A Quick Guide to Developing an eCommerce Website with WooCommerce

I am sure; you would have read several blogs before this one explaining that an eCommerce store is the new-gen shopping destination for everyone.

Moreover, one from WordPress, we get a free plugin - WooCommerce to develop one such store for our business.

While developing an eCommerce store is a bit of havoc for the people who find codes as some alien lines.

However, WordPress has gifted us the independence by creating the plugin - WooCommerce with which anyone can be able to develop the eCommerce store they wish for his or her business.

Here, I bring a quick guide that can assist you to develop and design your eCommerce store using WooCommerce by yourself.

Step-to-step guidelines of developing eCommerce store with WooCommerce.

By this draft, I mean to ask you to prepare a rough sketch of what all features do you want in your eCommerce store.

Prepare the structure that you want your online store to look like.

List down everything that you need on your online store and prepare them in perfect order.

Elements such as following are required to enhance the content of your online store:

• Product names - a relevant and descriptive name with high efficiency of SEO.
• Product Description - You need to describe your products on each product pages.
• Product type - You need to mention the types of products such as simple ones like mobile phone covers or variable ones such as denim, which has variations in size, color, patterns and more.
• Cost - Mention down the market as well as the sales price of your products.
• Images - pictures of your products that you are selling
• Stock - Along with the images, mention how many pieces of the item are in stock with you.
• Categories - You need to categorize the range of the products. This is an important aspect which will directly impact on your online store.
• Tags - Tagsdon'tparticularly require to be hierarchical, but they do have a bit of impact on SEO when used as meta tags. Don't overuse the tags as it will make the content congested and nothing else.

Once you list down all the required details and elements, you now have a picture of how your website or the online store will look.

The way a name is essential for every business, having a domain space registered with your business name is equally vital as it is your online space to create a brand and bring you more sales.

Domain - A domain is a web address that will help the traffic direct to your website, such as "mydomainspace.com."

It should be precise and quick to remember like your business name. It is preferable to create a domain after the business name only.

Hosting - Hosting is an online service that allows the websites and their content to be accessible to viewers on the web server.

While we consider online store for free development, hosting will cost you a bit; but if you need some space to publish about your business, you would have to pay some price for that.

Working with WordPress gives you options of cheaper hosting services such as Bluehost and WordPress.com with different offers as per the possible requirements.

These hosting services are available to subscribe on the WooCommerce website itself.

You can choose the hosting service as per the size and requirement of your business.

Get the WordPress installed on your system

Once you get the hosting service subscribed, you should install the WordPress on your system now.

You can now start building your website as you have arranged the space to place your content on the web server.

You can download the platform from WordPress.org following the instructions mentioned in the Support section on the website.

Otherwise, you can go onto your hosting service's user panel and find the option to install WordPress on that.

Once you click on the install icon, it will then direct you with the complete installation process with the on-screen instructions.

Once the process is completed, you now have the platform downloaded on your computer.

You can check that by going to your domain name, or you can log in on the admin panel.

You now have the main platform installed on your system; you need to decide on the look and feel of your website.

For this purpose, you need to select a theme for your website.

You can either apply a theme from the ones available for free of cost on the WordPress website itself or can get a premium theme as per your website and business requirements.

There is an instinctual and adaptable theme namely Storefront which is a free WooCommerce integrated theme.

The Storefront is robust as well as responsive for the layouts on different devices, comes with a flexible grid system and improved SEO enactment.

It is quite simple to use and design which can help you customize according to your business brand and the online store.

Further, if in case you feel that Storefront can't do enough for you, you can opt another from the several available that can integrate well with WooCommerce.

Now that you have your website designed and functioning, you should now move forward with making it work as your eCommerce store.

You have to install WooCommerce plugin for converting your website into an online store.

Following are the ways to do that: -

• Free account on WooCommerce website -
• Sign up on WordPress.com and WooCommerce.com for an account
• Choose one from -
• Pre-installed service with a reliable host
• Auto-installing WooCommerce through WordPress
• Downloading the zip file and doing it by yourself
• Downloading WooCommerce plugin -
• First, downloading your plugin
• Back to your website
• Go to uploads from Dashboard
• Select the plugin downloaded
• Install that and activate
• Searching for WooCommerce plugin -
• Go to Search plugins from your site's Dashboard
• Search "WooCommerce"
• Install that and activate

Choosing anyone process, once you accomplish downloading the WooCommerce plugin, you now have to work on making it more functional than just a simple eCommerce website.

6. Add the required and desired Extensions

Every website or rather say every online eCommerce store requires the functionalities of its particular kind.

Now that you have a website ready to function for eCommerce to help you sell any products or services, you need to boost up the functions to make the most out of it.

With WooCommerce, you can add up any extensions that you need to grow your store.

You can purchase the extensions from the website itself for almost everything, such as Bookings, payment gateways, shipping, subscriptions and memberships, and much more.

You can subscribe to any extension on an annual basis and access to support and all the product updates.

With WooCommerce extensions, you can scale up your client base and grow the revenue graph.

Your eCommerce website is now ready!

You have now designed your eCommerce store with WooCommerce and added the desired extensions to it.

It's now time to add up your product details on it and launch them out in the market to generate the sales.

With WooCommerce being a part of WordPress, you can optimize it for SEO.

You can use the plugins such as Yoast SEO to enhance your online store's index ranking and get more visibility and revenue.

Coming to the end

Further, if you feel that the above-explained process seems a bit tedious to you or you are looking for a completely customized eCommerce store, you can always opt for an eCommerce website development company for your assistance with the store's development and maintenance.