The Beginners Guide to WooCommerce
Building a WooCommerce store is a difficult business, being honest. There’s a lot to learn for anyone new to this. Rather than focusing on your product and promotion, you have to learn about domains, hosting, themes, plugins, payment gateways, and security. Wouldn’t you rather just concentrate on selling? This new Beginners Guide to WooCommerce series hopes to address this.
Now, I know some of you might reply with “just use Shopify” and this is a good option for many people. But, if you want to really control your data, optimize your SEO and gain the flexibility to really grow your business, WooCommerce is still the best solution.
So, I had an idea to make it easier
I always wanted to set up an online store myself as a little side-business. What about documenting everything as I go? I mean everything – from the initial idea, domain registration, hosting, theme set up – the works.
Even the logo doodles will be captured. And we’ll see where we get to step-by-step right to the finished product for sale. This will be a real product (or maybe product(s) – let’s see where this goes), with a payment gateway hooked up so you can buy it 🙌
Crucially I want to capture every decision – which will almost certainly include mistakes. I’ll be explaining my reasoning around everything but I don’t expect to get everything right first-time. There could well be revised designs, photo tweaks, even pricing changes depending on what works and what doesn’t.
This is the first of a weekly series, “The Beginners Guide to WooCommerce” – updated every Friday, with everything explained with screenshots and photos so that you can follow along, every step of the way.
About me – my situation
Just so that budgets and resources are comparable, a little about me. I’m based in Dublin, Ireland, Europe. Ireland is relatively expensive so that will have an impact on certain costs, especially postage and if I source any materials locally.
If you’re based in a lower-cost country you may well be able to do this a lot cheaper. I’ll be keeping a budget of income and expenses at the end of each week so that you can compare with your locality.
The product I will choose to sell is something that anybody can make and sell. So, I’m not going to sell something unique to my country or climate. You can already buy some Irish shamrock (and dirt) if you have $44 to spare.
Anyone can, in other words, replicate this tutorial.
Methodology
I’m a web designer and developer so that does have a certain advantage when building a site like this. However, I’ll be explaining everything as I go, and any custom code and functions will be documented.
I want to use defaults as much as possible, but I certainly won’t be able to resist getting to play around a bit with some original branding, typography and colors during the build. I want this to have its own unique identity.
Part of this is to show what the difficulty level is for someone completely new to selling online. I’m hoping the learnings will be really valuable for anyone getting started. For me, I hope this will help identify pain points for users and help me make better solutions in the future based upon my own experiences.
This Beginners Guide needs to cover a real-world example of a WooCommerce store, rather than just theory.
Building a side business
I’m intending for this to be a little side business – not a full-time endeavor. But saying that, it would be nice to sell some products and make some $$$. What to sell? Well that’s coming soon 😉
But I do have some basic goals before starting. This is what I would like:
Some goals
- Make at least one sale in the first month. Let’s keep expectations relatively low for now. I’m not expecting much traffic initially.
- Five sales by month two. A little over one a week.
- Ten sales by month three. A little over 2 a week.
- Bonus #1 📷 Add a photo of someone with the product from somewhere in the world (not my own city).
- Bonus #2 Get some hopefully positive customer reviews.
Are these goals achievable? Truthfully, I don’t know. Maybe there’ll be zero sales. Part of this experiment is the free-form nature of this. If it’s a complete flop hopefully there will still be plenty to learn from this.
A rough plan for now
A back of the notebook plan looks something like the following. This is (very) open to revision – and I’ll be tracking how long each task takes to complete. Something like the logo design could suck up days of time if I’m not careful.
Outline (open to change)
- Decide on a product to sell
- Work out the costs of production and postage. Calculate how much to charge in order to make a profit.
- Design a brand identity and logo
- Register a domain and web hosting
- Add a basic landing page to capture leads
- In the background build out the site and associated content pages using a really great theme
- Tweak the design to better reflect the brand
- Set up a payment gateway and do a lot of testing
- Focus on SEO improvements
- Look at speed – make it as quick as possible
- Analyze the conversions funnel – optimize this as much as possible
Next steps
I’ll be looking at what product to sell next time. And this won’t be through a spontaneous brain wave. I’ll be showing you how to research existing search traffic to ascertain where there might be a gap in the market. This gives us the best possible chance of succeeding.
I want this Beginners Guide to WooCommerce to be seriously comprehensive, and cover the mistakes as well as the successes. I’d really welcome any feedback you have! 👍
Read Chapter Two – Researching eCommerce niches →