We’ve heard that you’re on your way to open a brand new online store. Congrats! We ourselves have done that less than a year ago and let us tell you, with the right tools it’s not that hard as you may think it is.
Lets start by assuming you’ve already chosen your product and you have a clue of what would work best for your site. You’ve done your research, you know the market and your audience. Therefore lets talk about the solutions for hosted eCommerce. Nowadays, there are a few major players that provide you hosting solutions with amazing user experience.
On the one hand you have Shopify, which offers you a fully customizable script with a dozen of themes and a support staff that can help you with your launch. However you should keep in mind that it comes with monthly and transaction fees. Thus it can become too expensive for a first step to an eCommerce platform.
On the other hand you have WooCommerce for WordPress, which comes with many benefits from the get-go, such as:
- all the basic features are free of charge
- free and premium templates designed for user experience
- hundreds of plugins that will help you manage your online shop
- full control of your website
- financial accessible, if you want to grow your business over a period of time
- easy to use (still you may need some HTML knowledge)
Basic Features
Your first step should be installing WordPress on a hosting account with your domain name. Depending on the scale of your online shop you should choose your hosting provider (preferably one designed for WordPress). Afterwards you have to add the eCommerce functionality to your WordPress website installing the free WooCommerce plugin. Apart from transforming your regular website into an online store, it’s also a search engine optimization-friendly platform.
After activating the plugin, you should customize your basic settings. However, if you don’t have all the details set in place, you can choose to skip some of the steps and come back to them later.
Free and Premium Templates
Although WordPress provides you with many themes, be sure you choose one that’s compatible with WooCommerce, for a perfect synchronization.
Amazing Plugins