[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou may have found that starting your own store is one of the recommended things to do when you are researching how to make money online for beginners. While it might sound complicated, the truth is that there are plenty of ways to make the process smooth and simple. In this article, we are going to talk about how to setup an online store for your business and specifically with WooCommerce & WordPress.
Planning Your Online Store
If you already have an idea of what you want to sell, you are a step ahead of many people. Most people know they want to make money online, but are unsure about what to sell to make the money. The good news is that there is a market out there for almost anything. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of trinkets advertised on Facebook as well as clothes and other products. If you can think of it, there are most likely someone out there that wants to buy it.
Besides for planning what you are going to put in your store, you need to think about the categories you want to assign and how you are going to organize your store. If you don’t properly organize your store, you are going to have confused customers and confused customers don’t make purchases.
Making your online store as simple to use as possible is easy when you use WooCommerce and we will show you how below.
Domain & Hosting
Before you get started with the frontend of your store, you need to take care of the backend. By backend, I mean that you need a domain and hosting. A domain is what points to the location of your website online for instance, Google.com is a domain name. Hosting is a remote computer where your website files are stored and shared when people go to access them.
You need both a domain and hosting before you can set up your WordPress site and install WooCommerce on your site.
There are many different domain name providers and hosting providers available so find one that has the features and price that you want, make the purchase and let’s get started.
WordPress & WooCommerce
One of the reasons people find WordPress & WooCommerce to be so attractive is because they are both free and open source. You can use them and modify them as you see fit and you aren’t going to be asked to pay for a subscription and nothing is going to expire.
WooCommerce is the most cost effective and simple way to turn your WordPress website into an e-commerce store that is fully functioning and ready for you to start selling products. You install and activate WooCommerce just like you would any other plugin with all its features and ability to customize. If you can follow instructions, you can easily install it by yourself over the course of an afternoon. You also do not have to change your theme unless you just want to since it functions with whatever theme you have available.
You can use WooCommerce to sell many things like digital products, physical products, services, bookings, subscriptions, affiliate offers, etc. If you can put a price tag on it, you can put it up for sale.
Let’s Get Set Up
Now that you have your WordPress site up and you’ve installed WooCommerce, it is time to get things rolling. The launch wizard will come up and help you through the process.
One of your first actions will be to get necessary store pages ready.
The first step of the WooCommerce wizard is to make the necessary pages for them. The pages you need are shop, cart, checkout and my account. After you’ve finished making these pages all you have to do on the wizard is click continue so WooCommerce can set up those pages for you.
The next step on the wizard is setting up the locale. This is where you put in your location as well as your currency settings. Once you finish entering the information click continue.
On to the next step you will find your tax settings. While you might not fun this part of things to be fun, it is an essential part of running your business. You can use the tax table in the wizard to set the right amount of tax and then click continue. After you have things set up, you can double check with your location to make sure you are collecting enough taxes.
Picking your payment method is another important step. Paypal is often the choice new store owners choice since Stripe can be expensive for beginners.
Once you have all of the settings optimized, you are ready to add your first product. Simply navigate to the left hand side of the Dashboard under WooCommerce and click Add Product.
This is a standard WordPress editing screen, but in this case, the subject is the name of the product and the body text is the description of the product.
The rest of the page is there for you to set up your product data with pricing and photos. The setup is as simple as that and all you have to do to add more products is save the one that you are working on and go to the next. You can add as many products as you want to your store and set whatever pricing you choose.
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