WooCommerce 101

Introduction to WooCommerce

WooCommerce is...

A plugin for WordPress

A plugin for WordPress..

A plugin for WordPress..

A plugin for WordPress..

Sell

Digital
Things

Sell

Physical

Things

Sell

Any-

Thing

• Online courses
• Appointments
• Membership to sites
• Donations
• Store / Platform Credit
• Subscriptions

Getting Started

Step 1: Installing & Activating

Step 2: Configuration and Setup

Some recommendations 

• 🙅🏼‍♀️ Opt-out of WooCommerce tracking
• 🙅🏼‍♀️ De-select any 'included' or 'recommended' plugins
• 🙅🏼‍♀️ Opt out of Jetpack
• 🧙🏼‍♂️ If in doubt, you can quit this wizard
• 🛠 All these settings are under WooCommerce > Settings

WooCommerce gives us LOTS out the box

• Products & Product categories
• Shop pages (product views, listings etc)
• Cart page
• Checkout & My Account Pages
• Emails to Admins and Customers
• Admin screens for managing orders
• Inventory options and tracking
• Pricing options like timed sales
• Discount Coupons

There will be a learning curve

One step at a time

Lets start with Products

Simple Products

• Singular product 
• Represents 1 physical or digital thing
• Will display as a seperate listing on the store
• An example - A microwave

Vneck Shirt - simple product

Variable Products

• A parent product with "sub-products"
• Sub-products are called 'variations'
• The thing which varies is an 'attribute'
• Will display only the parent product in the shop listing
• Allows users to select from the variations before add-to-cart
• An Example: T-Shirt that comes in S, M, L

Vneck Shirt - Variable product

External Products

• Link to an external website
• Mostly for Affiliate products etc
• Can have attributes for filters, but not variations
• Allow you to edit the 'buy button' text per-product
• Appear in your catalog alongside 'simple' and variable products

Vneck Shirt - External product

More product types via extensions

Extensions:

other plugins that add things to WooCommerce

eCommerce is pretty complex...

Some things to think about...

Payments

How will customers pay for their goods?

• Some kind of trusted payment gateway is necessary.
• Never store credit card details yourself!
• Stripe is recommended
• PayPal is still popular in Australia
• Strongly recommend against AU/NZ Bank associated gateways

Shipping

Do you need to ship goods? And what kind of charges should be passed on?

• Customer love free shipping, your accountant might not...
• Flat rates come for free w/ core
• There is an Aus Post plugin that calculates shipping, but takes a lot of effort to setup
• Others like ShipStation can aggregate couriers but come with costs
• Table Rates can be a good in-between

Start Simple

Don't worry about scale

As your revenue grows, reinvest to gain efficiency

Don't skimp on hosting!

Thanks, and GLWS! 🎉