Ultimate Guide To WooCommerce

START SELLING ONLINE
The Ultimate Guide to

Set Up Your Online Shop
with WooCommerce
Table of Contents
Opening 4
Ecommerce Is Now for Everyone 4
Purpose of This Guide 5
People That Will Be Helpful To Have Around 6
Setting Up Shop 8
Define Your Product or Service 9
Choose an Ecommerce Platform 9
Choose a Domain Name 10
Choose a Web Hosting Partner 10
Set up Your Business Email 14
Create Your Business Social Media Accounts 16
Installing WordPress and WooCommerce 17

Install WordPress 17
Secure Your Website 17
Install WooCommerce 22
Set Up the Needed Pages 23
Payment Processors 24
Install Additional Plugins 25
Choose Your Theme 26
Adding Products 29
The Basics of a Product 29
How To Add Your First Product 32
How To Set Up Product Variations 32
How To Create a Product List Page 34
How to Feature a Product 36
Processing Orders 39
Payment Processing 39
Checkout Workflow 45
Personally Identifying Information (PII) 47
Taxes (The Tax Man Cometh) 48
START SELLING ONLINE 2

Products Shipping and Inventory Management 50
Shipping for Physical Goods 50
How To Set Up Shipping 52
Inventory Management 55
Shipping for Digital Goods 56
Enabling and Managing Subscriptions 60

Monthly Processing 61
Membership Versus Subscriptions 61
Creating Promotions and Coupons 67

How Not To Use Coupons 67
How To Use Coupons 68
Coupons in WooCommerce 69
Building your Mobile Strategy 72

Mobile App 73
What is The Difference Between Mobile-First and Mobile-Friendly? 73
How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly 75
Marketing Actions to Driving Traffic to Your Online Store 78

Paid Traffic: SEM, Social, and Sponsored Ads 79
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 81
“Earned” (Free) Traffic: Social Media and Engaging Content 82
Owned Traffic: Growing Your Mailing List Through Valuable Content 84
Wrapup 87

Opening
I remember building my first shopping cart/ecommerce system way back in the

early days of the internet. We (myself as the primary programmer and the lovely
and talented Kathy, my wife, as the designer) built it using ASP on a Windows
Server using IIS as the webserver. We even had a little bit of JavaScript in there—
back when it was called Dynamic HTML. We built this site for my parent’s
company, an established mail-order company. Early on, we were “Bricks and
Clicks” because we had a physical and virtual presence.
I can remember how excited we were when we brought the site live after six
months of work. Then, we waited. And waited. Three days passed before we got
our first order. Three days of checking to make sure the database was up, that
the link was on the website, that everything was working correctly.
Then it happened, we took our very first order. In a company whose average
order was around $150, ours was a single $9.95 item. Still, we were so excited! We
sold our first product. The future was bright.
That was the beginning of the journey that has led to this book. Along the
way, I have built several other systems from scratch, implemented existing
systems that I’ve modified, and installed systems as is and worked within their
existing workflows. All of this has given me an understanding of what it takes
to successfully build out a system and the pitfalls that most people miss. In this
book, I’ll point out both to you.
Ecommerce Is Now for Everyone
Back in the days when Kathy and I built that first ecommerce system (1998-
1999), you had to have your own physical server, know how to install and safely
configure software, write code, create graphics, and pull it all together. Today,
you can do what took us six months in a weekend.
With the advent of CMSs (content management systems) like WooCommerce or

Magento (and all the systems before them), the phase of a project developers
refer to as the “Yak Shaving”—getting everything set up and ready to go—has all
but been eliminated.
It doesn’t matter what you sell or how different your company’s workflow is;
there is most likely someone who has already figured it out and has either written
a blog post, recorded a video, or built a plugin to do exactly what you want to do.
If you have a product or service to sell and you are not selling it online, the
question has to be asked, why?
Starting an ecommerce site has plenty of advantages:
● It is easy to get started.
● It is cheap enough that most products or services that are a good idea can
make back the investment quickly and turn a profit.
● It requires very little specialized knowledge. You can find it with free
resources such as this ebook and the videos accompanying each chapter;
you will get the knowledge needed to start.
If you are still on the fence, it’s time to get off! Hop on over to the ecommerce
side, and let’s get you started.
Purpose of This Guide
This guide is designed as a practical tutorial. It’s broken up into digestible chunks,
so you don’t have to do it all at once. Each chapter helps you get one thing up and
running. We start with getting your site up, then your products and lastly your
promotional actions. We ensure you can take orders, and then we delve into
marketing your products and services and getting them noticed.
To help you with hands-on instructions, we have included 9 exclusive videos,

each one accompanying each chapter, which you can access directly. You will
find each video highlighted in each chapter with a direct link to access it. Simply
click on that link and you will be automatically forwarded to the video to start
watching it. Don´t miss any as they provide visual examples to help you get even
more familiar with the key steps on creating your awesome online store!
I recommend that before you do anything that you read, at least skim through

the entire book to get a feel for all the moving parts before you try to get the
first part up and running. If you approach it like that, your outcome will be much
better.
Whatever you do, do not sit down with this book and an idea and expect to get
a fully functional ecommerce site set up and running (and taking orders) in an
afternoon. It won’t happen.
Yes, it’s easy to get things set up, but there’s still a lot of work that has to be done
before your first order. Mentally prepare yourself and set realistic expectations.
People That Will Be Helpful To Have Around
One more thing before you get started; in software development, we have a
name for a single person that can write good code, design great graphics, and
write excellent copy. We call them unicorns. You find such a person about as
often as you find an actual unicorn. For those who don’t have a unicorn, here are
the three people you need on your journey.
1: A Programmer/System Operator
Yes, you need a technical person who can write code, configure things, and
generally understands how things go together. More importantly, they need to
understand how to put them back together when they fall apart.
I am not saying go out and hire a programmer immediately. I’m saying look
around, make friends with someone who understands this stuff. Yes, you will
end up paying them money to set up and fix things.
Start attending your local WordPress user group. Look for the technically minded
people and introduce yourself. If possible, invite them out for a cup of coffee or
a beer and get to know them. If they are someone you can work with—and not
everyone you meet will be—then explain what you are doing and see if they are
open to freelance work.
It doesn’t hurt to have a couple of friends like this in case one of them is busy
when you need them.

2: A Designer
A good designer is worth their weight in gold. Most people are influenced by
visual aesthetics. Therefore, you want someone working on your site whose sole
focus is the visual aspect. Everything from the images you use to the colors of
your theme, your designer should handle them all.
Bonus points if your designer is a “User Experience” expert; not all of them are.
If they are tough, listen to them. They understand how things should be put
together so that people are more likely to buy.
3: A Copywriter
The third person you want on your team is a wordsmith—someone who

understands the psychology of selling and marketing. You honestly didn’t think
you chose the brand of car you drive because it’s the best one on the market, did
you? No! A copywriter, along with some help from a good designer, influenced
you into believing that the brand you drive is the best. From that point, it was
easy to get you to buy.
You need a good copywriter to help you influence people. Like your programmer
and designer, you can probably find a good freelancer at your local WordPress
meetup. Join it, attend regularly, make friends, and start collecting business
cards of the people you want on your team.
Let’s Get Going
Are you ready to put your product or service online? Do you have a list of people
you can call on or hire for help in different areas? Are you mentally prepared for
a great adventure?If you answered yes to all of these, then let’s do this!
Let’s get your product or service up and available for sale. Then let’s tell the
world how awesome it is and how they can’t live without it.

Setting Up Shop
Great, you have now committed mentally to setting up shop. Congratulations!

Over the next week or so, we will get everything set up from a technical
standpoint. Let’s dive in.
Start with this video to get an overview of the 6 must-haves for your online
store before diving deeper into them. Click on the image to watch it.
CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO WATCH THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

1. Define Your Product or Service
You won’t get very far on your quest to sell things if you don’t
have anything to sell. You need to have a good idea of what
you will sell overall, but you have to have at least one service
or product to add to the system now. If you don’t have this,
you can still do everything else, but obviously, you won’t
make any money until you have something to sell.
2. Choose an Ecommerce Platform
In the ecommerce world, you have a multitude of options

when it comes to infrastructure. The big three are:
● Shopify
● Magento
● WordPress/WooCommerce
All of these are solid platforms to build on. However, the first two require more
time, and more importantly, more money, than the third. Dip your toes in the
water with WordPress/WooCommerce, and then when you make it big, decide if
there is a need to move beyond this to one of the big packages.
WordPress/WooCommerce
Note that we are using WooCommerce in addition to WordPress because there

are other options for setting up a shopping cart with WordPress. After looking at
and trying several of them on different projects, I have found WooCommerce is
by far the easiest to set up and run. It is also available for free for the basic cart.
Yes, you need to spend some money to do anything special, but you can set up a
basic shop for free. That is what we will use.
Throughout this book, I am teaching concepts as well as specific tactics. If you

choose not to use WordPress/WooCommerce, the concepts and strategies are
still viable. You will, however, have to adjust the specific tactics.

3. Choose a Domain Name
Before you can get started on this journey, you need a domain name.
Choose it carefully—it should represent your business, the service you

provide, or a more abstract concept that your customers associate you with.
A good option is to add a catchy domain extension if it goes well with your
domain, such as .pro, .shop, .online.
Once you have chosen a name, it’s time to register it and

make it yours! Many of the better web hosting partners can
also serve as your registrar, the company with which you
register your domain name. If your hosting partner can do
this, I urge you to work with them. Their systems are most
likely integrated so that when you register your new domain
name with them, you can click a button and set up the
website, WordPress/WooCommerce, email, and everything.
If your web hosting partner isn’t a registrar, there are many good ones out there;
check around locally to find the best option in your region. In this case, make sure
you contact your web hosting partner to find out what domain name servers you
should be using. You need at least two DNS servers to register a domain; only
your web hosting partner can provide you with these.
4. Choose a Web Hosting Partner
I’m going to dig a little deep here and explain the things you
need to look for when selecting a hosting partner. It should
be noted that price is not a factor I chose to use when
selecting a hosting partner. There are a lot of $5 a month
web hosts out there, and all of them are worth what you pay
for. You are not going to get good service, good hardware,
extra features, and good bandwidth for $5 a month.
If you are setting up a website to sell your child’s artwork to their grandparents,
by all means, set up a $5 website because if it goes down, it really doesn’t matter.

For anyone who wants to set up an ecommerce shop and make more than a
trivial amount of money, solid hosting is where you want to start. You wouldn’t
build a new house on sand or mud, don’t build your ecommerce shop on a cut-
rate web host.
How do you choose the best hosting for you? Let’s dig into what to consider.
1. Specialization in Your Selected Platform
If you have decided to build your online store with WooCommerce, I strongly
recommend you choose a host specialized in hosting it, like SiteGround. Their
tools, servers, and resources are optimized for WooCommerce. You will get the
most out of your site in terms of performance, as well as ease of setting it up and
receiving further specialized assistance on WooCommerce if needed.
2. Resources and Limits
An important thing to look at when selecting a web host, especially if you are
selecting a plan that does not come with a physical or virtual private server,
is the resource limitations. These are usually CPU, disk space, and bandwidth.
Sometimes, they may be expressed as “unique visitors”. No matter what the
resource limitations are, you need to know three things.
● Can you get started with the resources available to you?
● What happens if you exceed the available resources?
● Can you expand them if necessary without having to build an entirely new
setup?
If you are selling digital movies that are 50GB in size each, and the hosting plan
you have selected comes with 40GB of storage space, you will not get very far.
Make sure that the limitations are larger than your initial needs. You don’t have
to exceed your needs by much. 30%-40% is usually acceptable to get up and
running.
If your site becomes insanely popular, what happens to your site when you hit
your bandwidth cap? If the answer is, “My host cuts me off”, look for another
host. You never ever want a host that removes your site from the web. If the

answer is, “My host charges me for the next level up”. BINGO, you have a hosting
partner. You have someone who wants you to succeed and not just live within
your limits. If you are driving traffic, you are most likely making money. Having
your hosting partner bump you to the next level to keep you up and running is
a good thing.
If you know you are going to exceed one of your limits soon, does your potential
hosting partner allow you to buy more of just that resource? This is called “resource
planning”. If I know my traffic doubles during the Christmas holiday season, but
so does my revenue, then I know I want to buy twice as much bandwidth from
November through December. Make sure your host is amenable to this. Bonus
points if they let you “step down” after the rush is over and go back to your
normal limits. That is a true partner. They are concerned that you succeed and
are willing to do what they can to ensure that you do.
3. Speed Features
Speed is one of the main points that makes the difference in your website’s
success, as it brings a better user experience and leads to higher conversions and
better positioning in Google. Your selected hosting provider should be focused
on speed performance and offer you speed boosters such as:
● Fast hosting platform with SSD storage. If they are partnering with any
powerful providers, that would be a plus.
● Data Centers in different locations and a CDN (Content Delivery

Network) service. Your content can be quickly accessible no matter
where your traffic comes from, as it is delivered from the nearest server
to your audience.
● Customized server configuration for better resources optimization.
● Caching technology
● Latest PHP versions
Bonus: Determine your chosen hosting provider has additional speed tools
to optimize your website speed. For example, SiteGround includes for free
the SiteGround Optimizer plugin in all new WordPress installations on their
platform, which helps you get your website optimized in just a few clicks.

4. Security
You mustn’t compromise your website at any point. Security is key for every
website, and your hosting provider has a key role in your website security.
Make sure it complies with the following points to ensure your website is highly
secured:
● Offers SSL certificates
● Implements the latest PHP versions
● Secures your hosting account at a server level, with features and systems
to prevent bots, brute-force attacks, spam, and other bad actors.
● Provides daily backups
Bonus: Again, if your provider also provides or even develops additional security
tools and features, that is something remarkable that allows for easier and better
website security.
5. Customer Support
Choose a host who has reliable and fast customer service support, which
specializes in the platform that you are using to create your online store (in this
case, WordPress and WooCommerce), and is available whenever you need them;
that is 24/7.
6. Email Service
Your hosting partner will also most likely be your email hosting partner, at least
for your standard email addresses. Your system will send out what we refer to as
“transactional emails”. These are things like receipts for orders, password reset
notices, etc. These are not your marketing emails but are the normal emails
your systems sends out every day. It helps if your web hosting partner has email
included in your package.
Not all hosts will host email. I ran web hosting for 20 years but stopped offering
email hosting after 15 because email servers and DNS servers are the hardest to

secure against bad actors. Spammers love to find a slightly misconfigured email
server and use it to spew spam day and night until discovered.
If your hosting partner is offering email hosting, take advantage of it.
5. Set up Your Business Email
Email Accounts versus Forwarders
There are two different kinds of email addresses, regular email accounts and
email forwarders. You cannot tell the difference just by looking at them.
A regular email account is what most people think of when

you say email. It’s an address that people can send email to;
it holds on a server until you pick it up. Many hosts that offer
email hosting also offer a web frontend so that you don’t
even have to use a desktop program.
Email forwarders, on the other hand, are not real email addresses in that you
cannot log into a server and see the mail sent to them. As the name implies, they
forward the email sent to them to another real email account.
You can develop any strategy you like for setting up email accounts and
forwarders. However, remember this—for every real email address you set up,
you have to log into that account to see what emails have been sent.
My personal strategy is to only set up forwarders. I set up several email

addresses at every domain I put a website on. All of them point to my primary
email address. The downside to this is that when I reply, the reply does not come
from the email address they sent the email to but from my primary account. The
upside is that I get all of my email in one place.
If you have multiple people working with you on your ecommerce site, you will
most likely want each of them to have their own email address at the domain.
That having been said, you may also want to set up “role-based forwarders” so
that you can repoint them as your needs change.

Here are some examples of role-based forwarders that I use.
● abuse@
● root@
● webmaster@
● sales@
● info@
● accounting@
● support@
Each of these role-based forwarders can be pointed to different people. If I hire

a new salesperson, I can add them to the sales@ forwarder. If I decide that the
same person is going to handle info@ and support@, I can point them both to
the same person. Setting up and repointing forwarders is easy in most email
systems. Role-based forwarders allow you to easily collect the information you
need from your customers while making sure it goes to the right person or
people.
Email Mailing Lists
The other type of email you will be sending out is marketing emails. You send
these to your mailing list. Your mailing list is a very important asset to your
business. Because of this, we will discuss it more in-depth later and talk about
the different options for hosting your mailing list. In most cases, your web/
email host will not have the proper toolset to support your marketing efforts.
Therefore, prepare yourself now for the fact that, no, you cannot host your
mailing list with your web/email hosting partner. Yes, you will have to pay extra
for a mailing list partner.
There is a small segment of people reading this book who may say, “But my web/
email hosting partner has a feature called ‘lists,’ I’ll just use that”. Do me a favor;
if you are in this segment, while you are still building out your site and in the
development phase, add 10 friends or family to your web host’s list feature and
try to do the things we talk about in the marketing chapter. If you can accomplish
half of them, then sure, go ahead and save a buck, and use that to start with.
You’ll eventually come around, but I’m not going to waste space here arguing the

point or listing the reasons why this is a bad idea.
Most of you who try this won’t be able to do 10% of the things we discuss in
the marketing chapter. There, you’ve proven to yourself that you actually need a
mailing list hosting partner. See, that wasn’t so bad.
6. Create Your Business Social Media

Accounts
While you are in the registering mood, go ahead and register your social media
accounts. Register accounts on every social media platform you plan on using
to promote your products or services. Try hard to find a single account name
you can register across all platforms. This isn’t always possible, but the more
consistent you can be, the easier it is for your users to remember you.
You want to get these as soon as you can after registering

your domain name. The worst-case scenario is if you forget
to register them, go public with your site, and have someone
come and sweep them up before you can get to them. Prevent
this by thinking ahead and registering them as soon as you
know what you want.
I always make a “Coming soon” post once the site is registered just in case
someone finds you and wonders what you are up to.
Okay, you’ve done the pre-planning and the pre-set-up legwork. In the next
chapter, we will actually push the whoopie button. We’ll install WordPress/
WooCommerce, a theme, and then talk about some important plugins that will
make life easier.
Congratulations, you are well on your way to your new adventure!

Installing WordPress and
WooCommerce
Welcome to where the rubber meets the road. In this chapter, we stop collecting
things like domain names and social accounts and start building things.
1. Install WordPress
Whichever hosting service you choose, follow their instructions

for setting up a WordPress website.
Some of the better hosts offer you the ability to set up

WordPress and WooCommerce at the same time as SiteGround
does. If you have that option, by all means, take it. If not, then at
least get WordPress set up and running with your domain name
and the standard theme that comes with this year’s model.

2. Secure Your Website
Before we go any further, let’s talk a little about website

security. This is not a comprehensive guide to securing your
WordPress site; consider the steps here “table stakes”. These
are the absolute “must haves” before you open shop.
1. Install an SSL Certificate
At this point in the history of the web, security certificates are expected by users.
If you are just setting up your website, then make sure this is one of the first tasks
you complete. If you already have your site set up, don’t go any further in this
book until you have a security certificate installed. You might like to know that on
SiteGround, they install free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates shortly after creating
each website to make it even simpler for you.
2. Ensure You Have Daily Backups
You need to make sure you have nightly backups configured and running. Most
top-tier hosting partners like SiteGround offer this service. Many hosts maintain
a week’s worth of backups. If you want more—and you do—it is up to you to
download the backups regularly.
I recommend keeping 60 days of backups and then six months of the first backup
of each month. If your site gets compromised and malware gets installed, you
might not notice it for a week or more. If you have 60 days of backups, you can
usually go back far enough to get a clean copy.
3. Ensure You Have Firewalls
Website security is all about layers. Your hosting partner should provide you with
the first level: a hardware firewall. The next layer is what we call an application
layer firewall. In the WordPress ecosystem, this usually means a plugin. There
are several good ones out there, and I encourage you to test out different ones
until you find one that works for you.

Your application firewall should provide services like:
● Site scanning
● Malware removal
● Brute force attack protection
● Strong password enforcement
● Security logging
Most of the plugins available offer these services and more.
All of these layers combined help keep your site safe. Of course, the only
computer that is absolutely safe from being broken into is one that you’ve turned
off, unplugged, wrapped in plastic, and set in a safe somewhere. If a computer is
plugged into the internet and turned on, it is open to being broken into.
4. Manage Users Wisely
Users and login credentials present the biggest threat to your website. Once a
malicious user is inside, regardless of their user level, they start looking for ways
to escalate their privilege. All it takes is one bad line of code in one little-used but
not deleted plugin to give them what they want. Therefore, user maintenance is
crucial for your site.
Administrators
Be extremely careful who you give administrator privilege to. This is the
equivalent of giving someone the keys to your store and saying, “Lock up when
you are done”. Yes, there are times when someone absolutely needs to be an
admin, but you should limit it to those times that are absolutely necessary.
Never ever share your administrator credentials. If you bring a developer on

board to do some work that requires administrator privileges, set them up with
a new admin account. Once their job is done, delete that account.
This keeps your password out of the hands of those who might misuse it or let
it slip to others.

While we are talking about administrators, you should be able to count on a
single hand the administrator accounts on any given site. If you’ve got more than
five, you might have a problem.
Occasionally, you need to log in, go to the user’s list page, click on the Administrator
role and look at the list.
● Do you recognize all of them?
● Are they all valid?
● Are they all still needed?
If you find one you do not recognize, you’ve got trouble. Don’t delete it; that’s
everybody’s first response, but honestly, the horse is out of the barn already. Put
your site in maintenance mode and start searching for a WordPress “cleaner”—
someone experienced in cleaning up compromised WordPress sites. You
absolutely need professional help.
If, on the other hand, you’ve got old admin accounts for people no longer working
with you, disable those accounts and delete them. They are problems waiting to
happen.
There are plugins which allow you to define additional roles. If you need additional
people to help you manage things like inventory or orders, invest in one of them
and create roles with only those permissions needed to do the job.
5. Reinforce Passwords and Logins
Finally, in security, you need to ensure that for all staff accounts—any account
with privileges beyond your normal user, customer, or subscriber—you enforce
strong passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA).
Any account that can change things needs to be difficult for malicious users to
break into. Strong passwords go a long way towards that end. Strong passwords,
however, are just not enough these days. You need one more piece of information;
that’s where 2FA comes in.
It used to be that 2FA required special coding and handing out little devices to
all of your users that would give them a number to type in. These days, with the
advent of the smartphone, most of your users have a device; they just need the

app. There are several good apps out there that range from free to a paid service.
Which one you use depends on your acceptable level of risk.
Requiring 2FA for all upper-level accounts greatly minimizes the chance that
“leaked credentials” will affect your site. We all know you should never reuse
passwords, and yet we all do it. (Stop it! Just stop shaking your head; you do it
too!) 2FA is a cheap, free insurance to make sure that your site is that much safer.
Keeping your site secure is so important that we stopped right after installing
WordPress just to lock it down. Once you’ve got your security in place, you can
begin.
6. Use a Security Plugin
There are several plugins out there that can augment all of the above layers of
security. My personal favorite is the SiteGround Security plugin. If SiteGround
is your hosting partner, then it should be preinstalled on your site when you
set it up. If you are not hosting with SiteGround, you can still install it from the
WordPress plugin repository and use 100% of the functionality. None of the
functionality is dependent on SiteGround’s infrastructure.
SiteGround Security comes with a lot of security features. Each of them can
be turned on or off without bothering the rest of the features. My favorite four
features of the plugin are as follows:
● Two-Factor authentication
● Disabling XML-RPC
● Disabling the login name “admin”
● Lock and protect system folders
I’ve installed stand-alone plugins that did each one of these things. Each time,
I eventually removed the plugin because either it didn’t do the job the way I
wanted it to, or it became abandonware and was holding up the upgrading of
my system.
SiteGround Security integrates all four of these important features in a single

plugin. Because it’s created by SiteGround, I know that it won’t be abandoned.

3. Install WooCommerce
If your hosting partner does not offer you a pre-configured

WordPress/WooCommerce install, then you’ll have to
install it. Many of the better hosting partners like SiteGround
have their own plugin that will guide you through things like
selecting a template, installing WooCommerce, etc.
If you are hosting with SiteGround, setting up a new WooCommerce shop

is as easy as going to your dashboard and clicking the “New Website” button.
From there, follow the prompts until you get to the one where you choose an
application. At that point, select “WooCommerce”. SiteGround does the rest.
They lay the foundation for your new shop and get you ready to answer a few
questions before you are up and running.
Their WordPress Starter plugin simplifies the technical parts of installing and
configuring WordPress, and WooCommerce’s wizard picks up where it leaves off.
If you are not hosting with SiteGround, WooCommerce is nothing more than a
WordPress plugin at its heart. You can install WooCommerce into any existing
WordPress installation by accessing your WordPress Dashboard > Right Menu
> Plugins > Add New > Search for WooCommerce > Choose the WooCommerce
one, by Automattic > click on Install Now.
If you are not comfortable installing plugins on your own, stop right now and find
a developer or DevOps person who can help you. We talked about where to find
them in Chapter 2.
Setup Wizard
Once you have the base plugin installed, you will need to walk through its setup
wizard. This collects most of the important information from you and gets the
basics for WooCommerce up and running, such as your country, address, type of
products you are going to sell, etc.
During the Wizard, there is one step I always skip, “Include Business Features”.
If you look below the white box, it tells you all the plugins it’s about to install; one

of them is JetPack.
If you don’t want all of them but do want some, you can click the little arrow to
the right, and it will list all the plugins it is about to install and pick the ones you
do want it to install. In my case, I remove JetPack and the Mailchimp plugins but
let it install the rest.
Facebook is one that if you plan on using Facebook to market your products,
then it’s a good one to have installed. However, if you aren’t planning on using it,
don’t let the wizard install it.
The same goes for any of the plugins really, if you don’t plan on using it soon,
don’t install it until you need it.
4. Set Up the Needed Pages
When you install WooCommerce or install WooCommerce as

part of your site setup with your hosting partner, it creates
several pages on your site as part of the setup process. If
you go to WooCommerce >Settings >Advanced, you can
see the list of pages that WooCommerce needs.
Any page that does not have a name and Page ID number
has not been set up. This is usually the “Terms and Conditions” page, but there
may be others.
For the pages that are already set up, you can view them from your “Pages” menu.
You can customize them if you like, but in the beginning, I highly recommend you
leave the default layout.
For any page that is not automatically set up, you need to do this manually and
associate them on the WooCommerce->Settings->Advance page.
In the case of “Terms and Conditions”, most sites already have this page. If you
do, then select it from the drop-down box and then click the “Save Changes”
button.
WooCommerce also sets up a default “Privacy Policy” page. This page is left in
draft because for it to be useful, you will need to edit it. If you already have a

privacy policy, you can delete this page. If you do not have a privacy policy, edit
this page to reflect your policy and publish it.
Some third-party vendors like Facebook do not allow you to connect your site to
their service until you have a published privacy policy. It’s important to go ahead
and get this step done.
Get further guidance on the set up process of WooCommerce by

watching this video and following the step-by-step instructions
on the screen.
5. Payment Processors
One plugin you are absolutely going to have is some kind of

payment processor plugin. If you allow it to, the Wizard will
install the basic “WooCommerce Payments” plugin. Setting
up this plugin routes all payments through WooCommerce’s
payment processor.

The other free ones are:
● Stripe
● Paypal
● Amazon Payments
Additionally, there are paid plugins for many other payment processors you can
install and configure. We will see this step in more detail in Chapter 4, about
“Order Processing”.
6. Install Additional Plugins
It should be noted that while the basics of WooCommerce

are free, if you want to do anything other than selling a
simple product, you are going to be adding or purchasing
plugins. They can come from:
● WooCommerce themselves
● Third-party vendors
Outside of WooCommerce, you still need a few important plugins. The one that
I want to make sure you install is Yoast SEO. Every WordPress install needs Yoast
installed. Beyond that, you can begin to identify the different functionality you
need for your ecommerce site. As you see a need, write it down so you can begin
identifying the different plugins that can meet that need.
TIP: No matter what plugin you are interested in, before you install it, do some
research. At the very least, put “WordPress PLUGIN NAME problems” into a
search engine and see what problems exist. Every plugin out there, no matter
how awesome, is going to have someone who hates it. Don’t take the fact that
there are detractors to be a negative sign. Look for recent complaints and things
that don’t seem to be being addressed by the author. Reputable plugins have
support teams that respond to problems. This doesn’t always mean they will
fix them—because the issue might not really be a problem—but they should at
least respond.

If you are not sure which plugins you need, it’s time to drag your developer
into the conversation. They can help you select the plugins you need to get the
functionality you need. In some cases, you may need both your developer and
your designer in the conversation because there are plugins your developer
needs to install, configure, and possibly customize, but that also emits content
to the user. In that case, you need both of your experts to discuss the pros and
cons to get the plugin that is exactly right for your situation.
7. Choose Your Theme
Now that we have WordPress and WooCommerce set up, it

is time to pick a theme!
A WordPress theme is a predetermined template which sets up the layout and

design of your website. There are lots of options and thanks to them, you can
customize the appearance of your site, including the layout, typography, color,
and other design elements.
Selecting a theme is like selecting a life partner. There are a lot of them out there
that meet your criteria, but there are probably only a few that meet your criteria
and that you like.
To select a theme, first go to your WordPress Wizard. It will ask you to select a
theme and give you a list of both free and paid themes that are all “WooCommerce
compatible”. Within them, you should make sure that your chosen theme
complies with the following points:
● It is compatible with WooCommerce. The ones that are will say so. If you
don’t see that, assume it’s not and mark it off your list no matter how
pretty or cheap it is.
● It comes from a reputable developer or company; this gives you peace of

mind about the quality and support.
● It provides a framework. Themes that offer a framework are a great

place to start. They are clean, well-structured themes you can shape into
whatever you need.
● It has mobile-friendly features, which means it can adapt your website

to different types of devices apart from desktop, such as tablets or

smartphones.
For the sake of getting things set up, pick one of the free ones for now. I’ve had
good luck with “Storefront”, and it may be that it provides you with all the
features you need.
Once you get WooCommerce set up and operational, it’s time to pause and think
about what we want our site to look like and what features we need.
At this point, it is most likely time to call in an expert. Long gone are the days
when WordPress themes were simple, and you could just roll your own or pick
the default (K2 anyone?) and customize it. These days themes are complex
applications in their own right, and set up should be done by a professional.
You and your designer must discuss everything from the colors you want to use,
the fonts you want to standardize on, logo sizes, and image styles. The outcome
of this discussion should be a comprehensive “style guide”. This is a document
that answers any questions you may have when creating new content for your
site.
Once you have a style guide, let your designer implement it.
● Let them design your home page.
● Let them provide you with templates for:

• Posts
• Pages
• Products
If you invest in getting good templates set up at the beginning, adding new
content to your site will be easy and won’t usually require you to get your
designer involved.
While you are getting your theme set up, don’t just sit around. You should be
doing the other things that don’t require your theme to be set up.
● Make sure that WooCommerce is completely set up.
● Start working on your marketing plan.
● Go over your checklist and make sure you know all the functionality you
need for your site and that you have the plugins installed necessary to
achieve your goals.

Getting your theme set up and skinned properly is one of the more time-
consuming processes you will go through. Resist the urge to rush it, cut corners,
or do other display-related tasks at the same time, like entering products into
your system.
Take the time to get this step done right, and you’ll only have to do it once. If you
rush it or cut corners, you’ll end up paying for it again and again.
WordPress site owners suffer from an embarrassment of riches when it comes

to themes. Even the list of WooCommerce themes is long, and there are some
great ones there. Inevitably, you will be faced with the difficult choice of picking
one.
These days WordPress themes are much less about the color and much more
about the features. A good designer can make anything have the color scheme
you want, but if the theme you select is missing features that make it possible for
them to build things out properly, you’ll end up paying for that. Therefore, the
question of, “Which theme should I use?” is one you should ask your designer
and not try to answer yourself.
Most good designers have a theme or a few themes they prefer working with.
Letting them choose the theme means that they will choose one that meets your
requirements but is one they understand how to work with. This reduces your
overall cost of implementation. Don’t be surprised when they choose one that
is not free. Yes, you can get free themes for WordPress. However, unless you are
putting up your personal blog, be prepared to pay for the theme.
Once you have your basic plugins installed and have selected, installed, and
configured your theme, you are over the hump. This part takes a while, but the
payoff of spending the proper time and money is worth it.
BONUS: If you host your website with SiteGround, apart from pre-installing
WooCommerce for you, they also preinstall the Storefront theme for your ease.
You can also harness their WordPress Starter tool to easily select a theme and
additional features.

Adding Products
You should now have the shell of your store up. Since there are a lot of things
to do, it’s okay to multi-task. If your designer is still working on graphics or your
wordsmith is working on product copy, that’s fine. The important thing is not to
get too many balls in the air so that you can keep track of them all.
One thing most store owners can do at this point is begin to get their inventory
together.
The Basics of a Product
A store owner often thinks of a product as a physical thing—

something they made or bought and are re-selling. Ecommerce
can also be used to sell services and virtual products.

Product Types: Physical Products, Services, and Virtual
Products
1. Physical Products. T-Shirts are a type of physical product, and throughout

this chapter, I will use them as an example product because it is one most
people can understand.
2. A service is just that, some type of service you provide for someone else.
Coaching, consulting, translations, interpretations, anything you do for
someone else is a service. Most of the time, services can be seen as trading
time for money.
3. Virtual products can be anything that is not a physical product or a service.

Ebooks, MP3 files, videos of presentations, PDFs of love poetry, any of these
are virtual products. They are not a physical product; they are a collection of
bits. They are not services because you can sell them repeatedly, whereas
time is a finite resource that can only be sold once in most cases.
Usually, virtual products are downloaded. This brings its own set of problems
because, with a download, you have to figure out where to store it and how to
make sure that only those that purchase it can download it. We’ll talk more about
this later.
In an ecommerce environment, products have a lot of attributes. In all three

cases, though—physical products, virtual products, and service products—each
product has attributes important to the sale.
Attributes
Attributes are a combination of things you can see and feel—size, color, weight—
and things that are not readily observable (taxable, shippable, virtual). All of the
different attributes come together to make up your product. Let’s see how to
define them:
1. List Your First 10 Products
Before you start adding products into your system, go ahead and sit down with
a pad of paper and list your first 10 products. Once you get 10 going, you can do
the rest. If you are not planning to sell 10 products, or if your products are not
physical, this exercise is still important. If you are selling consulting services or

coaching services, you may only have one product. You still need to identify the
product so that you can do the next step.
2. Add and Prioritize Attributes for Them

Now that you’ve listed those 10, think about them. What are the attributes that
are important to the buyer?
If you are selling tees, then possible attributes are:

● Size
● Color
● Style
Those are the easy ones. As you look at your list of products, you can develop a
list of common attributes. Write them down.
Now, which of those are important? With tees, those three are really important.
I know that when I am buying a tee, I need to know at the very least those three
things.
Beyond that, if the T-shirt has a message printed on it, I want to see a picture of
it—possibly a picture of the front or back. I do not, however, particularly care
how much it weighs. That’s not an important attribute for the sale of a tee.
In the case of selling services, they may have attributes like:
● Time allotted per unit (selling your services in 1 hour increments)
● Response time
● Followup
Each service has its own set of attributes. Again, the point is to find the important
ones and focus on those.
3. Have a Look at What Others Do
Do some market research! Look at your list. If possible, check out other websites
that sell the same or similar products. See what attributes they thought were
important. When you go into their cart, what selectors do you have? What things
can you change when ordering? All of these are important attributes.

4. Select the Most Important Attributes
Strike through any attribute you have listed that is not important to the sale.
This doesn’t mean we won’t need to collect this information, but we don’t need
it right now to enter our first 10 products. Remember, we can always come back
and adjust!
This is the list you are compiling for each of your first 10 products.
How To Add Your First Product
Now that you have a list of products and attributes let’s

put the first product into the system.
1. Log into your website, and on the left-hand side in the

Admin menu bar, click on Products > Add New.
2. If you are familiar at all with WordPress, then this should look very familiar.
The first thing you enter is the product name.
3. The next field is a large text area for you to enter your product’s description.
This one confuses some people because they expect this will be displayed
directly under the title. Where it is displayed is up to the theme you selected.
What you type here is shown as the heading “Description”. The “Short
Description” is displayed under the title; we’ll talk about that in a bit.
4. Next, we get to the product data. This is where you add all those attributes
you listed.
Many of the attributes you thought of are probably already here in this panel.
There are tabs on the left-hand side that show you different groupings of
attributes. For example, when you click on the “General” tab, you should see a
place to enter the item’s price—an essential attribute.
IMPORTANT: When entering prices, just enter the number. Do not enter the
currency symbol. If you’ve not done so already, you can change the currency
symbol, the decimal separator, and other regional settings in the WooCommerce
> Settings page.

How To Set Up Product Variations
Many of you will have “variations” for tees; this might be the
material’s color. If, for example, we wanted to sell the same
tee on a gray, tan, and light blue fabric, we would not want to
enter three different products. Thankfully, WooCommerce
handles this out of the box, but you have to think it through
before starting.
1. Create the Variable Attribute

The first thing you need to do is create the attribute that changes. In our case,
we’ll call it color.
1. Navigate to Products > Attributes from the WordPress admin panel.

2. Enter the name of the attribute—“color” and click the Add attribute
button.
3. Click the “Configure terms” link so we can add the colors we want to offer.
4. Add “Gray”, “Tan”, and “Light Blue”.
The reason I say you have to think this through is we’ve just used the attribute
name “color”. If you decide to sell shorts later, and they come in other colors,
you might want different color names for them. You need to be careful what you
name your attributes. Make them descriptive, but think about conflicts down the
line.
Even if you sell shorts later, you don’t have to use the colors you picked for tees.
As we’ll see in the next section, we can use all of the colors defined, but we can
also choose only specific colors.
2. Add a Variable Product
Now, let’s add a variable product. This allows us to use the color attribute to
create variations.
1. Click on Product > Add New to add a new product. Give it the product
name of “Witty T-Shirt”.
2. Give it a description and a short description but do not say anything

about the color.

3. Below the description, change “Simple Product” to “Variable Product”.
4. Click on the “Attributes” tab and use the drop-down to select the color
attribute we just created. Then click Add.
5. Check the box that says, “Visible on the product page” and the box
that says, “Used for variations”. The second one is important because,
without it, you won’t actually have product variations.
6. In the text box labeled “Value(s)”, either enter the colors you want this
shirt to be available in or click the “Select All” to add them all.
7. Select the “Variations” tab. In the drop-down option that says “Add
variation”, select “Create variations for all attributes”. Then, click the
“GO” button. This creates three versions of our “Witty T-Shirt”.
We now have three versions of our “Witty T-Shirt”. Each of these variations have
attributes like price, etc. Before we can ace them, we have to at least set the price
for each variation.
3. Add a Price to Your Product Variations

To the right of each variation is an arrow pointing down. Click it to point it
up. This shows us the panel where we can set the different attributes for each
variation. The only one that has to be set is the price. Set the price on each of the
colors you selected.
4. Add an Image to Your Product Variations

Finally, each variation can have its own image. If you have three different colors
for your witty tee, you want to have pictures of each color. To add a picture to
the variation, click the image placeholder for each variation to take you to the
standard WordPress media selector, where you can pick an image or upload it.
The image variation does not show until your customer selects the product and
then the variation—in our case, one of the colors. It then overrides the default
image for the product with the variation’s image.
Make sure and click “Save Changes” after you’ve made all your changes.

How To Create a Product List Page
Remember, I told you to list your first 10 products on paper

before we started. Now, it’s time to enter them into the
system. Using the instructions above, you should be able to
get your first 10 products into the system.
Let’s look at our “Product Listing Page”. Remember when

we talked about how WooCommerce creates some pages for
you automatically? One of the pages it creates for you is your “Shop” page. If,
after entering 10 products, you look at this page and think, “Hmmmm...this looks
good”, then skip the rest of this section. If, however, you’d like to customize it a
bit, then you are in luck; it’s easy.
Changing how your shop page looks is easy for some settings, but beyond the
easy stuff, you should bring on a WooCommerce specialist who can help you set
up a custom template.
1. WooCommerce adds a section to the “Appearance” menu. Navigate to

“Appearance > Customize”. From there, you will see a list of options on the
left side of the page.
2. Select “WooCommerce”.
3. Select “Product Catalog”. These are the easy options to change. I always set
my catalogs to display two columns and four rows. You, however, should try
different settings and then look at each using a variety of devices. Find the
combination that works best for you and use that.
Additionally, unless you have many product categories, I would suggest that your
shop page display products and not categories. Displaying categories means
that your visitors have one more click to make before they can see and buy your
product. That may be the one click too far for them. Again, however, it is up to
you, the shop owner, to experiment to see which works best for you and your
customers.
4. Once you are happy with the settings, click “Publish” to make them live.
In addition to the changes you can make in appearance, you can also edit the
shop page itself. Anything you add to the shop page appears on all shop pages
before your products. Edit the shop page until it looks exactly how you want it,

and then click Update to publish the changes.
Beyond a single shop page, you can create pages for new products, products
on sale, products of a certain category, etc. You can slice up your product line in
a variety of ways to help your customer locate that one product they can’t live
without.
How to Feature a Product
The final thing we’ll look at is the concept of a “featured

product”.
The featured product feature allows you to showcase

specific products in different parts of your online store.
You can control which products are featured by toggling
them on and off for each product.
Once a product is featured, you can have a special page to display them on, put
them in a sidebar widget, or add them to any post or page. Let’s see how to do it.
1. Pull up one of your products that you’ve entered, or if you are just entering
dummy data, bring up our “Witty T-Shirt” product.
2. On the right side of the page, just above the “Publish/Update” button, is
where you can set “catalog visibility”. Click the Edit link, and it expands to
give you several options.
3. Check “This is a featured product” and then click “Update/Publish”.
After selecting a featured product, if you navigate to your list of products

(Products > All Products), you should see the product you featured has a solid
star displaying next to the product’s status. This is your quick indicator of which
products are featured.
Now that we have a featured product let’s put it in our sidebar.
4. Navigate to “Appearance > Widgets”.

5. You should see the standard sidebar setup. In almost every site I work on, I
delete all of these items but “Search”. Most of the default widgets are not
useful to an ecommerce site and may distract your users from what you
really want them to focus on, your products or services.
6. After you have them the way you like, let’s add one. I usually put this directly
under “search” as most users look for search at the top of the sidebar.
7. In the list of available widgets, find “Products” and drag it over to the
sidebar beneath search.
8. When you drop it, it expands to show you the options available. The most
important one for us is the one labeled “Show”. Select that one and select
“Featured products”. The rest of the options are up to you. I put “Featured
Products” in the title field.
9. When it looks the way you want it, click “Save” to save the widget. Then, look
at one of your pages. You should see your featured product directly under
the search box.
How To Change a Featured Product
Changing out the featured product is as easy as:
1. Going to the product,
2. Unchecking, “This is a featured product”, and
3. Selecting it on another one.
You can have multiple products featured just by checking the box on multiple
products. If you have a lot of featured products, the sidebar widget allows you to
specify the maximum number to display.
Now that you have your products in the system, your site should begin to start
taking shape. Later in this book, we will talk about marketing and the other
content you can create to help your customers find you and understand the best
ways to use your products.

Next, though, we’ll talk about an important step; your order flow and taking an
order. After all, that is the point of having a shopping cart!
Follow the steps to adding your first product and variations on

WooCommerce in this video.

Processing Orders
Congratulations on making it this far. Now that you have a site up and running,
WordPress and WooCommerce properly configured, and products in your store,
it is time to turn our attention to how orders will be processed in your system.
Payment Processing
The first thing we need to look at is how we will take our

customer’s money. We call this “Payment Processing”.
When I started working in “mail-order marketing” (that’s

what we called ecommerce before the internet), it was
a very different place. Credit cards were available but
not nearly as popular as they are today. We had to offer
customers other options. Most mail-order marketing companies had three
payment methods:
1. Credit card (for the cutting edge customers who had them)
2. Mail in a check
3. Cash on delivery (c.o.d.)

In the case of two and three, they were very inefficient. If a customer sent in a
check, we had to either wait for it to clear the bank before shipping the order or
risk getting a bad check and being stuck with the bill.
Cash on delivery was even worse. You shipped the product out to the customer,
and the postal worker had to collect it for you.
● If the person wasn’t home, the product came back to you.
● If the person couldn’t find their wallet, the product came back to you.
● If the person changed their mind, the product came back to you.
Still, with all of these problems, most of us managed to survive and sell products.
Now the bar is a lot lower. These days, if you have a phone, a tablet, or a
computer, you can build a website, create an endless list of products, and take
your customers’ money easily and safely. So let’s look at exactly how you do
that.
Get a quick overview of the different Payment Methods in

WooCommerce before diving deeper into each one in the
chapter below.

WooCommerce Payment Methods
WooCommerce gives you a wide range of options.
From your site’s admin dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings

and find the “Payments” tab. Clicking on it gives us a good start to look at our
payment options. The default options are:
● Direct bank transfer
● Check payments
● Cash on delivery
● Paypal Standard
Out of the box, you are ready to take most orders. You can use PayPal to process
most common credit cards; the other options can handle the rest of your needs.
This is assuming that you enable them and properly configure them.
A Note on Credit Card Processors

The credit card options available and the processor options vary wildly by
country. Not all countries have access to the same options. For this book, I will
discuss the popular options but please, investigate your regional options and
laws before you make any decisions.
Credit Card Payment Processors
For processing credit cards, the most popular options in North America and
Europe seem to be:
● Stripe
● PayPal*
● Square
*I am lumping all of PayPal’s extensions together here. They have several different
ways to process payments, and only “Paypal Standard” comes pre-installed.

Note: There are most likely other options depending on your country. If you
navigate to WooCommerce > Extensions and click on the “Payments” tab, you
will see all the available options. Again, some of these may be location-specific;
do some research before you spend the time setting up any payment processor.
The “second-tier” payment processors contain a lot of “A-List players”.
● Amazon Pay
● WooCommerce Payments
The important thing to look for in a payment processor, once you have
determined that they operate in your country or region, are the terms they offer.
While most fees and transactions are very similar, this does not mean that all
payment processors are the same.
The three things we will be comparing payment processors on are:
1. Percentage of transaction
2. Transaction fee
3. Do they offer recurring payments? (Subscriptions)
These are three crucial metrics for most online store operators, so we will focus
on them.
Processes
Transaction
Name Transaction fee recurring
Percentage
payments
Stripe 2.9% 0.30 (USD) Yes
PayPal 2.9% 0.30 (USD) Yes
Square 2.75% 0.10 (USD) Yes
Amazon Pay 2.9% 0.30 (USD) Yes
WooCommerce
2.9% 0.30 (USD) Yes
Payments

Just looking at the chart above, the obvious choice would be Square. However,
with any decision, you need to do your research. Let’s take a closer look.
Square
Looking into it, Square is an excellent choice if you are physically taking credit
cards and also want to sell online. They started in the physical spaces and have
expanded into the online. Their online offering is a bit more cumbersome than
other offerings. Still, if you are already using Square, then it’s a good choice.
Stripe
Stripe began online and is still the most popular processor in North America
and Europe. They are easy to get set up and operate with, and since they started
online, their workflow is easy to work with.
PayPal
The granddaddy of all payment processors, PayPal is almost everyone’s starting
choice. Given their ubiquity, many stores start here and stay here. If PayPal
meets all of your needs and you are satisfied with their terms and conditions, by
all means, use them.
Amazon Pay
New to payment processing for others, but certainly not new to payment
processing in general, Amazon is a solid choice. If you plan to sell internationally,
be aware that Amazon charges “cross-border processing fees”, which are
higher than their “domestic processing fees”. This is not unusual for payment
processors, but they bring it out in their transaction fees more prominently than
other processors.
WooCommerce Payments
The new kid on the block is WooCommerce Payments. They offer a very
compelling service.
● It is designed specifically to work with WooCommerce. Its workflow seems

to be the most complete and the most flexible.
● They offer access to Apple Pay. If you want to offer a “Pay with Apple Pay”
button on your website, this is probably the easiest way to do that.
● WooCommerce promises to pay out within minutes for “eligible

merchants” (and this is a metric you should really pay attention to). The
standard assumption is, “It’s my money; why shouldn’t I have access to it
immediately?” But not all processors are this friendly. Do your research
and understand the terms of a payment processor before you sign up with
one.
The downside to WooCommerce Payments is that it is not installed by

default. You have to install the extension to use it, and it’s not a single plugin;
you need a series of them. For instance, if you want to accept Apple Pay, you
must install the Apple Pay plugin and configure it. Currently, like WooCommerce
Payments, Apple Pay is a free plugin.
Multiple currencies, however, is not. If you want to accept payment in various

currencies with WooCommerce Payments, you must install the WooCommerce
Multi-Currency plugin.
The fact that WooCommerce Payments is spread out over multiple plugins is not
necessarily a downside; it is just something you as a site owner need to know
and understand.
The final thing to know about WooCommerce Payments is it is a wrapper for

Stripe. WooCommerce layers on tops of Stripe. This does not mean that you
need to install and configure stripe as well. The WooCommerce Payments plugin
will walk you through that.
How To Set Up a Payment Processor Account
Once you have decided which payment processor you are going to use, being
able to accept payments is as simple as:
1. Setting up an account with the payment processor,
2. Installing the WooCommerce plugin, and
3. Configuring it.
Most Payment processors are going to authorize you by passing you an “API
key”. This is almost always a long and random string of letters and numbers
unique to you and secret. Many processors have two keys you have to store to
authorize your transactions. The plugins tell you precisely what is needed and, in
most cases, include a link for you to follow to get your keys.

Once you have selected the payment processor you are starting with, be
prepared to spend some time setting up your account, proving who you are, and
providing a lot of personal information.
Tip: Be wary of any payment processor that lets you get by with just your name
and email address. You want this process to be strict and strictly enforced
with everyone. The fact that it takes you time to get this set up should give you
confidence in the processor.
Checkout Workflow
Now that you can accept payments, it is time to turn to how

your checkout process works. We call this your “Checkout
Workflow”, and there are many different options. For the
sake of simplicity, let’s focus on two different workflows
and then discuss a couple of options.
Single Page
The most straightforward workflow is the single-page checkout. The name

describes it accurately. When a customer clicks “checkout”, you present them
with a single page that collects all their information. The upside is that you don’t
force your users to fill out several information pages; they get it all at once and
are finished. This is the old-school way of doing things.
Wizard
Newer systems allow you to break the collection of information up across several
screens. This means users are not hit with 20-30 fields to fill out at once but
that the data is logically grouped. Most site owners are now using the wizard
workflow.
The problem with both workflows is cart abandonment. On the single page, the
user may feel it’s too much information to fill out “right now” and intend to come

back later but never do.
With the Wizard workflow, users may begin to feel like they are in a never-ending
quest to purchase your product and abandon the cart after the third screen.
Which way is best for you is largely dependent on your customers. Generally
speaking, if you are selling a low-cost product, then collecting the minimal
information on a single page checkout page offers less friction to your users.
Higher-priced or complex offerings can benefit from multi-page cart wizards

because the user is more committed to purchasing the product and thus will
accept the higher friction level.
Out of the box, WooCommerce comes with a single-page checkout workflow.

Like everything in WooCommerce there are both free and paid plugins that allow
you to customize your checkout workflow without resorting to writing code.
The place to start exploring these is the WooCommerce Extension marketplace.
These tend to be the more reputable vendors.
That said, searching the web for “WooCommerce checkout Workflow” gives
you a plethora of options, many of which do not appear on the WooCommerce
Extension marketplace. Find a solution that works for you and is from a vendor
that you trust. The choice is up to you, but so is the responsibility.
Upsells
One of the great tools for site owners is the “upsell”. Major retailers do this
everywhere. On a product page, you may see sections of the page labeled
“related products” or “customers that bought this product also bought”. When
planning your checkout workflow, don’t forget to include an upsell!
An upsell on your checkout page is the online equivalent of a point-of-sale

display. There is a reason most grocery stores put candy and magazines in the
checkout aisle. People pick these up as impulse buys. As an online merchant, you
don’t have to miss out on these sales. There are several plugins that you can get
for WooCommerce that will add an upsell to your checkout page.
The first thing you need to decide is what you want as an upsell. A simple option
is offering every person checking out the same special. This is a basic offering,
and if this is your goal, there are many options available.

A more complex offering is to tailor the offering to the purchaser. For example,
if they have a blue widget in their shopping cart, your checkout upsell could be a
blue widget cozy at a special price. This requires a bit more sophistication in the
code and means that your options are more limited.
As with everything, don’t install a plugin until you have:
1. Identified your needs.
2. Researched the available plugins that meet your needs and selected one of
them to try.
If you install a plugin in production to test it out, make sure you remove it if it
does not meet your needs. This doesn’t mean just deactivate it but delete it from
your system.
Upsells can increase your overall “Average Cart Value” (ACV) and thus your
profitability.
Personally Identifying Information (PII)
One note about your checkout workflow: This is

the place where most online stores collect the most
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on their
customers. Be very careful with PII. Collect only the
information you need to process the payment and only
store the long-term information you absolutely need.
Most payment processors store the credit card number

for you. As a general rule, this is one piece of information you never want to store
on your system.
Beyond that, though, do you need to store their shipping address long-term? Are
you collecting other information on them in a database? The more PII you collect
about your users, the more responsible you are for its safety and security.
In the United States “California Consumer Protect Act” (CCP) and in Europe, the
“General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR) are important laws. Regardless of
whether you are in either of these regions, you may be held responsible under

these laws if your customers are.
If you are in doubt, consult a local lawyer to find out your responsibility for PII.
Generally, though, collect as little as you can and store it for as short an amount
of time as feasible. It might limit some of your marketing options, but it will
reduce your legal responsibilities.
Taxes (The Tax Man Cometh)
I am not aware of anywhere you can sell things online

where you do not owe taxes to someone. Here in the U.S.,
the rules are complex and ever-changing. Still, every time
you sell a product, you will most likely have to collect tax
on that item. If you collect tax, you are only holding on to
it for whatever governmental agency you have to remit it
to. Eventually, they are going to want their money.
So plan for this as you are setting up your site instead of figuring it out after
selling things and getting hit with the tax bill.
The best (and honestly the only) advice I can give you on whether you should
collect taxes is to consult a local accountant with experience in online transactions.
Some items in some areas are taxed; others are not. In some countries, you pay
the local tax; in others, you pay tax based on your customer’s location. It is a
figurative minefield of regulations. Get help.
How To Set Up Taxes
If you live in one of the 30 countries that WooCommerce’s Tax plugin covers, you
are in luck. Setting up and collecting taxes is as easy as installing a plugin and
configuring it.
If you’ve not already installed it, you will need to install Jetpack by Automattic
first. Jetpack is a large plugin that does a lot of different and interesting things.
1. For now, install and activate Jetpack but tell it no when it suggests other
services. You can always go back and set those up later if you like.

2. Install WooCommerce’s free extension “WooCommerce Tax” by:
1. Navigating to WooCommerce > Extensions.
2. In the search field, enter “WooCommerce Tax” and press Enter.
3. Select the extension from the list and follow the prompts.
Note: WooCommerce extensions are standard WordPress plugins.

WooComemrce walks you through purchasing (even the free ones) the extension
and then installing it. If the installation fails for some reason, you can download
the extension and install it like any other WordPress plugin.
3. Once WooCommerce Tax is installed and activated, navigate to

WooCommerce > Home. You should see a new item in the “Getting ready
to start selling” section: “Add tax rates”. Click the link, and let’s set up a
tax rate.
4. When asked, tell it, “Yes please”, to allow Jetpack and WooCommerce to
automate your sales tax collection.
Now you are done. Yes, it is that simple. When your customers enter their address
into your shopping cart, it calculates how much tax is owed and to what entity.
How To Get Tax Reports
If you navigate to WooCommerce->Reports, you can click on the “Tax” tab and
get a report of all taxes collected and from what entity.
How To Make Changes to the Tax Settings
You can change the tax settings by navigating to WooCommerce > Settings and
clicking on the Tax tab. This allows you to change things such as whether the
price you display in your shop should include taxes or not.
All of this helps you collect the taxes you have to remit to the various government
agencies. It does not, however, actually pay these taxes for you. You need to
consult with a tax expert that understands ecommerce for advice on how to
remit the monies you collect to the various agencies.

If you have other needs, or if WooCommerce/Jetpack just doesn’t look good to
you, the WooCommerce marketplace has many options for you to test out.
Again, your first step is to consult with an expert in your area to see what you
need before installing and configuring plugins.

Products Shipping and
Inventory Management
Now that you have a product to sell and a payment processor in place, you need
to think about how you will get the products to your customers.
I grew up working in a warehouse for my parent’s company. By the time I was 15,
I could fill out a UPS book by myself and was on a first-name basis with our driver.
I knew how to pull orders, pack orders, and do the paperwork. I didn’t like doing
it, c’mon, I was 15, but I was pretty good at it.
Shipping for Physical Goods
Things have come a long way since then, and the changes
are for the better. Still, shipping is something that you will
deal with if you are selling physical products.
The first decision you have to make is who your primary

shipping partner is going to be. If you are in the U.S.,
the United States Postal System (USPS) is one of your

options. In other countries, this would be your local postal system. This is where
most new companies start because it requires little to no investment up-front,
and if you are shipping within your country, it’s usually reliable.
Once you need advanced or cross-border services, though, you may have to
branch out into one of the major shippers. Even within your own country, you
may find that one of the major shippers is a better, more reliable, and sometimes
even cheaper option.
The major carriers in the United States are:

● FedEx
● UPS
● USPS
● DHL
● Amazon
Yes, Amazon is a shipper. They have the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) system you
can use to ship your products even if Amazon isn’t your primary channel. Amazon
will pick, pack, ship, and track your orders for you. Of course, it comes at a price.
To integrate into WooCommerce, you have to buy the extension, and Amazon
charges a monthly fee plus a per package fee. Make sure you understand their
fee structure and requirements before you dive headlong into this program. Still,
for many store owners, this will be an attractive offering.
There are a lot of other shipping options. When it is time for you to make the
decision, do your research. Search the internet for pricing structures and
reliability. Remember, cheap isn’t really cheap if they don’t deliver the package.
Reliability is important!
How To Set Up Shipping
To properly set up your shipping in WooCommerce, we

again rely on Jetpack. If you installed it in the previous
chapter, then you don’t need to do anything new. If,
however, you did not install it when setting up taxes, you
need to do so now.

Install Jetpack
As with the previous instructions, ignore all the suggestions after you activate
Jetpack. We don’t need any of them to calculate shipping costs. After you have
finished this tutorial, feel free to navigate to Jetpack > Settings and look at the
options available to you.
Set Up Shipping Zones
1. Navigate to WooCommerce > Home. There is one task remaining in the “Get
ready to start selling” wizard, “Set up shipping costs”. Click the link to take
us to the shipping costs wizard.
Before we dive deeper into this, you need to understand the concepts we are
dealing with. WooCommerce and Jetpack allow you to set up zones. A zone is a
geographical region where you will ship your products and charge a flat rate
for doing so. WooCommerce cannot calculate actual shipping costs and allow
you to add on a handling fee out of the box. There are WooCommerce extensions
for most major carriers to help you do this; however, they are not free.
Suppose your products do not lend themselves to flat-rate shipping. In that

case, you should consider one or more of the carrier-specific extensions that
can accurately calculate shipping for your product based on its weight and the
address being shipped to.
For free, though, we can set up shipping zones and charge our customers based
on those zones. The shipping costs wizard helps us get started, but we can
constantly adjust them later.
The wizard prompts us for how much we want to charge someone to ship
anywhere in the United States. For simplicity’s sake, let’s enter $5.00. Now, any
order shipping to an address in the United States will be charged a flat rate of
$5.00.
2. Now that the Wizard is complete, let’s navigate over to WooCommerce >
Settings and click on the Shipping tab to set up more granular shipping.
Let’s our company is in Atlanta, GA in the United States. Specifically in the zip
code 30301. We want to set up two more shipping zones that both fall inside of
the United States zone.

First, let’s set up a zone for Georgia. Things we ship to customers in Georgia
won’t cost as much as things we might ship to Los Angeles, CA. So let’s reduce
the shipping to $3.00.
1. From the Shipping tab, click the “Add shipping zone” button.
2. Give this zone a name: Georgia.

3. Select the region. In this case, type Georgia and select “Georgia, United
States (US)”.
4. Click the “Add shipping method” button.

5. Select “Flat Rate”.
Now we have two zones. Whenever anyone from the United States orders one
of our products, they will automatically be charged $5.00 in shipping. If their
address is in Georgia, then they will only be charged $3.00.
3. What about locals? Should we charge them a shipping fee if someone is in

our local zip code and wants to pick up their item? Probably not. So let’s add
one more shipping zone.
1. Click the “Add shipping zone” button.

2. In the name, enter 30301—the zipcode of our fictional company.
3. In Zone Regions, again select “Georgia, United States (US)”.
4. Then click the link below “Limit to specific ZIP/postcodes” and enter
30301 into the box. Note that if you are entering multiple zip codes, you
have three options.
a. Enter each zip code, one per line
b. Enter a wildcard (e.g. 3030*)
c. Enter a range separated by ellipses (e.g., 30301...30305)
6. Select “Local Pickup” as the shipping method and click the “Add
shipping method” button.
Now you can click the “Shipping zones” link above and see all three zones.
The order of your shipping zones is important. WooCommerce starts at the top

of your list and finds the first one that matches. Therefore, if the United States is
the first one on your list, they will be charged the full $5.00 shipping even if they
are a local customer.
With this in mind, please take a moment and order your shipping zones by
dragging them up and down the list until you get them in the proper order.
You can create as many zones as you like and put whatever fees you want for each
zone. One final zone is created for you automatically: Locations not covered by
your other zones. If you do not set this zone up, then customers who are not in
a zone you have created will not be able to complete an order.
While all of this comes free with WooCommerce, you can lose a lot of money with
flat-rate shipping if you aren’t careful. The other side of the coin is to keep from
losing money, you have to overcharge your customers. Neither of these options
is great. Yes, you can spend a lot of time setting up a complex list of shipping
zones, each with fees that are close to what it will cost you. Or you can purchase
one or more of the carrier extensions for WooCommerce and get set up with
them. In the United States, a good option to start with is USPS. If you purchase
that one, it accurately computes the shipping costs, and you have the option of
installing a label printing extension for free that prints USPS-approved labels
ready to place on your packages.
Let’s watch on the screen how to put your shipping in place.

Inventory Management
Knowing how many you have in stock is vital if you sell

a physical product (like a T-Shirt and not a PDF of a
book showing T-Shirts). How you manage inventory in
WooCommerce depends on the type of product you are
selling.
Single Variation Product
A product that only has a single variation has its stock managed in the
“Inventory” tab of the Edit Product screen. The first thing you need to do if you
are managing your stock through WooCommerce is to check the check box on
the product “Enable stock management at product level”.
Doing so reveals three new fields:

● Stock quantity - How many of this item do you physically have?
● Allow backorders - This is a dropdown with options to allow you to select

how to handle when someone wants to buy a product you don’t currently
have.
• Do Not Allow - If you don’t have it, you can’t sell it.
• Allow but notify the customer - Let the customer buy it but let them
know it’s on backorder.
• Allow - Just take the order as usual.
● Low stock threshold - When set, when your item’s stock reaches this
quantity, you will receive an email letting you know that you are low on
stock. This box allows you to enter a number, and it will override the
store-wide default you can set in WooCommerce > Settings > Product >
Inventory.
Multiple Variations Product
If the product you sell has variations, you can still use the above method to keep
track, but it will only keep a total number of items. If you want to track how many

you have of each variation, the process is similar but in a different place.
In the Edit Product screen, go to “Variations” instead of “Inventory”. Expand
one of the variations of your product by clicking on it, and you can see the same
“Manage Stock?” checkbox. If checked, the same three fields appear. The
difference is that the values you set here only apply to this specific variation. You
can set different values for each variation and track stocking levels per variation.
As with any inventory system, the number in the system will get out of sync
with the actual number on occasion. Therefore, if you are using WooCommerce
to track stock, it is good to do a periodic “inventory count” and ensure that the
number in the system is the number you have on hand.
When you receive new stock, you go to each product and update “Stock
quantity” with the total amount you currently have on hand. Each time an item
is ordered, WooCommerce takes one out of this number.
Shipping for Digital Goods
With the advent of the internet came the ability to readily

sell digital goods. At first, it was ebooks as PDFs and other
lightweight offerings. As bandwidth grew, so did the size of
the items sold. These days it is not unusual for full-length
movies to be sold and delivered over the internet.
This offers excellent opportunities for ecommerce retailers,

but it also has challenges.
The opportunities are that anything that you can create digitally can now be
monetized. You don’t have to worry about getting a major publisher onboard
for your book idea; the tools you need to write it and publish it are commonly
available to everyone—the same with an informational video or even a course.
You can build it, bring it to market, promote it, and sell it if you have an idea.
Because there are no physical goods involved, your costs of goods sold are
almost nothing for digital goods. You can sell as many copies of your product as
your audience will purchase.
That ability to endlessly duplicate a digital good is also the downside. As the
music and film industries learned early in the history of the internet, once you

convert something to digital, it can be distributed far and wide, with or without
your permission.
This problem has spurred an entire sub-industry, Digital Rights Management

(DRM).
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
The basic concept behind DRM is that it is gateway software that controls who
and when someone can access your digital goods. While this can be a good
thing on the surface, if done improperly, it can introduce friction into your user’s
experience. If you make it too difficult for a user to access your goods, then
they just won’t. They may buy from you once, but the next time you release
something, they will avoid you because of their previous experience.
The movie and music industries learned the easiest way to kill piracy was not to
clamp down harder but to make a user experience that was seamless and easy.
Now we can pull up our favorite songs on our phone without thinking about it.
This didn’t happen by accident, and just because it is easy doesn’t mean there is
no DRM in place. It is just frictionless.
So what can you do to protect your digital goods? Well, there are two schools of
thought around this.
1. Lock it down.
2. Control the initial download.
Lock It Down
Locking down your digital goods used to mean doing what the music and film
industries did back in the early days and what the software industry tried to do in
its infancy as well. The thought is that you can protect digital goods by injecting
something (a piece of code? encryption? etc.) into the digital good and require
your system to unlock it before you can access it.
Sometimes this meant a special video player, a custom book reader, etc. The
problem with this is that if a user can only access your digital goods where and
when you want, word will get around quickly, and your audience will dry up.

Now, thanks to almost ubiquitous internet connectivity, DRM can be accomplished
seamlessly behind the scenes by your player or viewer requesting permission
before allowing access. Yes, accommodations have to be made for those who are
offline but overall, the system is working. Apple has proven that a custom player
(iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.) can work if you build your market big enough.
Amazon has done the same with books and their Kindle reader. You can read
Kindle books on your phone via their app, on a Kindle device itself, or using their
website—assuming you are logged in.
Locked-down DMR has not gone away; it has just gotten a lot better.
Still, being locked down has its downsides, at least for the consumer. If you don’t
build it correctly, then your users are inconvenienced when they try to access the
content offline. Worse yet, if your user cancels their account, they lose access to
all of their paid content.
The locked-down model is available even to small businesses owners. However,

it is usually cost-prohibitive. Some companies provide you the wrappers for your
content and the viewers necessary to access the protected content. If you are
operating at scale or have a high-ticket item, this is an option. However, if you
are selling a $9.95 book to new scuba divers, this is probably not the best option
for you.
Control the Initial Download
If locking it down is not an economically viable option for you, or if you just
don’t want to introduce that kind of friction into your system, then option two
is probably a much better option for you. Using this option, we do not protect
the digital goods themselves, but we protect the initial download of the goods.
Under this plan, we make it impossible for a user to get a URL to download a
video they purchased and pass the URL around to their friends. The URL we send
out is a “single-use” URL and, once used, can never be used again. If they pass it
out to their friends and a friend downloads it before they do, they are out of luck.
This method of protecting digital goods is based on the assumption that most
people won’t share your content. Yes, you will lose some sales to sharing, but
not enough to cover the cost of locking it down. If you can track sharing of your
goods and you find that you are losing enough sales to warrant locking it down,

then yes, you should consider it.
Controlling the initial download can be easily implemented using the

WooCommerce Amazon S3 Storage extension and an Amazon AWS account.
The idea is that your digital goods are stored on AMazon’s S3 platform and only
available by unique URLs that expire. If you use this method, you will have to
learn how AWS and S3 operate. Thankfully, WooCommerce’s documentation is
complete and constantly updated.
Using that plugin, you can decide how long a given URL is valid. The shorter the
time it is valid for, the less chance it will be passed around. The default is one
minute, which is usually a valid time frame since the clock starts ticking when the
user clicks the link to download.
How you secure your digital goods—or for that matter, whether you secure
them at all—is a decision only you can make. In many cases—especially for lead
magnets, etc.—I don’t even bother. For other goods like my books, controlling
the initial download is fine for my needs. So far, I’ve never implemented a lock it
down DRM on any of my goods.

Enabling and Managing
Subscriptions
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the holy grail for online stores. Everybody
wants to come up with that one idea that is so great that customers permit them
to charge them for it each month.
Some subscription sites are membership sites where you, as the site owner,
provide information for a price. This information is information that users can’t
get elsewhere. Other subscription sites sell a product—physical or digital—that
must be replenished each month. Whether dog treats, your favorite coffee,
or tokens for an online game, the customers who subscribe never want to be
without your product.
However, all subscriptions come down to one thing, though, at least from the
processing side, a system that bills your customers each month so that you
don’t have to remember to do it. This is trickier than it sounds since almost all
ecommerce systems these days do not store credit card numbers. Nobody wants
to ask their customers for a credit card number each month; that’s inconvenient
for everyone. You need a few things to make a subscription system work.

Monthly Processing
Most of the major payment processors these days handle

recurring payments. Even the new kids on the block, Amazon
Pay and WooCommerce Payments process recurring
payments for you. The question is, how easy is it for your
customers to subscribe, and equally important, how easy is
it for them to unsubscribe?
In terms of workflow, Stripe and, by extension WooCommerce Payments, seem

to be the best workflow. WooCommerce Payments has the added advantage of
having an interface for payments built just for WooCommerce. Stripe without
WooCommerce Payments still does everything revolving around subscriptions,
but you may find your customers emailing or calling you to cancel their
subscriptions. WooCommerce payments put the cancel button on the My
Account > View Subscription page, where users can easily find it.
Canceling
Making it easy for your customers to cancel a subscription does not encourage
them to cancel. On the contrary, it gives them the confidence to subscribe
because they know they can easily change their mind whenever they want.
Suppose your plan to keep customers is to make it difficult to unsubscribe, or
worse yet, require that they call you to unsubscribe. In that case, you won’t have
many subscribers to begin with, and you will have a lot of people taking to social
media to scream at you about how hard it is to unsubscribe. They say that there’s
no such thing as bad press; they are wrong.
For ease of operation, WooCommerce Payments and Stripe are hands down the
best solution to begin with when setting up an ecommerce store with recurring
payments. If Stripe is not available in your geographic region, PayPal is probably
the second-best choice, although their cancelations can be a little tricky.

Membership Versus Subscriptions
As discussed above, there are two primary use case

scenarios for monthly recurring revenue, memberships,
and subscriptions. Because we are talking about building
sites with WordPress and WooCommerce, I am ignoring
all the great plugins out there for memberships that are
not built on top of WooCommerce. If memberships are
your only product, you may want to consider bypassing
WooCommerce and using one of the other plugins that
focus on membership sites.
Memberships
Membership sites have content (Posts and Pages) that are only available to
members at a certain level. Some sites only have one level (usually just called
member), and everybody who is a member can see the protected content. Other
sites build user hierarchies where some content is reserved for those at higher
levels. Let’s see the steps to create a membership site strategy:
1. Basic or Tiered Memberships?
The most important thing you can do before you set up a membership site is to
sit and think this through:
Are you going to have a basic membership, or are you going to have tiered
memberships?
While tiered may sound attractive because you can charge more for the higher
tiers, remember, you must provide extra value to these members. That usually
means more content or deeper content.
2. Outline Membership Levels
Outline each membership level you want to provide, and then for each level,
outline the value proposition for that member. What content will they have
access to?

You may want to go so far as to create one of each type of content you will be
providing. This would be a full-blown piece of content, not simply a sample. The
reason you want to do this is two-fold.
1. It shows you precisely the effort necessary to create this type of content
to ensure that you can do this regularly.
2. Now you have a sample of the content that you can use in your marketing.
By way of example, if you are going to create a two-tiered membership for your
site, your membership outline might look something like this one that I created
for a membership site I am making for new scuba divers.
Silver Level
● Access to weekly blog posts giving tips and tricks on how to be a better
scuba diver.
● Access to archived video content that is six months old or older.
Gold Level
● Access to weekly video series showing how to perform skills, what to look
for when diving, equipment reviews, and other insights that new divers are
interested in.
● Access to discounts on diving with local diving charters.
● Access to discounts on dive gear.
● Access to all content available to Silver-level members.
3. Measure Your Time and Commitment
As you can see, now that I have written it out, I am committing to creating two
pieces of content each week, a blog post and a video. This means I have to do
research, writing, and for the video, production and post-production. Now I am
beginning to understand the scope of my commitment. Additionally, I need to
schedule time to talk to local dive centers and dive charters to arrange for special
discounts for my Gold-level members.

Now that I have my list, I should write and produce one blog post and one video,
so I know exactly how long it takes me to do these things. Then, once I have them
the way I want them, I sit back and think:
Can I realistically meet these commitments on an ongoing basis?
● If the answer is no, I need to rethink my strategy.
● If the answer is yes, I need to make sure that what I am charging for access
is commensurate with the price.
Running through this exercise shows me that while I can produce a weekly blog
post in about two hours (research, writing, editing, and formatting), a video
takes me eight to ten hours to create (researching, writing, producing, post-
production, and publishing). That is a much more serious commitment, and I
need to make sure I can do that weekly before setting up that membership tier.
These are actual times I discovered doing a sample piece for a site I am currently
working on. Your times may vary. The point is not to see if you can do it faster
than I can; the point is to figure out your time commitment before starting to
think about pricing.
One subscription site I created began with a low cost for the single membership
level. After a year or so, I realized that the value I was providing was worth more,
so I raised the price. This was disastrous and set the whole project back a year
in growth. Had I taken the time to think it through like described above, I would
have realized my price point before going live originally.
It is easier to price something high and discount it than it is to price something

low and then raise the price.
For many ecommerce sites, memberships are for accessing digital content only.
Because of this, people think they are easy and cheap to set up and run. Doing
the exercise above will show you exactly what the costs are in person-hours. This
means that the only way the content is free is if you don’t value your time.
Subscriptions
On the other hand, subscriptions usually deliver products—physical or digital—

on a scheduled basis. Let’s dive into how to build a strategy for subscriptions:

1. Outline Subscription Levels
A popular subscription service for a physical product is coffee because so many

people worldwide drink it. The tricky part is to make sure you offer customers
enough levels to find one that meets their needs without overwhelming them
with options.
For instance, a coffee company may offer the following options:
● 1-pound bag of ground coffee delivered monthly
● 5-pound bag of ground coffee delivered monthly
● 5-pound bag of roasted beans delivered monthly
This is an easy choice for most customers. They decide how much they drink per
month and whether they want ground or just roasted beans.
Yes, you could offer your customers many different options (2-pound bags,
10-pound bags, dark roast, light roast, etc.). Remember, though; a confused
mind says no. It is better to start easy and then once they are a subscriber, offer
them different options at that point. Once they
become an educated customer, offering them many choices won’t confuse them.
2. Create the Pricing Structure
Once you have your subscription levels mapped out, you can easily figure out a
pricing structure that reflects the service you are providing and the value it has
to your customers.
As the site owner, you get recurring revenue, and it also makes inventory planning
a lot easier.
From the point of view of the system, your subscriptions are just products. For
your WooCommerce storefront, WooCommerce Subscriptions is going to be
your best bet to get started with.
Subscriptions are a great way to build your ecommerce business, but like
any business, you need to think it through before starting. Understand your
customer, understand your offering, and most importantly, understand the
value you are providing the customer. Once you have those in mind, you can
build a subscription that is both valuable to your customers and your business.

Follow on the screen to process to enabling and managing
subscriptions on your store.

Creating Promotions and
Coupons
Congratulations! You have built it; now we need to get them to come and buy.
Who doesn’t have fond childhood memories of mom sitting at the kitchen table
with the newspaper clipping coupons before heading off to the store? These
days, dead-tree coupons are much rarer, but coupon codes for online purchases
are still a great way to influence your customer’s behavior.
Used correctly, coupon codes can help you increase your average cart value, sell
products that are not moving as fast as you would like, or encourage users to try
new your products or services. Misused though coupons are simply a way for
customers to get your goods on the cheap.
How Not To Use Coupons
I once had a friend who worked in the marketing department of a major

manufacturer of vacuum cleaners in the United States. This company was
a household name but had been in decline for a decade or more for various

reasons. To solve the problem of flagging sales, they began
to send out coupons to their mailing list.
Unlike most coupons targeted at a particular item or service,

these were generic “10% off anything in the store”. These
types of promotions have their place, but they should be
the exception, not the rule. As time went on, the marketing
department saw a bump in sales every time they sent one of
these coupons out, so they began to do it more frequently. By the time my friend
joined the department, they were sending one out a week. Each week, however,
was a different percentage, 10%, 15%, 25%, and then repeat.
It doesn’t take long for your customers to see the pattern, like the members of
this mailing list did. Soon, sales were flat every week except for the week when
the 25% coupon went out. The company wasn’t encouraging its customers to
buy more products and services. They were training them to wait for the 25%
coupon, which they knew was coming.
For various reasons—including a marketing department that did not understand

the use of coupons—this 100+-year-old company was bought out of receivership.
While the brand name still lives on, it is just a small part of a much larger company.
This sad tale may have had a happier ending if, instead of just training their
customers to wait for the big coupon, they used coupons to influence customer’s
purchase decisions.
How To Use Coupons
The proper way to use coupons is to help your customers,

and potential customers get off the fence and buy. If you
sell colorful widgets and you find that baby blue widgets
are not selling as well as the other color groups, offering
a 10% discount on baby blue widgets for a short time
may help move the inventory. The customers who take
advantage of it may also be interested in other color
widgets or accessories while purchasing the discounted baby blue widgets.
Coupons are a scalpel, not a sledgehammer—unless you are offering 50% off of
something. Before you decide to provide a coupon, decide what behavior you
want to encourage in your customers.

Additionally, not all of your customers will respond to the same offer. Segmenting
your mailing list—basically tagging people with tags showing their interests and
only mailing to a portion of your list—is a great way to increase your open rate
and to increase your uptake on any given offer.
If someone has already purchased a baby blue widget, sending them a 25% off
coupon a month later will most likely just anger them and teach them to wait
to purchase. However, sending them a coupon for a baby blue widget cozy (or
another accessory for the baby blue widget) will entice them to buy if they are
happy with their existing purchase.
The bottom line is that coupons are a terrible way to increase sales overall, but
they are a great way to encourage specific customers to make specific purchases.
Coupons in WooCommerce
The good news is that coupons in WooCommerce are built-

in. Well, at least the basics are. You can start immediately
$ creating basic coupons. For most store owners, the basics
are going to be enough.
With WooCommerce out of the box, you can create a coupon

to:
● Give someone a percentage off their order (Percentage Discount)
● Give someone a specific amount off of their order (Fixed Cart Discount)
● Give someone a specific amount off an item in their order (Fixed Product
Discount)
Those options cover most of the easy scenarios store owners will encounter.
In addition to those types of coupons, you can filter the coupons to only be
available for specific items or only if particular items are in the cart. You can
set a limit on how many times a coupon can be used. You can limit who can use
the coupon by email address, and you can select an expiration date for your
coupons.
Given all of that flexibility, you might wonder why you would need any additional

extensions for coupons. There are scenarios where the basic coupon system just
won’t cut it. In the WooCommerce marketplace, there are about a half dozen
extensions that cover edge case scenarios like handing out a URL that is a coupon.
How To Create a Coupon
To create a coupon:
1. Navigate to Marketing > Coupons and then click on “Add Coupon”.
2. Give the coupon a name. The name needs to be very descriptive. E.g., if it’s
10% off any order, then of course “ten percent off” works. However, if you
celebrate a special day, e.g., New Year’s Day, you may want your coupon to
be “I LOVE NEW YEARS DAY”. Whatever name you give it is what the customer
will type in as the “Coupon Code” on the checkout page.
3. You can optionally give your coupon a description. This is for you to
remember why you were issuing the coupon. It’s not shown to the customer.
4. Select the type of coupon you are creating. In this example, we select a
“fixed cart discount”, which gives a customer 10% off their order because it’s
New Year’s Day.
5. Enter 10 in the coupon amount.
6. Enter 01/01/2022 (or the next New Year’s day if you are reading this after
01/01/2022) as the Coupon expiry date. Now technically, this coupon is
valid as soon as we click Publish. So if you only want it available on a specific
day, you need to schedule it like you do a post. On the right, you will see a
“Publish” button. Just above it is when the coupon goes live if you click the
Publish button. Clicking “Edit” next to the date and time allows you to set
the date and time that the coupon goes live. Before that date and time, it
cannot be used. Click “Edit” and select 01/01/2022 (or the next New Year’s
Day).
7. Now click on the Usage restrictions. Remember, coupons are less about
driving sales and more about encouraging behavior. We don’t want to give
a 10% discount on every order. (Well, you may want to, if you do, skip this
section.) We want to reward customers who buy a certain amount with a
10% off coupon. Let’s say they’ve got to spend $22 to get the discount going
into the New Year.
So enter 22 in the “Minimum spend” field.

For our example, that is the only restriction we put on the coupon. However,
familiarize yourself with this section because you have a lot of powerful filters

here. You can do things like give a cart discount only if they buy a specific product
or category. You can also limit who can use a coupon by their email address. So
if you want to give someone a free widget cozy on their birthday, you can restrict
the product a coupon can be used for and the email address of the person who
can use it. As I said, it is pretty powerful once you begin to understand the fields
available to you.
8. The last section of the coupon is the “Usage Limits” tab. This lets you set
limits on how many times a given coupon can be used, as well as how many
times any single person can use it. For your New Year’s Day coupon, you may
not want any limit on the number of times the coupon can be used, but you
probably want to set the per-user limit to one. So everybody in the world can
use the coupon, but they can each only use it once.
9. Once you have your coupon the way you want it, you can click the “Publish”
button to make it live.
Congratulations, on New Year’s day, your customers will be able to save 10% if
they spend $22 or more on your site.
Of course, now you have to let them know about this special offer. That’s a
discussion for the chapter on marketing.

Wondering how to use and set up coupons? Watch the steps
above in action in the following video on YouTube:

Building your Mobile Strategy
Even as recently as a few years ago, ecommerce store owners struggled with
the question of whether they should build for the desktop, mobile, or both. In
2017, the percentage of U.S. ecommerce sales taking place on a phone or tablet
was 34%. In 2021—and since I’m writing this in 2021, I need to add “so far”—the
percentage is 54%. That is a sizable increase for just four years.
If half of all ecommerce sales are taking place using a phone or tablet, then the
question has been answered. The question ecommerce store owners now have
to ask is, “Do I want only half of my potential sales, or do I want all of them?” If you
answered that you only want half, then go ahead and skip this chapter.
To capture the full spectrum of sales available to you, you need to ensure your store
is accessible via mobile. Even that, however, raises a whole list of new questions, the
most important being:
“Do I need to have a mobile app, or do I just need to be mobile friendly?”

Mobile App
A mobile app is considered native mobile code. For the

most part, this means you have hired a developer to build
you an app specific to Apple’s iOS and/or Google’s Android
platforms. It is possible with the right tools to make the app
once and “transpile” it to each platform. Additionally, there
are ways to build an app in a language like JavaScript and
run it inside a virtual machine on each operating system.
The result, however, is the same, you are running native code on the device.
On the surface, this might seem attractive. You can get into the app store, you
can possibly get a spot on the user’s home screen, and users that download your
app are more dedicated to you and your brand. In the long run, however, unless
you are selling high-ticket items, most store owners never recoup the sizable
investment required to develop a mobile app.
Beyond that, though, the only reason you need a native mobile app is to access
hardware on the phone that is not available inside the browser’s sandbox.
Almost all ecommerce store owners do not need access to these systems. Yes,
there are exceptions, but they are few and far between. They are also usually for
high-ticket items.
If you are selling high-end automobiles and you want to show the user a VR
screen that transposes the image of a new car on the image of their driveway.
For this, yes, you are going to need to develop a native mobile app.
For most of us, though, this is not necessary to give the user a good user
experience in our store.
So if we are not going to develop a native mobile app but we want to get our
share of the mobile transactions, where does that leave us? That leaves us in the
“mobile-friendly” and mobile-first space.

What is The Difference Between Mobile-First
and Mobile-Friendly?
Mobile First
As the trend is heavily towards mobile, since July 1, 2019, Google uses its mobile
index as preeminent to rank a page in search results. This is called “mobile-
first”. It consists of designing your site for mobile devices and then figuring out
the desktop experience.
Applying mobile-first on your website design helps you get a better SEO ranking
and enhance the experience of your users landing your web through mobile, so
investing in your mobile experience first is definitively a good investment.
Mobile Friendly
Mobile-friendly websites are also known as “responsive” websites. These days,

thanks to the great tools available to designers, websites can be designed that
are intelligent enough to know where they are being displayed and reformat
themselves accordingly.
This doesn’t mean that they show everything smaller. Websites can now be
designed to use different layouts. When needed, they can even show different
or fewer images when they are rendering themselves on a device that would not
show it appropriately.
Responsive sites are not the old way of doing things where you had a separate
site for mobile; they are a single site that knows how to rearrange itself on a
desktop but still delivers a good user experience on smaller devices.
Because mobile is already half of all ecommerce sales, being mobile-friendly

can’t be an afterthought. It has to be something you plan for up-front. From
day one, you and your designer should be looking at mockups for mobile. If you
have brought on a user experience (UX) expert, they need to consider the flow
on mobile and desktop.
This is where a UX person can make a difference. Because the form factor is
different, the workflow has to be different if you want to provide a positive

experience. You can’t just make everything smaller and expect your users to
figure things out or keep having to zoom in to fill out the fields for your shopping
cart. You have to provide a mobile experience that users like, or they won’t come
back.
Learn why having a mobile-friendly website is a must for your

online store success and get an overview of the 3 main steps you
should follow to achieve it.
How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
To make your website mobile-friendly, you should consider these key three
points:
1. Select a Responsive Theme
If you are setting up a site to sell your baby blue widgets as a side gig or as
a hobby, there are many good themes for WordPress and WooCommerce that

are responsive already. For a small investment, you can get a theme that most
anyone can tinker with and make look decent.
WordPress’ “Appearance” menu has come a long way, and these days you can
get excellent results with a good theme and some time spent tinkering.
On the other hand, if you are building an ecommerce storefront as your primary
income and baby blue widgets is your life’s passion, find an agency that has
experience in mobile-first.
2. Install an AMP plugin
Some years ago, Google developed a new technology called AMP (Accelerated
Mobile Pages) to deliver ultrafast webpages on mobile devices. Indeed, Google
grants better organic positioning to pages using this technology. If you search
on mobile, the first results that appear use AMP technology. Harnessing this
technology is as easy as installing an AMP plugin. You can do it by going to the
WordPress admin menu > Plugins > Add New > Search AMP. The AMP plugin
by AMP Project Contributors is currently the most used one; it may be a good
option for you too.
When the plugin is installed and you have selected the type of view you want,
you can check how the AMP version of your website looks by adding /amp/ at the
end of your website U
3. Keep Your Site Speed High
Your site speed is crucial for a better mobile user experience and mobile SEO
ranking, as speed on mobile devices is usually lower than for desktop. Ensure
you have a fast hosting like SiteGround, your web content optimized for mobile,
and keep testing your speed regularly to keep improving it.
If you have decided to go mobile-friendly or mobile-first, make sure that whoever

you hire for your store’s design understands mobile design, responsive websites,
and mobile user experience. Yes, your nephew or niece may have built out their
school’s website, but that does not make them qualified to build a mobile-friendly
user experience that will bring in the sales you need to take your company to the
next level.

You also don’t typically want to hire a single person. Again, small businesses
relying primarily on pre-built themes can hire a designer with a good eye for
aesthetics to help tweak the theme and pick the graphics. For larger shows,
however, or for custom needs, you are going to need specialists in several roles
to research, validate, build, and test your new storefront.
Mobile is essential to every ecommerce site owner. Mobile should not be an

afterthought; it should be your primary design goal. With the tools available,
even small ecommerce shop owners can build and test sites that work well on a
mobile device.

Marketing Actions to Driving
Traffic to Your Online Store
Everybody in web development loves to misquote the movie “Field of Dreams”

and tell people, “Just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come”. This is
true, but they leave out that if you’ve built something truly useful, as word gets
out, people will start coming.
Every idea I have ever had, I think, is useful to a segment of my target market.
I don’t invest my time in anything I consider a stupid idea. The problem is—as
it turns out—I am a horrible judge of stupid. So while I might think it’s the most
revolutionary idea out there, it doesn’t matter what I think.
For sites where I built something useful and did the legwork to develop my
community, word spread beyond my little tribe, and people I didn’t know started
buying my widgets. That is when you know you may have something.
I was lucky; I had time to let things grow organically. I didn’t have
to do much work beyond improving my product and asking people
to recommend it to their friends. If you’ve got time to let things
grow organically, then you probably don’t need the advice in this
chapter. For everybody else, here’s what I’ve learned working

on my own products and working with clients to help them build systems to
promote their products.
Get introduced to the different ways in which you can drive

traffic to your online store in this short video, before diving
deeper into it in this chapter.
Paid Traffic: SEM, Social, and Sponsored Ads
This is the fastest way to build traffic to your site: buy ads.
It always amazes me that some people spend hundreds of
dollars on books, courses, and other learning aids to teach
them how to get free traffic. In most cases, if they spent that
same money buying ads—the right ads on the right sites—
they would get more traffic than they ever will for free.

Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an industry term that means buying ads in
search engine results. We’ve all gotten used to the fact that the first one to three
responses on most searches are paid ads. They may be relevant, but they are at
the top because they paid to be there.
Social Ads
Social Ads are just that, ads you buy on a social media network. Whether that
is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or your favorite social media site, almost all of
them sell ads.
Sponsored Ads
Sponsored ads are for smaller communities you are targeting. If your target
community has an active forum and you buy an ad on this forum, that’s a
sponsored ad. Sponsored ads can also be in the form of audio. If there is a
podcast that is reaching your target audience, buying a sponsorship for that
podcast is a sponsored ad.
The trick with each of these is figuring out the right ad and where to run it. In all
of the research and experimenting I have done, I’ve come to realize that there are
only two ways to figure out these things.
1. Trial and error. Start running an ad on your favorite social media platform
and see if it gains traction. If it does, run more; if it doesn’t, try a different
message. Many experts I’ve heard from over the years recommend that you
run 10, 20, or even up to 30 messages at a time so you can try out different
ones and then double down on the ones that work. If you’ve got money—
and I mean lots of it—then yes, do this. It does eventually work. You will
eventually find messaging that speaks to your target audience. Then you
can run variants of that message until it stops working. Then you start over
again.
2. Look at what others are doing. Yes, I do mean steal. It’s okay to steal ideas,
just don’t steal things like images or copy; that’s not okay. Look at what your

competitors are doing. Now find a way to do your version. This isn’t a one-
time thing. You don’t see one thing your competitors are doing and copy
that; you study constantly. You analyze every message they send out, every
event they hold, every piece of content they produce. Then you figure out
how to make it your own. Again, don’t mimic; people will see through that.
However, if you see your competitors producing live events that are more
discussion-oriented than webinar-focused, try one yourself. See if you can
make it work. More importantly, see if people show up and whether they
convert with any regularity to paying customers.
When it comes to investing your money in buying traffic, start looking around
early. Do not limit yourself to a single source either. You may think your favorite
social media network or favorite topic-specific forum is “where it’s at”, but unless
you spend some quality time digging around, you‘ll never know. Honestly, if you
haven’t spent at least a month researching your target audience, where they
congregate, and how they speak, you have no hope of motivating them.
Done right, paid traffic is some of the cheapest traffic you can acquire. For those
that say “Free or earned traffic is cheaper”, that is because you don’t put a price
tag on your time.
Organic Traffic: Search Engine Optimization

(SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is configuring the

elements on your page so search engines—mostly
Google—pick up on them in the hopes that they will rank SEO
you higher than other pages covering the same content.
To comply with the basic SEO requirements you should:
● Get your website secured with an SSL certificate so it runs with HTTPS
protocol: Google is currently marking websites that do not run with HTTPS
as insecure and not considering them for ranking, so make sure you get
your site secured.

● Have a responsive web design: As talked before on Mobile First and
Mobile-Friendly, your website needs to adapt to other devices apart from
the PC such as tablets and mobile phones to be accessed easily through
those and get a better Google ranking.
● Speed up your website: Website speed is an official ranking factor as it is

directly related to user experience. You should keep your site optimized,
starting from choosing a fast web host like SiteGround.
● Create relevant content: Any content from your site, no matter if it is a

blog post, a product description or a landing page, should be relevant to
your audience, targeting the right keywords, be readable and answering
the right questions for what the user searched for. To help you with that,
you can install the Yoast SEO plugin which will guide you on the best
SEO practices when creating your content. Follow their instructions. That
is money well invested and it can actually improve your search engine
rankings.
Of course there is a lot more about SEO. If you want to check more of our content
in it, visit our SEO Youtube Playlist and our SEO articles that you will find in our
blog.
“Earned” (Free) Traffic: Social Media and

Engaging Content
Earned traffic is traffic that comes to your website without

you having to pay for it directly. If you post an interesting
blog post on LinkedIn and people click through to see
what else you have, that is “earned traffic”.
In the long run, earned traffic can be more expensive than

paid traffic because it takes a lot of your time to build a
following to the point they engage with you and visit your
website. Still, everyone feels that earned traffic equals free traffic because you
aren’t paying for it with cash.
To earn traffic:
● Build a following on one or more social media networks.

● Send messages to your followers that engage them and get them to click
through to your site and take action. (Join your mailing list, buy something,
subscribe, etc.)
Sounds simple, right? It’s not. An earned traffic strategy is a long-term strategy.
Yes, it is possible to build large followings on social media. If you are lucky
enough to build a large group of rabid fans, then you are well on your way. Rabid
fans tell others how fantastic your product is; they click on your links and buy
your products. Everybody wants rabid fans. The problem is that unless you are
a sports figure or rock star, you probably aren’t going to build that base quickly
or at all.
If you have identified where your target customers congregate, then start hanging
out there as well. Start slowly. Answer questions as they come, make relevant
comments and congratulate others when appropriate. Step one is always to
become a member in good standing with this community. Then, once you are,
start getting people to follow you by creating quality content or products. Be
helpful, be interesting, and people will begin to notice you slowly.
If, on the other hand, you go in guns blazing and start posting links to your
product in places nobody wants them, you’ll find that not only does no one want
to have anything to do with you, you’ll find yourself removed from the group or
blocked by all the influencers. You know, the same group of people you need to
pay attention to.
Earned media is a long-term strategy. However, it can work for you and work well
if you are willing to put in the time.
The general rule of thumb when trying to build a social media following is the 5:1
ratio. For every self-serving post you make on social media, you should make five
that help others without helping yourself.
For example, if your target audience hangs out in a Facebook group, once you
have established yourself as a member in good standing in the group, you should
post five answers to other people’s questions. Then, can you post a link to an
article you wrote, even if you think that article will help others. No matter how
helpful to your community, an article on your site is still a self-serving post whose
primary purpose is to get people to click through to your site. If your purpose is
truly altruistic, just post the article’s content on the group without the link. Yeah,
I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, I don’t do it, and neither do the other thousands of

people trying to market their site on social media.
Other than the 5:1 ratio rule, the other principle you need to understand is that
people are not on social media just to see ads. Sometimes they like what they
see, but for the most part, it is interruption marketing. So if you are going to
interrupt people, BE INTERESTING.
Remember above, when I talked about watching what your competitors are
doing? Well, that’s the only reason I use social media these days. Even then, I still
see ads all the time. Every once in a while, even though I know better, I click on
an ad and go down a rabbit hole, usually on a product that I do not need but...
oooohhhhh...shiny! When do I click, it’s because, against my better nature, what
the ad has to say speaks to me. In other words, it is interesting.
How do you make your ads interesting? That’s a topic that spans many volumes.
An entire branch of science is devoted to making things interesting; it is loosely
called the science of persuasion. It is also known as marketing. Once you start
down that particular rabbit hole, though, you may never come back (but make
sure you wave at me while you are down there).
The short version is whenever you see an ad that catches your eye, stop. Think,
“why does this ad tempt me?” Does it fulfill a need? Does it solve a problem? Does
it answer a desire? Figure out why before you click into the rabbit hole of, “What
is this cool product I must have?”
Now that you know why, write it down. Take notes. I keep a Moleskine handy, but
a spiral-bound notebook achieves the same purpose as long as you keep it with
you.
Write down why you find an ad compelling. Then think about how you can engage
your customers with the same “why”.
Do your ads showcase how your product solves a problem your target audience
has?
Do your ads show how your product makes your user’s life better in some way?
Do your ads you produce will make its user more desirable?
These, and several other questions like them, help you determine how you can
make your ads interesting. Just remember, nothing is interesting to everyone.
Each ad should target a specific segment of your audience. The more targeted
your ads are, the more effective they will be.

Owned Traffic: Growing Your Mailing List
Through Valuable Content
Finally, the last group of traffic is your most valuable:

owned traffic.
Owned traffic is the traffic you drive to your website from

your in-house mailing list. You own your list, and you
control how often you talk to them and what you say. That
is why we call it owned traffic. You own the list; nobody
can take it away from you.
Every other type of traffic we have discussed so far has been people you are
trying to attract to your product or services. Your mailing list is full of people
who have already self-identified as being interested. Well, it is if you’ve built it
correctly. If you are buying names to add to your mailing list, you are missing the
point of the list entirely.
When someone signs up for your mailing list, they have permitted you to engage
with them. They are interested in your product. They are lovers of baby blue
widgets. So talk to them.
Unlike other kinds of traffic, you don’t have to be cautious about how you speak
to them or how often you speak to them. Talk to them about your product or
services as often as you like.
I’ve been on mailing lists that sent me a daily special. I’ve been on mailing lists
that sent me emails twice a week about upcoming events. I’ve been on mailing
lists that once a week sent me special tips on how to get the most out of my baby
blue widget.
How often you talk to your list and what you talk about are totally up to you.
That having been said, here is a simple plan that almost anyone can implement
to help you engage with your list.
Once a week, say on Tuesday, send out a helpful article. It doesn’t have to be long;
as a matter of fact, short is better in these cases. 300-500 words have worked
well for me in the past. Make sure you end it with a call to action (CTA) that gets
them to click back to your site for some reason. Recently I sent out a message to

my mailing list offering a free PDF as the call to action. The mailing system I used
allowed me to “tag” users that had already downloaded the PDF, so I would only
show it to those who had not yet downloaded it.
That is the entire message, something helpful and something free.
Then every other Thursday, I sent out a marketing message. It is in a different

template so that they know it is a different type of message. Sometimes it’s a
user testimonial for my services; other times, it is a discount on my services. Each
message, however, was unique. Each of my marketing emails targeted a specific
segment of my list. This means that my message didn’t work for everyone every
time. My message did, however, work very well for the audience for which it was
intended.
Owned traffic—your mailing list—is one of the most valuable assets your business
has. Make sure you nurture it regularly. Make sure it is as easy for people to leave
as it is for them to join. Make sure there is value to the members for joining and
for you in having them join. An extensive and vibrant mailing list will serve your
business well long into the future.
Traffic is important to your business. We’ve talked about three types, paid,
earned, and owned. Most smart marketers use the first two to build the third.
Business owners often won’t even start marketing to people until after they are
on their mailing list. The real value of paid and earned traffic is to build your
mailing list. Once they are on your list, then you can start talking to them, helping
them solve problems, and showing them how your product or services will make
their life better.

Wrapup
Ecommerce has come a long way since I built my first shopping cart. We have
better tools, faster connections, and most importantly, a lot more potential
customers. Still, some things never change. Back then, we focused on making it
as quick (it wasn’t quick) and as easy as we could for customers to buy something
and complete the transaction. We assumed if it were quick and easy, more
people would do it.
In this guide, we have covered a lot of ground.

● Setting up WooCommerce
● Entering in your products
● Marketing your products and store, and a lot more.
As you can now see, this isn’t as easy as many would have you believe. Yes, it
is possible to get your store on the internet, and tools like WooCommerce and
WordPress make it affordable to just about anyone.
Getting your store online, though, is just the first step in your journey. To actually
make money, you have to put in work regularly.
● Create new and compelling products
● Create new and innovative marketing to get people’s attention
● Sell them your product
● Keep them happy
If you can keep your user happy and create compelling products, you will be able
to sell products to those users.
After all, that is kind of the point of setting up an ecommerce site to begin with.

About The Author / Cal Evans
Cal Evans is a WordPress and a PHP expert. He has been programming

for 36 years and is one of the most active and dedicated members of
the PHP community. For the past 17 years, Cal has worked with PHP
and MySQL on Linux, macOS, and Windows. He has built a variety
of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million
dollar web apps, including ecommerce sites using WordPress and
WooCommerce. He also enjoys building and managing dev teams
and speaking at conferences around the world on various topics.
@CalEvans

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START SELLING ONLINE

The Ultimate Guide to

Installing WordPress and WooCommerce 17

START SELLING ONLINE 2

Enabling and Managing Subscriptions 60

Creating Promotions and Coupons 67

Building your Mobile Strategy 72

Marketing Actions to Driving Traffic to Your Online Store 78

START SELLING ONLINE 3

I remember building my first shopping cart/ecommerce system way back in the

Ecommerce Is Now for Everyone

With the advent of CMSs (content management systems) like WooCommerce or

START SELLING ONLINE 4

● It is easy to get started.

Purpose of This Guide

To help you with hands-on instructions, we have included 9 exclusive videos,

START SELLING ONLINE 5

People That Will Be Helpful To Have Around

START SELLING ONLINE 6

The third person you want on your team is a wordsmith—someone who

Let’s Get Going

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Great, you have now committed mentally to setting up shop. Congratulations!

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO WATCH THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

START SELLING ONLINE 8

2. Choose an Ecommerce Platform

In the ecommerce world, you have a multitude of options

Note that we are using WooCommerce in addition to WordPress because there

Throughout this book, I am teaching concepts as well as specific tactics. If you

START SELLING ONLINE 9

Choose it carefully—it should represent your business, the service you

Once you have chosen a name, it’s time to register it and

4. Choose a Web Hosting Partner

START SELLING ONLINE 10

1. Specialization in Your Selected Platform

2. Resources and Limits

● Can you get started with the resources available to you?

● What happens if you exceed the available resources?

START SELLING ONLINE 11

● Data Centers in different locations and a CDN (Content Delivery

● Customized server configuration for better resources optimization.

● Latest PHP versions

START SELLING ONLINE 12

● Implements the latest PHP versions

● Provides daily backups

START SELLING ONLINE 13

If your hosting partner is offering email hosting, take advantage of it.

5. Set up Your Business Email

Email Accounts versus Forwarders

A regular email account is what most people think of when

My personal strategy is to only set up forwarders. I set up several email

START SELLING ONLINE 14

Each of these role-based forwarders can be pointed to different people. If I hire

Email Mailing Lists

START SELLING ONLINE 15

6. Create Your Business Social Media

You want to get these as soon as you can after registering

Congratulations, you are well on your way to your new adventure!

START SELLING ONLINE 16

Whichever hosting service you choose, follow their instructions

Some of the better hosts offer you the ability to set up

START SELLING ONLINE 17

Before we go any further, let’s talk a little about website

Installing WordPress and WooCommerce 17

Enabling and Managing Subscriptions 60

Creating Promotions and Coupons 67

Building your Mobile Strategy 72

Marketing Actions to Driving Traffic to Your Online Store 78