Book Image

Mastering WooCommerce - Second Edition

By : Patrick Rauland
Book Image

Mastering WooCommerce - Second Edition

By: Patrick Rauland

Overview of this book

Author Patrick Rauland is a WooCommerce expert with a deep-rooted passion for the platform. Drawing from his multifaceted experience as a customer, WooCommerce support team member, core developer, release leader, and conference planner, he presents the latest edition of this guide to help you master every facet of launching and managing a successful WooCommerce store. From initiation to seamless integration of essential components such as payments, shipping, and tax configurations, this book takes you through the entire process of establishing your online store. You’ll then customize your store's visual identity, optimizing for search engines and advanced sales management through Point of Sale (POS) systems, outsourced fulfillment solutions, and external reporting services. You’ll then advance to enhancing the user experience, streamlining reorders, and simplifying the checkout process for your customers. With this new edition, you’ll also gain insights into secure hosting and bug fixing and be prepared for updates. That’s not all; you’ll build a promotional landing page, ensure store safety, contribute to the WooCommerce community, and design custom plugins for your unique needs. By the end of this WooCommerce book, you'll emerge with the skills to run a complete WooCommerce store and customize every aspect of the store on the frontend as well as backend.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Exploring the essentials of an ECommerce Store
6
Part 2: Managing an Online Store
12
Part 3: Customizing the Appearance and Functionality of Your Store

Importance of test sites

If you’ve been a WordPress developer for a while, you’re probably familiar with test sites. And while they’re important in developing non-e-commerce WordPress sites, they’re critical in WooCommerce development. The following screenshot shows what the website development process looks like:

Figure 1.1 – Website development process

Figure 1.1 – Website development process

In a typical WordPress development project, you’ll build custom functionality on your local machine. Then, you’ll upload it to a test site where the client usually approves it. Then, you’ll move the test site to the live site, replacing data and files.

And this works great for most WordPress projects. But when it comes to e-commerce, there are two problems:

  • You can never replace the live database: Since an e-commerce site is always on and always accepting new orders and payments, and marking items as shipped, you can’t replace the...