🛒 Complete WooCommerce Tutorial for Beginners 🌟 - Step by Step - 2025 (Best eCommerce 💰 Tutorial)

Key Takeaways

Today, I'll walk you through how to set up your own e-commerce store using Woo Commerce, and we'll cover it step by step so you can get up and selling quickly. We get this question a lot because a lot of beginners, they get a little intimidated by the technology. Maybe you want to start a store, but you're not really sure how to set everything up, and so you you're not wanting to touch anything. It's okay. It happens a lot. But don't worry, we'll cover each step progressively so you can start [music] from having no website whatsoever to having a full-blown store that you can start selling your items on. So, a couple of things that you're going to need to set this up is the first thing you want to do is you want to set up a domain, you need hosting because you need a server to host all the files, images, and products and things like that. So, you'll need a hosting provider, and you also need to set up WordPress, and then we'll set up Woo Commerce on top of that. Now, that sounds like a lot, but a lot of those things kind of go in one fell swoop. So, we'll get started with that. So, as far as hosting providers go, one of the best ways to get started is by using something like Blue Host. We recommend Blue Host simply because it's easy to get started and it is quite economical to get started as well. As we go through these, these will be the steps that we'll be covering. We'll have a link in the description below where we can get you even more discount on Bluehost. To get started with Bluehost, you want to go to wpbginner slreffer/blhost and that is our affiliate link. We will get a commission if you use that link for us. So once you get set up, you can see this special page. With this link, you also get a free domain for the first year. You'll also get free SSL certificate and that's just says SSL stands for secured socket layer and that just makes sure that your website is secure and encrypted between you and your readers or your visitors. So let's go ahead and click on the get started now button. I would say you want to look at between the plus and the basic. And a couple of the major differences between the basic and the plus is the basic you only get one website and you have a few other items there to look at. Whereas with the plus, you get unlimited websites. For this tutorial, I'll simply choose the basic. Now, from here, this is where you create your new domain name or the website where you're going to send people to. So, now you can put it in, put in what you want your website name to be. And when you click next, it will either come back and let you know if it's available. If it is available, it'll give you this big green banner that says it's available. If it's not available, they'll give you some ideas of some other website names to try. So, scrolling down, you'll want to fill out all of this information. And then when you scroll down to the package information, then this is where you need to make a decision on how much savings you want. And you have your choice between 36 months, 24 or 12 months. And that gives you the separation between 12 month savings worth of savings. And then it resets to the normal amount or you get 3 years at 275. So something you need to look at. But you notice that the domain name registration is free and the let's encrypt is free as well. And then scrolling down there's some package extras. And you really can uncheck all of these. And then scrolling down you see the total savings for this is at least 50% off. And this is our total amount. So you just want to go through here and enter credit card information. You want to go ahead and read their auto renewal terms. That's just letting you know when it renews it will renew at the standard price and then once it goes through actually create your website. Once you get all the information then Blue Host will go out and install WordPress for you. And this is the back end of it. Now that we've installed WordPress, the next thing we need to do is we need to install the e-commerce plugin. And Woo Commerce is the best e-commerce plugin for WordPress. So we'll head over to our plugins area. Go to add new. And from here, we need to search for Woo Commerce. This is the one we want. So, let's go ahead and click install. Now, go ahead and make sure you stick around to activate the plugin as well. Now, you see the WooCommerce setup wizard. So, you want to add your address here. From here, you can choose which industry you're in. From here, you can choose which products you'll be selling, physical, download, subscriptions, memberships. If you get the premium, then subscriptions, memberships, bookings, customizable products, and things like that, they're already part of the subscription fee. From here, you can choose how many products you want to display. Are you currently selling anywhere else? We'll say no. We're just setting this up. And then they also suggest some of these items to start driving traffic to now. We're just going to say no to those. Now, you can choose a theme. A theme is how your site looks to other people. And so it's pretty important to choose one that looks good, looks inviting, but also showcases your products really well to others. The default theme is the storefront, and that's the currently active one. You can see it here. You have a bit of a dashboard here, but we always like to go over on the left under Woo Commerce. You can go to settings, and you'll see several tabs here that you can choose from. From here, we're going to click on payment section, payments, and these are all of the payments that come with Woo Commerce. The PayPal standard is the easiest way that you can get up and running with accepting payments. So, we're going to toggle that one on. I'll also recommend doing either a cash on delivery or check payment. Turn that on. And that's just so you can test out the orders without actually haveing having to go through a payment processor. So, once we have those selected, you can also click setup for PayPal standard. And from here, you just need to enable it and then add the PayPal email address. Add your PayPal email address. Once you're finished, let's go down and make sure you save changes. Okay. Now, let's take a look at some of the tabs up here. Under general, this is where we added our address. And that put that in there. The general options of who you are selling to. You can sell to all countries or you can break that down to only sell to certain countries as well as your shipping locations. If you want it to be shop base address, which is the address that we put in there. If you want to enable taxes, you can choose that here. And then it'll go through and set up help you set up some taxes. You can also enable coupons. And you can also allow them to calculate coupon discounts, stacking coupons. So, you can choose to do that. Most people don't allow that. And under currency, you want to choose the currency that you're accepting money in with the separator, decimal, and number of decimals. So, we'll save changes for them. The next step we want to do is under products, we want to take a look at what type of products are we doing. So, we're doing a shop page. That's when somebody goes to shop your store, they can go to the shop page. And then you can add cart behavior. If you want to redirect to the cart, once they add an an item to their cart, you can redirect them or just enable Ajax. And that will kind of bring up the cart on the page without redirecting. What's great is you have these little tool tips that will tell you what everything is. So, basically, these are image URLs for your products, and you can choose four. The weight that you want, since I'm in the US, I'm going to do pounds, and I'm going to do inches for dimensions. If you want to enable product reviews, verified owner, you can do that as well. If you want to enable a star rating, which gives people a visual of how these products are, you can do that as well. So, we'll save changes and then move on to the next one. Under shipping, you want to set up your shipping zones. And then you want to do payments. We already did payments, accounts, and privacy. This allows people to do guest checkout where they don't have to create an account. Also, account creation and registration policies and things like that. Under emails, these are all the transaction emails that they will get and you can go in and change them up and make them more personalized for your product. And then under advanced, if you just scroll down, these are basically the pages that are being set up that were created when everything was set up. They you have a cart, so they can go to cart, they're ready to check out. There's a checkout page. They can go to my account to see a dashboard of everything that they've ordered. You'll want to add a terms and conditions page. So, you'll want to create that and then select this from the drop down. They don't create that for you because you'll need to create that for your business. Now that we have everything set up, now we need to create a product. The easiest way to do that is to come over on the left and we have products here and we can click add new. This is where you can create your first product. And you can go in and do this manually or if you have a CSV or an Excel file of multiple items, then you can import, but we're going to just show creating a product from scratch. You want to create the information here. Scrolling down, you can give a regular price. And then you want to do a sales price. And then that way when it's showing, it'll show that sales price and the regular price so that they see it's a a a sale for them. You can go in and choose inventory, shipping, linked products, or if there's other items that you want to sell that are related to this, you can do that here. You can also do a short description down here. And now over on the right, this is where you want to select images. You won't have any images to begin with, but I have some here already. So, just to show you, you can add one image and then if you want to add more gallery images or more images about this product, you can do that here as well. But now we've created a very simple product. We can click publish. And now we can see what this looks like on our site. And we haven't seen our site yet. So, let's go ahead and take a look. So, you can visit the site. And then from here, you can also click on shop and this will take them to the store. Now, I have added a few others in testing. So you see those here, but normally you'll only see one where you can look at it, click on it, and then this is the product. This is also the theme. This is the storefront theme. That's the regular theme that comes or the default theme that comes, but you can set up any other theme that you want as well. Now, the other thing we want to look at is you notice this is our web URL address or the address of this t-shirt. We don't want to have that. So you want to click on change per links. And if you ever need to come back here, go to the left, go all the way down to settings and go to permal links. This is where we want to make some changes. Scrolling here, we see plane. And so this is what's set up. We don't want that. We want to do post name. And basically, that will be the name of the product, which I named it t-shirt. And that will be after my web address. So, we're happy with that. So, I'll scroll down, save changes, and now when I go to my site, and I click refresh, and now we have t-shirt as my product name. Now, let's look at customizing the theme. The theme is what your site looks like. And you can customize it even further than what the base theme is. So, we can go back to our dashboard and over on the left, we want to go to appearance, customize to make the changes. What's cool about the customize is whatever changes we make, we will see them here. This is the site title and you can do a tagline. You can do a site icon. So that would replace this little world right here. You can select it. You want it to be in 512 x 512. Simply going to choose this just because I have that image. And then it'll want me to crop it. So we'll do that. Great. Now, that will be my site identity logo or the favicon as it used to be called. And here you can choose a background image. I'm just going to show you what this does. That will be up at the top just so you know. We will remove that. And then you also have the color scheme here. So, if you wanted a different color than just white, you can change that here. And you see it in real time. And what's cool about this is you're testing everything out, but you're actually not making the changes. None of these changes will actually go live until you click publish. So right now, you're just previewing it all and making the changes. If you don't like that color, you don't know what to do, you can click on default, and it'll go back to what it was initially. So you can go through this whole process and make any changes. But if you actually don't like the theme that you have, then we can actually change the theme. So we're going to get out of this. And if you want to actually change the theme al together then we'll go back to appearance themes and again just like before we see all of these themes available to us. From here we can either choose premium themes those are paid for themes if you want or you can choose the wordpress.org themes. These are free but they are vetted by the WordPress theme team to make sure that there's no horrible code or things that might hurt your site. And what I like about the premium is you can do a feature filter. So with the feature filter, you can say I want e-commerce. So it's basically anything that is created with e-commerce in mind. We'll go ahead and apply filters. And then you can choose any of them from here. So you can scroll through, pick the one that's closest to how the brand, how you want your brand to look and feel. Just going to pick Astra because it's actually a really good theme with some starter stuff and it gets you up and running pretty quickly as well. And then you'll also want to make sure you activate it. Otherwise, it won't be the active site on your website. So now we can go to our website and refresh it. And now this is what we can work with. So now when I go to shop, I see it a little bit differently set up. I kind of like this look a little bit better. It's just a little bit grander shop for me to work with. You notice when I keep going to the homepage, it's kind of showing whatever blog post is there. I want I want to change that as well. Instead of hello world, maybe I want the shop to be the homepage. So, I'm going to go back to our WordPress dashboard. We're going to go down to settings and reading. From here, you can change what the homepage looks like. So, right now, it's just showing your latest post. That's why we're seeing that. But, we actually want the homepage to be our shop. And so, then all of our products will show there. And then if you want to, you can create a new page and then make your posts. If you're creating a blog attached to your site, you can do that and then attach the blog post or the blog page as your post. So all the posts will show on there. So I don't have a blog page yet. We'll just save changes because I just want the homepage to be my store. So now when I go and refresh, now that is my homepage on my website and I like that a lot better. Now that we've created products, we want to set up a a few other pages for our site. We want to do a blog page. We want to do about and a contact page. And then we'll set some other things up as well. So to do that, let's go into pages. We'll go to all pages. And from here, you see all the current pages. And right now, all of the pages except for the sample page. That's just a sample when WordPress is installed. We can actually trash that. But all of these others are set up and they were initially installed when Woo Commerce was set up. So, we can create a couple more pages. So, for instance, we want to do add new. And I'm going to create a contact us page because we want to set up a contact form. And I'll show you how to do that. Contact us. And anywhere you see a little plus sign, we're going to click on that. And we're looking for form. WP forms is what we want to do. And it'll say select a form. We haven't created a form, so we're going to create one, and then we'll come back and add it. But we'll click publish. And so now we have a contact us page. We'll go back. I want to create an about page. And I want to create a blog page. The about us, that's where you set in your story so people know what you stand for, what your site is about, what you are selling. And now we're going to go back and we're going to do one more. Like I said, we're going to do a blog page. And then we can go back into settings and change that all the blog posts will come here. So we're going to publish that. And now we've created three of them. Going to go back. And now we have more. And I want to add some of these to our menu. We haven't looked at menu yet. So we're going to go to appearance menus. And we don't have any menu yet. So this is just pulling in our pages that we have. So we're going to call this main. and the main will be up here. Create I'm going to name it. Let's go ahead and create menu. And now we need to pick what pages we want to bring over. You can bring over pages. You can bring over posts, categories. There's several things that you can bring over, but I'm going to go to view all because it's not showing all of them. So, I'm going to do shop, about us, blog. What else do I want? Contact us, and do checkout and my account. If they're logged in, they'll see that as well. So, I'm going to add all of these over to the menu. You can rearrange these however you want. That looks good. We'll save menu. And now we can refresh. Now, we'll see this changes a little bit. So, we've got our about us. We've got our blog. We need to when I click on blog, nothing's there because I need to add that all of the blog posts will go to this page. So, let's go back to our dashboard. Scrolling down, we're going to go to settings, reading, and you remember under reading. This is where we set up the static page for homepage. Now we have a blog page. So we want to make all the posts go to this blog. From here you can choose how many blog posts will show on one page before it starts going to next and next and next. 10 is good. And for each post in a feed I want this to actually be summary because by default it'll just do show the full text. So you'll just have scrolling for days. So let's go do summary. And so it'll just be a little bit portion of it and it'll say read more to read more of it. So we're good with that. So save changes. Now, when I go to my blog page, there's one blog post that is here. And now it's going to show. When I have more, those will all show underneath as well. And then we created the contact us page, but now we also need to create the contact form. WP forms is the easiest drag and drop form builder for you. What's great is Blue Host installs this for you, but you'll need to go into all forms to create your first form. You can also go to add new. So, we'll create add new here. And since it's simple contact form, this is the one we want to use. So, I'm going to click on that. And the beauty of WP forms is now this is the form that I can use. You can make some changes if you want. You can change the name of it to just contact us. You can change what the submit button says. I'm happy with that. Go back to fields. This is really good out of the box. The only thing I like I always like the simple field here. And now everything else looks good. So, we can save this. And now we're going to go back to contact us to embed that. The contact us page to embed that. So, I'm going to exit out of this. We're going to head back over to our pages and we're going to go to our contact page. And from here, now that we have WP forms here, we can select the form from the drop down and it'll pull this in so we can get a preview of what this will look like. So, that's perfect. That's all I want for contact. I'm going to save that. And now my contact form is set up. Now that you've created your website, you also want to make sure that you've got tracking installed on your website so you know what customers are what people are coming to your website, where they're coming from, so who's referring your site, what type of pages are the most popular pages, and so much more. To do that, you can do it with Google Analytics. And you can watch this video where I walk you through step by step on how to set up Google Analytics. But to get Google Analytics installed and connected with your site, you want to use Monster Insights. Monster Insights is also set up on installed by Blue Host. So you can just click on the button here or you'll also see it down here under insights. Now with Monster Insights, I would actually recommend you use their pro feature or your page their paid feature. So go to Monster Insights. So, you want to get the pro feature or higher because that installs the ecommerce report tracking and it makes it super easy to find your average order value of your website and it brings in a lot of other tracking features for your website as well. Once you get an account, you can go to your downloads area and you can download it. I'll also copy the license key. We'll head back over to our WordPress dashboard. From here, we want to go to plugins, add new. And these are all the plugins that are available for you to search for. And these are all of the ones that are in the WordPress repository. We're actually going to come up here and upload a plugin because we just purchased it. And you can either choose file or because I have it installed right here. I can see it. I can leftclick, drag this over. I'll install it now. And you'll want to stick around to activate the plugin as well. Once it's activated, because we have the light version also installed, let's go ahead and click deactivate the light plugin. Now, we see Monster Insights Pro. That's the one we want. So, let's go ahead and activate this. From here, we can launch the wizard. And when you launch the wizard, it will ask a few questions about what your site is. And based on that, it'll automatically turn on some features for you. Now, we'll paste in our license key. And now, let's connect Monster Insights. And what it'll do is with Monster Insights, it'll go out and connect to your Google Analytics. So, if you've already created the Google Analytics account for this, it goes out and finds it. If you haven't, make sure you watch that video I mentioned where it walks you through that process. I have several, but you just want to find your website and then complete the connection. And now, Monster Insights will talk to your Google Analytics so you can see the data and how it's how your site is performing. From here, it'll automatically turn on some items for you, which is what we want. We'll scroll down, save, and continue. Now, Monster Insights e-commerce, that's the one that we do want to install. So, let's go ahead and install add-on. And let's activate it. You can also turn on Monster Insights for forms. So, that'll track how many forms have been converted, how many people have seen it, and then they convert or submit a form. Those are the two main ones that you want to do. So, we'll save and continue. And now everything should be good to go. So now we can finish and exit the setup wizard. And now monster insights is connected. And now what we can do is we'll see some data on our reports section and go to insights and go to reports. And now we'll see this data. Since you're just setting it up, you probably won't see any data. It'll take a little bit of time for the data to start reporting. Also takes traffic to your site for the data to start reporting. We also want to set up the e-commerce section. To do that, let's go down to settings under insights and we want to go to e-commerce. And from here, we want to do enhance e-commerce. You see a little toolbar. It also tells you that you need to set up enhanced e-commerce on your website. So, in order to do that, you go to your analytics. You go down to admin. And over here on the right, you have e-commerce settings. You want to make sure that this is toggled on. And you want to make sure that enable e-commerce is toggled on. You want to make sure that enabled enhanced e-commerce reporting is also toggled on. When both of those are toggled on, then you have a lot more reporting functionality for your site. So enhanced e-commerce is turned on here. It automatically turns on Woo Commerce because it sees that that is also installed on our site. And so now we're good to go. Now we can see advanced report tracking for e-commerce. Again, you won't see any data here until you start making sales. But then from here, you can see the conversion rate on your site, which is huge because this gives you a starting point. So, how what is your conversion rate on your site and how can you improve it? Gives you the number of transactions. So, the number of sales, gives you the total revenue, and it also gives you the average order value. Once you start knowing this information, then it helps you tremendously in improving these conversions or improving these sales. Now, once you start learning about how your traffic is doing and the e-commerce report tells you the transactions, the average order value, a way to improve the conversion rate of your site is by using something like Optim Monster. You can create little pop-ups, little reminders to get even more clicks to your site. Once you connect it, you can then create a popup or a floating bar or a full screen inline slide in and gamified. The gamified is perfect for e-commerce to get somebody to sign up, then they like spin the wheel. So, we'll use this template, start building it. From here, you can say whatever you want. Add your information. This looks pretty good. I'm not going to go through too much because I think it looks great. And then this is the optin. So, then you can do the display rules. So, when do you want this to show up? By default, it shows up when time on page is at least 5 seconds, but you can go in even further. You can also do e-commerce product targeting. So if they've visited a certain product, then you can turn this on. So for this one, just to show you, I'm just going to do time on pages at least 5 seconds. And then we can do integrations. So if you want to start collecting emails for your e-commerce store, that is perfect. You either add a new integration and they integrate with dozens of email service providers, most of the top ones that you see here. If you don't have an email service provider, don't let that stop you. By default, they will collect them under monster leads. So, it's collected locally for you, which is perfect to get you started. Then, under analytics, they will do their own analytics, but then you can also connect to Google Analytics, which is what we just set up if you want to do that here. Then, whenever you're ready, go to the publish screen. Now that everything is connected, we can also click preview, and we'll see what it will look like on our site. So, here's our site and it does the spin to win. That should help with you growing your email list as well as increasing your conversions for any other products. Congratulations, you've set everything up. Now, make sure you watch this video next as Chris from Seed Proud will walk you through step by step on how to create a customized product page using Woo Commerce. And thanks for watching.