 8, More Possibilities Using Plugins, explains which plugins to use and where to look for other possibilities. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. On top of WooCommerce, you can install additional plugins to expand or change the functionality. But there are so many options, which plugins are a good choice?.
In this book, we're assuming that you're familiar with using WordPress. You do not need development skills, but just a 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 as it does not offer the possibility to install your own WordPress plugins.
If you're not yet familiar with WordPress, we highly recommend that you read one of the WordPress beginner's books or tutorials first. WordPress 4.x Complete from Packt Publishing is a good start (https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/wordpress-40-complete).
If you're already working with WordPress, we're also assuming that you know how to work with an FTP tool, like the free FileZilla.
Besides this, it's handy to have 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, Customizing a WooCommerce Theme. Well-known editors are Notepad++ for Windows users and Coda or Sublime Text for Mac users. There are plenty of alternatives as well; just use the tools that 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 an 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, and web design agencies working with WordPress. First of all, this book is meant for everyone willing to run their own online store on a relatively small budget.
Although this book is not aimed at developers, some WooCommerce code examples are provided in this book.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Next, simply enter WooCommerce in the Search Plugins field and hit Enter."
A block of code is set as follows:
add_action( 'get_header', 'remove_storefront_sidebar' );
function remove_storefront_sidebar() {
if ( is_product() ) {
remove_action( 'storefront_sidebar', 'storefront_get_sidebar', 10 );
}
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Plugins in the menu on the left-hand side, and click on Add New".
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