The Ultimate WooCommerce Tutorial For Beginners 2026: How To Build an Online Store with WordPress!

Key Takeaways

If you're looking for the most comprehensive Woo Commerce tutorial, this video is for you. In today's video, I'll be showing you how to build an online store using Woo Commerce in WordPress. If you clicked on this video, you probably already know that Woo Commerce is super powerful. It's a great way to build an online store and start selling products. Tons and tons of really big brands use it. Yeah, in this video, I'll take you guys step by step through the whole process. I'll show you how to design your store, the best themes to use, adding products, setting up shipping and payments. Yeah, I'm all about saving money, so I'll show you how to do this in the most affordable way. Hopefully, you guys can follow along. That's going to be the best way to use this video. And yeah, let's get started. So, if you click on the link down below, it's going to take you to this exact page, and you'll get the best deal on Blue Host web hosting using this link. It's only available for my audience, so I really encourage you guys to take advantage of it. So, what we're going to do is click on get started now, and it's going to take you to the three different plans. So, there's the personal, the starter, and the business plan. So, for most of you watching this video, I'm going to recommend the starter plan. The reason for this is because you can actually build 10 different websites using one single plan. So, yes, you could do, let's say, 10 different stores. You also get a lot more storage and it basically gives you more power to basically run your business. Now, if you want to build up to 50 different websites, you can, of course, choose the business plan. You get 50 GB of storage as well as a bunch of other things. But for most of you guys, this plan is going to be enough. Now, if you only want to build one single website, maybe the personal plan's okay, too. That one is the cheapest, but you can only build one site and you only get 1 GBTE of storage. Of course, you can always upgrade at a later time, so it's really up to you guys. Now, I will say every single plan comes with a free domain for a year, which is absolutely crucial to have, and you can also use Blue Host AI website creation tools. So, choose accordingly, but for this video, I'll go with the starter plan. This is going to be more than powerful enough to build a WooCommerce online store. Now, it's going to have you select a free domain name, so you guys can do that now or you can choose a different one later. I'm just going to do something right now called Charlie sells clothes. Let's see if that's available. So, it seems like it is available. So, now what I'm going to do is enter in my email as well as a password right here to create an account. You can also sign in using Google if you want. For these, I'm going to uncheck these add-ons. For now, I'm just going to have starter hosting selected since that's what we want. And over here, you can see we're going to be able to select how long we want to have this hosting plan. I recommend doing at least 1 year. Now, if you do monthly, it's going to be a lot more expensive. That is like the standard pricing, but we can lock down the super low rate if we do at least one year. So, for this video, I'm going to do 1 year, but if you guys want a little bit cheaper per month, feel free to do three or four years. We have our free domain right here. It's up to you whether or not you want domain privacy and protection as well as this. Just for this video, I'm going to remove this. Let's go ahead and uncheck this. And now I'm going to enter in my billing information. Once you're done with that, I'm going to click on submit payment. And you'll have your web hosting. So, after that, it's going to take you to your main Blue Host dashboard. Here's where you're going to be able to look at your different sites. So, we can create up to 10 different sites right here. You can do your email, your domains, look at your hosting, right? Like this is where we can access our C panel and file manager. Basically, what we're going to do is we'll click on WordPress admin. So, this is going to take us to this exact page. And what we're going to do is we're going to click on AI site creator. It may look a little bit different depending on when you are watching this video, but this is a great way for beginners to get a basic site going. If you already have an existing WordPress site, you can also import it here. But for this video, we're going to create a new site. So, we're going to name it Charlie sells clothes. For site type, we're going to select online store. And then what we're going to do is describe our site. Feel free to write this yourself. Or you can use chatg to create a description for you. But basically, the more detailed you are, the better the AI is going to build your site. We'll click on next. Now, it's going to have you enter in a site logo. I don't currently have one, so I'm going to create one with AI really quickly. It already has information about what I put, so it's just going to generate something for me. Yeah, it's really cool to have AI features like this because I remember 10 plus years ago when I was making online sites, it took a lot more time. Now there's all this AI functionality, especially with Blue Host. So yeah, if you want to save some time, definitely recommend using it. So let's go ahead with this one. I'll take you guys through the AI builder and show what site it builds. At any time, you can always go back, change the theme, and basically rebuild it yourself. So let's click on next. Now it's going to build your website using AI. They'll have you select beginner, intermediate, or advanced. So just choose accordingly. For this video, I'll just go with intermediate. And this is going to take a few minutes. So now it's done. And we have three different websites we can pick from. So basically go through and see which one you like the best. You can always click on preview. So this is what one of the sites looks like. There's this one. And there's this one. So I'm just going to go with the second one right here. And we'll click on save and publish. Now we're in our WordPress admin dashboard. This may seem a little bit intimidating at first, but it's actually not too bad. You have your menu on the left. So, this is where you can access, for example, your posts, all the different files you have, all the different pages on your website. Since we told it that we're making an online store, it already has the WooCommerce plugin installed. But if you want to add yourself, it's very easy to do that. All you do is go to plugins, click on add plugin, search up WooCommerce, and add that in. Now, what I recommend doing is come in here. What we're going to first do is click on customize store. So, basically, just go through the checklist and what we'll do is, for example, choose colors and fonts. Let's just go ahead with what they selected for us. But you can always click on here, for example, if you want to change the typography. Super easy to do that. I don't recommend changing too much since these are designed already. And so, usually a lot of the elements already go well together, but go through this. Go through typography, colors, background, shadows, layout, and feel free to change that. Let's go back to our homepage. What we'll do is go to customize header. Now, on the header, we basically have the site logo, which is right here, and we have the navigation. So, that makes a lot of sense. I'm not going to play around with that, but there are different designs that we can choose from. So, you can go ahead and choose between these. I prefer the original, so I'm just going to stick with this one. We'll click on save. Let's go back to WordPress. You can now customize your footer. So, this looks fine for me right now, but if you want to change anything, you can just click on it. It's very, very easy to use this editor. Think of everything as blocks that you can basically move around. For example, if I want to replace this, I can easily do that. I can align it differently if I want. For example, if I want this on the left, I can go ahead and do that into this block. If I want to move it over here, I can also do that. But let's just go ahead and leave it where it was. All this looks okay. I probably would, you know, remove this. Charlie sells clothes. And of course, change any text that you need to change. So, we'll go ahead and save this. Let's go back to the WordPress dashboard. So, what I like doing before customizing the homepage is I like to see what the current site looks like. So, you come up here, click on visit site, and this is going to take you to the live version of the site. So, as you can see, it looks exactly like the thing that we saw before. We can click around. So, for example, we can check out the about page. Yeah. So, what we're going to do is go back to WordPress. We're going to come to appearance, click on editor, and this is going to bring us to the WordPress design editor. So, in terms of how you actually edit with this builder, it's very, very easy. You want to change any text, you simply just need to click on whatever section you want to change and type in. Right? So, I'm going to leave it as is. If we want to change this text, we can easily do that. You can always change any of the formatting super easily. You want to change a button, you can just simply click on it. We can change the text here where it goes to. If you find yourself in the editor and it seems like it's not your homepage, you want to make sure that this says home homepage. Now, if there's any sections that you do not want to have, so for example, let's say we want to get rid of this. We'll click on this block right here. Click on these three buttons. And all you need to do is click on delete. Now, as you can see, we can also duplicate this if we want. So, if you want two sections, we can do that. I'm going to do control or Apple Z to remove that. But let's say, for example, we don't want this section right here. Let's just click on delete. So now we just have this hero section. We have our featured products and we have this cool little section right here. Maybe let's get rid of this featured products again right here. Delete. Delete. Cool. And if you ever want to add different sections, all you need to do is click on this plus button right here. We can add an image. We can add text. We can click browse all. If you're using Blue Host, I recommend using Wonderblocks. These are like pre-esigned templates that you can simply insert into your website. For example, maybe you want to put testimonials. So, we'll put in this block right here. And so, yeah, it's very, very simple to use this block editor. But one thing that you guys should definitely be aware of is you'll want to make sure your site looks good on desktop, tablet, as well as most importantly probably mobile. So, you can toggle between the different view modes. You can also edit based on whatever view mode it is. Usually, if you don't tweak the theme too much, it's going to look pretty decent. And so, yeah, I think this looks pretty solid. Let's go back to our desktop mode. Whenever you want to save changes, you'll click on the save button right here. And there you go. Let's go back to the WordPress admin dashboard. Now, I know a lot of you guys watching this video might want to use a different theme. So, I'll show you guys how to do that really quickly. What I would do is come here to appearance, go to themes, and what we're going to do is click on WordPress.org themes. This is going to take us to a huge library of really great themes. This is definitely one of the best parts about WordPress and why so many people use it. I'll search up Astra since this is one of my favorite beginner themes that I think everyone should learn on. We'll click on install right here. Now, we'll click on activate and it's going to switch from the original Blue Host theme that we built with the AI to this new Astro theme. We can always go back to the old one. All you have to do is click on activate here. But if you want to customize this current theme, let's go to customize. And it's a very similar editor. Now, if you're going this route, I recommend doing two things. Going here to plugins, clicking add plugin. And what we're going to do is search up starter templates. This gives you a bunch of really cool templates that we can use. So let's click on install now. I also recommend getting Elementor. So this is like a website builder that a lot of people use. In my opinion, it's a bit better than the default builders. So let's click on install now. Let's go to installed plugins. I'll go to starter templates and click on activate. So if I come here to appearance and then go to starter templates, it's going to bring us to this page. And there's a few different ways we can do this. So, you can use the AI website builder or build with their templates. I'm going to select Elementor right here. And what we'll do is choose any of these themes. So, I think this is a pretty solid one for e-commerce. So, let's go ahead and choose this one. We'll select Woo Commerce since that's what we want to use. You'll be able to enter in your logo, select your font, colors. I'll leave these as is for now. Click on continue. We'll just skip this right here. Skip this as well. And now, it's going to build our website for us. So, like I mentioned, there are different ways that you guys can actually build your site. You can use the initial Blue Host site that we built using AI. You can use Astra, or you can actually just use starter templates. Now, for most of you guys watching this video, I'd say starter templates is probably the easiest. And what you'll do is you can use Elementor to further customize the design of your website after it builds it for us. So, now it's done building our website. We'll click on view your website. And as you can see, this is what it currently looks like. Pretty solid. And what we can do is go back to our dashboard. Let's go to activate Elementor. Now, at any point, you can choose to edit with Elementor by clicking on this button right here. But just like before, anything you want to change, you can always do that right here. And so, I'm just going to leave this as is. Now, what I want to do is go back to the WordPress dashboard. And now, we're going to set up Woo Commerce. So, we'll click on this Woo Commerce tab right here on the left side. Now, what we'll do is come down here and click on add products. And so, this is basically how you add a product that you want to sell. What we'll do is we'll put a product name. We can add a product description. And feel free to use chat GPT to make this for you. I'd of course recommend a bit more than that. Now over here on the right, you're going to select your product image. So I'm just going to select this image that I uploaded before. Of course, as you guys can see, it's not an actual image of a product. If you want to have a gallery, you can always click on this one and add more. As you can see with our theme, we actually add images that were pre-populated into the website. So for example, I can select these. Now we have a product gallery. Here is where you're going to basically put in your product data. Now, if you're trying to do a virtual product, so this is something that's not shipped, you can click on this. That's basically going to remove the shipping tab right here. Or if you're doing a downloadable product, so this could be something like a PDF or template, you can click on this, and you can actually add that downloadable file right here. You can always play with these options right here. I'm not going to go over it too much, but for a physical product, what we're going to do is let's say add a regular price. Let's put something like $35. Let's say the sale price is 30. You can also schedule when this sale price is in effect. Now, as you can see here, there are different types of products that we can do. Simple product is just going to be one single product, right? There's no sizing, no color, stuff like that. A variable product is going to be where you have a bit more complexity. So, for example, let's say I want to select a variable product. We're going to come here to attributes. And what you're going to be able to do is put new attributes here. So, for example, let's do something like color, blue, green, and let's say red. We can add another one like size. So, small, medium, large. Again, just an example. We'll click on save attributes. Now, if we click on here, variations, we'll want to click generate variations. I've did my math correctly. There should be probably nine different variations, right? So, three different sizes for blue, three different sizes for green, three different sizes for red. Obviously, you guys are going to be probably selling something a bit different. If you're doing clothes though, it's probably going to look something like this. You'll want to probably enter in a skew. Woo Commerce is also very powerful. You can do stock management. If you come here to shipping, we can set all this information right here. So, let's say it's£1. Let's say it's 3x 5x 7. This is in inches. Shipping class. We'll come back to this stuff later on. Under advanced, right, we can put different notes that show up if someone makes an order. You can enable or disable reviews, but I think this is okay for now. You probably want to create a short description. And cool. Once we're done with this, we'll click on publish. Now, this is going to be a product that we can sell. If we come here to all products, we can see all the different products that we have in our store. With our theme, we had a bunch of different ones that were pre-made. thing I like to do to actually save some time is you can go into any of these. So, for example, let's click on this one, click edit, and instead of starting from scratch, you can just change the name here, add your product description, you know, play around with all the stuff that we already covered, change the images, and do it like that. Another thing that's very important in Woo Commerce is categories. So, you want to have different product categories that people that are browsing your site can sort by certain categories. So, for example, men, women, it could be t-shirts, sweaters, stuff like that. Right? If you want to add a new category, it's very simple. You'll just come here, select a name, sweaters. Sweaters for slug. That's the URL. You can assign a category description, and you'll click on this. You can also add a thumbnail picture if you want. So, right now, we have sweaters, and we have uncatategorized. I recommend going through this and creating more categories. You can also create different tags for your different products, but I'm not going to get too much into that. So, at any time, you can come here to this button right here and click visit store. And this is going to show all the different products that you currently have for sale on your website. For example, let's click on this one right here. It's very bare right now, of course, but you can see this is basically what we just made. Now, what you're going to want to do is come back here to Woo Commerce, and what we'll do is go to settings. So, under here, I recommend going through all this stuff, filling out all this information, but let's cover shipping real quick. So, what you'll want to do is add a shipping zone. I recommend doing something like US domestic. We're going to select North America, and we'll select United States. We'll be able to add shipping methods for this particular zone. Let's do something like a flat rate shipping. Let's say we want to do flat $5 shipping. Create and save. That's going to show up right here. So, do this for all the different zones. Depends on where you want to actually ship your products. Under payments, you'll be able to install whichever payment methods you want. Google payments is great. You just click on this button right here. It's going to have you set up an account. You can also accept PayPal. There's also Stripe if you want to do that. So, if you click down here, you can install different payment options. And for all these, you'll have to create an account with whatever that payment provider is. For example, if I want to accept Stripe, I'll click install and then set up a Stripe account or connect it to your existing account. Just for now, let me show you guys this. What a lot of people don't realize is that with, let's say, Woo Payments, you can actually accept Apple Pay and other types of payments. There's also like CLA if you want to have financing. I'm not going to go through this, but you'll essentially go through these steps. Submit for verification. And then once you do that, you'll be able to accept payments on your store. Under accounts and privacy, I recommend going through this, selecting what you want. I always recommend having guest checkout enabled. This way, customers don't need to create an account, which a lot of people don't like doing. If you want to allow customers to create an account, you can select this button. For privacy policy, for example, this one and this one, I recommend just using Chat GBT to create this for you. Anytime you make changes, of course, click save changes. WooCommerce also has email functionality. So, you'll want to probably set up all these different emails that get automated. For example, if someone creates a new order, we can click on this button right here. You can change all the stuff, the subject, the email heading, the content, email type, and all that stuff. And you can preview what that looks like. So, this is currently what the email they receive looks like. Don't worry too much about advanced. I think most of you guys won't need to do too much there. The other stuff that we covered is just more important. So, as you guys can see, we use Blue Host to basically create an online store in not a lot of time at all. There are many ways you can use WordPress to build a store. With WooCommerce, it's extremely powerful. That's why a lot of big brands use this. As for designing your website, of course, so many different options. I recommend just using the AI builder using Blue Host or using something like starter templates to build the site for you. We also covered designing your site. So, very, very easy to use the block editors. Also, use Elementor if you want. And we also covered how to actually set up your Woo Commerce, right? Setting up shipping, setting up payments, all that stuff. This is more of a comprehensive guide. So, if you really want to dive really really deep into something, I recommend just searching that up on YouTube or AI and it should be able to walk you through the steps. Of course, we didn't have that much time to cover everything in this video, but hopefully this gave you a very like comprehensive and solid overview of how to build your WooCommerce site in not a lot of time. If you guys are building your own site, I do want to say congratulations. I'm really excited for you and I wish you guys the best of luck. I know we covered a lot, but feel free to check out the description for all the resources we talked about. Of course, my affiliate link for Blue Host is going to be there. If you guys do want to use that link to sign up, it will help support the channel and help keep these videos free. So, I do want to say thank you so much in advance. All right, that's it for this video. If you enjoyed it, make sure to hit that like button, subscribe for more content just like this because I make a ton of tutorials as well as videos about finance, entrepreneurship, and stuff like that. My whole goal with the channel is to basically help you guys live a financially successful life. Thank you so much for your time, and I'll see you in the next video. Peace. Hey, hey, hey.