How to Setup a WooCommerce Store

In this article, I’ll show you how to set up a WooCommerce store from scratch. In this tutorial, the product I’ll be selling is a digital book, and once you see the process, you’ll automatically know how to add other types of products. So let’s get started!

Step #1: Install the WooCommerce Plugin

If you’ve purchased WordPress hosting with SirsteveHQ, then you don’t need this step since SirsteveHQ will install the plugin for you automatically (as well as install WordPress!). But if you’ve purchased hosting from another company and gotten your WordPress instance manually installed successfully, then you’ll need to add the WooCommerce plugin as shown here next:

Just activate the plugin and you’re ready to go.

Step #2: Configure Your Store

After activating the plugin, WooCommerce will present you with a series of questions to configure your store. This is what will determine the type of store you have.

It starts with basic questions about your e-mail ID, where you live, and more:

Next, choose the kind of industry your store belongs to:

Since we’re selling a digital book, I choose “Other”, and type “Books” in the text field. Click “Continue”. Now choose the kinds of products that your store is going to sell:

Here you can choose between physical and digital products for free. As you can see, you can also sell other kinds of products like memberships, bookings, bundles, or a custom combination of all of the above.

The catch, however, is that all except the first two are paid products. If you want to sell appointments, for example, you’ll have a pay a monthly fee.

Since, in our example, we’re just selling a digital download (eBook), I can choose the free option. Next up, select the number of products that you’re going to sell:

Step #3: Choose The Features You Want To Enable

Next, choose the features you want to include in your WooCommerce store. For example, you probably need to include a way for your customers to pay you! WooCommerce can also help you with your tax information, based on the data you provided earlier regarding your location. Take a look at all the features, and select the ones you want. You’ll find that most of them are very useful for any store, whether it be digital or physical.

This is the last of the configuration options for your WooCommerce store. Now we need to choose a theme so that our store looks professional and establishes our brand.

Step #4: Choose a Theme For Your WooCommerce Store

On the next screen, you can choose the theme. You have a choice between paid and free themes, or you could just choose to use the theme that you’re currently using:

The Storefront theme is pretty nice and it’s free! So take a look at what’s available and select one based on your taste and budget.

Step #5: Connect Your Store To Jetpack For Backups

To proceed with either the installation or to render functional one of the features that you selected earlier, WooCommerce will ask to connect your site to Jetpack. Jetpack is a great integration that comes native with WooCommerce that enables backups easily and makes your site more secure. (and it’s free!)

If you already have a Jetpack account, go ahead and sign in now, or create a new one if you don’t.

Next, we’ll get started with creating our first product!

Step #6. Creating Your First Product

For the next step, WooCommerce will get you started with adding a new product as shown here. Click “Add Products” to begin:

Based on what you chose in the configuration stage of the WooCommerce setup, it’ll ask you what kind of product you want to add. Since here we want to sell a digital eBook, we choose “Digital product” as shown here:

This will bring you to the WooCommerce editor where you can create your first product. The interface is almost the same as a regular WordPress post or page, so you should feel right at home. If this is your first time creating a WooCommerce product, you’ll get a brief guided tour via notification bubbles about writing product descriptions. They’re fairly self-explanatory and you can skip them without losing much.

In the product screen, give your product (in this case a book) a name, and fill out the fields for the description. Lower down, after the post body itself, you’ll get a chance to define your product’s characteristics as shown here:

As you can see, this is the place to enter the price at which you’ll sell the product, and since this is a digital download, you can choose the file or files you want to provide to the buyer.

The product configuration box is very detailed, and there are all kinds of tabs, using which, you can configure more options. For this tutorial, I’m only showing you the easiest and fastest way to bootstrap a store. You can tinker around and figure out further details on your own.

Save your product and publish it. The final page looks like this:

As you can see, it looks just like any other storefront that you see on the Internet. Users can add the product to their card, read the description, reviews, and more. And when they’re ready to checkout, the button is available on the top-right-hand side of the screen as you might expect.

That’s it! You’ve created your first product on a WooCommerce store.

Step #7: Setting Up Payments

WooCommerce tries to direct you towards the Stripe payment platform, but here I’m going to show you how to accept payments via PayPal, since a lot of you already have PayPal accounts, and many of your customers will as well.

Using PayPal, your customers can also checkout using credit or debit cards, so it’s an all-in-one solution, though PayPal does charge a hefty fee.

To get started, click on the WooCommerce tab on the right-hand side, and scroll down till you see the “Set up additional payment options” list item as shown here:

Now when given the option, choose “PayPal” like this:

The next screen will install the PayPal payments plugin and then you can proceed to the final step:

Finally, you can connect your account and activate PayPal by clicking “Activate PayPal”.

This will let you log in with your PayPal credentials and complete the setup. Once done, your customers can use PayPal for all their purchases.

There’s Lots More to Configure with WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a very mature WordPress shopping card plugin that can mold itself to any kind of store or requirement, whether it’s a subscription-based service, digital products, or regular physical products with shipping. Because of the wide variety of store types, it’s impossible to create a single tutorial that covers everything. Luckily, the process is quite streamlined and once you’ve set up a skeleton store, it’s easy to make modifications and add new features as necessary. Experimentation is key, and soon you’ll have a lovely, unique store that integrates perfectly with WordPress.

If you want some of the advanced features, you’ll have to pay a subscription fee, but the basic plugin is so capable that you might be able to get by without paying a cent, provided your requirements aren’t too complicated. With the SirsteveHQ WordPress hosting plan, you’ll have plenty of room to grow, since we aren’t stingy on resources like other hosting providers.