See this article for an easy method to start selling products on your WordPress website. The ease and low overhead of starting an online store is a beautiful feature of our current digital world. Understandably, so many people want to offer products for sale on their website, where they have control over the content and purchase process. Not to mention, selling on your website helps keep costs down.
Selling Products On WordPress Websites
Given the popularity of e-commerce, it’s not surprising that there are so many options for running your online store. It can be confusing to navigate the landscape of plugins and services, so that’s where I come in to help!
Before we get started, a note: If your business needs a large-scale online store, and that store is going to be the main focal point of your website, I would recommend considering a service like Shopify. You can choose between many ready-made templates, and they will sort out the hosting and support. In the long run, you will pay more than WordPress, but I would argue that the time you save would be worth it.
However, if you are like my clients, you may want a “store” page on your existing WordPress website that sells a few products like books, t-shirts, etc. In this case, I think the best path is to install the WooCommerce plugin.
Why WooCommerce to Selling Products On WordPress Websites
WooCommerce integrates nicely with most themes I’ve tried, is easy to use, and looks great. The base plugin is free, but you’ll need to pay extra for extensions with specific functionality.
Whether selling digital downloads or physical products, WooCommerce can handle the entire customer experience.
How to set up WooCommerce
To set up WooCommerce, install and activate the plugin in your WordPress admin dashboard via Appearance>Plugins. You will then be taken through the setup steps, where you can tell WooCommerce various things about your store, like which currency you will be selling in, whether you’ll be charging tax, and which payment gateway you want to use.
Payment Gateways
The free version of WooCommerce supports several payment gateways. I would recommend Stripe if it’s available in your country. I have found it to be the easiest to set up and use. If it’s not available, the second-best option is PayPal.
Adding Products to Start Selling On WordPress Websites
Products are added the same way you create a page or post in WordPress. You can enter the product image, description, price, etc. You can check the box for “Downloadable” and add the file URL if it’s a digital download.
The main index page of your website will then show all your products, and customers can click through to see and buy each product.
So that’s the basics, but there are many more advanced ways to enhance your online store. Some extensions I’d recommend looking into are:
- WooCommerce One Page Checkout plugin
- Woo Layouts
- Booster Plus for WooCommerce
- WooChimp
- Woocommerce Custom Tabs PRO
Do you have an online store? Comment below to let me know about it!
