WooCommerce Tutorial 2021 (Step by Step For Beginners)

Key Takeaways

Welcome back to the channel. This video is a step-by-step tutorial to show you everything you need to know to set up your first online store using WooCommerce. And this is an extremely popular way and really a great way to set up your online store for several different reasons. So, first of all, WooCommerce is a plugin that's going to run on WordPress. Now, both WooCommerce and WordPress are both completely free. So, really all you have to pay for is your domain and your hosting, which are generally very cheap. So, it's a very cheap option for creating an online store. Now, second of all, this is using WordPress. And WordPress is very, very popular because it's extremely versatile with thousands of plugins, thousands of themes, and so you really have kind of unlimited options for how your store can look. If you want to have 500 blog posts on here, you can easily do that with WordPress. Now, the last reason that's very popular is because it's a very robust and very versatile software that allows you to sell different types of products. You could have physical products, digital products. You could have not even really products. It could be affiliate marketing links. You could have things on there that would be selling services, for example. And I'll show you how to set up all of those in this video so that by the end of this video, you can have a full-blown store ready to go that's up and live selling your products. Now, with that in mind, guys, we have a lot to talk about in this video. I'm going to try to keep things not too technical because honestly, this does not require any coding at all. You can easily just go through this video and click on everything I'm clicking on and have your website, your store ready to go by the end without understanding a lot behind it. But, for those of you who are interested in understanding a little bit more behind your website, I will add some commentary to explain what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and give you a better idea of how things are actually operating. Now, I want to start off with exactly how WordPress is really operating and what we're talking about when we say hosting. Now, I like to compare this to typing out a document, for example. So, if you're going to type out a document, there's several different programs you could use. You could use Google Docs, you could use Microsoft Word, you could use Apple's version. Like, there's just a lot of different softwares you could use. Of course, we know one of the most popular ones is Microsoft Word. So, that is the equivalent of WordPress. Now, you there's a lot of different ways you can make a website, but WordPress is a very popular way of creating our website. So, if the document is the website, then WordPress is Microsoft Word. So, that's your analogy right there. And then the hosting is similar to that in that when you write your document on Microsoft Word, you can't just close out of the document, or else it'll go away forever, and nobody can ever see it again. And so, what you have to do is you're going to save it to a specific drive, somewhere on your computer. Now, the drive is what I would compare to your host. So, when you're hosting, it's going to be where you're saving your website essentially. So, you have to buy your domain, you have to save your website somewhere. That's really where your host is. Then WordPress is the engine we're using to interface between what we want to do and actual code that goes on behind the scenes. So, between these, we'll be able to just make our website with no coding at all. It's saved on our host, and it's ready to go on the internet. All right, so santrelmedia.com/bluehost, or you can click on the link in the top of the description below, and that will bring us all to the same page. It will also give you a discount, so you have the best price. You'll see it's about 50 to 60% off right there. So, it was $8 a month, now it's $4 a month. And I'll show you how to even get a better deal than that. Uh so, if we go into choose plan, we have three different options here. And it's important to look through these because, well, in this video I'm going to get the basic one because that's all I need for this video, but some people may want the plus or the choice plus. So, it's important not to save yourself $1 a month over something that could be a pretty substantial difference. Now, like for example, the automated backup could be a really important thing for your website, depending on what type of website you have and what you're looking for. Likewise, the 50 GB limit of space on the basic option, if you have a lot of content on your website, a lot of pictures, and a lot of just stuff, maybe videos for example, uh you may want to upgrade to the plus or the choice plus. But like I said, this video, I'm just getting the basic one. For a lot of websites, this is probably all you really need. And $3.95 a month, I'll talk about the price there in a second because it is not necessarily always $3.95 per month. It depends on how you get it. Now, choosing the domain, you can either have one that you already own and transfer it. So, if you bought it from Namecheap, which is actually a really good way to buy a lot of domains, or from GoDaddy or something like that, uh you could save a little bit of money. It's a little bit more confusing, which is why I typically just buy the domain right here. So, we are going to Or you could just say, "I'll create my domain later." You could skip it if you want. I recommend doing it right now. So, let's say sandrellmediawebsite.com. And of course, you can change it instead of .com. The other ones like .blog or .tech, like there's It's much more likely that your domain is open for those. .com is probably the most recognizable and one that I generally recommend. So, then the next page right here, the Luckily, the domain was not taken. I'm sure a lot of people really want sandrellmediawebsite.com, but anyway, as we go down, we can create our account information right here. And before I get into doing that, let's go down and I want to talk about the package down here. So, you see that the price, first of all, they have 36 months for $3.95 per month. If you want to pay on a shorter time scale, maybe annual or bi-annual, then it's going to be either $6 a month or $5 per month. So, really not a huge difference there, but if you're willing to make the 3-year commitment, uh honestly, it's only $140. So, it's really not that expensive considering a lot of other business expenses are significantly more. And when you're creating this, WordPress is free, the template's free, the theme's free. So, I wouldn't worry too much about that. If you think you can handle the longer the the longer range, go ahead and do that. Uh another thing is you actually don't have a month-by-month option here. 12 months is the least you can get. And you'll see right there, the other option just popped up. So, they are suggesting that we can get either, you know, even a greater savings right now. So, I'm going to claim the savings on that, uh and it'll bring us back to the same page again. Um and so, that's why I didn't type in the account information yet. If that did not pop up for you, the way you would get it to pop up is just go up here as if you were about to X out. And right when your mouse gets somewhere up around here, that should pop up. And that will give you $2.95 per month again for 36 months, but now you'll notice that all of these dropped by $1 per month. So now I can get the 12 months for only $59, which is honestly a a pretty good deal there. Now we do have free domain registration. I believe the domain's only free for the first year. Uh this also gives you SSL encryption, which you'll see the little lock icon at the top. That's what it's going to do. Very important when people visit your site, and especially if you're taking any kind of credit card payments. Now the package extras, we have some other things. The domain privacy and protection, an extra $1 per month. Uh that that way normally you could just go to whois.com and I could find out who owns any domain where what their address is, what their phone number is, and sometimes you just want that information hidden. So that's typically what I would do. I pay the extra dollar per month to hide that. You also have CodeGuard Basic. I'm not going to get that on this website. I'm not going to get SiteLock on this website either. You may want these, so definitely go and read them as well. So then click the giant blue button that says create my account. It'll bring you to this page right here, and we are going to create a password. So let's do that right now. And now this will bring you to this page right here, so we can go ahead and log our account. So next Bluehost wants to know a little bit more about what type of site you're creating, and this is so that they can recommend plugins and extensions for you on your website. I'm going to skip this step because we really don't need it right now. Next I want to know what we should add to our site. So blog, store, about me. I'm going to skip that as well. I'm going to show you guys how you can import an entire website very easily for free. So we're going to skip all of these different things right here. Skip these steps. Uh we're going to skip this as well. So if you get down to the bottom, we don't need to pick a theme just yet. Of course, if you see one there, you could do that. to show you in this video how to actually get the theme uh much more easily than that. So we're going to click on So actually let's just go through this real quick. So we have home, uh and this is going to give you a little bit of a checklist of things that they recommend you do. Uh you can go down and see my sites. If you have multiple sites through Bluehost here, of course you can have different ones hosted. Create a new site if you want. Um we have marketplace, email and office, stuff like that. I'm not going to get into that. Domains, the ones that you bought are down here and they tell you when they expire, how much it costs to renew, stuff like that. So for this video uh right now, to make our site to make our WordPress website, go back to home, click on WordPress on the top right. It'll open up WordPress and we should be getting signed in pretty much automatically here. And the dashboard here, admittedly, does look a little bit intimidating at first. There's a lot going on. So, I want to walk you through just the basics before we get into things to show you what we're working with. So, right here on dashboard, you'll see I don't really do a whole lot with this. It's just going to be some news, some things like that, some change your design. You can do things like right here, but everything that it's going to show you here, you can also access elsewhere. So, going down on the left side, we have updates and it is very important to check this every time you sign in to WordPress to make sure all of your plugins and your themes are up to date so you don't have any kind of vulnerabilities and you don't have any issues with your website. Then we have posts. This is going to be essentially anytime you make a new article for your blog or something like that. Uh and so do these will show up here. You'll see author, tags, stuff like that. We can go and check out categories. Uh we I'll get into that later on. Media is going to be where you can upload documents or uh images or videos that you will be using on your website. You can manage them, delete them here, whatever you need to do. Then pages will be essentially everything on your website that is going to be staying long-term. So, maybe an about us page, a homepage, stuff like that. It'll be showing up here. Right now, we have no pages, of course, because we just started this website. You'll see the comments when people comment on your articles. If you have comments enabled, they'll show up here and you can approve them or you can reject them. Sometimes there are spam comments out there, so it's important to get a spam filter plugin. As we go down, you'll see appearance. This is where we can change the theme of it and what it actually looks like because if we go to mikeshatchshop.com right now, it has this theme by default, but it has nothing on there. It's a very blank website. So, let's go to mikeshatchshop.com and you'll see that we have it looks very, very bare. It's just another WordPress website. That's what it says. So, I'll talk about the rest later on, but we see plugins right here. It's the last thing that I really want to talk about. And this is going to be all the little tools that I said you can add on to this. So, let's go and start setting up the appearance. So, we're going to go and check out So, we have three themes right here. I'm going to go and add a new one. One that I recommend a lot of people should check out is Astra. There's an Astra Pro. So, Astra. So, we'll check out Astra right there. And this one is It's a good theme. It's one that a lot of people use. Uh they have a pro version and a free version. So, you can preview it, but uh the preview is not going to show you a whole lot. It's just going to show you the different fonts and stuff like that, but it's a very fast theme and it tends to work very well from my experience. We're going to install Astra. And then once we install Astra, make sure you click activate so that it'll make that the primary theme right there. So, you see Astra is now our theme for our website. So, if we go over to the site and we refresh it, it'll look slightly different. This is now the Astra theme right here, but it's still very, very bare. Nothing going on. And what we probably want to do is actually start setting up a pre-made website. So, if we go to Astra options down here under appearance, you'll see import starter templates. We go down to install importer plugin. It's going to install that and activate it, and then it should show up right over here. There we go, starter templates. And we have a couple options if we want to set it up with Elementor, Beaver Builder. Uh there's a couple different ways that you can make it. Uh these just integrate and allow you to drag and drop. So, uh so, Astra is going to look like this, and Elementor is going to allow you to add little images and text blocks and and make it feel a lot easier to make your website. So, let's go back and let's go and actually install Elementor first before we go to starter templates. All right. So, to get Elementor, go up to plugins and click on add new, and you'll be finding it right here. But first, let's just take a look at Elementor. So, if we go to centralmedia.com /elementor, and you'll see right here. It'll take you to Elementor, and you can see a lot more about it. There are different page builders. This is one that we recommend. It's one that we've used before. It works very well. And there is a free version and a paid version. So, if we go to pricing right here, you'll see that what you want to do is if you're upgrading to the paid version, just go over to pricing, choose the plan that you want. So, you can say I recommend the cheapest one, honestly, especially since it's only one website here. And you have over 90 widgets, you have 300 templates, you've got a lot of other things that you can do here that enable you if you choose it early on, it's going to enable you to make choices early on for the better aesthetic website. If you choose it later, you still get a lot of power from it, but you know, you're going to be building a lot more and spending more more time building your themes, building stuff like that. This does have WooCommerce builder as well, so a lot of stuff going on here. I recommend buying that, but you can always start for free, as well. And what happens is when you buy it, I'll show you later, you can actually go and they'll give you a code, you type the code in into the the Elementor thing over here. So, let's go and add it first. So, let's go to Elementor and just look up Elementor in your plugins. So, plugins, look for Elementor, here it is. Very popular, 5,000 positive reviews, over 5 million active installations. Let's install it right now. And as always, guys, when you install things on WordPress, you have to install it and then you have to activate it. And activating it is going to bring you to this page right here. You'll see that Elementor now shows up on the left and we have a lot of options with that, as well. Now, remember I showed you the things on the left, as we get plugins, like you'll see SiteGround Optimizer, Elementor, they start showing up on the left, as well. So, when you're looking for your plugins and your settings for your plugins, look over there on your, you know, WordPress page right here and you'll see that's where these show up. Now, in Elementor, I actually have an entire separate tutorial coming very, very soon, so check the description of this video for that. But in this video, I'll show you the basics of what you need to know with Elementor. Let's get on to actually going back to appearance. So, we go down to appearance and we're going to continue with the starter templates. That's what we were trying to do. We got Elementor, we have Astra. Let's go and click on So, appearance, starter templates and go to Elementor. And Elementor will give us lots of different options here. You'll see that Astra, there are Astra themes that we can have with Elementor, yes, or with some other ones. And then you can search for all of the ones, the ones that are business, other e-commerce, or blog. Uh so, let's go and check out all the e-commerce ones. Some of them you do have to have the agency version of Astra. Uh and so, it's something that I don't recommend filtering out only the free ones yet. I recommend looking at all of them, and if the one that's right for your business costs money, then I recommend paying for it. Um but of course, there are some free ones. If you're fine with getting a free one, then then go for it. But if you really think that something like this is just going to bring your website to the next level, uh you could get the agency bundle. And so, if we check out that right here, you'll see that the the prices are honestly not that bad. It's going to be $41 um per year, or you can get the lifetime version of Astra or Astra Pro. I'll have a link down in the description for the best price of that if you guys want to. But for the purposes of this video, I will be choosing a free one. So, you'll see the top this one, for example, is free. Um and so, let's go down and just see which one looks the best for free. I would say I think I like this one a lot. This one's selling plants. For some reason, all my tutorials about e-commerce stuff always ends up being like They always end up being a plant website. So, let's go down here and in import the complete website. And of course, if you already have a website, I don't recommend doing this. If you jumped forward and you have a website and you just want WooCommerce, do not do this cuz it will it could mess up a lot of other things on your website. So, let's import the complete website cuz we don't have anything yet. These are the settings we want. Let's click import. It'll take It says 2 to 10 minutes. It should be fairly quick. Um and then we'll revisit this. All right, that was very quick, and it says imported successfully. So, we can close that, or we can go and view our site. I already have it open over here. So, let's just go and reload this right now. And our website should suddenly look significantly better. So, we now have an entire full website. All we have to do is add our own content. You can see the image in the background at the top looks really nice. Everything We have some products already in the store. As you go down, you We have a couple things on sale already. So, they give you a really a full website. If you if you were selling plants, you really are pretty much ready to go. Obviously, we're not selling plants, but it just they have the nice infrastructure here. They did all the work for you and this is actually entirely free to get this one right here. So, we can go down. You'll see that we have on the bottom a nice footer right there. We have a go to shop buttons. We have some testimonials here. We just really have a lot going on with this website. Now, we can actually go and start to customize it. You can customize it at the top right here by clicking customize, but really we're going to be element editing with Elementor. So, if you go to customize right there, this brings you into your word uh your Astra settings right here. Um so, you can edit the theme a little bit. So, if you want to change like your breadcrumb, uh if you want to change your header for example, you can say primary header. You can change how it actually is going to look up there. So, if we want the logo in the middle, if we want it on the left side, some things like that you can be changing in the Astra theme. And that's Astra in particular. Uh so, header and footer are two examples of that. I believe you can also change the font over here as well. Um so, yeah, we can change WooCommerce settings right here. We can go down to uh just a lots of stuff like that. Now, adding Now, importing that website did a couple things. You'll see right here that we did add WooCommerce and a couple of things down there as well. Uh then we have WordPress forms right here. So, it added some plugins that if you want them, that's great. If you don't, you can just go down to plugins and you can easily remove or deactivate them. Um so, you'll see they're all right here. We have uh Elementor, which we added. Uh we have the Elementor header, footer, and blocks. Uh we have SiteGround Optimizer. We have starter templates right there. We did add that one as well. And then WooCommerce came with the abandoned cart recovery. Uh and so, if we don't want these or if you jumped forward in this video and you want these, then all you have to do is go up to right here. We you go to WooCommerce. And we type in WooCommerce right there. And you'll see that the plugin, since we already have it, sorry, we need to go to add new. I apologize. So, go to add new and type in WooCommerce. And this is how you would be getting uh WooCommerce right there. Since we already have it, it's already active, but you would be going and you can see 5 million active installations. Very, very popular. Um and so you can just add that right there. Now, we already have it, so you can go over here and you'll see WooCommerce is on the left side and we have so many options in WooCommerce as well. I'll get into actually customizing the website in a second, but let's first talk about the products we have and actually kind of optimizing what is going on with the store before we change how the store actually looks. So, let's go over to products on the left side and we have quite a few different options for how we want products to appear, what kind of products we want, uh and you just have a lot of options with what you want to do with these products. You can add some to favorites right there. I'll talk about that in a minute. We can make some discounts. We can have in stock. We can track the stocks, have SKUs, or or stock keeping units is what that stands for. So, let's go through and first let's add a new product. So, let's go up to the top and click add new. And for this first product, why don't we call it Santrel media t-shirt. So, I think I don't know. Let's just say we want a t-shirt right there. Uh and so we have a lot of options down here. We can add some uh description right here. So, some paragraph. We can have uh just going to copy some text. So, that's going to be our description right there. And as we go down, uh we have quite a few options down here. So, the product data first of all, what type of product is it? So, we have four types right here and then it could be virtual or downloadable or both as well. Uh so, virtual maybe be if you want to have like uh some kind of consulting call would be an option right there. Or maybe you would be like uh if you're doing something like a service for somebody. So, if it's like I will make your website for you, uh then they can buy that and then you'll make a website for them or make a logo for them or something like that. So, that's a typical kind of thing you'd see on like Fiverr. Downloadable would be like an ebook or maybe a song uh or anything that somebody would pay for and then be able to download. Then the product type so we have simple product right here, which is not going to have really anything too fancy with it. We have grouped product, we have external or affiliate link right there. Uh and that's going to be if I am if I want to you know promote someone else's product, so maybe Amazon Associates or Amazon Affiliates, um and I want to you know put that product on my website, they can click on buy it, it goes through the affiliate link, and then they're redirected to Amazon where they can actually buy it. And then we have a variable product, so that will be anytime you're buying like bulk type stuff like that. If you have a couple different variations of it, um so you could do that down there as well. But, simple product is probably the one that most people would be using or downloadable as well. Uh so, first of all, we choose the regular price, and we can schedule a sale if we want to have a sale. So, let's just say for this t-shirt, let's just say it's $25, um and we will actually have to change the price right there. I'm just going to type it in as if it were dollars. We'll change the price in just 1 second. The sale price, let's just say it's on sale right now for 22, or maybe it's not on sale right now. Let's schedule that and say that it's on sale starting uh Thursday, and it's going to be on sale until the end of June. How about that? You know, until the end of June. Uh and so, now we have our price and that right there. We can go down and check out the inventory. And so, if you have a lot of products, you probably want to have a stock keeping unit, so you can keep track of each thing as a number rather than as a very long description of the product. And we can go and enable stock management uh at the product level. So, if we have stock quantity right now, let's just say we have I don't know 200 of these shirts, uh and we don't want to allow back orders. So, that means once we run out, we don't want people to order them because maybe you'd have a really delayed shipping, maybe you have a long lead time. Or you could allow it, but notify them that they're back that it's back ordered and they'll get it eventually. Or you could just allow it, and if it's something that maybe is doesn't have a long lead time, you could just allow a back order and you'll just get the orders uh regardless. So, let's just say do not allow for now. And the low stock threshold, we want to be notified when we have uh maybe 25 of them. So, 200 when it gets down to 25 we'll be notified, we can order more, obviously always dependent on your lead time right there. And then down here we can say enable this to allow only okay. So, we could enable that right there if they're sold individually. So, only one per order for example, if you don't want to have someone have someone order like a bunch of them. This would be good if it was like downloadable, if it was like the ebook for example and you don't want people to buy like seven of your ebook. That doesn't really make sense and you would have people spending too much and being angry then accidentally. For this for t-shirts you can buy as many as you want. Now we go down to shipping and we have the weight right here. Again, it's in kilograms and centimeters. We'll convert that to the units that we'd be using here in the states. And so let's just say I mean we can adjust this later maybe it's like 2 lb or something. The length and dimensions it's going to we're going to change the units so let's just type it in right now. Let's just say it's like I don't know it ships in like a 12 by 2 by I don't know. 12 by How about 12 by 6 by 2 something like that. Shipping class we don't have that yet. So, go down to linked products. Linked products is cool because you can upsell things or you can have cross sells meaning that at the bottom below your product you can offer say hey you know maybe you'd also be interested in a sweatshirt or some socks or something and then the cross sells of course would be maybe when they get to check out they can actually go and you'll suggest other things there as well. And so because we only have one product I'll talk about that a little bit later on in this video. We go down to attributes and we can have some other attributes right here. So, if we want to create a custom attribute we can go and say how about colors. So, let's just say color and so we can say so we want to separate it by this little separating thing right here. So, we have black white blue gray And so maybe those are the different colors we have for this product. And then we can go down and see some advanced stuff. This is going to be like a purchase note, a menu order. Uh we can disable reviews right here if we don't want them. And of course you could get more options down here as well. If somebody wants to make a bid, uh you can go and add that. Uh you can have minimum or maximum quantities. If you want to have maybe some price brackets, you could do it that way. Uh you can also have additional uh variation images, stuff like that. Um but that's really going to be the basic of what we're doing. On the right side you start to get a quite a few more things here. So, the status of it it's currently just a draft. It's not a published uh product right now. No one can buy it. So, it's not It will be visible though once we release it. That's why this will turn to published. This will remain public. Uh and we're going to publish it immediately. You could create it and schedule the publish to go out on midnight on some release date if you're trying to do that. And then as we go down we have some different categories. So, we can have uh I mean there are cactus and and plants right now are the categories we have. Let's just add a new one and say clothing for now. So, clothing. Clothing and we want a parent category. We could put that underneath one of these if we want to have a subcategory. So, if clothing is a subcategory of plants, you could do that. Obviously that's not the case right here. But we're going to say uh clothing and then let's add a new So, let's add that new category right there. And that is going to be the category that we're in. Now, if we go down we can have some Astra settings right here. So, if we want to change the sidebar, if we want to disable the title, um sorry I didn't mean to scroll. Uh we have some options there as well. So, product tags, uh if you want to add tags to the product in case people are searching it we can say t-shirt, t-shirt, t space shirt, um sand trail shirt, and shirt. So, basically anything that's related to your product. You want to do that in case anybody has, you know, if you have search functionality on your website and somebody's searching for your product, it'll be easier to find once you have tags on there. And again, Astra settings like I talked about, you can disable different things on there. Uh I generally don't recommend doing that. I think the store already looks pretty good as it is. And then we can go down and set some product images. All right, so to add the product image, let's go and select a file right now and we are going to choose one not from a live concert. How about from this plant this one right here. So, if anybody wants an I love Santro LTE shirt, [laughter] if that So, I just made this up like real quick, just photoshopped it in. But, if that's the shirt you want to buy, so there's our image right here. Add some alt text. So, we're going to say white t-shirt. Uh so, we have the alt text on there. That's the title. We're just going to say white. Uh no, we're going to title it going to be I love Santro t-shirt. All right, so now if we want to see this, we can go over to the website. Make sure you refresh it after we published. And like I said, we'll retouch on all this, add our logo and stuff in a minute. But, let's go and actually check out the store and we should be able to find this product. So, if we go down, you'll see a bunch of plants. There it is, right there. So, we have our our shirt right there. Um and we can see we still do not have dollars. So, let's go and convert the units right now. But, uh before we do that, I just want to point out where everything is actually going to be located here. Depending on which theme you chose or which preloaded website you chose, this might look slightly different. But, for the most part, it should be looking pretty much like this where you have some uh tags right there. So, you can see everything that is a t-shirt. So, you click on this and it'll basically do a search right there. So, this is the product tag t-shirt. If you have more, it could be useful for people to find similar products. Uh likewise, clothing, you can check out everything in that category. And right now we only have this as well. So, if we go back, you'll see that our description is down here. This is obviously nowhere near a good description, but everything that we typed here is going to be showing up as our description and we can add some other stuff in here as well. Uh so, if we want to add some media or add a form, uh we can easily do that. So, we can have a contact form, uh show the name, uh and we could just or maybe not show the name. And let's just add a form in there as well. So, the form will show up down there. That's in case anybody wants to maybe if you want to customize it or something like that, you could pretty easily do that right here. Um and so you have a form down at the bottom or maybe that could be like request a quote. If you want to request a quote uh or maybe if you want them literally anything. Every business is different, but you could have want a form down there and you can customize that as well. I'm going to be getting rid of that form for this because for a t-shirt it doesn't make sense to have a form. So delete it, click update, and you'll see right here uh once we refresh the page, that will go away. And we also have additional information, which is going to be the colors right there. And you'll notice that the colors don't show up over here because we just chose a simple product, which means that as you can see right here when we go down, uh we chose simple product. If we wanted to have different colors, so a t-shirt really wouldn't be best as a simple product. A simple product would be best if you're just buying like a camera lens or a pocketknife or just something random that doesn't really have any variation. Um when we go and click on the image, you could also zoom in right here as you see. Uh so make sure you choose a high-quality image for this. Uh I mean the better quality image generally helps customers understand what they're buying. Uh if I see a low-quality image, I'm very unlikely to buy it. Now all right. Now as you can see right there, this is still not in dollars. Let's go change the currency. If you go back to the dashboard, you can click on WooCommerce and then go down to settings. And within settings, you will be wanting to go and change everything right here. So we want to change our country, our city. So all of this is mostly for tax purposes, but also I believe it is usually legally required, depending on where you are, to have an address so that if people have an issue, they can contact your business. Um so you want to put your business address here or you know, depending on where you are, maybe you can get like a PO box or something and use that right here. Then as we get on to general options, you'll see that currency right now is set to pound. Let's go to US dollar. Let's see USD. Um so dollar. We have the Australian dollar and then the US dollar should be somewhere in here. There's so many different dollars to choose from. There it is, United States dollar. Uh and so we currency position uh is going to be on the left, and then for thousand separator is a comma, decimal is a period, and we want two decimals. That sounds like the right currency to me. And then as we go up to the top, you'll see that we have a bunch of other things in here. So definitely let's go through the settings right now and make sure we have everything correct. So products, um we can go down here and you'll see that the units for measurement, being that I'm in the states, is going to be pounds and ounces. And then we're going to use inches. We could use yards if it's a big product. We're going to use inches for this for just going to be for shipping purposes. Uh we can by default enable or disable product reviews. I recommend doing that. Um and you can have verified owner label on customer reviews if you want. If somebody actually did uh you can say right here, you can only have reviews by people who actually made the purchase. Uh that's a cool feature to have if you're getting a lot of spam and you want to make sure that you're not getting bad reviews that are unnecessary or are not real. Uh you could do that right there. And let's go and save changes for this one. Going across the top, we have shipping. Uh I'm not going to get too much into shipping right now. But you can do some shipping zone calculators. There's some plugins for that, stuff like that. Uh we can go to payments, and you're going to be wanting to set up different payments. So maybe PayPal is one you want to set up. We're going to turn that on. Uh maybe we want to have something else. So let's go and save right now. You'll click on set up and manage that, and that is going to be how you'll be accepting payments. PayPal's usually one of the best ones where you can accept credit cards on here. Um or you can just use a PayPal account as well. When we go to accounts and privacy, you can allow guest checkout, or you can allow people to uh you maybe have to require them to make an account. Generally, if people make an account, it tends to be easier if they come back and want to make returns, or if they want to buy more stuff. Uh so maybe encourage people to make an account, but they definitely don't have to for every store. Sometimes it's nice just to allow people to uh order as a guest. I I know a lot of big companies do that as well. And there definitely is a good reason for that. Not everybody wants to make an account or end up on your email list. Go down here and you will have a privacy policy page. I recommend uh I mean, make it very accessible. It's required. You should have a privacy policy. You should have you know, check out what the requirements are for uh your website. Of course, every website should be having things like a terms of service or terms and conditions, a privacy policy, maybe an affiliate disclosure. Make sure you're following the rules on your website and we'll add those as pages. I'll show you that in a minute. We can go over going through these settings. We have emails right there. Uh we have integration and we have advanced. I'm not going to touch on that right now. So, we should have really the basics. We changed the units and if we go back, we should be able to refresh this. This should be in dollars and then our dimensions should be in inches right here. And you notice that it didn't actually convert or change the numbers. That's why I said before, type in the number even though it said pounds, type in the dollar amount and then when we convert the currency, it'll still show up the same number we typed in just with a different sign in front of it. So, going back here, that is our WooCommerce setting settings. Uh we can go back to the dashboard on WooCommerce and this gives you some analytics a little bit about what your sales were, uh how the performance was in the past week or month. Uh we can go down and check out the orders. So, when somebody places an order, you'll see it here uh and it should be you can easily track them. You can manage them. You can uh mark them as shipped uh and really manage everything right here. If we go down to coupons, you can make some discounts. This is a great way to integrate with Mailchimp, for example. One thing that I always like to do with an online store is find out, you know, collect people's emails with uh you know, with with Mailchimp and then have them type in their birthday as well. And then on their birthday, send them a big discount. Send them maybe a free ebook. Send them a you know, some kind of discount. And you can make a code right here, a coupon. Um and then that will allow you to have the coupon, send that to them on their birthday uh and then they can go and buy themselves a birthday present from your website. So, right here we can add a new coupon if we wanted to. And there are quite a few things here. The coupon code we could just say um um discount discount 20 or something like that. And the description is save 20% on anything in the store. And it could be a fixed discount right here. It could be a percentage discount. So, uh of course you have a couple different options right here. So, we're going to say percentage discount and we want it to be 20%. So, 20% and we maybe want to allow free shipping, right? Uh and so maybe you can get free shipping on your birthday as well. And then just have no expiration on this for this one right here. We could have restrictions and say maybe you have a minimum spending amount, maybe you have a maximum spending amount if you don't want to discount too much. Um and you can have, you know, a lot of different things right here. If you're looking for this, check it out. And then of course we have usage limits. So, you could have you you're limited to like one per customer or something like that. So, we could have a limit of one uh or we could just not have any limit at all. So, that is going to be how you'll have some different discounts Go and publish that. So, now we have a coupon that can work. So, if somebody goes to buy this, they add it to their cart. And then if we go up to their cart, they should be able to go and apply a coupon. So, we'll just say discount discount 20 and apply it. I believe it should be taking off 20%. So, right there. Took off 20%. We already have a coupon that works. And honestly, by the way, I I think that WooCommerce does a really good job of making this look like a very professional checkout. I think this looks really good in my opinion. I would definitely be buying from this store um if it looks like this. And we didn't even add the logo or the right colors yet either. So, continuing on, we have customers right there. So, if somebody calls you with an order that they had, you could check your orders or you can see your other customers here uh and learn a little bit about maybe where people are buying from, the regions, uh or for shipping purposes if you need to refund somebody or send them another product, you could have that right here. Of course we have reports. I showed you up in dashboard you have some other reports, but you can have some more detailed ones here. Uh you can really see the gross sales, the net sales, the number of orders, the items purchased. Um you can see a lot of stuff here and start to learn what works best and where you're making the most profit on your store to really start to optimize things. And again, you can see even more of that down in analytics here. Um so really, really in-depth as you can see all the way across the left there. Now, going back to products, I know we have so many different products here. If we decide that we just don't want anything down here, these these products, we just don't need them, you can easily select all of them uh and we can go to trash for each of them or we can go to bulk actions and we can move them to trash. So, let's apply that and we'll be deleting uh almost all of those. I think there was eight of them that I deleted right there. We can go to trash if we really don't want these um and we can go and select all of them in the trash and we can empty the trash. Let's you Let's just click empty trash right there. And so, that gets rid of all of those products that we had that maybe we just didn't want those. All right, so now let's go back to products and from here we might want to actually change some of the products. We got rid of a bunch and let's say this one right here, a t-shirt. Currently, if we go and check out our store, we'll go to store, we'll go down and find the product and you'll see that because it's a simple product, it is a little bit strange. So, we don't actually have any colors up here and if you go down to additional information, the other attributes of color show up right there and it really makes no sense. It doesn't give the customer any option to change the color or even choose one. So, it's just very weird right here. So, what we want to do is actually go and let's say we want to change that to another type of product. So, if we go to edit right here and remember I showed you before the drop-down menu down here, we have simple product as what it is currently. Now, if we want to have different variations, we want to go down to a variable product. And so, we'll go to click on variable product and we want to go through here and change a couple things first. So, if we go down into attributes, you want to click on the one that we already have. Color was the first attribute which as I showed you made no sense for the first uh for t-shirt right here. And we want to make sure that we're clicking right here used for variation. So, let's save that attribute and let's add a couple more attributes here as well. So, how about one could be size? That's a pretty common one for shirts. So, size, and we want to have this as small, sep- and then choose a little separator, and then medium, and then large. So, we can save those, and make sure you select used for variations there as well. And then let's add another one, and let's call this one fit. So, we give it a fit, and this could be uh slim fit or casual fit. And again, click on used for variations, say save attributes, and we have our attributes right now, but they won't actually show up properly unless we go down to variations right here. In the variations, we can click the drop down. We can either add a variation right now uh not based on the attributes there, or we can go right here and create variations from all attributes. Very easy to do. Click on go, uh and we will just go up there and say, "Yes, we do want to do that." It'll make many different uh variations cuz it is a full permutation. All right. So, now we have all these different variations right here. You can see we have white small slim fit, white small casual fit. And this is a little bit tedious, but you want to go through and make sure each individual one has a picture. So, you can go and upload an image. So, maybe this one is the right one for Obviously, you'd want to have 24 different images if you can, if you have 24 different variations. You want to make sure each one has a SKU. So, we want to say maybe 10,000 um 10,001 for this one. We can have a regular price and a sale price. Uh we could not allow So, we can change the back orders, the dimensions of this. Um and of course, we do also have the option of making it downloadable, virtual, and if we want to manage stock or not, so you can select that. And so, you want to go through and do this for each individual one. Like I said, it is a little tedious, um but you do want to make sure that you have this so that Yes, we're managing stock for this one. Uh the stock quantity we have maybe 50 of these, and we don't want to allow back orders. Maybe for the stock quantity we have uh 150. And so you want to go through each individual one of these. Make sure you have a price for it. Make sure you have a sale price if there it is on sale. Make sure you do pretty much everything. So I'm going to do that right now and we'll get back to this in just 1 second. There we go. All right, so now we finally have all the variations with all the prices and there are two different pages right there. So if we go over to mikeshop.com, so mike's shop. Or Mike's hat shop, sorry. Mike's hat shop.com. All right, so now we finally have all the variations, all the prices in there. And if we just go over to the website now, we can go and check out the shop page. So we'll go to store and we'll go down to the product. And this should now have a lot of different variations right there. So you see the price can be different right there anywhere from 1 to $65,000. Just I just typed in random numbers. And so you can see right here if we want a white shirt that is a small and we want it to be slim fit, it's going to be originally $25, now $20. And you can see casual fit is not on sale. Slim fit is on sale. Maybe the blue one is $100 off right there. And they tell you how many are in stock there. You can also go down here and see additional information. So you see the different variations right here. Of course we see the dimensions if it's shipping. We can have different dimensions for different products right here. So if you have maybe the extra large one is going to be slightly heavier and in a larger box. You can change that down here. And we can have reviews as well. So this is the variable product. I think for most people, this is probably the one you're looking for. So so far we talked about simple product and variable product. Let's now talk about an external or an affiliate product. This is actually something else that's very interesting. So if we go and add new and we want to add How about we add one that is going to be an Amazon Amazon headphones. And so let's just say we have amazon.com. Let's say we have some headphones. Let's just How about Yeah, sure. Headphones. It doesn't really matter. Let's go with these right here. Uh and so if we have some headphones and we have an affiliate link to these. Let's pretend this is an affiliate link. This is obviously just a regular Amazon link. But if we have an affiliate link and we want to set up an affiliate link on our website where we have this. We can go and have an affiliate or an external product. We can have the product URL right here. Uh the button text could say buy product and the regular price we don't have to actually add the price. We could if we want. We could say it's $49.99 right now uh is the sale price. So $49.99 and the regular price was $59.99. So if we want to add that, we'll do that. So $59.99. $49.99 is what it is right now. Uh and so we don't have any inventory obviously right here. We can link products and have upsells if we want. Uh attributes we don't really need to care about that. And this one's actually fairly straightforward, very easy uh to do. So if we just want to go and say about this item, we can have some of this some of this information right here on our site. Uh and of course you always want to be careful and watch out where you're doing this. Not every affiliate is going to be okay with this. Uh this is purely just an example right now. So look into this on your own before you before you do this. But this is how you would go about doing that. So if we want to go and add an image right now. So select a product image. Let's go and open the snipping tool. Uh and we are going to take a picture of this right here. Um Unless I think we might actually just be able to save the image. No. So let's use the snipping tool and just get a picture of that. And of course this could of course this could be anything. This could be a program if you're trying to be an affiliate for literally anything out there. You could do that. And of course this is just an example with a product. If you're trying to make an affiliate marketing website. All right. So then we'll go and set the product image right here. We're going to upload a file. Select a file. And we'll go and select headphones right there and they will be uploaded. So we'll go and set the product image. Of course maybe you want to add some all text or something like that. And so let's go and actually publish this product now as well. See, this one's significantly easier. Affiliate products can I mean, it can be very easy if you're just copying text and using stuff like that. Um so, now if we go back to the store, so we'll go here. I believe we clicked update up there. So, let's update. Make sure the store is up-to-date. And something else I'll actually get into in just 1 second is this right here. We're not ready to actually accept payments here because this is not a secure website and we do have some other issues with the website itself. But like I said, guys, I'm just showing you through WooCommerce first before we get into the other stuff with our site. So, as we go down, you'll see right here the Amazon headphones. If we check them out, they're currently uncategorized. So, remember I showed you before you can add categories on the right side. You can have in multiple categories as well. So, maybe if under clothing we want to have uh a new one of like uh headphones. We want this to be a subcategory of clothing. We can do that right there. So, to say clothing and let's get it out of uncategorized and let's just say it is also technically in clothing. So, let's go and update that now. So, the breadcrumb at the top, this little thing right here, should be showing us uh the correct thing. So, now it's clothing, headphones, Amazon headphones right here. That's what we're calling them. And you'll see that it tells you about the product. You can have a related products right there. That's a nice thing to have and you can choose which ones are related. So, in order to do that, what you want to do is go down to uh some advanced options down at linked product options right there. And maybe we can have uh t-shirt or a cactus. See if we have a plant. Uh so, we want an this plant right here could maybe be a suggested upsell right there. So, we're going to update that right there. Uh and as we go over, let's go and refresh this page. And the upsell should be right here. So, you might also like and it shows this here. Now, related products is slightly different. This is because it's in the same category. It's going to show that. So, you can have your upsells as hey, you might also like this. And this would be If I was selling this, I would probably have a similar item linked down there That would maybe be either maybe uh a charger for this or maybe a a cable like an an aux cable or maybe you want to have a case for it or an MP3 player or like a phone or something, you know? Like you could have different options that you'd want to show down here and they would be good upsell that are related to this. Now, of course, at the top you'll see that no one's actually buying this from us. It's not going to be adding to our cart here. Instead, if someone clicks buy product, it goes through the affiliate link to the product right here and they can actually buy it on Amazon. So, it's a cool way that you can have an affiliate thing set up. It's something that a lot of people do for affiliate marketing websites. So, nobody's actually buying it directly from you, but you will get a commission when somebody buys it through Amazon. It's a really interesting way of marketing and setting up your own website and if you're getting traffic, it could be very very powerful to do it this way. So, we have that product right there. Let's go back to products and actually add another one. Now that we have three different types of products here, I think it's time to get into the downloadable ones or the digital ones. So, if we go and add a new product here, um and we want to make this one How about let's just make this one a PDF a PDF. So, let's just make this one a YouTube growth PDF. And we can just have people uh if they want this one, they can download it. So, this will just be a PDF of how to grow on YouTube. It was just something that originally maybe about a year ago Nate and I were we made this and we were we were just giving it out before. So, let's just make this a downloadable product and we're going to make it a simple product here, not really any variations. And so, the downloadable file, we can add it right here. Um and so, let's add the file. We can make it as a URL if we want um or we can actually go and upload the file. So, let's click add the file. Choose the file uh and so, we're going to upload it and let's go to and we have a PDF now that can be downloaded when somebody pays for it. We have a title, caption, stuff like that. And the regular price we can say is normally uh I don't know, 200 Some people like to have sales here and I'm just going to bring it down to $0 if somebody wants it right there. And the name of this we're going to call it uh YouTube growth blueprint. And so that's our file right there. You can have multiple files if you want people if they want or if you're they're getting a deal, they're getting multiple files here. The download limit, let's just say you have a download limit of one uh and maybe it expires uh maybe in 6 days or 7 days. So they have 1 week to download it before it expires. We can go and see inventory. Obviously, we don't have inventory right here. That's not really uh it's not a problem obviously being a PDF. Uh there is no shipping so we don't need to worry about that. Linked products, we can have some upsells here. So maybe we want Amazon headphones. Actually, let's say Amazon headphones are a cross-sell. So Amazon headphones right there are a cross-sell. Uh so we're going to add that. And then attributes, obviously being at this is such a simple PDF right here, we're not going to have any of that but we could set the product image that is still important. So maybe for the YouTube growth uh I don't know, let's just say we could choose any picture, it really doesn't matter. Let's just say maybe this guy is uh big on YouTube. So we're going to say let's just go with that for now. It's obviously not the PDF image you would want but just you get the idea of what we're trying to do here. And for this one, we want to add another category of maybe self-help download. Okay. So now we have this product. We can publish this product here. And again, I think you know what's going to happen. If we go back to our website, we go to the store page and we will now have that product. So if we go down, we can see right here is our YouTube growth PDF. It was $250, now it is $0 so you can go and check this out. And by the way, while you're on the website, if you wanted to leave a review, you could also do that. Um but remember we said you have to be verified purchased um to actually leave the review. So, you have to buy something but until you and then leave a review. Uh you could change this if you want if you're trying to add your own reviews in the beginning. Uh so, let's just say we want to add this to cart. So, we have one download. Now, it'll pop up in our cart up there. We can go up and we can actually go and view the cart. And when you view the cart, you'll see this is the cross-sell right here what I was mentioning before where before you could say you might be interested in uh so, on the other page if we go back to I believe if it was on the other product, the headphones. So, we were upselling here. We were upselling the t-shirt so, you could say or the plant. We were upselling this. This is the upsell whereas you might also like on the product page. And then if we go to the cart, the cross-sell is going to be when you see it in the cart. So, you might also also be interested in and we chose the cross-sell for this one would be uh adding the headphones. And it would be something very easy for somebody to add in uh right there. And of course, if somebody adds this into your cart, so let's just go and this one of course, they are not adding to the cart because it's an affiliate link right there. Um but they could add to the cart and again, remember we also have the discount code right there. So, let's go and proceed to check out. Um and from checkout, you'll put in your stuff like that, all your information. And so, if you're giving away things for free, this is maybe a good way to build an email list. Uh if you're giving a free PDF that people are putting their email for that, they you know, check the little box that says, "Yep, sign me up for your email list." And then you can grow your email list. It's a lot of way people start their ClickFunnels for online courses and stuff like that. Of course, as I mentioned before, I mean, we never sell online courses. I was just giving this away on our website before because it seemed like a good thing that could accompany the videos we were making at the time. So, now we have that product right there. And we're going through these products. Actually, so far we have pretty much all the products that you would want of course except for maybe one or two other ones. So, uh if we want to have a virtual product that is not downloadable, so we have a virtual simple product right here, and this one could be a consulting call. Or how about this one is I make a logo. I'll make a logo for you. It's kind of a Fiverr type gig right there. And so, this one is very straightforward. All you have to do here is just add a description, uh, and you'll just say like, I will make a logo for you for in within a week. For $10. Let's just say we're fairly cheap on the logo making. And so, right there we can go and change the regular price. Maybe it's going to be 10 or normally it's 20 bucks. And we are on sale right now for $10, which is why we probably don't want to put that down there, just in case we ever change the price. And let's go and say publish this one. And you'll see that this is not categorized at all right here. So, by default it goes into the uncategorized, uh, category really. And going back to store, again, you see what's going to happen here. We're going to have a new product. This one does not have an image. I didn't add an image, but you'll see we can have right here a digital product. So, somebody you know, I make a logo for you. Obviously, there is no shipping. There's no extra details down there because your description is just going to show uh, what is actually going on. So, I will make a logo for you. That's the description right there. And so, that would be an option right there. And then the last type of product that we really have here is the grouped product. And this would be if you have multiple products that are similar or somehow grouped. Um, and so, this is something that I don't have a lot of experience with. I don't typically sell things like this. Uh, but a lot of maybe bulk things if you have minimum order quantities, or if you have things that, uh, maybe have some other variations that you want to buy in bulk and a bunch of each of them individually, then maybe that would be something you'd do with group product right there. And it's really fairly easy to do. Same idea. I'm not going to get into that. Let's move on with this video. And some other things that I think we need to do now are actually going back. All right. So, looking at our website so far, what we did was we added the theme right here. We added Elementor. We added all the products we want. We added a coupon. We can look at the orders that people are placing. We know where to do all of that stuff for WooCommerce management. And now we know a lot more about products as well, the analytics. Marketing's the next thing that you can really get into and you can integrate it with with Mailchimp as I said before. I have an entire tutorial. I'll show you guys like right up here. I'll link out to the Mailchimp video and it can show you how to do that if you want to have an email campaign. But now let's focus a little bit more on the website itself. So, that's the basics when you're looking at WooCommerce itself. But now the website is actually missing quite a few things. And you can see right here that first of all, the logo's incorrect on the top. We have all these other pages that we might not want. Maybe you want to add other pages. We have the you know, things in here. We want to change the content. Maybe we want to change or get rid of the testimonials down here. We want to change the footer. Maybe go to shop. Maybe we want to change that link as well. And on top of that, we also notice at the top it says not secure. So, we don't have an SSL certificate on this either. Which means that most people are probably not going to buy from us if it's not a secure website. So, we have quite a few other things to do. So, going back to the dashboard here and going down the left side, we pretty much have WooCommerce products, analytics, and marketing set up. Like I said, marketing you can integrate with Mailchimp for example. You go down to settings. Let's go and adjust things like the permalinks for example. So, if we go down to permalinks, this is going to be actually we'll walk through all these settings. But starting with permalinks, that's something that I want to make sure everybody's changing this and making it correct. So, plain does not look good. So, if you have a post that is about like how to take care of a cactus, you don't want it to be you know, p equals 123. Like that just not that's not a good look. What you want to do instead, what I would recommend, uh at least for for most websites, is post name is probably the best way to do it. So, you somebody can just look at this domain, right, or this URL here and say, "All right, this is the domain, mikeshathshop.com, and then it's obviously about this. This is going to be relevant. It's going to help you with SEO. It's going to help you with uh recognition. You're going to have fewer 404 errors when people just know how to type it in." And overall, you're going to do better for your website by doing that. And so, making sure that you have a post name uh as your permalink setting, that's definitely a good start right there. Uh and then down here, you can change some other things if you want to change like your products. If you want to be {slash} product {slash} something else. Um or it could be {slash} buy or {slash} you know, really whatever you want for when you're shopping stuff. Uh you could do {slash} shop {slash} whatever the product is. That's probably a good way of doing that. Um so, we're just going to save changes for that. And let's go through the rest of the settings now and make sure everything is as it should be. So, the site title, first of all, is definitely not correct. So, we want to change that to Mike's Mike's Hat Shop. Uh and then we want the tagline to be the best hats on the internet. The best hats in on the internet. Let's just do that. And then the URL is this. Make sure that you have the S right there because we have an SSL certificate, so we want to make sure that it is secure, HTTPS. Uh and so, that is going to be that right there. Uh the email is going to be how people can So, it's admin purposes right there. Uh I'm just going to leave that email as it is. We can have anyone can register for membership on our website if they want to. Uh default new role is going to be as a subscriber. And then we can go down and change the date format. Depending on where you are, you might want the date format to be like this or like this. Uh I'm going to leave it like this so everybody knows what the format is right there. Pretty straightforward. And we are going to have about capital PM right there. Uh the week starts on Monday. And we are going to save these changes. So, it's important to go through this. This is definitely a big one so you have a name for your website and because we changed something important right there, uh they do want us to actually sign in again. All right. So, now we changed the general settings. Now, we can go down to writing. Uh and this is also pretty important. So, by default, we probably don't want things to be uncategorized. We can put them in a different category if we wanted to uh for new posts. Now, we don't have new categories for posts yet. Uh we did make categories for products, but if we want to make categories for posts, that would have to be up here in categories. And so, maybe we just want to have uh a new category called uh hat hat stuff. Right? Something like that. And then the URL could be hat-stuff. That'd be the URL slug at the end. No parent category. We're just going to save that as a new category. You probably want to add a description for SEO purposes, but otherwise, maybe we want that to be our default. So, if we go back to writing settings right here, uh we can make our new default hat stuff. So, when we write a post, it doesn't go uncategorized. That doesn't look very professional. So, setting hat stuff maybe is a better default for most of your posts, especially if they're all going to be pretty much in the same category. You could even just remove the breadcrumb at that point, but I would leave it. Uh at least have a default category like this. Now, the the default post format, you can change how you want that. Just going to leave it a standard for now. Uh and I'm not going to change anything else here. When you go down to reading, uh you can see exactly what your home page displays. If you want it to be a static page or if you want it just be your latest posts, you can have different ways to have a home page. Being that this is a store, a static page is probably what you want to do. You can change which of the pages you actually want to be your home page right there and how many posts per page you want to show um or which post page you want to show, not how many. Sorry. And the the how many is going to be down here. So, uh blog page shows 10 posts at a time. See, stuff like this is all important to change. It's like subtle things that will really make your website look a lot better and not too cluttered, but also have enough information that it it you don't have to scroll forever to find things. Um so, other than that, when you get down here, there's really not a whole lot of other things that I want to talk about in this video um as far as the settings go down here, you know, like thumbnail size is important, but things that you should just go through when you're making your website to make sure that everything looks as it should be. Now, you can select a privacy policy page. We don't have one right now, so we probably do want to make a privacy policy page, which reminds me that the next thing we really want to get into is going to be in the pages. So, let's go back up to pages and start really looking at what our website is going to be. So, let's close out of some of these tabs on the top. We don't need SiteGround open anymore. Let's refresh this. So, now you see right there, it should have a secure so it's not fully secure. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time until we are a secure website depending on what your SSL certificate is going to be. Might take a day, might take a little bit longer, but we will be able to eventually have that. So, the next thing to do with this website is to manage the pages. You'll see right here that if you go to pages, we have quite a few different pages already and some of them we need, some of them we don't need. We might want to get rid of some. And on top of that, they're not all showing up on the top in our menu and also we have these two which are not pages, they're just categories showing up on our menu and I'll talk about that just in a minute. But, looking at these pages, you'll notice that some of them are actually related to WooCommerce. So, when we installed this pre-made website, it came with a bunch of pages. A lot of them are WooCommerce pages and if you just skip to this part of this video and you didn't install a pre-made website and you just want to add WooCommerce and you want these pages, what you'd want to do is actually go to WooCommerce, go down to status and from status, you can go over to tools and you can install the right pages. So, if we go down here, we can create default WooCommerce pages, create the pages. But, we're not going to do that cuz we already have the pages on here right now. That's just if you skipped to this step and you do not already have the pages, that's where you would get them. So, let's go back to pages and say that if we want to let's say we don't want a page like uh maybe we don't want the about us page. Maybe we don't need about us. Maybe it's just something that I don't really care about. So, let's go and click on that and we can move it to trash. So, So, if you click on trash, it'll just get rid of that page. We no longer have that. And now we have these pages right here. Now, if you want to edit a page, so for example, maybe the contact us page, we can do a quick edit right here. And that's how you'll change the URL slug. So, right now it's mikeshatchshop.com/contact-us. Uh and you can change the the date um when it was published. You can change if it has a parent content uh or anything like that. So, you can do a uh you know, a couple things in the quick edit right here. But if you really want to edit it, let's say cancel right here, and we'll go to edit with Elementor. Or you can just go to edit. So, we'll click on edit. This is the current editor. Uh and you'll see that uh the WordPress editor is not necessarily the best. Uh it shows you some things on the side. You can change the featured image. You can change uh just the basic stuff like the permalink. If you want to change contact-us to something different, you can change that. But you'll see that right here it says edit with Elementor because this page was made with Elementor, which is the page builder we're using. And so, we can go and actually edit with Elementor. It'll open it up and it'll look something like this for you. And I like Elementor a lot because it makes it very easy to edit your pages. You don't need to do any kind of HTML coding or anything. Everything's drag and drop. It's very easy to do. And you have these kind of little sections right here. So, if I want this section to be for some reason above the other one, you just click and drag it and it just goes right up where you wanted it to. So, it's very easy to do. Uh and on top of that we have some Astra options right here, some starter templates. We can also add Invado elements. That's something that I recommend and I'll show you that in just one second as well. But looking at this, uh you'll see that maybe the contact us page looks just fine. But if we want to add, how about an image up top here? We can go back to the you know, click on the little grid right here. We'll go and add, how about an image up top? So, you click and drag the image to right above send us a message. And we can add an image right there. You can make the image whatever you want. How about this? I don't know. Yeah, this girl right here can be the image. So, insert the media. Maybe if we want to go and uh you know, add a button above that, you can say the button right there can be centered. We can say contact us. And the button could be a link to you know, you click the settings right here. You can link to really whatever you want. So you can make it open in a window and we can have dynamic tags. Let's not do that. Let's just say it'll just link to I don't know our home page. Normally you would you would have it linked to like an email or something like that. So and so I'm I'm going to go through more of this in another video on using Elementor. But for the purposes of this video, you get the idea that you can build any page with Elementor very easily just by going to the four dots right there or the what is that nine? And you can just click and drag really anything you want onto the page here and really build out your page as much as you need to. So I don't want to get too off topic with this. Let's go back. So click on the three bars in the top. Go to exit to dashboard and so it should be updated and we're ready to go back to our pages here. Let's say we want to add another page. So we'll click on WordPress right there and let's go and add a new page. And maybe this page is going to be a blog. Maybe we want to make a blog or maybe we want to make a page that is just something that everybody always asks. So maybe just like a fitting chart. So t-shirt or hat since it's a hat shop hat fit chart. And this is something that maybe everybody who goes to our website wants to see this. So we could just start adding content here. And so if we add whatever content we want, we can edit the whole thing here. But like I said, this is a lot harder to build your website right here. It's so much easier if you go to edit with Elementor. It'll open it up in Elementor and you can really optimize your website. You can add other templates and themes on here and make things look a lot better you know, working in Elementor. But you'll see right here we have a bunch of stuff on the side. So that is definitely interesting that we have a page with all this stuff on the side. We can change the way this page actually looks if we just made a new pre you know, preloaded page here if we had if we use one of the Astra templates right there. But let's just say the hat fit chart is something that we're okay with making just like this. Now we can edit things, we can get rid of that. Uh we can add a section, maybe have an inner section within that. And let's just say we want maybe the hat fit chart's going to be like the hat size is going to be like a picture of someone's head or I don't know a watermelon or something. And then over here we can add some more text. So let's add some text editor and say small hats hats fit best for heads with circumference. Right. So we can make stuff like this and you get the idea. Like I said, I'm not going to flush this out too much but you can start building out your page a lot more like this or you can go down and check out some starter templates for the page. And if you say, you know what hey I I I want a different page. So if we go right there to pages, we can find a lot of different options here for how we want this page to look. You probably want it to be similar enough to your theme. So I wouldn't necessarily choose just anything but you could also just choose individual blocks. If you say, you know what I really want maybe I don't know. Let's just go through these and see which which of these blocks look good. Maybe maybe this one right here actually looks pretty good. I I kind of like this one. So let's go and check it out and let's import the block and we can use it in this page right here. So it's really cool that you can use the Astra templates like I was talking about. You can add them in there. It's a little bit squished because of the the the shape of the page right now because we have all these sidebars and stuff like that. So instead we could get rid of the sidebars or we could go and change this down here. So content with could just be full width if we wanted it to. And so I'm not going to get too much into all of this right now. Like I said, I will be making an entire tutorial in the future and I'll show you how to get rid of the sidebars, how to do stuff like that and really master everything with Elementor. So now let's go back and exit to dashboard. We have the idea of how we'd want to make some different pages here. So, we have a new page being our hat fit chart. So, if people are trying to buy hats, they want to write fit. And so, you'll see that it pops up right here, the hat fit chart, but it doesn't pop up here on our menu. So, we still want it to be up on our menu, and it's not quite there yet. So, what we want to do is actually go down to down here. You'll see in appearance you we have menus. And menus is going to be exactly what we're seeing on the top. This is the the header menu. We also have footer menus on the bottom. So, see if they have one right here. I believe this is the footer menu right now, uh depending on how they set up this page. So, let's go and they say about us is no longer valid. So, let's go and click the drop down and we'll remove this one because that page I deleted it. So, it's no longer going to be in the menu. And so, in this menu, we have our main menu is going to be the top one like I said. Let's add the hat fit chart. So, we'll go and add that to the menu. It'll show up over here. And let's say, you know, that's something people want a lot. Click and drag it to right around there. And you see it just went over a little bit. That's something that we don't necessarily want on this right here, but some things maybe are going to be a subset of something else. So, if we want the categories right here, we want these to be a subset of store. So, we're going to move them over, which means that when somebody hovers over store, we don't want that. So, when somebody hovers over store, it is a sub item that shows up and pops down. So, we can also have posts in our menu. We can have custom links in our menu. So, if you want to link out to like affiliate link or something like that, you could do that right there or to an email or really anything you want. The categories, you could have them linked right here as well. Or the WooCommerce endpoints, you could have as well. So, you could have like your lost your password, downloads, orders. Let's say orders we want orders to be added to that. So, let's add that to the menu. And so, that's going to pop up down there. Um and so, if we click save, you'll see that this is our menu now. And if we go over to refresh the page from the top, you'll see that it's no longer going look like this. So, if we refresh it, you'll see that store should have a drop-down menu then. So, right there we do have the drop-down menu, and we have plants and cactus. Those are the two groups or categories of products that I added in there. And of course, you could always change these categories as well. So, right now it is the plants category, that's what it was before. So, we can go and open that up right now. This is the plants category. So, if someone is buying plants, and because these products still exist there, we can do that. But likewise, we can actually go back to our store, and we have other categories. So, we have one for t-shirts, we have one for like Amazon headphones. So, if we go to this category right here, we could just as well have the clothing category up on the top menu. And in fact, we probably should add that up there. And to add the clothing category to our menu on the top, I'm just going to copy the URL right there, and go back, and we're going to add this as a custom link right there. So, link text is going to be clothing. And we're going to add it to the menu. And so, this will pop right there, and we're going to go over to make this a menu item right there. So, we're going to save the menu, and it should be updating on the website. So, we're going to go back to the website, reload it, and on the drop-down, we should have clothing, which we are currently on right now. So, it'll redirect us around. So, if we go to home, we can go to clothing, and it's going to bring us over to the clothing page. So, just like that, we have any of the store menus or you know, subcategories can pop up on the menu right there, just by copying and pasting the link into right here. Now, this is going to be showing up as a custom link. You could also have it show up as a category, as the other two did. Just another way of doing that. The next thing I want to talk about is actually the sidebar. So, if we go down to appearance, and go down to Astra options, you can click on sidebar options, and it'll bring you into a new window right here, a new tab. And we have some options for different pages on our website. It's going to take a second to load here. But, here we go. Okay, this is what I was looking for. So, now we can have a right side sidebar, a left sidebar, or no sidebar. So, I'm going to say left sidebar, and we want it maybe on pages, we want no sidebar. Maybe on blog post, we don't want a sidebar, but maybe on WooCommerce, we want a left sidebar, and maybe on a single product, we want a right sidebar. And we want the sidebar width to be 20%. We don't want it to be very large. We're just going to make it type that in, 20%. And we are going to publish that now. So, that's the difference that we have right there. Now, to actually add the sidebars, we want to go back to over here, appearance. Now, we can go down to widgets, and it'll give you this weird intimidating interface interface of the sidebars. So, WooCommerce sidebar, product sidebar, we have no sidebars. Main sidebar had a lot of sidebars. I deleted all of those, and we can add whatever we want to the sidebar now. So, for product sidebar, let's just say we maybe we want the product categories in case somebody's interested in some other categories, and maybe we want to have the option for them to see recent product reviews, maybe. That's another option that we might want to add in there. So, review reviews, let's just say like I don't know, three recent reviews. You can change that number to whatever you want. And likewise, with the WooCommerce sidebar, maybe we want to add something else like filter by price, for example. So, if we do that, they should be saved, and now let's go over and check it out on our store. So, from our website, if we go into an individual category, so plants, for example, the sidebar should be on the left. The widgets are currently not there right now. So, we'll go and check out an individual plant or product like this one here, and you'll see right there, the product categories, as we put on the right side, are showing up. So, if somebody's looking at this, and they want to check out some other categories, they can click on any one of those. And there are so many different ones you can add. You can add a cart option right there. So, anything that's in their cart, maybe you can put that on the sidebar. So, let's delete what was there. Let's have a cart on the left side. Maybe we want uh product categories on the left side of this as well. So, product categories on the WooCommerce sidebar, maybe we want to have You know, you have lots of different options here. Maybe just text. Maybe you just want to have something that's text right there. Um and you can have the text could really be anything. You could have a form pop-up. You could have a WordPress form as we have right here. Many different forms you could have. And so, just lots and lots of different options to have there. And you'll see that they will be showing up here. So, we chose the right sidebar for products. And in the categories tab, we have the left sidebar. Um as you should be seeing here in just 1 second as it loads. So, if we go back to store, we go to How about plants? And we should see the sidebar on the left side. So, product categories and what's in your cart. That doesn't look good being the vertical buttons right there. So, you'd want to adjust this, make it a little wider than 20%. Um and so, you can see right here it easily click and drag it and see what it starts to look at look like. So, still doesn't look good. I would rearrange this one. You can edit that part of the sidebar if you want and get rid of these little buttons. Um or just remove this all together. The cart on the left side maybe just it doesn't fit there. And then likewise, when you go into an individual product, we should be seeing things on the right side now. And of course, you could customize this as you need to. Um you know, however you want right there. So, you could show it as a hierarchy or not. If you want to show them all in line, I think that looks a little cleaner. I think I might be doing that for this store. So, we'll click publish and that is how you're getting widgets on the side. Again, you have so many different options here and I can make an entire separate tutorial just on the widgets themselves uh because there are so many different options with how you can set that up. All right. One other thing that might seem a little bit unrelated, but you'll notice when you look at the store right now or the website, we have on our homepage, we have our logo now, which is just a name. Uh there is no logo image next to that. And on top of that, we also have the not secure up there despite already having an SSL certificate. So, you can go to an SSL checker if you just Google that and it'll check it and it does confirm that we do have an SSL certificate, which is valid. And yet, it's not fully secure because there's probably some image somewhere on here that is http http and not https. And so, something that I would do for that would maybe be get a plugin like Better Search Replace. So, I went to plugins plugins and looked for Better Search Replace. And so, if we go to add new Better Search Replace and you just search for that. It's it's a relatively simple plugin. It's just going to find something and replace it. So, you see right here a million active installations. I already installed it, activated it. Now, if we go down to tools, you'll see Better Search Better Search Replace right there. And so, we can just go and type in our website. So, anytime it finds just http we want it to replace with https. And so, we might do a dry run first just to see how many replacements we have. So, actually sorry. Click on this, control A, or highlight everything there. So, we're searching every all tables. So, now let's do a dry run and see what it would have to replace to get the security. Now, it is important to have security there because if somebody's on your website and they see not secure right there, they'll hover over that, maybe they'll click on it, and their browser's telling them attackers might be able to see things and change stuff. And it's definitely very intimidating and and and people are going to be, you know, significantly turned away from your website and also far less likely to enter their credit card information or any, you know, personal information on your website. And so, it's really important that you, you know, follow the best practice of making your website secure, your entire website secure. And so, see if this is done. It looks like it found 11 cells that need to be updated. Okay, so let's find let's not do it as a dry run and actually just go and run and search and replace right now. And while we're at it, eventually or one once this is done, I'll go back and we will want to change the logo at the top. And maybe we want to add a little bit about another page. Let's check out like the orders page, we can edit that as well as the home page right here. I want to show you guys that before we the of video. All right. So, now all the changes are made, we'll open a new browser without a cache, and you'll see right here that it is now secure. We have the little lock icon right there. So, all we had to do, like I said, replacing HTTP with HTTPS, and you should be good to go. Now, going back to our site, the other things that we wanted to do, let's refresh this really quick. Um and this is not secure just because we have a cache. It's it's loading an older website there. And we want to change maybe this right here. So, we can go to customize on the top, and this will allow us to edit the page, and you'll see at the top, I think I pointed this out earlier on in the video. I mean, this video is a little bit long by now, but you do have a little pen icon up there. We can go and click on that, and you can easily change You can either remove that. So, I think for this website, I'll probably just remove that. Um or you could I also remove that as well. Um or you could just add a different logo in there if you wanted to. So, let's go and publish that, uh so it'll not have that logo up there. Instead, we'll just have the text logo. Um I think that really looks better for this situation. All right, and then the other thing I wanted to do is actually edit with Elementor on this homepage right here. And so, I showed you before how you could edit any of the other pages, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't necessarily have to be a post or a page that you're editing. Uh you could very easily edit the homepage, for example. Um and so, just going down, you can change this background image right here. I believe this is a background. Um so, yeah, I got it. This is a background image on the entire section. So, right there we have a background image. We could easily change that uh to any image we want. If we wanted this one as the background on the top, so our website's a little bit lighter right there. We can change this. Um and remember, this is a a hat store, but I mean, obviously, uh this is the plant default. I don't have enough pictures of hats and stuff, so that's why we're just leaving a lot of this. But here, uh we can change the buttons, and and we can easily, you know, change their locations. We can make them centered buttons. Uh we can make them larger or smaller. So, let's make this one a little bit larger. Make it extra large, actually. And maybe we want this to link to some page that we have. So, the little hash symbol right there, the little uh pound sign, is actually going to allow you to link to an anchor somewhere on the page and not to get too into details here, but if we go and we have maybe another article and then halfway down the article we start talking about plant varieties, we could easily say so http // mikeshathshop .com / and then whatever the article would be so article title So, and then we'd have slash and then a little hash symbol and then wherever your anchor is. Anchor one. And so, I can I'll talk about that in another video. If you guys want to see a full Elementor tutorial, you can easily link these two other things on your website. And so, just looking through this, I think otherwise it looks pretty good. I think that we have maybe the testimonials if we want to change them or move them around. You can easily click on them and drag them wherever you want so you can have this one is just a mid section right here with spacers above and below it. Over here we have you know, so this is this is two sections right here. We have see the little the little dotted line box. And so, that's how they set this one up right there. And if we want to you know, move them all over here we could have three in a row if you wanted that or you could have you know, really any way you want and there's a gap there because I believe they probably have a spacer. So, if you wanted a spacer in there you could go and find spacer add a spacer right there and then you can adjust the size of that spacer. Maybe they have it maybe it's 30. Maybe that would look better. So, something like that and then you can easily you know, adjust the the rounds on this and and they made all of this very easily with Elementor. Like I said, I can show you in the future, but you could easily just change the names. You can add duplicates. So, if we want more of these let's duplicate that one and let's bring the duplicate over to here. And then we can add some other testimonials from maybe somebody else. And so, let's actually bring that below. See if we can get that. Sometimes it's a little weird when you click and drag. There we go. We want it right there. So, you can add you know, different names make different testimonials from different people. Make sure they're real quotes. I mean, you could make up fake people, but it's generally better if you have real real stuff going on there. Um and then one other thing, I showed you how you can get the little Astra icons right there or Astra, you know, different little boxes and page templates. Something else that I also recommend is by So, if you go to Santrel Media Santrel Media .com /envato Uh this will give you This will bring you to Envato right here, and you will be able to get some other cool things. So, I like using Envato. It's a great way to have more cool little things on the bottom. So, if we go down to plugins, uh so if we go down to plugins and we want to add a new one add new and this one is going to be Envato. And likewise, there is a paid version for Envato as well. And it does give you some really cool templates and different ways that you can have some email uh email fields and and just different ways to integrate with uh Mailchimp and Facebook and pretty much everything that you want because Elementor, like while it does have quite a few elements on the side that you can add in, as I said, some of them on the bottom, if you want to have like a Facebook one uh or a little Facebook, you know, uh likes countdowns, things like that, you will You see a little icon right there. You do actually have to pay for those or you have to pay once to upgrade to Elementor uh premium or pro, and then you'll [snorts] have those. But, you also using uh Envato, I think, gives you quite a few extra things, extra little blocks and widgets you can put in here. Now, besides editing pages, there's one last thing I want to talk about in this video, and that is actually editing posts and creating posts. So, if you want to have a blog, then one of the big things, I think really one of the main reasons to use WooCommerce is to have a large blog library to attract more traffic to your online store and to just gain exposure through organic traffic. So, having a blog is a really big advantage of using WooCommerce and WordPress being so flexible, and you can have, you know, a very very large library, hundreds of posts if you want to with really no problems at all. So, you can have excellent navigation options and it's obviously just a very flexible system right here. But, if we want to add a new post, we can just go to posts on the top, say add new, and you're going to see a similar layout to what we saw when we're making a new page. So, we can just create a title right here and there are some big differences. I want to show you guys how you can actually make this you know, based on a template so it looks really good from the start. So, we can go down here. Let's create uh let's let's just name it best hats of 2020. Something like that because this is a hat shop. On the right side, you'll see that we can add categories to it. Uh so, if this wants to be maybe hat stuff for example, we can add tags to it. We can add an excerpt and this is going to be what shows up below that uh when you're you know, on Google. The metadata or the meta description would essentially be that right there. Um and so, we can add whatever we want right here. Um so, let's just say I don't know, just random text. Copy that and then we're going to So, if we say publish, we can publish that right now and it'll be published as best hats of 2020. And so, that's going to be the link right there. But, what I would recommend doing is I mean, you don't have to publish that. You could have just saved it as a draft. So, what I would recommend doing is going down to templates right here. All right. So, once you get down to templates, assuming you have Elementor Pro, you can actually go and add a new template right here. So, if you click on add new, click the drop down to a single and then single is going to be a post. And then our single post is going to be you can pretty much name your template or whatever you want and we're going to create this template and now you have tons of different options for what this template is actually going to look like on your article. So, if you want your article to look like maybe this one right here, you can click on the little plus right there and it'll show you just an idea of what it'll look like. So, your post can automatically just be formatted. Every single post you make on your blog can always look just like this if you want to. You just have your featured image image at the top, the author, through author name, the title and then the date right there. And then at the bottom they have, you know, comments and the social structured like that. So, that's one option. Of course, you have tons and tons of different options. Uh some of them are pro options right here. Uh some of them could be free options as well. Looks like all of these are pro options um because it is for a single. Uh I believe the if you don't have a pro version then you can't make the single post ones, I believe. I could be incorrect, but uh I I that's this is one of the reasons I recommend getting Elementor Pro so you can easily go for like this one for example. I think also looks really good. Really clean if you're trying to make a blog that uh is just very readable and very user-friendly. Um this is really one way that I recommend doing that. So, you could easily just insert this and if we choose this one, we could say insert. Uh and we're going to say yes, we want the document settings there. It's going to open up Elementor to edit that. And then we can easily go down to the bottom left once we customized exactly what we want. Um and so, it's inserting right now. Um but then we'll go down to the bottom left and instead of publish, we would just go up and apply it. Display conditions, we would change which articles or which posts it's actually displayed on. So, you could say all or you could say an individual one. That's what I would recommend doing um and one of the big reasons that I recommend using Elementor Pro. All right, guys. So, that's pretty much everything you need to know about starting your first online store. As you can see here, with almost no effort at all, you have a beautiful online store that's ready to go. Uh if you're selling plants, obviously this one is ready to go without any images, but you'll just have to take some of your own photos and do a little bit of your own artwork to make your website, but otherwise all of the hard legwork behind it has been done, which is one of the great reasons that I recommend WordPress and WooCommerce to so many people starting their online stores. All right, guys. So, that's everything I have to show you in this video. Hopefully, you found it helpful. If you did, please consider going down and clicking the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you enjoyed this video, please click the like button and leave a comment if you have any questions, any areas for improvement, or anything you liked about this video. Good luck with your online store everybody. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.