Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce

The Base Location field holds the country of your store. The default setting may vary, depending on the country and language settings of your WordPress environment. Just change it if needed. Note that if you're in the United States, you'll also have to choose the correct state. Note that the country field will be used as the default country for calculating taxes. It will also be used as the default country for customers checking out or creating an account.

Do the same for the Currency field, if necessary. Note that your WooCommerce online store by default can only handle one currency.

As we move along we'll have to make a lot of decisions. The first one is the countries that we want to allow. That is, will we export our products or will we just run our store for one single country? Set the correct value in the field Allowed Countries. If you want to limit your sales to specific countries, next also select those countries in the field Specific Countries.

If you immediately installed WooCommerce in a live website—which we don't recommend—you have the possibility to show a warning message to your visitors. By checking the field Store Notice, the field Store Notice Text becomes available, giving you an opportunity to write your own text that will be shown on top of your site.

When scrolling down a bit on the General tab, there are a number of settings on a higher level to control the behavior of WooCommerce. The first one is Enable Coupons, which is checked by default. If you're not planning to use discount coupons you can switch it off. You'll see that as soon as you have such a field available, customers almost expect to have a discount coupon and will start searching for it. Having a coupon field that is not actively used is therefore a real conversion killer.

Next, there are three fields to control your checkout process. First, do you want to force your customers to create an account in your store? We recommend to keep the default value if you're not sure. The second field gives the possibility to your customer to add a remark or question to the order. Finally, checking the last field forces a secure SSL connection during checkout. If you enable it, you'll need a SSL certificate for your website. You should not enable this on a local test environment.

The Registration section gives the possibility to decide where your visitors can create an account. This can be done on the checkout page, on the My Account page, or both. Further on, it's possible to decide to use the e-mail address as a username, or let your customers choose their own username. We recommend to enable it, so that the e-mail address can be used to login.

The next section named Customer Accounts delivers the possibility to block your customers from your WordPress admin. Normally it isn't needed to have them there, so enable it. The next setting lets you clear the cart if the customer logs out. Keep it disabled. Finally you can give your customers the possibility to repurchase an existing order. Especially in business-to-business stores this often makes sense, so enable it if you do not have specific reasons to keep it switched off.

We're moving further to the Styles and Scripts section. This lets you control the default colors, but if you used WordPress more often, you'll know that this is normally controlled by your theme. For now, you may keep the defaults. We'll discuss the look and feel of your online store in Chapter 5, Working with WooCommerce Themes.

The last part of this tab covers Downloadable Products. Think about e-books, photos, movies, or other digital goods. If you're not planning to sell those, don't worry and skip this section. If you will sell downloadable products you might want to take a look at the settings. However, we'll discuss these kind of products more deeply in Chapter 3, Other Product Types.

Remember to click on Save at the bottom!

First of all, using the Default Product Sorting field lets you decide how your products will be sorted. There are different possibilities, just choose what suits your situation. The default setting is nice, because it puts you in control. Using the default setting you have the possibility to control the sort order of items one by one.

Next, there are two settings that define what will be shown on your products page and category pages. By default they will show products only, which is fine in most circumstances.

Enabling the Redirect field to the cart page after successful addition is especially useful when you're only selling one (or a few) products, and chances are high that your customer will only buy one. In that case, you want to redirect them to the checkout as soon as possible. Enabling this field will help you to do just that.

The Product Data section lets you set some settings that are important for your product catalog. At first, we see four fields that are all enabled by default, giving you the maximum possibilities when creating new products. Note: SKU means Stock Keeping Unit, also referred to as Item code or Article number. However, if you won't sell products that require a weight or dimensions, you can disable these fields. Further on, it's possible to store weight and dimensions, without showing them to your visitors.

Next, define the Units of measure for your products. Just choose what is appropriate for the region you're selling to. Are you selling to different regions with different units of measure? Unfortunately that's not an option in WooCommerce, so in that case you'll still have to choose the best match.

Choose whether or not you want to work with Product Ratings and if yes, how you want to do that. We recommend to keep the defaults and leave these fields to enabled.

Scrolling down brings us to the section, Pricing Options. These settings will influence the way prices are shown to your users. Where do you want the currency character ($, €, and so on ) to appear? You should also check if the Thousand Separator and Decimal Separator are correct for your region. Further on, decide if you want to show decimals or not.

Setting Image Options is something you should probably skip at this moment. These fields will set the sizes of your product images will be shown in. However, before you set these, it's wise to first choose or build your WooCommerce theme and then come back here to do the correct settings. For now we keep the defaults. Note that it is important to come back here and check if you need to make changes before you are going to create all your products!

Remember to click on Save again at the bottom of the tab.

First, decide if you want to track stock levels in your shop or not. Use the Enable stock management field, which is enabled by default. We can think of a few reasons why you would not want to do this:

The Hold Stock (minutes) setting sets the number of minutes the stock is reserved for a customer. As long as the order has not been paid for, the needed items are being reserved for that customer to make sure that the customer can safely do the checkout. Especially when you have limited stock levels, it's important to pay attention to this setting. If you do not want to hold any stock for your customers you can delete the existing value. A blank field will disable this function.

Next, it's possible to decide if you want to receive a warning message when one of your products is running low on stock, or is even completely sold out. You may also set the threshold levels for these warning messages. This means that you'll receive an e-mail as soon as the stock level reaches the threshold. It's not possible to set these fields on the product level, so if you have lots of different products that might be a problem.

Decide if you want to show or hide products from your customers if they are out of stock.

Use the Stock Display Format field to decide if you want to show your stock levels to your customers, hide them, or only show them if you're running low on stock. It's your choice, but from the conversion perspective showing a low stock level for certain products might increase the sense of urgency with your customer and thus increase sales.

Remember to click on Save again at the bottom of the tab.

First of all, decide if you want to Enable taxes and tax calculations. It's not always necessary to display taxes in your store to your customers. If you decide to disable it, you may ignore all other fields mentioned below this option.

Next, assuming that you enabled the field mentioned previously, decide if you want to enter your sales prices including or excluding tax in the Prices Entered With Tax field. Including tax is quite common in a consumer oriented store, but again, this differs per region.

Depending on the tax rules in your country, you need to set the Calculate Tax Based On field. Sometimes taxes should be calculated based on the shipping address of the customer. In our example, the base address of our store is used, which means that all customers will pay the same rate. By using the setting as shown the applied tax rate will only depend on the product, not on the address of the customer.

WooCommerce works with a "Standard tax rate" by default. It's not possible to delete this one. You can add additional rates if you need them by adding a description of your choice to the Additional Tax Classes field. The Reduced Rate and Zero Rate options have already been defined.

Once done, click on the Standard link at the top of the screen to set your default tax rate. Click on Insert Row. Just fill in the Rate % and set a Tax Name that makes sense for your customers. Note that it's possible to set rates per country, state, or even based on zip code. Note that this will only work if you've chosen to base the tax calculations on the address of your customer! By default your Tax rate will also be used for the shipping amount. Finally, using the Compound field it's possible to use multiple tax rates at once (tax on tax). Don't forget to click on the Save button!

Next, also set the other rates that you might need, such as Reduced Rate, Zero Rate, or any other rates that you added yourself.