Mastering WooCommerce 4

Build complete e-commerce websites with WordPress and WooCommerce from scratch

Patrick Rauland

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838827687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Understand all aspects of building a successful online store which is search-engine-optimized, using theme management and one-page checkout features

Key Features

• Extend your WordPress knowledge to build fully functional e-commerce websites using WooCommerce and its plugins
• Implement payment gateway, shipping, and inventory management solutions
• Improve the speed and performance of your websites by optimizing images and caching static information

Book Description

WooCommerce is one of the most flexible platforms for building online stores. With its flexibility, you can offer virtually any feature to a client using the WordPress system. WooCommerce is also self-hosted, so the ownership of data lies with you and your client.

This book starts with the essentials of building a WooCommerce store. You'll learn how to set up WooCommerce and implement payment, shipping, and tax options, as well as configure your product. The book also demonstrates ways to customize and manage your products by using SEO for enhanced visibility. As you advance, you'll understand how to manage sales by using POS systems, outsource fulfillment, and external reporting services. Once you've set up and organized your online store, you'll focus on improving the user experience of your e-commerce website. In addition to this, the book takes you through caching techniques to not only improve the speed and performance of your website but also its look and UI by adding themes. Finally, you'll build the landing page for your website to promote your product, and design WooCommerce plugins to customize the functionalities of your e-commerce website.

By the end of this WooCommerce book, you'll have learned how to run a complete WooCommerce store, and be able to customize each section of the store on the frontend as well as backend.

What you will learn

• Grasp the fundamentals of e-commerce website design and management with WordPress
• Use Gutenberg product blocks to display products across various categories on your website
• Get to grips with WordPress plugin development to customize your website's functionality
• Discover various ways to effectively handle product payment, taxes, and shipping
• Use analytics and product data syncing in WordPress to keep an eye on the user experience and monitor the performance of your online store
• Promote your new product online using SEO management and landing pages

Who this book is for

This WooCommerce development book is for web developers, WordPress developers, e-commerce consultants, or anyone familiar with using WordPress and interested in building an e-commerce platform from scratch. Working knowledge of WordPress development and general web development concepts is required.

Configuring Products

You can't have an online store without something to sell. Before we can sell something, we have to add products to our store. But before we do that, we have to know the different kinds of products you can add to your store.

We're going to look at three types of products that are included in the free WooCommerce plugin. We're also going to look at the Product Bundles (https://www.woocommerce.com/products/product-bundles/) and Subscriptions (https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/) that are available through premium extensions on the WooCommerce website . Each of these types of products will have unique features, and choosing how you want to display your products in your store is an important decision.

In this chapter, we're going to look into the following:

• Simple products
• Variable products
• Digital products
• Product bundles
• Subscriptions

All of these product types build on each other. So, before you jump ahead and look into variable products, make sure to look at the section on simple products. By the end of this chapter, you should know what types of products you want to offer in your store as well as the technical information you need to configure them correctly.

Exploring the WordPress editor

Before we start adding products to our store, I want to point out one thing about the interface we're going to be using. This is the modern interface for editing posts and pages as of WordPress 5.0:

It's very clean and it uses the new block editor that comes with WordPress 5.0 called Gutenberg.

Simple products

The easiest type of product to create is unsurprisingly called a simple product. It's important to know how to create a simple product because everything else is based on it. So, you'll want to know exactly how to manipulate a simple product.

A good example of a simple product would be anything that comes in one format, such as a coffee cup, ring, or backpack. You can add a new product through your WordPress admin under Products | Add New.

We're going to look into a few different aspects of simple products:

• Required and optional fields—to add useful data to the product page
• Taxonomies (categories and tags)—to make it easy for users to browse through our store
• Images—to instantly communicate what our product looks like
• Description fields—to describe your products.

Product data fields

The only required field for a product is the Product name (also known as the title). If you add the product name to a product and publish it, you'll see an empty page:

You can also add a price to the product. It can be 0 or any positive value. And as soon as you add a price, users can add it to their cart.

Optional fields

When you take a look at the add product screen, it might not be clear where you add all of the information about your products. You'll need to scroll down to see the Product data panel.

This controls the majority of the settings for your product, including the following:

• Product type (simple, variable, grouped, and so on)
• Downloadable and/or virtual
• Price
• Shipping dimensions
• Linked products

For now, leave the product type set to Simple product. Leave Virtual and Downloadable unchecked—we'll look at those later in this chapter.

Under the Product data panel, set a Regular price and a Sale price:

After setting a price, you will likely want to look into the inventory and stock settings. These track how much product you actually have in stock and they make sure that users can only check out while you have items in stock—a very handy tool for a store owner.

Inventory and stock

If you manage stock for your product, you can have WooCommerce track the quantities. Under Product data | Inventory, you can enter something for the following:

• Enter a value for SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), which is an ID for a product.
• Check Manage stock.
• Once Manage stock is checked, you can enter the Stock quantity.

I'm a big fan of setting the Low stock threshold, which will email you when your product is low in stock so you have enough time to order or produce more products.

Shipping

The Shipping tab in the Product data panel is important for two reasons:

• It's what your store uses to calculate live shipping rates.
• It's displayed to the customer on the frontend.

While images can be helpful to show the size and scale of products, nothing beats having dimensions listed on the product page. Consider the following example:

A friend of mine was looking to purchase a new refrigerator and did weeks of research. She found a gre...