Introduction to WooCommerce

10 steps to set up an ecommerce store with WooCommerce in WordPress.

Getting started with an ecommerce store can be tricky, and it’s easy to miss a step or two. This guide takes you from interest to having a fully-fledged webshop in WordPress – complete with the tools you need to figure out the next step in your journey as an e-commerce merchant.

What is WordPress and WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is the largest and most well-developed WordPress e-commerce project available. The project is run by the company Automattic, who are also the creators of WordPress. WooCommerce is the most widely used e-commerce solution for small and medium-sized merchants in the world today and is growing steadily.

Since WordPress and WooCommerce are open source, you have complete freedom to change as you wish and where all documentation is available online. This creates a vendor independence that is difficult to get with, for example, a rental solution. There are then lots of people who can help if you happen to get stuck.

As a buyer, it can be very difficult to know who to turn to for good help if you get stuck. The safest solution is to look for a supplier that is affiliated with the official partner programme, WooExperts. Those listed in this programme are there by invitation only from the creators of WooCommerce and are the closest you can get to a guarantee that the work will be done well. Angry Creative has Gold status, which is the highest status available in the programme.

Where should I turn for extensions & themes?

Basically, both WordPress and WooCommerce are open source and therefore cost nothing. However, in order to use WordPress and WooCommerce, you often need extra features that are not included. These are called extensions (plugins) and there are thousands of free ones. We have made a number of plugins for WordPress that are available for free, but also many customised ones. Everything that is free is usually available on Wordpress.org, but for WooCommerce you often have to pay a small amount for many of the basic functions you need to use. These are usually purchased from Woocommerce.com.

You should be careful about what add-ons you choose. The add-ons available on woocommerce.com are all reviewed and maintained, but on wordpress.org only a minor review is done. On third-party sites such as themeforest.com, you can find lots of plugins, but the quality can be very uneven. We therefore recommend as a rule to always use Woocommerce.com and wordpress.org, or to hire an expert.

When it comes to themes, we always use our starting point Qala E-commerce. In this theme, we have collected experiences from our projects so that you get the things that you need to solve to run a successful WooCommerce project. If you have the ambition to create an international e-commerce, Qala will streamline the project by several hundred hours. Qala is especially suitable for the more ambitious e-retailer who wants to carry out a really good project, but for someone who starts up and does not have a budget, WooCommerce’s own Storefront is perfectly adequate.

Hosting for WordPress & WooCommerce

An important part of running a successful e-commerce is choosing the right kind of hosting. Therefore, we need to look at a hosting provider that can run our solution.

When it comes to hosting services, you will have different requirements depending on where you are in your development. Generally speaking, you are in one of three stages; Startup, Sub-enterprise and Enterprise.

Regardless of the solution you choose, it is important to use SSL. SSL means that the transmission between your e-commerce site and the end customer is encrypted. This is extremely important because as an e-retailer you will be handling some of people’s personal and payment data and without SSL it is easy for malicious parties to intercept the communication between your solution and the customer and thus get hold of information that is sensitive.

There are many different types of certificates, but the simplest protection you can use is Lets Encrypt. Lets Encrypt is a project to strengthen security on the web and through donations from many of the world’s largest companies, they can issue SSL certificates free of charge. The only thing needed for those who use it is that your hosting partner has an automated solution to manage the process around this – but most respectable hosting partners have that today.

Startup

When you’re a startup , you don’t always have a lot of customers. It might not matter too much if something goes wrong every now and then, as long as the price is right and the solution works well enough. The focus here is that the solution can be changed quickly and that it is cheap to change it. What you want to look at here is a general supplier that you can grow with until you reach the next level. Here you want them to provide as stable a service as possible while having good support. Here we recommend Oderland web hosting or WP Engine.

Sub-enterprise

As a Sub-enterprise customer, you have probably been up and running for a while and are making some money on your solution. The challenges you face here are often about wanting to enter more markets or take the “next step”. Here, it becomes important to ensure that the e-commerce solution does not go down when you run a major campaign, that test environments are not published so that they are indexed by search engines or perhaps that when an update is run, there is no possibility of the shopping basket/checkout crashing by accident. With performance optimisation and modern development principles (automated testing, builds, version control, VPN, etc.), you ensure that this does not happen.

When you are at this level, we recommend Synotio WordPress hosting, which is our solution where we have combined our 10 years as WordPress providers. Here we take total responsibility for the webshop being up and if this works, we guarantee with penalties (refund obligation).

Enterprise

As an Enterprise customer, a single mistake can mean huge losses. Therefore, the need for processes and a solution that is always up and running is a basic requirement. What is often forgotten, however, is how to get the co-operation between different developers. It becomes especially complicated when there are developers and others internally who need to collaborate with external suppliers.

Synotio offers an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for this purpose. This means that you can buy hosting and development processes together, giving you the opportunity to utilise both external and internal resources if you wish and get DevOps help in return.

Install WordPress & WooCommerce

Once you’ve chosen which hosting provider is right for you, it’s time to install WordPress and WooCommerce. The execution looks a little different depending on which solution you have chosen, but in essence, the first 5-minute installation of WordPress is carried out. After this is done, it is no more difficult than going into “Add-ons”, searching for “WooCommerce” and installing.

When this is done, go to “Appearance” -> “Themes”. Here you can search for themes that are freely available. Search here for “Storefront” and click install. After you have done this, it may be worthwhile to review the page and make sure that everything is translated into the desired language. Since the theme comes from WordPress.org, if the translation is not complete, you can go to Translate WordPress, find the theme and help translate it.

Now the foundation is laid, but this is also where the hard work begins – getting all the settings to be as you want them.

Choosing a payment solution

There’s a whole host of payment providers out there, and the different providers’ suppliers and solutions all look different. Therefore, it is important to have an idea of who your customers are and in which markets you will be active. Investigate which option is right for you. There is no universal solution that is always right. Sometimes the payment providers don’t want the particular service you intend to sell because they don’t think you are a suitable customer. Then you have to look further.

If you are a startup, it is often advantageous to keep costs low. As a standard solution, you can always use PayPal, but the cheapest is probably to use Stripe.

Another good option is Klarna. Klarna is a household name in Scandinavia and is perceived as a safe alternative that increases the conversion in the last step of the checkout process through its smooth solution. The downside is that it can require a fairly good turnover to be able to negotiate a really good deal. You can find Klarna’s plugin for free at woocommerce.com.

Read our more in-depth guide to payment solutions to find the one that suits you; Best payment solution for woocommerce.

Keep in mind that it usually takes a number of weeks before agreements are finalised and this process is completed. It is therefore important to run several processes simultaneously.

Choice of shipping provider

Shipping, just like payment providers, is a long selection process and a long contract procedure. Here you need to ask yourself: Where are the customers? What type of products need to be shipped? How will things be stored? If things are not stocked locally, it may be worth looking into more comprehensive 3PL solutions (Third party logistics) or dropshipping – but for now we’ll assume that what needs to be shipped is in place.

Some of the most common providers are Postnord, DHL, DSV, Schenker, Bussgods, UPS and Fedex. They all have different prices, partners and solutions that can be compared. Then there are also freight brokers who manage to push prices further through co-freight or simply good negotiations. Some of these services include Grossist.se, Fraktjakt, Fraktsystem, e-handel.se’s Edge or Pluskonto’s DHL discount.

It is often easy to use a supplier such as nShift, which can connect lots of different shipping suppliers via a single system. This makes the work around shipping much easier, and only one integration is needed. We have ready-made solutions for nShift if you are a contract customer. Read more about nShift and the benefits of this solution.

Set up shipping costs & shipping classes

Setting up your shipping costs exactly as you want them in WooCommerce can be complicated if, for example, you do not use free shipping or a fixed shipping price. If you are selling things that vary in size and weight, there can easily be many exceptions and high complexity, which WooCommerce cannot handle in its basic design.

To solve this common problem, you often use Table Rate shipping, which is an extension that makes it possible to define complicated shipping sets. This extension works for the vast majority of e-merchants, but in some cases customised functionality is needed, which requires hiring a WooCommerce expert.

Terms of purchase, shipping terms, general terms & conditions & cookie notes

The final step in the process with the payment and shipping provider is usually that they authorise your store to use their solution. It is therefore important that, before this point, you have finalised your website terms and conditions. Your store should have the following:

• General terms and conditions
• Purchase terms and conditions
• Shipping terms and conditions
• Information on cookies

These texts often take a long time to produce and need to be customised to the particular business that this e-commerce will be engaged in. Keep in mind that favourable shipping prices and return conditions make for satisfied customers!

Often you want to inform in a neat way that and how to use cookies. For example, you can use the CookieYes | GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice extension that does this in a smooth way. This add-on enables you to comply with GDPR and cookie laws.

Set up taxes & zones

Depending on the markets to be sold to and whether you are working with B2C or B2B, the tax rules are very different. Within Sweden, there is a difference in the type of products sold. Before specifying VAT rates, we always recommend that you check what VAT rate applies domestically. This is easily done on the Swedish Tax Agency’s website.

If you sell products within the EU, it is relatively easy. VAT is paid by private individuals as usual, but entrepreneurs do not pay VAT. The Swedish Tax Agency’s website also provides good information on how this works.

If you intend to sell to companies within the EU, a plugin is usually needed to check the buyer’s VAT number (VAT registration number) in the checkout. Here you can use the EU VAT number plugin to solve such a field.

If you sell goods outside the EU, the customer will also have to pay customs duties and there may be a lot of trips with customs. Keep in mind that some things may have export bans and must be approved by authorities – so investigate carefully first! The Swedish Tax Agency also has a good guide here.

Since 1 July 2021, the EU has also introduced new directives and EU VAT rules with One Stop Shop. Read more about OSS and the EU VAT rules.

Add products

Once we have started to find our payment provider and shipping provider, it is a great time to start adding the products to the shop. Depending on how many products there should be, this can either be done manually, or products can be imported from, for example, Excel lists. For this, ready-made CSV import extensions are often needed or customised tools must be developed.

If the number of products is limited, the best possible result is generally obtained by adding the products one by one. Each product has one or more descriptive texts and these are extremely important. Search engines will index them so it is important to have good descriptive texts, reviews, nice pictures etc.

Keep in mind that categorisation and organisation of products will be important to build navigation. Menus will be much easier to create if there is a good and clear structure.

Understand the difference between different product types

In WooCommerce, you can choose between a couple of different product types. The most common is to choose between standard simple products and variable products.

• Simple products mean that each individual product has its own product number (SKU). These products are only available in one version.
• Variable products mean that the product comes in several variations. For example, if you are marketing mobile phone cases, a case for an iPhone could be one product – but the 10 different designs on the product could be variations on this case.
• Grouped products mean that you group several other products together in one group. In this way, it would be possible to sell each product separately as individual spare parts – to include in a group also the service of “assembly”, so that the customer receives a fully assembled product.

There are also product types for subscriptions, services (virtual products), downloadable products, affiliate and more. WooCommerce has a comprehensive guide on the different product types and how they work that is recommended further reading.

Organise invoices & packing lists

Packing slips and packing lists are handy things that are often needed to make things run smoothly for you as an e-merchant. This is especially useful if the packing of the products is not handled externally. If you handle the packing yourself, don’t forget to buy packing materials and packaging.

WooCommerce doesn’t handle packing lists and invoices in its basic form, but requires extensions to do this well. Print invoices and packing lists is a plugin that is often used to create packing lists and invoices, but often needs hand coding to make it feel consistent with your other graphic profile.

Set up tracking

By now we have a working e-commerce solution. Now it’s time to market our solution, build engagement around your brand and gradually improve the store to gradually increase sales.

The foundation of this further development work is traceability. Every change we make must be justified by data. Therefore, it is extremely important that we have analysis tools that work and that deliver the right data to us.

Google Analytics (GA) & Google Tag Manager (GTM ) are two common products used to analyse data. Google Tag Manager is used as a customisable container within which to embed GA and other measurement scripts, but it is also possible to use GTM to track advanced interactions such as a specific button press or whether users have successfully viewed a specific part of the page.

When implementing GA, you usually need to use an extension that syncs the correct WooCommerce data to Google. This tells GA what is a conversion and how much the order was worth. This in turn gives access to GA’s e-commerce views, which are very beneficial. Enhanced E-Commerce is an add-on that we have used many times with success.

Hotjar is a service that works well as a complement to GA & GTM. Hotjar’s coolest feature is that it can record what visitors do on the site, allowing you to follow their path from entering the site to making a purchase. This is a great way to analyse the design and usability of the site to find out what can be improved. Hotjar also has a lot of tools for different types of pop-ups, customer surveys etc. that can be interesting to use.

We hope that this guide has been helpful in creating your e-commerce. Good luck to you!