2.1 Install WooCommerce

Okay, so what we are going to be doing is working with a clean installation of WordPress. And this is a site that I just installed this morning on my local server. So this is running on my Mac. So there's going to be a few things I can't do with it. For example I can't set up SSL. So I can't create a secure store, which is something you should do. And I'll go through that in more detail with you later on. But let's get started with this local site. The first thing I need to do is install the WooCommerce plugin. Now, there's a few places you can get the WooCommerce plugin. The first one is the WooCommerce website itself. And you'll find that all the links I'll be using as we go through this slide stream are on the YouTube page along with this video. The second place you can get it is the WordPress site. So you can get it here in the Plugin directory. But the easiest way to get it is right from inside your WordPress dashboard. And if you're familiar with WordPress, you'll know how to install Plugins. So let's do that. We're gonna go to Plugins and add new, And then we'll type in a keyword. So I've typed in WooCommerce. WordPress is spending a moment thinking and then here we are with WooCommerce. I'll click on Install Now. Hang on a minute. My autocorrect has put a space in WooCommerce. Don't you just hate it when autocorrect does that? One of my friends calls it autocarrot, which I think is great. So it's been installed, and now I click that button again to activate it. So WordPress does its thing, takes a moment, and then it takes us straight to the Setup Wizard. Now if you want, you can skip this Setup Wizard and go to the settings pages that I'll be showing you later on. But by far and away the easiest way to get started is by using this wizard as you get started. So let's have a look what we're given first. First off it asked me where my story's based, and it's automatically detected that I'm in the UK because of my location. So I'm gonna keep to the UK. My address. I'm not gonna put my own home address because I don't want you all beating on my door trying to find out more WooCommerce. So I'm gonna use, oops, 10 Downing Street. And let's type it correctly. Let's pretend that the Prime Minister is gonna be selling some stuff on WooCommerce. And I don't know the post code for 10 Downing Street, but I do know the post code for the house of the parliament. So let's assume it's pretty similar. So because i'm in the UK, i'm gonna use pound sterling again. You can choose whatever currency you want. And you can see there's a whole heap of them to choose from. And then, you specify which type of product you plan to sell. Now, I'm going to sell both physical and digital products on my store. So I'll select that option. Now, bear in mind that you can use the settings screens in WooCommerce to change this at any point in the future, so don't worry if you get anything wrong. If your store moves, you can change that. If you decide to use a different currency, you can change that and if you change the target product, you can change that to. So everything we do in this wizard you can go in and change later on. So I'm going let Woo Commerce collect non sensitive diagnostic data and usage information because that helps the guys at WooCommerce make the plugin a better plugin. So I'll click let's go and now it's asking me what payment methods I want to accept. So you can see there are four options here. Now, the simplest one is offline payments. And this is how stores used to operate back in the good old days before we had things like PayPal. So I could collect people's payments by check, or by direct bank transfer if I wanted to, or I could even ask them for cash on delivery. Either if they come into my store to pick something up or when I deliver it to them. Now, I don't know any stores that run cash on delivery anymore. I don't think there were 20 years ago. So I'm not going to be using any of those. What I am gonna use instead is PayPal. Now you'll see here that there are two options for PayPal. There's PayPal and PayPal Standard. And if you're anything like me, you'll look at this screen and think? I don't know if there's a difference between those two things. It's quite a subtle thing. It's basically about the way that PayPal operates in your site. If you select PayPal Standard, your customer will be taken out of your site and into PayPal, and they'll do all of the payment and transaction will be completed in PayPal. If you select PayPal, which is really PayPal Express, what will happen is that they will go into PayPal to put in their login details for PayPal or to give their credit card details. And then they'll come back to your site to complete the transaction. It's a simpler thing to set up because you don't have to use something called IPN codes, which if you've set up WooCommerce in the past you might be familiar with IPN. If you're not, don't worry about them, we're not gonna use them. So PayPal Express tends to work better. And if you want to find out a bit more about PayPal Express, this is the plugin that WooCommerce actually installs if you select that. WooCommerce PayPal Express Checkout Payment Gateway. Quite a mouthful there. And here on the PayPal website there's some information about Express and how it works. Using PayPal Express or PayPal as it's called in the setup wizard will give your users a better experience. Now we will find that because I am developing locally here, it doesn't actually like it because it needs to hook up to PayPal online. But for the purposes of the demo, I am gonna select that and click continue. So on your live site select that and it will work fine. So now we've got past payment, WooCommerce again is gonna do its thinking. And it's gonna bring me a new screen, and that's shipping. So here you can specify the cost of shipping. Now this will only come up if you've selected that you're selling physical products, or physical and digital products like me. So because I'm selling physical products, let me just take a drink of water. Because I'm selling physical products, I need to specify how much it's gonna cost to ship them. So within the UK where I am, I'm gonna say a flat rate of 2 pounds, which is pretty cheap. And then in other locations, I'm gonna specify 4 pounds. Again, that could be quite cheap, but what I would suggest doing is investigating how much it's actually going to cost you to do. So that's my shipping costs, and then we've got weight unit, so you can specify what weight units you want to use for your products. I'm going to stick with kilograms instead of making it grams or using imperial measurements, and the same I'm going to use centimeters as my dimension unit. So again, I'll click continue and wait for WooCommerce to do its work, which it did way too quickly then cuz it didn't give me time to have a sip of my coffee. Again my voice, good, find a better word. So, right, now we have some extras. The first one is the store front thing. Now I recommend using this unless you've already got your own theme that you've developed, or unless you've got a third party theme that is specifically designed to be compatible with WooCommerce. Now I manage quite a few client sites that use WooCommerce and what I do in those cases is develop a bespoke theme, especially for that site. So I wouldn't select that here, but if you're setting up a new store, store front looks great with WooCommerce. It's designed to display your products nicely, it's designed to give you a nice welcome screen that people can see when they enter your store and I'll show in a bit more detail later on and we'll see how we can customize it and make it consistent with your brand. The next thing you add is automated taxes. [COUGH] Now what this does is automates the taxes on your site. That's what it says on the tin. But what that means is that instead of having to manually input taxes for different locations, if you're shipping to areas that have different taxes from where you're based, it will work out automatically based on where your customer is how much tax they have to pay. Because the sales tax that somebody pays on items in your store is relevant to where they are, not where you are. So if you're in the US, this could be really useful because you'll have different taxes in different states. I'm in the UK, I'm gonna be selling internationally, but I'm not gonna select this option for this demo because that requires me to hook up to Jetpack and sign into WordPress.com, which is something we don't have time for in this hour. But if you do want to automate the process of working out taxes in your WooCommerce store, I recommend it. So I've selected storefront, and not automated taxes, and I'm going to click on continue. Hopefully, it takes long enough for me to have a sip of my coffee. Perfect timing. Right. So I've just mentioned Jetpack. You can also, even without those automated taxes, you can connect up with Jetpack to add some extra features to your store. And the reason this is in here is because both WooCommerce and Jetpack are developed by Automatic, so they're designed to work really nicely together. So Jetpack will give you enhanced security. It'll give you access to statistics so you can see how many people are visiting your store and interacting with different pages. It'll give you monitoring if your store goes down. And you can also use it for sharing your content and your products and so forth. I'm not gonna do that right now because this isn't a live stream about Jetpack. So I'll go down here and skip this step. So, You've got my email address there. So I'm ready to start selling. I can sign up for the WooCommerce mailing list here. And that's a by the WooCommerce team. That enables you to get access to things like discounts and product updates and tips on getting the most out of your store, so it's well worth signing up for. Because for example, if you want to buy any add ons for WooCommerce, you'll know when they are on sale. I'm not gonna sign up for that right now, and then finally it's time to start creating products. Now you can either create a product manually, or you can import some products. So if you had another store elsewhere using a different system, you could import products from a CSV file that you've exported from whatever system it is that you've been using. Now I'm going to import products and I'm going to do that using the WooCommerce Dummy Data, now let me just show you that. So here on WooCommerce Docs, you can see that WooCommerce has something called Dummy Data. And that is a file [COUGH] with product data in that you can use to populate your store for testing. And I find it really useful even if I'm gonna be adding manual products later on or my client is. Because it gives me some products and images, some product categories and things I can play with. And it'll be great for demo like this because it means that you can see what the store will look like. So I'm gonna import those products. So what I need to do now is find the CSV file. So I click on choose file, and it's in, where you'll find it is in the plugin. So in the WooCommerce plugin here, you can see there's a dummy data file. So when you download WooCommerce or when you install it and you're looking on your server, or alternatively you can download it from that link I showed you a moment ago. Have a look inside the plugin files, find this dummy data folder, and you'll see that there are three files in there. First one is a CSV file which we can use here. The second is an XML file. You can use that if you are using the WordPress importer instead. And the third is sample tax rate. We're not gonna be worrying about that. So I'll select that dummy data CSV file. I'll click on choose. And then I have the option to check whether the products are being duplicated. My store's empty, it's brand new vanilla WordPress installation with nothing there, so I don't need to check that. But if you do already have some products in your store, I recommend doing that so you don't get any duplication or confusion. So I'll click Continue. It will then ask me to map the columns in my CSV file to the fields in WooCommerce. So, for example, you can see that there's the name, which is the name of your product, and I need to check that that's, don't point at the screen Rachel, they can't see me pointing at the screen, that, that is tallied up with the right column in my CSV file. Now obviously, because this file is designed specifically for this process, it's all absolutely fine. So I'll just scroll down and I'll run the importer. But if you're importing your own CSV file, take some time here to make sure that everything matches up because it's a real pain to have to go back and do it again. You could do, you could delete all those products and install all over again but I wouldn't fancy doing it.