Adding an online store to your WordPress website

Adding an online store or e-commerce component to your website doesn’t have to be as difficult as you think. Website technology has come leaps and bounds in the last 5 years, and with these changes, the cost of implementing features such as online stores into your website has come down. The availability of new payment gateways such as Stripe has made taking online payments a breeze and online accounting systems such as XERO allow integration between all facets of your online store.

So what is the best ee-commercesolution for your WordPress website?

Well ,our answer is Woocommerce.

Woocommerce is the leading ecommerce solution for WordPress and is used on millions of websites worldwide. Woocommerce is capable of running online stores with just one product, all the way up to 10,000. The power of Woocommerce is outstanding and believe it or not, the setup process is not overly difficult. If you are looking to start selling a few simple products with no fancy shipping or billing options, then Woocommerce is a breeze to setup. The installation process will guide you through the required settings and prefill a lot of the tax and shipping rules. Paypal is built in as standard, so you can be up and running in no time and taking payments straight away.

Adding Products in Woocommerce

When Woocommerce is installed a two new menu links will be added to your Dashboard – Woocommerce, and Products. Adding products to your store is much like adding a post or a page in WordPress. The option to “Add new product” is available from the Woocommerce submenu, and from there you are presented with a number of options to fill out. For simple products, it’s just a matter of providing some information about the product. The only required fields are a title or name for your product as you can run your store as a catalogue, and content such as a description, category, photo, price are all optional. To sell products you will require a price and this will then allow products to be purchased.

When adding photos you can  set a featured image, much like pages and posts, and also subimages that act as additional photos shown under the featured image.

Woocommerce Features

The beauty of Woocommerce is its ability to integrate seamlessly with WordPress – and it’s FREE. It’s opensource technology allows 3rd party companies to build plugins or addons for Woocommerce which extend the softwares usability. There are thousands of plugins available for Woocommerce ranging from shipping solutions,  product display, complicated tax scenarios, checkout options and automation. Here are a number of top features:

  1. It’s opensource and FREE
  2. Thousands of plugins and addons available (free and paid)
  3. Minimal setup costs compared to other software
  4. Great support and tutorials available online
  5. Ease of use. Easily add products and manage orders online
  6. Multiple payment gateway options
  7. Add 1 product or 10,000
  8. Built in reporting and analytics

So overall if you are looking at adding an online store to your website then take a look at Woocommerce. The ease of use and management of products and orders is exceptional and the product is easily scalable.

Woocommerce is the eCommerce software of choice at M2media and has been used on many clients website projects. M2media can take care of all the installation and setup along with any customisation that you might require.