There is great news for WordPress eCommerce website owners. eCommerce has become a significant player in the retail market. By 2040, 95% of the shopping will be done online. It’s not just one survey; the stats show consistent growth in eCommerce.
One of the most amazing things about eCommerce is that you don’t need many things to set up your eCommerce store. With a suitable platform, you’ll be able to create a WordPress eCommerce website where you can sell products online in almost no time.
Creating an eCommerce website is not that difficult. In an age where things are readily available, you can build a website with just a few clicks.
In this blog, you’ll learn the step-by-step process to develop a WordPress eCommerce website.
1. Choosing An Appropriate Domain
The domain name must be chosen wisely. The domain name usually represents the brand name. But at times, a domain name can also represent a service that you are providing.
A good domain name can quickly be brought from a domain provider. If you are a lucky person, you might find your domain name for a few dollars; other times, your chosen domain name might cost you some extra money. Because of the unavailable domain name, you need to purchase the domain from the person who has the domain.
As mentioned earlier, choosing the domain name close to your brand is the best approach. The key is to keep it short and memorable.
The “.com” domain is the most vital domain as it provides an option to sell products worldwide. If you pick a country-specific domain (like .us or .uk), you are merely limiting your reach of potential customers.
2. Sign up to BionicWP
To launch your website on WordPress, it is better to use a WordPress-managed platform. A platform like BionicWP gives you an option to launch your eCommerce store smoothly and maintain it with ease.
With BionicWP,you can set up a WordPress website in just a few clicks and the unlimited edits add-on will allow you to completely hand over your website to our team of WordPress engineers who will switch out images, upload products, look after your sites plugins and do every day edits so that you can completely focus on the things that matter the most.
Sign up for a free trial before you become a paying customer.
From website maintenance to security and performance of your website, BionicWP helps in scaling businesses fast.
3. Install WordPress
You can install WordPress with One-click install or manually.
As you might have guessed, One-click install is the easiest of the two. Depending on the hosting provider, you’ve opted for, you would be guided on what are the steps to install WordPress.
- One Click Install with BionicWP
If you are a BionicWP client, our custom dashboard provides you a simple option to install WordPress automatically. You would only be required to choose a server location and your database preference.
If you are not tech-savvy, we suggest that you go for a one-click WordPress install that’ll give you the ability to install WordPress in a hassle-free way.
- Manual WordPress Installation
For manual WordPress installation, you need to upload everything on the hosting server. A step-by-step guide will help you to install WordPress manually.
Installing WordPress is technical, so you must leave the job to a professional. Once the WordPress installation is done, you can move forward with configuring the WordPress eCommerce extension so that you can start selling.
4. Configure WooCommerce
One of the most downloaded plugins for WordPress for eCommerce website owners is WooCommerce. With more than 5+ million and a rating of 4.6/5, the plugin has more than 1 million active installations.
It’s a free WordPress plugin that gives the owner the ability to customize the plugin as per their need. You can easily create a whole store within even spending a dime.
Here are some of the features that you’ll be able to get along with WooCommerce:
- Product pages
- Checkout System
- Secured payments
- Extensive Shipping options
- Automated tax calculations
- Google Analytics, Facebook, and MailChimp integrations.
- Install & Activate WooCommerce
Simply log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to the ‘Plugin’ directory. In the search bar, type ‘WooCommerce’ and click on the ‘Install now’ button.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll get the ‘Activate’ button; click it.
WooCommere’s helpful setup will guide you through the setup process.
- Add Business Details
Just add business details that are required.
You need to add business details in the correct section of the WooCommerce section.
Suppose you are selling digital products like WordPress themes, courses, or stock images. At the same time, a digital camera is a physical product.
Selecting payment options is the next step to complete the setup process.
When you set up the payment on WooCommerce, you can either choose PayPal, Stripe, or other available options. You can even add these options later once you’ve set up everything else.
Confirm the shipping options. WooCommerce automatically recognizes your customer’s location, and your customer’s shipping zone will be added. You can select more location options.
When configuring WooCommerce shipping options, you can select free shipping or add carriers that will do your shipping. WooCommerce also gives you live shipping rates.
Now you need to choose the plugins and theme options. This is a crucial step because some recommended plugins need to be installed. You must also decide whether you need WooCommerce’s default theme or plan to use another theme for it.
You can choose WooCommerce plugins or add them later. You don’t have to commit to adding anything right now. Feel free to ‘unselect’ these and add them later on, and maybe you don’t need them later on.
At this stage, Enable Jetpack plugin. You’ll get payment setup and the option for taxes; you can even disable them. Just click on ‘Continue with Jetpack.’
Now, the basic configuration is sorted out. Now, you need to add the products.
Before the next step, you need to ensure that you have WooCommerce enabled in the directory. If it’s not, you need to activate it.
Choose the relevant shipping and payment option. You can always edit them according to your preferences.
5. Choose A Theme
Your theme will be the basic design of your content. The most wonderful thing about WordPress is that you can customize the entire theme of WordPress. You can also add HTML and make your website wonderful.
Unless you know coding well, you can choose the default theme, which makes more sense, and the desired product will be as per your need.
In other words, pick a theme that looks great for your eCommerce website, even if it means purchasing a premium theme. It will save you time in the long-run.
There are popular third-party websites that you can buy themes from like: ThemeForest, Elegant Themes, and others.
Choosing the fastest wordpress theme is a tough decision. If you are willing to scale your business, it is better that you use a premium theme that will have fewer issues.
You will find many WordPress free themes in the theme directory, which you can choose from the dashboard.
- First, log in to your WordPress and head towards the dashboard.
- In the ‘Appearance’ tab, you’ll find the ‘Themes.’ This is where you’ll be able to pick the theme.
- You need to click the ‘Add New’ button on the new theme and find the featured themes or even the popular themes from particular industries.
- You can check the demo of each theme before you buy the theme. When you find the right theme, hit the ‘Install button, and the theme will be downloaded.
- Once the theme is downloaded, you’ll be able to ‘Activate’ the theme, and the theme will be installed.
To install a premium theme, there is a little change.
- First, download the zip folder.
- Now, login into your dashboard.
- Go to the Appearance tab in the ‘Theme.
- Once you click the ‘Add New’ button, you’ll get the WordPress dashboard theme.
- Go to ‘Upload Theme’ and upload the zip file that you’ve downloaded.
- You’ll see that the theme is successfully installed. Now, you just need to activate the theme.
Pro tip:
WooCommerce has its theme, too, which works seamlessly and looks pretty neat. Since anyone can create a theme and upload it on the internet, you must understand which one is the trustworthy theme.
If you choose the theme poorly, it will give you a lot of trouble. It will also make your website an easy target for hackers. And don’t forget that the demo option is there to make you feel what a premium theme will look like once you install it on your website.
Before you move on, ensure that you have searched for the premium theme that you like. Check the demo version of that theme, and if possible, check the reviews of that theme. Install the theme and enjoy.
Let’s head to the next step.
Make Custom Creative Banners
There are so many eCommerce websites out there. When a customer visits your website, a banner is the first thing that he/she notices. If the banner is not attractive, it will drive the user away.
You can use free online tools to create banners for your website. Canva has some great customer banners, and you can even choose themes for your banner.
Content Creation
A banner might get the visitor’s attention, but it is the content that will retain that attention. To engage customers, you can hire professional content writers that’ll be able to write content that will get the attention of visitors.
If you are on a tight budget, you can go through a few copy writing guides and invest this money in marketing your new store.
First, write the essential pages like the About us page, contact us page, shipping page and return policy. These are some pages that can provide Google with some positive SEO signals. Next up, you need to write the product descriptions. For this, too, you might require help from professional writers that understand your product and can deliver your message to the audience.
The Additional Plugins
You might need some extra plugins that will give you the features you are looking for. But ensure that these are necessary plugins. If there are plugins that you don’t plan to use, it is better to deactivate those plugins.
Because activating too many plugins can make your website slow. Hence, it’s recommended to install plugins that add value to your website and your goals.
Submit Sitemap
If you expect that customers will magically land on your website and place orders, then we hate to break it out to you, that’s not how e-commerce works.
Nevertheless, you can grow exponentially if you leverage from tried and tested digital marketing strategies. Submitting your sitemap to google is the first step to helping potential customers find your website through search engines.
This is important because Google crawler needs to know the structure of your website to rank your website. When you submit the sitemap, Google will know the structure of your website, and it will be easy to index the pages in a structured manner.
Establish a WordPress maintenance contract with a Virtual assistance, agency or BionicWP
If you have appointed a freelance developer, that is great, but more often than not, certain edits require immediate attention and freelancers can be quite a pain with deadlines.
On the other hand, hiring an agency for regular WordPress edits can prove to be very costly in the long run.
So what should you be doing?
You can opt for WordPress maintenance services from BionicWP and leverage the following benefits:-
- Unlimited Application-level edits (Uploading products, changing banners, applying CTA’s and much much more)
- 1 platform for managing everything, from hosting to plugins to themes and everything
- 90+ Google page speed insight guarantee
- Frequent Malware Scanning, WordPress Hardening & WAF Firewall
- Guaranteed improvement in site performance and conversions
- Auto backup to staging and rollback for all those awkward moments
- Managed update of core, theme, plugins
Closing Thoughts
WordPress eCommerce website is a great way to sell your products online. There are many other platforms that you can use however, Woo-commerce is arguably one of the most reliable and popular e-commerce platform.
We hope that this post has helped you in launching your Woo-commerce powered store. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch .
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