2.2 Set Up WooCommerce

So I'm gonna run the importer, and you can see it importing my products. So while it does that, I'll give you a quick taster on SSL. So something that's what worth setting up for your WooCommerce store is SSL. In fact, it's more than well worth setting up, I would say it's something you have to do. Because this makes your store much more secure, so if you add an SSL certificate for your store, your domain name will be HTTPS instead of HTTP. So for example my website is https:/rachelmccollin.com, not HTTP. And that means my site even though it's not actually a store is more secure, it also helps your Google rankings. Google has in the last year changed their algorithm so that secure sites do get higher rankings. And it doesn't cost you anything anymore it used to be that you had to pay for an SSL certificate, but now you can use something called Let's Encrypt. So this guide in the Tuts+ website gives you a guide to using Let's Encrypt, and talks you through how to do it. Now, some of this looks a little bit complicated, what you might find is that your hosting provider has Let's Encrypt as part of their package. Mine does, I'm with SiteGround and I get Let's Encrypt and I can just click a button and I get an SSL certificate for free for all of my domains. So it's not difficult to do, check with your hosting provider if you're at all confused. So, our products have been imported and we can click View products to take a look at them, and that takes us to the Products page where you can see all of my products listed. So I'm now in the admins screens looking at my WooCommerce page. And you can see here it doesn't like the PayPal express checkout being set up without SSL. And that's because I haven't got SSL because I'm using a local installation. If you've got SSL setup, and if you haven't yet you should do. And you're working on a remote host you won't get this error message. Unfortunately I can't get rid of this error message so you'll have to keep looking at it throughout the live stream. So what we'll do in a moment is take a look at the WooCommerce settings in more detail. But first, I'm gonna take a quick pause and check whether there are any questions. And I'm taking a look at my iPad screen down here. Okay, so there aren't any questions at the moment, so I will continue. Please dont forget to let us know if there are any questions, and Adam at Tuts+ is helping me out with this. Is gonna be feeding me questions as they come and if I'm looking at the wrong place, he'll tell me that as well. Okay, we got a question, so let me read the question to you. Hi Rachel, I'm creating a website for an institute, where they want to make courses available online, but the price is different for the same course depending on whether the student is taking the course offline or online. Is it possible to change the price in this way? And that's from Praveen, thanks for your question, Praveen. Well, that's quite a tricky question. Right so, presumably if they were taking the course offline they would be downloading it, and therefore I guess maybe you want to make it either cost more because they're downloading it so they're keeping the files. Or cost less because online they're getting more of a service because they might be getting to interact with you. What you might be able to do, you have two options, you can either create two separate products, one for each because it might be that they are sufficiently distinct. Or it might be that you can create variations of a product with an add on for WooCommerce. Now, I think because if they're taking the course offline they're gonna need to download something, and if they're taking the course online they'll need a link. The product details are gonna be different, so actually, I think probably the best thing to do would be have separate products, one for online and one for offline. But what you could do is group those products, so you could use the group's extension for WooCommerce. And that allows you to group very similar products and display them on one page in WooCommerce. And then you can actually copy and paste them, so that you can create duplicates and then just edit each one so they look slightly different. So I think that's my recommendation is to create two products and group them using groups. When we come to look at products, if I've got time i'll try to have a quick look at that for you, Praveen, thanks for that question. All right, so we've installed and activated WooCommerce, we're now gonna move on and look at the WooCommerce settings. So, in WooCommerce we'll click on the WooCommerce link in the menu, in our dashboard. And let's have a look at the settings screens. Now, these will include some of the things that we did in that wizard, but there's more stuff as well. So first, there are general settings, we've got our address here, so you can change that if you move your store. We've got a selling location, so you can specify where your selling to. And also where you're shipping to, because you might choose not to ship to all the countries you sell to. So, for example you could sell virtual products to the whole world, but just sell physical products to your local area. You can specify default customer location either by geolocating that or by setting that to your own location. I'm gonna stick with geolocation, you can enable taxes, which I'm gonna do, and you can also enable a site-wide store notice text. This is something that's a little snippet of text that'll appear on every single page of your store. It's really useful for alerting people to something. So for example, on Black Friday, if you've got a sale on, you can put a notice across your whole store saying, it's Black Friday. We're running 20% off everything for example. I'm not gonna enable that at the moment because I don't want to do that on my store when I launch it. And then here you've got the currency options, and I already selected what currency I wanted when I was going through that setup wizard, but you can specify in more detail how you want that to be displayed. So I'll save my changes, And that's the general tab. So, now let's move on the the next tab, which is Products. And here you get to specify some more settings and configure those for your products. So the general is your weight units, and I mentioned units which we saw in the wizard, and then there are reviews. So you can enable product reviews, in my book, I would never not enable product reviews cuz they can really help you decide to buy. Show verified owner on product reviews, so that means if somebody has actually bought this from your store, it will show that. Which will make their review look that much more powerful, so I would include that. And you can also specify that only those people who bought from your store can leave reviews. Again by default that's off and I would leave it off because sometimes you might find that someone's bought something that's available from your store, elsewhere but they're still happy to leave a review. And here you've got star ratings and whether they're required or optional. I haven't changed anything there so I'm not gonna click to save changes. We've then got the display options, so here you can specify the page that your shop is on. Now WooCommerce when I installed it, it created a number of pages in my site, and one of those was shop, which it automatically populates with the front page of your store. So I'm gonna leave that as it is, and then on my shop page, I can choose what to display. So I can share my products, or my categories, or both. And I'll show you product categories in a bit more detail later on. So I'm gonna select show Categories and Products. And then in my category pages, so when somebody clicks through to one of those categories I can show sub categories if I want. I'm not gonna bother with those because I'm just going to stick with products on those lower level pages. And I'm gonna keep the product sorting as the default, but if you wanted to you could change those, for example, to popularity. So we then have, and let me take a quick drink, add to cart behavior. And here you can choose to redirect people to the cart page immediately after they add something to the cart. Now again, this is unchecked by default and I think that's wise. Because if somebody adds one thing to their cart and you take them straight to the checkout, you're assuming they're only gonna buy one thing. And I don't know about you, I want people to buy more than one thing in my store, so I'm gonna keep that as is, we'll enable Ajax, because that speeds things up. And the product images, we'll keep those as the defaults I mentioned. So here I have made some changes, and I'm gonna click Save Changes to save those. We can then look at the inventory, so you can make changes. You all got my email address by now it's not that bigger deal. [LAUGH] You can make changes to stop management and how that works. So this obviously only relates to physical products. Although you could have a limit on how many times something could be downloaded. So here there are options related to your inventory, how long you hold stock for, whether you enable notifications on the site and what your thresholds are for low stock and out of stock. So, I'll keep those as the default and then finally there are some options here for downloadable products. So, you can select different options for how people download them. I'm gonna stick with the default of forcing a download, so that means they can download immediately. You can also require a login to download if you want people to register and login for your site. I don't, I wanna make it as easy as possible, so again, I'll save my changes. And I see we got more questions coming in, and I will pause after we've looked at these settings to answer those. So moving on to tax, now this is where you can set up tax rates. Now firstly, I'm gonna enter prices inclusive of tax, because that's how we do things in the UK. If you're in the US or another country where your prices don't include tax, you keep it as the default. Tax is based on the customer's shipping address and it's based on the cart items. Now I'm not gonna go into a huge amount of detail on tax because what you can do instead is take a look at this Beginners Guide to WooCommerce Taxes. Because there's quite a lot to get your head around on taxes, and it could take up the whole hour. So, I'll save my changes there, and bear in mind that if you do go through that guide, you can use these screens to add tax rates for different places that people can buy from. We've got shipping options here as well, and you can add different shipping zones. I've just got the UK and anywhere outside the UK, but you can add extra ones. So, for example, I could add Europe, because it would be cheaper for me to ship to ship to Europe than it would be for me to ship to the rest of the world. And then we've got checkout. So here you've got firstly coupons, so you can enable the use of coupons which means you can send so for example people who subscribe to your mailing list. You could send them coupons giving them discounts which is a good way to reward loyalty. You can calculate discounts sequentialy, and what that means, if somebody has two 10% coupons, and you're selling them something for a dollar. If the discount is calculated sequentially, they first get 10% off, so that's $0.90. And then they get 10% off that, so they're paying $0.81, because they're getting $0.09 of the $0.90. If you don't do it sequentially, they pay $0.80 so I think that's a bit nicer to my customers and it's only a cent, so I'm gonna keep that as it is. Guest checkout is something that for most doors you will want to keep because people don't need to be logged in. And then for secure check out is something that you should check here. I'm not going to because I don't have SSL on my local server. But I very, very strongly recommend that you get and SSL certificate for your store, and that you force secure checkout here. We've then got the pages and again WooCommerce has created some pages in my WordPress site for the checkout. So the card and checkout pages are automatically populated with the correct content so leave those as they are. Terms and condition it doesn't create a page for, so you would have to create a new page in WordPress called Terms and Conditions. Populate that with your store's terms and conditions, and then come back here and select that. And then finally we have, not finally cuz there's payment gateways as well sorry, we have checkout endpoints. So these are the slugs at the end of the URLs for those screens in checkout, keep those as they are, there's no reason for changing them. And then finally, this is finally, we have those payment gateways. So because my PayPal isn't working, because of this error message up here, all I've got is check. So people love to write me checks, I don't know about you but I don't know where my checkbook is I probably only use it for school trips for my kids. Not many use them anymore so obviously you'll want to set this up differently, but that's what I've got on my demo store on local machine. So, I'll Save my changes here, although I'm not sure I actually made any, and you can see here you can edit the details of each of your payment methods. The next tab along is Accounts, and here again you have a page created by WooCommerce that you can specify, keep that as the default. Customer registration, I'm gonna enable it under my account page as well as the checkout page. And if somebody's coming back, you can encourage them to log in, because that means they get access to their details and they don't have to put their address in again, for example, so that's good. And the username and password, generating a username from customer email makes life easier, but I would let them keep their own password. And here again you got endpoints which all those slugs, so I'm gonna Save changes again and this is great. We've got some more questions and I will get through this temp as quickly as I can so we can answer them. We don't have the notifications, now WooCommerce will email a variety of people, we'll they'll email you and your customers mainly, when things happen on your store. So for example, when a new order's placed you yourself will get that in my last store manager. But let's have a look at this completed order email, which is an important email which goes out to your customers. So I'm enabling this, and here's the subject line you can edit that subject line if you want to, so you can make it more consistent with your brand, and email heading as well. But if you want change to come into the email itself, you need to make a copy of the file from the WooCommerce plugin that you can see here, and add it to your theme folder. So if you're comfortable doing that and editing that code, and you wanna make changes to that default email and to any of the other default emails, feel free to do that. So I haven't made any changes here, so I won't bother clicking Save changes. And then finally, the last tab is API, and here we can enable or disable the REST of the API. And I would leave that on because it enables interaction with your site using java script, which for example, if you do decide to use Jetpack, it will help that to work. So those are the settings pages, and now let's have a look at the questions.