New year, new ideas! The new year brings boring things like new year’s resolutions that only last for a few weeks, but also new and exciting ideas. Over the holiday season people have had the time to think about their next step or that side project that has been brewing inside their brains for the past months. And now the time has come to turn it into reality. But where to start? How to turn that idea into an eCommerce reality?
Well, the solution is actually pretty easy. Remember that I’ve talked about how easy it is to set up a website via WordPress? If you’ve already started using our WordPress tips, you’re only one step away from unlocking eCommerce magic on your website. WooCommerce is the (free) add-on you need for this.
WooCommerce? What’s that?
The short version… WooCommerce – or Woo – is a plug-in, an add-on that turns your WordPress.com website into an online shop. It turns the lights to green on your road to eCommerce success. Once enabled you can start selling products (physical or digital), services or affiliate products… Or a mix of all these types of products.
WooCommerce really brings the magic. And you can add various other plug-ins to take your WooCommerce shop to the next level… Add a payment or shipment provider for more advanced yet easy to use added features. The sky really is the limit.
Getting started is so easy: get this offer for a 14-day trial of Managed WooCommerce. Select a store design then drag, drop & tweak to turn it into your own online store. Easy as.
My experience with WooCommerce
For me, my WooCommerce journey started more than 10 years ago. I was in the same situation, a great idea for a niche solution but no idea where to start. WordPress and WooCommerce were the tools I started to use. And after seeing how easy these were to use, more advanced versions of the eCommerce site were launched. And more side projects, new ideas, were launched in the online world. All based on WordPress and WooCommerce.
Sometimes you hear people say “WooCommerce that won’t work for me because of XYZ”. Maybe that is true for some exotic cases but 99% of the side hustle or new project ideas are perfect for the magical combo of WordPress and WooCommerce. Even if you grow, WooCommerce grows with you. It’s scalable.
Fear of the dark can only be solved by turning on the light
I get you. It may feel daunting to create a website with eCommerce capabilities, especially if you’re not that tech-savvy. That is how I started out as well, no worries. You’re not alone in these tech fears of the dark. Let’s turn on the light and get rid of these fears.
Fear 1: How to create a good-looking online shop? I’m not a designer
The first steps on WordPress and WooCommerce are easier than you think. Our blog post about the quick & easy way to get your side hustle online and “how to do it yourself and how do it well!” has got you covered. There are so many easy to use & great looking templates available that it is like building with LEGO.
Start with a pre-made design and tweak it as you go. You’ll notice that soon you’ll get the hang of it and you go from tweaking the pre-made stuff to creating blocks yourself. Your WooCommerce store can grow from a simple yet effective side hustle into a professional, full-fledged eCommerce shop.
Fear 2: What if I break something? I’m not technical so who will fix it?
First of all, WooCommerce has a set-up wizard that guides you step-by-step. You can build your website without people seeing it. Create an account and build your online shop, then publish it when you are ready to go live and take orders. You can even select a plan – after the free trial – that includes the option to create a staging site, a private copy of your online shop where you can experiment without affecting your live site. If you do make a mistake, you just restore a backup via your host’s one click restore process.
Fear 3: A website or webshop is expensive
The biggest advantage of WordPress and WooCommerce is that you can start small. Get started with this 14-day trial offer for a hosted WooCommerce store on WordPress,com. WooCommerce turns your WordPress website into an online shop while WordPress dot com is the computer system (hosting provider) that powers your website & online store.
You decide if and how many paid plug-ins or extensions you want to add. And yup, there are free plug-ins available as well.
Fear 4: What if my shop gets hacked?
This is probably one of the best fears to have, as it means you’ve been thinking about security and how to take care of that. After all, a secure shop, is a place people love to shop. Security starts with a few common-sense things you can do:
- When setting up your website & online shop, stay away from simple easy to guess passwords. So no passwords like “admin” or “shop123”. Create a complicated password, that is impossible to guess and save it in your secure Password Manager.
- Keep your website and WooCommerce shop up to date and create back-ups on a regular basis. And that is where a handy security tool like Jetpack comes in. It’s the one-stop security and anti-spam plug-in for WordPress websites. It also blocks attempts to hack your site from millions of known malicious attackers, automatically so easy to use.
Fear 5: I don’t know how to handle payments or shipping
No worries. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you only need to be an expert in the field of your business idea or side hustle. Leave the tech, finance or shipping stuff to other professionals.
Your WooCommerce shop supports WooPayments out of the box, just install the plug-in and follow the steps to get started.
Shipping is relatively easy as well: start with simple shipping. Offer flat-rate shipping or free local pick-up to keep things easy. Use a shipping extension to calculate shipping rates and print labels.
That’s one of the big advantage of WooCommerce, there are so many easy-to-use extensions available that allow you to customise & tweak your online shop without any coding knowledge needed.
Fear 6: What if no one buys from me?
Getting your online shop up & running is step one. The next step is that you need to spread the word and get people to your website. Use social media to share your products, behind the scene photos or videos and the work that goes into creating your product on social channels like Instagram, Pixelfed, Facebook, Mastodon, Friendica, TikTok or Loops.
Make sure to reply quickly to comments and questions. Show your future customers that you are the real deal, a real customer-oriented small business.
Master basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) skills so you’ll rank well in search engines and get recommended by AI systems. Plugins like Yoast WooCommerce SEO will help you to understand what is needed. It guides you to the wonderful world of SEO.
Fear 7: I’ll have to spend hours managing the shop or my socials
Work smarter, not harder are classic wise words for a reason. There lots of things you can schedule or run on auto-pilot. Our article about taking social media to the next level without spending more time on it shows you how to master your socials without having to spend massive amounts of hours on it. Use smart tools & plug-ins to handle emails, backups and upgrades to your online shop.
Fear 8: I don’t know how to track sales or taxes
No one likes to spend hours on boring yet important stuff like statistics and legal stuff. Luckily WooCommerce comes with WooCommerce Analytics – replacing the classic reporting option – that shows you heaps of info about the performance of your online shop.
- Net sales
- Orders
- Top categories – Items sold
- Top products – Items sold
And that’s only on the main dashboard. From there you can focus on different areas and drill down further. You can even connect tools like QuickBooks or Xero with WooCommerce to track finances.
See WooCommerce in action
As WooCommerce powers millions of online shops worldwide, you’ll probably visited a shop powered by WooCommerce. If you haven’t – or haven’t realised a shop was powered by WooCommerce – check out the online shop of our crochet mates at Woolster.
WooCommerce is everywhere, so you’ve probably experienced first-hand how easy it is to browse products and make a purchase. Especially when the shop had enabled a simple one-page purchase process. And that’s another important tip: keep the purchase flow and the check-out process as simple as possible.
- Give people the option to set a different shipping address instead of forcing them to fill out the shipping address again when it’s the same as billing address.
- If you’re selling digital products, why ask for a shipping address?
- Why ask for data you won’t need for fulfilling the order?
Keep it simple & snappy. When your customers have filled their basket you don’t want them to experience a frustrating and long check-out process. Don’t put up roadblocks.
Final Tip: Start small, start now and tweak later
Don’t over-think it. Start small but start now as the best way to learn is by doing it. Set up a test shop, play around with the settings and look & feel, then launch when it’s “good enough.” You can always tweak as you go. Get started with this 14-day trial offer for a hosted WooCommerce store.
Let’s be honest, in a year or 2 you will have gained so much knowledge about selling online and setting up & managing an online shop that you will look back at your first online shop and think: “why did I start with that look & feel?”. Your first set-up will look great at first, but as your shop evolves, you’ll likely outgrow it and build something even better. Another advantage of WooCommerce, it evolves and grows with you.
And always keep reading blog posts about online selling, digital marketing and more… And ask questions. Post ‘em here as comment and I’m more than happy to answer them.
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