WooCommerce: An Introduction and Basics
WooCommerce is a free e-commerce toolkit for WordPress. With the installation of this plugin you can enable shop facilities on your website. With a very simple to use interface it is a very useful tool if you want to start your own business online.
Getting started with it is quite simple. Here is an introduction to the basics of WooCommerce.
Create Your Product
Types of products
- Simple Product is a regular product that is tangible and can be shipped easily.
- Downloadable Products are those that can be downloaded and need not be shipped.
- Grouped Products are simple products that are related and can be grouped together.
- Variable Products are those products that have various variation of the same product.
- Virtual Products are neither shipped nor downloaded. These are generally services that are booked.
Add a Simple Product
This is very much similar to adding a post on your website. From the WP admin go on to the Product Menu item on the left hand side locate the menu option and click on the Add Product. You can give the product description and title here.
The General Tab includes SKU (Stock Keep Unit), Price (Regular and Sale prices) and Tax (Tax Status and Tax Class).
Inventory Tab allows you to store and manage the products. It also lets you take back orders. If the stock management is disabled from the settings page, only the ‘stock status’ option will be visible.
Shipping Tab consists of:
Weight- weight of the product
Dimension- Length, width and height of the item
Shipping class- These are used to group certain shipping items.
Adding a Variable Product
Variable Products is a great feature of WooCommerce that enables you to add variations ofn the same product, for example different sizes or colors of the same T-shirt. Click onn the link below for step by step guidance for adding variable products on your website.
http://docs.woothemes.com/document/product-variations/
Add Your Product’s Images and Galleries
Using the insert media option, upload the images for your product. Select among them, the featured image for the product by clicking on ‘Use as featured Image’. It will display ‘Done’ to confirm the selection. Now click on ‘Insert into post’ to set the image as the featured image.
Product galleries simply display all the images attached to the product, with the featured image being the prime image defining it. Rather than using the Product Gallery meta box, you can add a gallery the same way you set the feature image.
For detailed guidance click on this link:
http://docs.woothemes.com/document/adding-product-images-and-galleries/
Coupon Management
Coupons are a great way to increase sale and promote your products. They are an excellent aid in providing your customers with offers and discounts and thus luring them into doing business with you. To use these coupons on your website, you need to first enable their setting on it. Here is a step by step guide by WooCommerce for the same.