Online shopping has got the world and became a stable, profitable, and customizable replacement for conventional stores we are used to. You are about to start making money on your site, but you have no idea how to open an online store? In this guide, we will show you how to turn a regular WordPress site into an eCommerce store using a proven WooCommerce tool.
WooCommerce is a free open-source e-commerce plugin designed specifically for WordPress. This is a great platform for a store of any size. WooCommerce has a number of features, such as various methods of delivery and receipt of payments, custom types of goods and much more. In this WooCommerce guide, you will learn everything you need to set up and open an online store on your WordPress site and start selling your products.
WordPress Environment Installation
First of all, get a WordPress site up and running. Within the Jelastic marketplace, you can choose a standalone or clustered package and install it automatically based on your requirements in a matter of minutes.
To foresee all possible loads your store may experience in the future, we will use Enterprise WordPress Hosting with Automatic Scaling and High Availability.
In the installation window choose all the available features to make your website fast and secure.
High site performance is provided by the LiteSpeed Web Server and additional security is ensured with Web Application Firewall and WordPress Brute Force Attack Protection features.
Note: In case you decide not to use the LiteSpeed Web Server, the NGINX will be installed instead.
WooCommerce Installation
Once the WordPress environment is ready, log in to the admin panel and go to the Plugins tab.
Important: If you use NGINX based installation, deactivate the W3Total cache plugin as it can lead to the conflicts according to Woocommerce official documentation.
1. Find WooCommerce plugin, install and activate it.
2. Then you have to go through five steps of your online store configuration:
- Specify store location.
- Define the Industry the store will operate in.
- Add business details related to marketing that will cause the respective WordPress plugin automatic installation.
- Choose a theme for the store. Since the appearance of the store is a very important issue you may go with default one at this step and customize it later on.
Just before the last step, the Jetpack + WooCommerce Services plugins popup window arises. This is up to you whether to continue with them or to skip this step by pressing the No thanks button.
3. Congratulations! Your store is almost ready to sell, but it needs the goods to be filled with. There are multiple ways you may go on the last step:
- Create a product on your own
- Import existing product catalog compatible with WooCommerce in csv file format
- Customize the web site your store is located on
- Change the settings you entered in previous steps
- Go to the WordPress Dashboard
Product Generation Demo
If you are a newbie with WooCommerce you may get much more familiar with it filling out your store with demo data. This will give a better understanding of how the WooCommerce works and will allow you to conduct benchmark tests or use case tests.
1. To get demo data a WooCommerce Product Generator plugin is required from the WordPress plugin collection. So, find and install it in the same way as you did for WooCommerce itself.
2. Activate the plugin and proceed to demo data generation.
3. To initiate product generation click on Plugins>Product Generator.
4. The continuous generator does not work more than once per second, creating the specified number of products per cycle (Per Run). It will be creating new products until it will be stopped or the total number of products reaches the specified limit. Let’s define this limit as 10000 units. The generated products have a dummy picture and price, sensible random titles and fake description, related categories and tags.
Scroll down the web page and enter the limit in the Generate up to… field and then press Run in Continuous AJAX Run section.
Products generation takes time so be patient.
5. Right after generation is completed you may go shopping. Just visit your site front page and click on GO SHOPPING button.
You may click on products adding them to the cart and proceed to checkout selling your goods virtually.
Now you know how to set up an online shop and how to test it thoroughly before starting to sell real goods. Keep in mind that WooCommerce-based store performance immensely depends on WordPress configurations used underneath such as web server settings, resource usage optimization, etc. With Jelastic you can get a highly-effective WordPress setup proven as Top Tier by ReviewSignal benchmarks.
Register and host your WooCommerce sites at the preferable Jelastic Cloud Provider!
