A one page order form can put your entire product catalogue at your customers’ fingertips. By creating a one page store, you can streamline the shopping experience and encourage customers to purchase more products. It can also make your site hugely attractive to wholesale customers and bulk buyers.

In this article, we’ll explore how WooCommerce one page order forms work, and why you might want to add one to your online store. We’ll then show you how to build your own one page shop in four easy steps. Let’s get started!

Understanding the Typical WooCommerce Store Layout

The layout of your WooCommerce store is usually determined by your site’s theme. However, many popular e-commerce themes such as Storefront include some standard elements. This means that most WooCommere e-commerce stores function similarly.

Typically, customers may start by searching for a product they’re interested in. This might involve entering the name of a specific product in the search bar, or navigating through your product categories and subcategories.

When a customer finds a product they’re interested in, they can learn more about it by visiting that item’s dedicated product page. Here, the customer can also add the item to their virtual shopping cart.

Some stores feature variable products. For example, you might sell a hoodie that comes in several colors or sizes that customers can choose between. These options will be visible on the product page as well.

Most WooCommerce stores feature a separate Cart page where shoppers can view which products they’ve selected. This gives them a chance to remove unwanted items or edit their variation selections before proceeding to checkout.

The checkout process typically occurs on yet another separate page:

For many e-commerce stores, this is the desired setup. It enables shoppers to browse available products and learn more about the ones they’re interested in purchasing.

However, this isn’t the best layout for all e-commerce stores. In some scenarios, it may make more sense to create a one page order form.

An Introduction to WooCommerce One Page Order Forms

A one page order form condenses the product selection and checkout process into a single page. By opting for a one page order plugin such as WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate, you can display your entire catalogue in a compact visual display:

Customers can purchase any product from your catalogue by clicking on its accompanying Add To Cart button. If a customer wants to purchase multiple versions of the same item, they just need to enter the desired value into the Quantity field.

WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate

List products in quick and easy order forms

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Sometimes, customers may want to purchase several items. This is particularly common among wholesale buyers. In this scenario, the customer can select each item’s accompanying checkbox and then click on Add selected to cart.

Related Tutorial
Here’s a step by step guide on setting up a wholesale store with WooCommerce

This will add all these items to their shopping cart in a single action, saving the shopper time:

Customers can even purchase variable products directly from your one page order form. For these items, WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate displays a Select Options button:

Your customers can click on it and all of the options available for that product will become visible. When they’re happy with their selections, they can add the variable product to their shopping cart as they would with any other product in the table.

Why (And When) You’d Want to Create a WooCommerce One Page Order Form

A one page order form displays everything your online store has to offer in a single location. This convenience can help drive sales by making your products easier to find and purchase, particularly if you have a large product catalogue.

If your store features lots of similar items, a one page order form can make it easier for customers to compare and contrast these products. This can help shoppers make more informed purchasing decisions and improve their experience.

The ability to compare products also makes one page order forms a good fit for takeaways and restaurants. Customers typically expect to compare all starters, main dishes, desserts, and sides from the same page. If you spread your menu across multiple pages, it could make for a poor customer experience.

Related Tutorial
Follow this guide for how to accept online orders for your restaurant

One page order forms can also appeal to wholesale and B2B customers. When placing a large order, it can be difficult to navigate between multiple product pages. Your wholesale customers will likely appreciate the ability to build their orders by working through a compact, organized list.

All that said, a one page order form isn’t suitable for every online store. This includes e-commerce sites where your products require a significant amount of supporting information.

For example, electronics stores might have dedicated technical specifications for each product. This information is crucial to helping shoppers make informed purchasing decisions, so it typically makes sense to include it on a dedicated product page rather than trying to squeeze it into a product table.

A one page order form may also be unsuitable for stores with a limited product catalogue. A streamlined shopping experience can benefit your customers. However, shoppers may be underwhelmed by an e-commerce store that’s stripped down to just a few lines in a table.

How to Create a One Page Order Form For Your Website (In 4 Easy Steps)

WooCommerce is a popular e-commerce plugin. However, it doesn’t provide features specifically tailored towards helping you build a one page order form out of the box.

While you could build a custom one page order form using WooCommerce’s built-in tools and the WordPress Block Editor, this would require a significant amount of time and effort. Thankfully, there are available plugins that can extend this popular e-commerce platform and make it easy for you to create your streamlined layout.

You can build a one page order form in four easy steps using a dedicated plugin such as WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate. After installing and activating it, you’re ready to get started with Step 1 below.

Step 1: Build Your One Page Order Form

The first step is specifying the content you want to include in your one page order form. For example, you might create a minimalist form that contains only the information wholesale customers need to reorder products they’re already familiar with.

Alternatively, you may want to appeal directly to consumers or to those who are unfamiliar with your products by including product images and short descriptions. Your goals and target audience will shape what content is most fitting for your product table.

In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings and select the Product Table Ultimate tab:

In the Columns field, choose which columns you want to include in your one page order form. The possible values are sku, thumbnail, name, short-description, attributes, categories, tags, price, and add-to-cart.

Most of these options are fairly self-explanatory, but SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) numbers are identifiers that retailers use to internally track their inventories. SKUs can be particularly useful for repeat customers who regularly purchase the same items. Often, these customers can find the relevant item in your product catalogue much faster by searching for the associated SKU.

Step 2: Make It Easy to Bulk Order By Adding Quantity Selectors

Next, you can choose whether to display a quantity selector alongside each product. This gives customers the ability to bulk purchase an item in a single action.

You may want to consider adding a Quantity selector if you sell items that customers often purchase in bulk, or that you regularly run bulk buy discounts for. This feature can also make your store easier for wholesale customers to use.

To add a Quantity field, open the Show quantities on add-to-cart column dropdown in the WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate settings. Then select Yes.

You can also help customers add multiple unrelated products to their carts in a single action. According to neuroeconomics expert George Loewenstein, consumers prefer to complete their purchases as one easy transaction, rather than buying multiple items separately. By enabling this feature, you can improve your site’s customer experience while also encouraging conversions.

The WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin has an Add Selected button that you can include in your one page order form. Simply select Enable add selected button > Yes. Customers will then be able to select all the items they want to purchase and add them to their carts with the click of a button.

Step 3: Add Your Variable Products and Decide How to Display Them

If your store features variable products, there are several ways to display them in your one page shop. One option is to redirect users to a separate product page when they click on a variable product to add it to their cart.

This method can be useful if you offer many customization options that would be difficult to include in a one page order form. It can also be an opportunity to improve the customer experience. For example, you might display a live preview that adapts as the customer builds their variable product.

To set up this redirect for variable products, select redirect to product page from the Variations Display dropdown menu in the WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate settings.

Alternatively, you can display the variable options as separate rows in your product table. With this setting enabled, each variation will appear like a separate product in your one page order form.

The third option is to choose the as dropdowns in parent row method. With this setting enabled, WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate will display variations as part of the parent product, with dropdown selectors for customers to specify which variation(s) they want to buy:

WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate has a wide range of settings that are worth exploring in detail. However, these are the ones required to launch a one page shop with WooCommerce. Once you’re happy with the information you’ve entered, click on Save Changes at the bottom of the Settings screen.

Step 4: Publish Your WooCommerce Product Table

All that’s left is to publish your one page order form on your site. You can add tables created with WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate to any page using a shortcode. This enables customers to view your entire catalogue, purchase products, and complete the checkout process from a single page on your website.

In your WordPress dashboard, find the page or post on which you would like to display your one page order form. Open it for editing, then add a new shortcode block:

Now, paste [product_table_ultimate] into your shortcode block. Save your changes, and your one page order form should appear on your chosen page. If you want to give customers the option to purchase and check out from multiple locations, simply repeat the above steps to add more one page order forms to your e-commerce site.

Conclusion

If you’re building an e-commerce store, WooCommerce and WordPress are an effective solution. However, they’re also a popular choice. If you want to get ahead of the competition, you may need to enhance the WooCommerce platform with some additional features. By adding a one page order form to your site, you can streamline the shopping experience, particularly for bulk buyers and wholesale customers.

In this post, we’ve discussed how to create a one page order form using WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate in four simple steps:

1. Build your one page order form by accessing the Settings screen and choosing which columns you want to include.
2. Make it easy to bulk order by adding quantity selectors to your product table.
3. Add your variable products and decide if you will redirect shoppers to product pages to select their variations, list each variation as a separate row in your table, or include variation selectors for each parent product.
4. Publish your WooCommerce product table on any page using the [product_table_ultimate] shortcode.

Do you have questions about creating a one page order form for your WooCommerce website? Ask away in the comments section below!

WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate

List products in quick and easy order forms

Find Out More

The post 4 steps for creating a WooCommerce one page order form appeared first on Plugin Republic.

With online retail at an all-time high, your e-commerce store has the potential to reach a huge audience. And, with more people shopping online than ever before, the world of e-commerce is evolving at a rapid pace – and WooCommerce is increasingly to the fore. In this article, we’ll share some the latest stats for 2021 and an amazing infographic showing how the WooCommerce platform is developing.

The latest WooCommerce stats include:

• How many websites use WooCommerce?
• How many e-commerce websites use WooCommerce?
• What is WooCommerce’s market share?
• How many times has WooCommerce been downloaded?
• How much revenue does WooCommerce generate?
• How many WooCommerce themes are there?
• How many WooCommerce plugins are there?
• How many people contribute to WooCommerce?
• How many WooCommerce meetups are there?
• How many languages has WooCommerce been translated into?
• How many people work for WooCommerce?
• How many WooCommerce jobs are there?

WooCommerce stats infographic

Here are the latest 2021 WooCommerce stats and timeline in an infographic. Feel free to embed this on your own site – please ensure you link back to this page. You can just copy and paste this embed code:

View this code snippet on GitHub.

Click here for the plain text.

Embed this WooCommerce infographic using this:

View this code snippet on GitHub.

Click here for the plain text.

An introduction to WooCommerce (and how it became a top ecommerce platform)

Before we get to the latest stats, let’s look at some figures which illustrate how WooCommerce has got to this point.

Originally created by WordPress theme developer WooThemes, WooCommerce made its debut on September 27th, 2011. However, in April 2012 the popular e-commerce platform experienced a major setback, when WooCommerce was hacked. The hacker managed to delete the WooThemes database and all the content on the WooThemes server, including the team’s backups. 

Despite this crisis, the e-commerce platform managed to recover, and in January 2013 the team announced that WooCommerce had reached half a million downloads. WooCommerce 3.0 arrived shortly afterwards, in March 2013. This version revamped the gallery for individual product pages, and added support for mobile touch gestures. Just a few months later, WooCommerce hit one million downloads.

In 2014, the community saw the release of WooCommerce “Peppy Penguin” 2.1. Peppy Penguin added support for the Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API). This gave WooCommerce users the ability to create, read, update, and delete data using the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

Shortly afterwards, WooCommerce hit the four million downloads mark:

The WooCommerce team kicked 2015 off with a bang, with the release of WooCommerce “Handsome Hippo”. Just one month later they announced that WooCommerce had been acquired by Automattic, shortly before the platform officially reached seven million downloads.

Since then, WooCommerce has grown to become one of the most popular e-commerce solutions in the world, with over five million active installs and 86 million all-time downloads. On November 25th, 2020 alone WooCommerce was downloaded over 700,000 times. 

Okay, so those are the stats for WooCommerce’s early years. Let’s take a look at the most up to date stats for WooCommerce.

WooCommerce 2021 stats

WooCommerce and WordPress is a powerful combination that’s made it easier than ever before to launch and run a successful e-commerce business. However, the best way to gauge WooCommerce’s popularity is to look at some cold hard facts.

Here are 12 WooCommerce statistics you may not be aware of:

How many websites use WooCommerce?

Nearly 4.5 million websites use WooCommerce. That’s 7.5 percent of all sites! WooCommerce is also the most popular plugin in any category, accounting for 81 percent of all websites that are known to use a plugin or module. 

How many e-commerce websites use WooCommerce?

As of January 2021, WooCommerce powers 30 percent of the top one million e-commerce stores. This has grown from 26 percent in August 2020, and 22 percent in 2019. This makes WooCommerce the most popular choice among the top million e-commerce sites, ahead of major competitors like Magento and Shopify. If we narrow the focus to WordPress, an impressive 93.7 percent of all WordPress e-commerce websites rely on WooCommerce. 

What is WooCommerce’s market share?

WooCommerce has the largest market share of the top 581 e-commerce platforms and technologies, powering over 29 percent of all online stores. This places WooCommerce firmly ahead of major competitors Squarespace Online Stores (21.12 percent), Shopify (12.66 percent), and WixStores (4.88 percent). 

How many times has WooCommerce been downloaded?

WordPress users have downloaded WooCommerce over 123,000,000 times. On November 25th, 2020 alone WooCommerce was downloaded over 700,000 times.

How much revenue does WooCommerce generate?

A study conducted in 2017 by the Head of WooCommerce suggested that WooCommerce stores would collectively account for nearly $10 billion in sales. In the same year, WooCommerce extension sales were expected to generate over $30 million.

Fast forward a few years to 2019, and WooCommerce’s General Manager stated that if all WooCommerce stores formed a single country, its revenue would be greater than 35 percent of the world’s actual countries. By October 2019, WooCommerce stores had generated around $11.8 billion in sales.

How many WooCommerce themes are there?

The WordPress.org Theme Directory boasts over 1,100 WooCommerce themes. You’ll find another 1,360 WooCommerce themes and templates over at ThemeForest, almost 300 at Mojo Marketplace, and 23 at the official WooCommerce site.

In addition, there are hundreds available via independent websites and smaller marketplaces. This means the true number of WooCommerce themes is likely more than 3,000.

How many WooCommerce plugins are there?

There are over 6,000 WooCommerce plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory, and you’ll find a further 1,800+ WooCommerce plugins on CodeCanyon.

However, the total number of WooCommerce plugins is likely far higher, as there are many websites that sell WooCommerce-ready plugins independently or via smaller marketplaces. This means many WooCommerce plugins aren’t included in the official figures.

The WooCommerce Extensions Store has over 500 free and paid add-ons.

How many people contribute to WooCommerce?

WooCommerce’s GitHub repository has over 1,000 contributors. 

How many WooCommerce meetups are there?

There are over 80 WooCommerce meetups worldwide. 

How many languages has WooCommerce been translated into?

The community has translated WooCommerce into 65 languages. In addition, WooCommerce is integrated with 140 region-specific payment gateways.

How many people work for WooCommerce?

WooCommerce has 150 employees.

How many WooCommerce jobs are there?

At the time of writing, Indeed.com has over 300 jobs that specifically mention WooCommerce. 

Furthermore, Codeable has over 390 developers who list WooCommerce as a specialty.

Clearly, WooCommerce is already a hugely popular and successful e-commerce platform – but what’s next?

If these stats have sparked your interest, you may be wondering what’s in store for WooCommerce throughout 2021 and beyond. 

3 key WooCommerce trends for 2021

Regardless of whether you’re hoping to launch a new e-commerce business or grow an existing one, it’s important to keep ahead of the competition and give consumers exactly what they want.

To help keep you at the cutting edge, let’s talk about where WooCommerce is heading. Here are three key WooCommerce trends for 2021!

1. There will be an increasing use of the WooCommerce Representational State Transfer (REST) API

WooCommerce’s REST API enables developers to interact with the platform’s data. This includes performing administrative actions such as editing product details, creating orders, and generating reports. 

You can access WooCommerce’s REST API settings by navigating to WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced. You can then select the REST API link:

WooCommerce’s REST API gives developers the flexibility to use their e-commerce data in other contexts. This includes single page and mobile applications. We predict that in 2021, we’ll continue to see an increase in the number of online stores using the REST API, particularly when it comes to mobile app development. 

In 2019, mobile devices accounted for 65 percent of all e-commerce traffic, and 53 percent of sales. With the number of smartphone users forecast to grow by several hundred million in the next few years, building a mobile shopping app could be a powerful way to boost your sales. 

Since you’re only receiving text data, the REST API can deliver a performance boost when performing complicated actions. This data can also be cached, which is great for performance. Studies suggest that 79 percent of customers who are unhappy with a site’s performance are less likely to make a purchase. This means the REST API can be a powerful way to drive conversions. 

WooCommerce is a hugely popular platform, but that popularity also means that it’s a recognisable technology. As the ongoing pandemic pushes more shops online, it’s only going to become more important to stand out from the crowd. The REST API isn’t constrained to any particular front-end technology. This gives you the flexibility to create exciting new layouts that don’t rely on WordPress plugins and themes, which could be the secret to getting ahead of your competitors. 

2. You can expect continued growth in WooCommerce extensions, themes, and plugins

WooCommerce may be a free plugin. However, WooCommerce extensions, add-ons, and additional plugins all generate revenue. In August 2020 there were 1,900 WooCommerce plugins on CodeCanyon. As of January 2021, there are 2,134. 

Meanwhile, in August 2020 there were 331 plugin extensions in the official WooCommerce extensions store. As of January 2021, there are over 500. It’s safe to predict that this upwards trend will continue throughout 2021. Check the stats above for more detail.

It’s difficult to estimate just how much revenue is generated by the WooCommerce community. Back in April 2015, WooThemes co-founder Magnus Jepson stated that: “I can’t disclose our exact income unfortunately, but we do process several million dollars per year. Our revenue has been climbing steadily over the past few years, and we are regularly breaking monthly revenue records.”

While it’s impossible to get an exact figure, many successful WooCommerce themes and plugins publish their total number of sales. By crunching the numbers, we can gauge how much revenue a successful WooCommerce project could generate.

Let’s start with Avada. This popular website builder for WooCommerce has been sold to over 655,000 WordPress users, according to ThemeForest. Priced at $60, we can calculate that this theme has brought in an excess of $39.3 million. 

Flatsome is the most popular WooCommerce theme on ThemeForest. This theme has sold over 150,00 times. With a price tag of $59, it’s generated in excess of $8,850,000. 

If you’re interested in becoming a WordPress plugin or theme developer, you may be facing lots of competition, but the figures suggest that an exceptional WooCommerce theme or plugin could earn you thousands or perhaps even millions of dollars. With healthy profits to be made, we can expect continued growth in WooCommerce extensions, themes, and plugins throughout 2021.

You can check out our own range of WooCommerce plugins here.

3. The WooCommerce user interface is likely to receive further updates

WooCommerce 4.0 introduced a new JavaScript-powered interface for managing your store. This new UI provides a powerful analytics dashboard covering important metrics such as sales, revenue, taxes, and your most popular products.

This updated admin dashboard is more intuitive and user-friendly. WooCommerce 4.0 also features a simplified onboarding process, which should help news users create their first WooCommerce stores.

This streamlined onboarding process and UI appears to indicate the direction WooCommerce is heading in. A big part of WooCommerce’s popularity lies in being beginner-friendly. At some point in the future, we may see WooCommerce expand this redesign to other parts of the platform. This would create a more intuitive experience, which could attract even more users to the WooCommerce platform.  

Conclusion

Stats don’t necessarily tell the full story but the figures above should give you an idea of the pace that WooCommerce is growing.

Do you have questions about any of these WooCommerce stats and trends for 2021? Ask away in the comments section below!

The post 12 WooCommerce stats and 3 key trends for 2021 (+ infographic) appeared first on Plugin Republic.

Fortunately, this crucial step is easier than you might expect. You don’t need a background in web development or design to create an effective e-commerce shop with WordPress. The WooCommerce plugin enables anyone to get an attractive and functional online business up and running quickly.

In this post, we’ll introduce WooCommerce and explain why it’s a strong foundation for your online store. Then we’ll walk you through how to set it up, and where to go from there. Let’s get to work!

Why You Should Use WordPress and WooCommerce to Build Your Online Store

These days, starting a website is simple. There are many tools available to help you get started – so many, in fact, that it can be difficult to choose the right ones.

When it comes to building an e-commerce store, we highly recommend using WordPress:

This Content Management System (CMS) is easy to use, intuitive, and flexible. It can be leveraged as a foundation for many types of websites, including online stores. However, it doesn’t include e-commerce-specific features out of the box, so you’ll also need a plugin.

That’s where WooCommerce comes into the picture:

This plugin adds new functionality to WordPress – everything you’ll need to showcase your products and enable visitors to purchase them. It has plenty of features without being overwhelming, even for new users. Best of all, it’s simple to set up WooCommerce, and completely free.

How to Set Up and Configure WooCommerce (In 7 Steps)

If you’re still a little unsure about launching your e-commerce site, don’t worry. In this walkthrough, we’ll show you everything you need to know to get your WooCommerce store up and running.

Step 1: Set Up Your WordPress Website

WooCommerce isn’t a standalone solution – you’ll need to install it on a WordPress website. If you already have one, you can skip to the next step.

If not, you’ll want to set up a new WordPress site. The first task is to choose a web host. This is what makes your online store available to visitors.

You can purchase a shared hosting plan for $5 per month or less, which will give you what you need for a small online store. However, you tend to get what you pay for with web hosts. We recommend Kinsta as the industry leader in WordPress web hosting.

Next, you have multiple choices when it comes to installing WordPress. You can do so manually, which should only take a few minutes but can be a little tricky for complete beginners.

Alternatively, your web host may offer a simpler solution. Many hosts have a one-click WordPress installation feature. Check out your provider’s documentation or support for more details.

Step 2: Install WooCommerce

At this point, you should have a WordPress website up and running. If you’re brand-new to the platform, you may want to spend some time familiarising yourself with its basics before moving forward.

One of the best things about WordPress is its plugins – add-ons that give your site new features and functionality. WooCommerce is one of the most popular, and adding it to your site is simple.

Just open up your WordPress dashboard and head to Plugins > Add New. Search for “WooCommerce” – it should be the first option that comes up:

Click on Install Now, then wait a few moments. When the button text changes to read Activate, click on that as well:

With that, WooCommerce is now up and running on your website.

You should then be redirected to a setup wizard that will walk you through configuring your new online store. While this wizard is optional, it’s a good idea to take care of these crucial tasks now.

Step 3: Add Your Store Details

The first screen of the WooCommerce setup wizard looks like this:

Here, you’ll input some simple information about your store. Where it’s located will be important when it comes to calculating taxes and shipping options, so make sure the details you enter here are accurate.

You’ll also see a checkbox labeled I’m setting up a store for a client. This will enable some handy options for developers. However, since you’re building a shop to sell your own items, you can safely skip it.

Step 4: Choose Your Product Types

The next screen will ask you about the categories of products you’re planning to sell:

Choose the option that fits the best, or Other if none of them apply.
After that, you can include a little more detail about the types of products you’re offering:

By default, WooCommerce lets you sell both physical and downloadable products. You can check one or both of these boxes depending on your needs.

Note that the remaining options have prices listed next to them. These are product types that WooCommerce doesn’t support out of the box, but that you can add to your store by purchasing one or more extensions.

So for example, if you want to offer subscriptions to a service, you could purchase the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension for $16.58 per month ($199 per year).

Keep in mind that you don’t need to set up these extensions now – you can install them later if you want to. Additionally, if you want to add new features to your store, there are other WooCommerce add-on plugins you can choose from besides the ones listed on this page.

Step 5: Add Optional Plugins

Once you’re done choosing your product types, you can continue to the next screen:

Here, you can include some information about the amount of products you intend to display in your store. Note that this won’t limit you in any way, so don’t worry if you’re not quite sure yet.

WooCommerce will also ask you about where else you’re selling (if relevant), and how much you’re making annually. This gives the plugin a sense of the current scope of your business.

Finally, you’ll see a checkbox labeled Install recommended free business features. This will add a curated selection of useful plugins and other tools to your store, including:

• Jetpack: An all-in-one solution that offers security features, performance optimisations, and more.
• WooCommerce Shipping & Tax: Lets you handle shipping and fulfillment right from your dashboard.
• WooCommerce Payments: Offers more payment options than the default WooCommerce setup.
• Facebook for WooCommerce: Helps you integrate Facebook with your WooCommerce site.
• Mailchimp for WooCommerce: Enables you to connect your store to Mailchimp (an email marketing platform).
• Google Ads: Lets you track key analytics for your store (number of visitors, views, sales, etc.).
• Creative Mail for WooCommerce: An alternative email marketing solution, powered by Constant Contact.

Some of these will require you to set up accounts before you can connect them to your store. While these are all handy solutions, it’s important to note that every store’s needs are unique, and there are lots of WooCommerce-compatible extensions and plugins to choose from.

Plus, having unused plugins can cause slow site speed. So we’d recommend skipping these installations for now, and taking your time to decide exactly which tools you require.

Step 6: Choose a Theme for Your Store

Alongside plugins, themes are one of the features that makes WordPress shine. By adding a theme to your site, you can dramatically change its appearance and layout. This lets you control the style of your online store without requiring design know-how or coding expertise on your part.

All new WordPress sites have a default theme installed – typically, this will be the Twenty Twenty-One theme. While it’s a fine option, it’s not designed for online stores specifically.

It’s a good idea to choose a theme that’s built for e-commerce, or even one designed for WooCommerce users. That will make it easier to ensure that your entire site looks consistent, especially if you have other pages alongside your shop.

The final step in the WooCommerce wizard prompts you to choose and install a theme:

There’s a selection of free and premium options here, some with a more general focus and others designed for specific types of stores. If you want to keep things simple, you can opt for the free, official WooCommerce theme, Storefront.

Just keep in mind that, as with plugins, there are lots of theme options out there. The ones presented here are just the tip of the iceberg. If you don’t like any of them, you can find plenty of free and premium WooCommerce themes elsewhere. You can also change your theme at any time, so feel free to play around with a few options before making a final decision.

Step 7: Start Using Your WooCommerce Store

If you want to use one of the recommended themes, select Choose and it will be installed and activated for you. If not, just hit Continue.
Either way, you’ll be presented with one final option:

This is another chance to install the Jetpack and WooCommerce Shipping & Tax plugins on your site. Go ahead and do so if you like.

As with the rest of the wizard, these decisions aren’t final. You can always come back and install these plugins later, or uninstall them if you choose not to use them.

After that, you’ll be taken to your new WooCommerce home screen:

This provides you with links to some of the other key settings to configure, in order to finish your store’s setup. You can add your payment options, shipping methods, and so on.

If you chose to add any extensions or plugins to your store while following the setup wizard, there will also be prompts to install and activate them here. These tasks can be tackled now, or at any later point.

Alternatively, you can head straight to WooCommerce > Settings to see all of the available options for your online shop:

With that, you have officially set up WooCommerce!

What to Do After You Set Up WooCommerce

At this point, you may be wondering what you should do next. WooCommerce is installed and set up, but your store isn’t quite ready to go.
Here are some of the other tasks you’ll want to tackle now:

• Finish configuring your WooCommerce settings. As mentioned above, you’ll still need to enter details about your payment and shipping options, taxes, and so on. It’s a good idea to start by heading to the WooCommerce Settings page and familiarising yourself with the options there.
• Customise your theme. Most WordPress themes offer plenty of customisation options, so you can tweak exactly how your store appears. If you haven’t yet, you can start by selecting a WooCommerce theme. Then head to Appearance > Customise to start making changes.
• Add your products. Right now, your store is empty. You’ll need to add each product or service you intend to sell via the Products > Add New screen. For more details, check out our full tutorial on the subject.
• Improve your store with supporting plugins. WooCommerce adds vital e-commerce features to your website, but you may want additional options. There are certain things that you can’t easily do with WooCommerce out of the box, such as creating product tables and building a members-only store. Fortunately, there are plugins you can install to add just about any feature or functionality to your site.

It will take some time and research to outfit your store exactly the way you want. However, the more time you take to perfect it now, the easier it will be to start building a customer base and bringing in revenue.

Conclusion

E-commerce is a booming field, and there’s a lot of competition out there. If your new online store is going to succeed, you’ll need to give it the best possible shot by building it using proven solutions. WordPress, WooCommerce, and a curated selection of supporting plugins are a smart choice.

Once you have those tools in hand, building your e-commerce shop is pretty simple. After you set up your WordPress website and install WooCommerce, you’ll be able to follow the plugin’s setup wizard to handle most of the key initial steps, such as entering your store details and choosing a theme.

Do you have any questions about getting your WooCommerce shop off the ground? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post How to set up WooCommerce: your complete 2021 guide appeared first on Plugin Republic.