Preface

According to BuiltWith (https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/WooCommerce-Checkout) there are over 3,000,000 stores running WooCommerce! That is second only to Shopify with 4 million stores.

There’s no one reason people choose WooCommerce. Some store owners like the thousands of themes they have access to, some like that they can build on top of their existing WordPress sites, and others really like the open source customizable angle and knowing that they can always customize the code any way they want. If you decide to build a store on WooCommerce, be prepared for a virtually overwhelming amount of choices. Because it’s so popular, you’ll always have a lot of options in front of you.

Mastering WooCommerce takes you from an empty WordPress site to having a fully functioning store. As the title of the book implies, we will go deep into WooCommerce and show you the basic options as well as some of the more advanced customizations. We’ll do so in an orderly way, starting from the very beginning by setting up a test WordPress site and covering fundamental topics that we’ll revisit throughout the rest of the book. Each chapter that follows will expand on the basics, allowing for a gentle progression curve that will allow almost any user to follow along. Each chapter will cover a new section of WooCommerce and thus can be seen as an independent unit, letting you tackle each section separately from the others.

We’ll first introduce you to the basics of WooCommerce and WordPress, which will help you develop and debug any issue. You will then learn how to create a simple product and optimize it for SEO. We will then look at shipping, taxes, and payment. After that, we will look into integrating with third-party services for fulfillment and reporting. Furthermore, we will also dive into Point of Sale (POS) systems that let you sell in person. Near the end of the book, we’ll create a custom plugin that you can use for any customizations you wish to make. To end the book we take a peek at some advanced topics such as keeping your store safe, making an accessible store, and staying up to date with open source software.

Who this book is for

Mastering WooCommerce is made for everyone who builds WooCommerce sites. You could be a developer who builds sites for clients or you could be a store owner who wants to take a DIY approach with your own store.

You should be familiar with the fundamentals of WordPress. That means understanding what plugins do, what a theme does, how to install plugins and themes, how to keep your site up to date, and how to create posts and pages. So, if you can do the basics with WordPress, Mastering WooCommerce will show you the rest.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Installing WordPress and WooCommerce, brings everyone up to speed. If you’ve never installed WooCommerce, we’re going to go through it together – step by step – looking at setting up our store settings, how we’re going to accept payments, and how we’re going to keep the admin interface clean.

Chapter 2, All About Configuring Products, digs into all of the settings for products. We’ll cover when you should use certain product types, how to give your visitors as much information as possible, and some of the premium product types such as WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Chapter 3, Organizing Products, explains how to add categories and tags to your store and looks into when you would want to do so. We will delve into intuitively organizing your products and enabling customers to find your products and checkout in a flash.

Chapter 4, Attracting Traffic with Search Engine Optimization, is all about getting traffic. We’re going to look into some of the common ways to bring people to your site, focusing especially on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing, which is very popular with WordPress.

Chapter 5, Managing Sales Through WP Admin, helps store owners manage and fulfill sales. Once you get that traffic, you’ll have orders and will need to ship your products. There are some subtle features in the WooCommerce admin realm that make this process surprisingly easy.

Chapter 6, Syncing Product Data, illustrates how tricky it is to keep all of your product data in sync. We’ll cover a manual process that you can use to update your products and investigate services that do this for you automatically.

Chapter 7, Configuring In-Store POS Solutions, will highlight the different ways in which you can sell products in person. We lay out several POS solutions, along with their benefits and drawbacks, to help you choose the right one for your store or your client’s store.

Chapter 8, Using Fulfillment Software, draws together another suite of tools, this time focusing on fulfillment (getting a package to a customer’s door). There are built-in options that are great for starting out but at a certain point, you’ll want to use a 3rd party service to save you money and time.

Chapter 9, Speeding Up Your Store, highlights several ways in which you can speed up your store and talks about the importance of doing so. If your store is slow, no one will want to check out, so look into these techniques to speed up your store.

Chapter 10, Setting Up Your Theme, will show you my two favorite themes for WooCommerce and how you can set them up to display your products.

Chapter 11, Customizing the Product Page, is all about building that perfect product page. We’ll look into 360-degree images, videos, and the process of adding social proof.

Chapter 12, Building a Landing Page, will show you some key principles of landing page design, how you can add e-commerce functionality to the landing page, and then how to measure the effectiveness of the page and how to optimize it.

Chapter 13, Creating Plugins for WooCommerce, is here for the developers or to give a store owner insight into how a developer does their work. We’ll write code to modify WooCommerce itself, customize an order status, build a plugin, and integrate a service with WooCommerce.

Chapter 14, Next Steps with WooCommerce, gives you a look ahead into further areas you can specialize in. We’ll look into the importance of accessibility and how you can build an accessible store, how you can keep your WooCommerce store safe and secure, and how you can follow the development of WooCommerce, and contribute code to WooCommerce itself.

To get the most out of this book

You will need to have a functioning WordPress site. Ideally, you should know how to create a test or development site, since many of our examples will change the frontend of your site and you don’t want your visitors seeing a work-in-progress store.

I highly recommend that you always keep WordPress and WooCommerce in their latest versions, as well as all the plugins and themes. The further you are behind the latest version, the more features won’t work. It’s also helpful, but not necessary, to have familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
WordPress 6.5	Windows, macOS, or Linux
WooCommerce 8.8	Windows, macOS, or Linux

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-WooCommerce-. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “ So, you can do some digging by searching for {{your industry}} + POS systems.

A block of code is set as follows:

class WC_Example {
    public function __construct(){
        // add more code here
    }
}
// Start running our plugin
$GLOBALS['wc_example'] = new WC_Example();

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$this->form_fields = array(
    'api_key' => array(
        'title'       => __( 'API Key', 'woocommerce-integration-demo' ),
        'type'        => 'text',
        'description' => __( 'Enter with your API Key. You can find this in "User Profile" drop-down (top right corner) > API Keys.', 'woocommerce-integration-demo' ),
        'desc_tip'    => true,
        'default'     => '',
    ),
);

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “In FOMO, you can click on Events and you can see all of the events that FOMO picked up.”

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

Get in touch

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