I already know that this topic is very "crushed", but I cannot begin to talk about more advanced aspects, without first explaining in a simple way how to install WooCommerce and publish your first product, all in less than 5 minutes.
The goal is to make life easier for those who want to start using WooCommerce and have no prior knowledge. In other words, anyone who has a WordPress website can set up their online store from scratch and without having to hire an expert.
I'll also post more advanced stuff that most will need throughout the project. But first, let's start with the basics.
How to set up your WooCommerce store in WordPress?
In this case, we assume that you already have WordPress installed on your woocommerce hosting.
And not. We are not referring to having a free blog on the WordPress.com platform, that is not worth us.
Having clarified the above, the first step would be to enter your WordPress administration panel and go to the Plugins section and then click on « Add new «.
Now type in " woocommerce " and click on " Search Plugins " so that WordPress starts searching for WooCommerce in its plugin repository.
When the search is done, it will show you a list of plugins. You just have to click " Install Now " on the first result in the list.
Now that you have installed the WooCommerce plugin, it remains to activate it. To do this, you just have to click on the link « Activate plugin «.
If it were any other plugin, with this you could start using it, but with WooCommerce you need to take one more step which consists of creating all the pages that will make up the online store. But don't worry, all this process is done in a few seconds automatically simply by clicking on the button « Install WooCommerce pages «.
Ready! You already have your online store installed in WordPress with WooCommerce.
From now on you will see two new sections in the WordPress navigation menu: " WooCommerce " and " Products ". In these two sections, you have everything you need to manage your entire online store.
Configure some basic WooCommerce settings.
Before uploading your first product, I recommend you configure the type of currency with which you are going to work in WooCommerce, the countries to which your sale will be destined, and the main location for your business.
To configure these settings you must go to " WooCommerce> Settings " And in the " General options " section you will see:
Main location. Here you must choose the country or region where your business is established and, therefore, where you will pay the taxes. If, for example, your business is in Spain, WooCommerce forces you to choose the province in which your business is developed. In other cases, such as; Mexico or Argentina, just select the country.
Places of sale. This field allows you to configure your store to sell products worldwide or only in certain countries. If you are going to sell to everyone, then leave the option that comes by default. But if you are going to sell, for example, only in Europe, then you have to choose the option " Sell to specific countries " and in the field that appears just below, select the countries from the list.
Just below you have the section « Currency options » where you must configure the fields:
Coin. Here all you have to do is select the currency with which you are going to work in your store.
Currency position. The currency position is used to tell WooCommerce in what order you want it to display the currency symbol that goes with the price. For example, if the currency you are working with is € uro, the logical thing to do is choose the option to display it to the right of the price, leaving it like this: € 29.99.
Upload your first product in WooCommerce.
It is useless to have WooCommerce installed and working if you do not know how to upload products to your store. Therefore, the next step that I am going to explain is to create a product page and complete all the necessary information to have a decent product file and finally publish it in your store.
To create a product page go to the " Products " section and then click the " Add Product " button.
Write the name of your product and add a description, the more detailed you make it, the better (we will explain it in more detail in another post).
Assign a category to your product. If necessary, you can assign several categories to the same product, although it is usually better to use subcategories or attributes, a very powerful and useful option to filter and search for products.
Show a prominent image of your product. To do this, go to the " Featured Image " section that you will see on the right, click on " Assign Featured Image " and upload the photo of the product you want to highlight. This will be the main photo of the product that customers who enter your website will see first. You can add more photos to your product, but these will not be shown as featured, but as a gallery within the product page.
Finally, you must insert a reference number and put a price on your product. To do this, go to the "Product information " section and click on the " General " tab. There you can see the fields we are talking about:
Reference. Here you must enter the reference code of your product so that WooCommerce can keep track of the stock. Remember that it must be a unique code for each product.
Usual price. Here you must include the price of your product, NO TAXES.
Below I show you an example of how the product should look once uploaded.
The design (colors, button, layout, etc) may vary since that depends on the theme you are using in your WooCommerce store. What interests me is that you see how the product card would look and how the customer would see it.
These would be the 5 basic steps that you should carry out to upload a product to your online store.
There are indeed many more fields in the product sheet that we have not talked about, simply because we believe that it is better to dedicate another complete entry to explain what they are for and how they can help you, for example, to better manage your catalog or improve sales.
As you can see, installing WooCommerce and publishing your first product is not complicated and it will not take much time.
My intention is that little by little you get to know all the WooCommerce functionalities so that you can squeeze all its power to the fullest and apply all this knowledge to your online store.
