today i'll walk you through how to set
up your own ecommerce store using
woocommerce and we'll cover it step by
step so you can get up and selling
quickly we get this question a lot
because a lot of beginners they get a
little intimidated by the technology
maybe you want to start a store but
you're not really sure how to set
everything up and so you you're not
wanting to touch anything it's okay it
happens a lot but don't worry we'll
cover each step progressively so you can
start from having no website whatsoever
to having a full-blown store that you
can start selling your items on so a
couple of things that you're going to
need to set this up is the first thing
you want to do is you want to set up a
domain you need hosting because you need
a server to host all the files images
and products and things like that so
you'll need a hosting provider and you
also need to set up wordpress and then
we'll set up woocommerce on top of that
now that sounds like a lot but a lot of
those things kind of go in one fell
swoop so we'll get started with that so
as far as hosting providers go one of
the best ways to get started is by using
something like bluehost we recommend
bluehost simply because it's easy to get
started and it is quite
economical to get started as well as we
go through these these will be the steps
that we'll be covering we'll have a link
in the description below where we can
get you even more discount on bluehost
to get started with bluehost you want to
go to wpbeginner
forward slash refer
forward slash bluehost and that is our
affiliate link we will get a commission
if you use that link first so once you
get set up you can see this special page
with this link you also get a free
domain for the first year you'll also
get free ssl certificate and that's just
said ssl stands for secured socket layer
and that just makes sure that your
website is secure and encrypted between
you and your readers or your visitors so
let's go ahead and click on the get
started now button i would say you want
to look at between the plus and the
basic
and a couple of the major differences
between the basic and the plus is the
basic you only get one website and you
have a few other items there to look at
whereas with the plus you get unlimited
websites for this tutorial i'll simply
choose the basic now from here this is
where you create your new domain name or
the website where you're going to send
people to so now you can put it in put
in what you want your website name to be
and when you click next it will either
come back and let you know if it's
available if it is available it will
give you this big green banner that says
it's available if it's not available
they'll give you some ideas of some
other website names to try so scrolling
down you'll want to fill out all of this
information and then when you scroll
down to the package information then
this is where you need to make a
decision on how much savings you want
and you have your choice between 36
months 24 or 12 months and that gives
you the separation between 12 month
savings worth of savings and then it
resets to the normal amount or you get
three years at 275 so something you need
to look at but you notice that the
domain name registration is free and the
let's encrypt is free as well
and then scrolling down there's some
package extras and you really can
uncheck all of these and then scrolling
down you see the total savings for this
is at least 50 percent off and this is
our total amount so you just want to go
through here and
enter credit card information you want
to go ahead and read their auto renewal
terms that's just letting you know when
it renews it will renew at the standard
price and then once it goes through
actually create your website once you
get all the information then
bluehost will go out and install
wordpress for you and this is the back
end of it now that we've installed
wordpress the next thing we need to do
is we need to install the ecommerce
plugin and woocommerce is the best
ecommerce plugin for wordpress so we'll
head over to our plugins area go to add
new and from here we need to search for
woocommerce this is the one we want so
let's go ahead and click install now go
ahead and make sure you stick around to
activate the plugin as well now you see
the woocommerce setup wizard so you want
to add your address here from here you
can choose which industry you're in from
here you can choose which products
you'll be
selling physical download subscriptions
memberships if you get the premium then
subscriptions memberships bookings
customizable products and things like
that they're already part of the
subscription fee from here you can
choose how many products you want to
display are you currently selling
anywhere else we'll say no we're just
setting this up
and then they also suggest some of these
items to start driving traffic to
for now we're just going to say no to
those now you can choose a theme a theme
is how your site looks to other people
and so it's pretty important to choose
one that looks good looks inviting but
also showcases your products really well
to others the default theme is the
storefront that's the currently active
one you can see it here you have a bit
of a dashboard here but we always like
to go over on the left under woocommerce
you can go to settings and you'll see
several tabs here that you can choose
from from here we're going to click on
payment section
payments and these are all of the
payments that come with woocommerce the
paypal standard is the easiest way that
you can get up and running with
accepting payments so we're going to
toggle that one on i also recommend
doing either a cash on delivery or check
payment turn that on and that's just so
you can test out the orders without
actually having having to go through a
payment processor so once we have those
selected you can also click setup for
paypal standard
and from here you just need to
enable it and then add the paypal email
address add your paypal email address
once you finish this go down and make
sure you save changes okay now let's
take a look at some of the tabs appear
under general this is where we added our
address and that put that in there
the general options of who you are
selling to you can sell to all countries
or you can break that down to only sell
to certain countries as well as your
shipping locations
if you want it to be shop base address
which is the address that we put in
there if you want to enable taxes you
can choose that here and then it'll go
through and set up help you set up some
taxes you can also enable coupons and
you can also allow them to
calculate coupon discounts stacking
coupons so you can choose to do that
most people don't allow that
and under currency you want to choose
the currency that you're accepting money
in with the separator decimal and number
of decimals so we'll save changes for
them the next step we want to do is
under products we want to take a look at
what type of products are we doing so
we're doing a shop page that's when
somebody goes to shop your store they
can go to the shop page
and then you can add cart behavior if
you want to redirect to the cart once
they add an item to their cart you can
redirect them or just enable ajax and
that will kind of bring up the cart on
the page without redirecting what's
great is you have these little tool tips
that will tell you what everything is so
basically these are image urls for your
products and you can choose four
the weight that you want since i'm in
the us i'm going to do pounds and i'm
going to do inches for dimensions if you
want to enable product reviews verified
owner you can do that as well if you
want to enable a star rating which gives
people a visual of how these products
are you can do that as well so we'll
save changes and then move on to the
next one under shipping you want to set
up your shipping zones and then you want
to do payments we already did payments
accounts and privacy this allows people
to do guest checkout where they don't
have to create an account also account
creation and registration policies and
things like that under emails these are
all the transaction emails that they
will get and you can go in and change
them up and make them more personalized
for your product and then under advance
if you just scroll down these are
basically the pages that are being set
up that were created when everything was
set up they you have a cart so they can
go to cart they're ready to check out
there's a checkout page they can go to
my account to see a dashboard of
everything that they've ordered you'll
want to add a terms and conditions page
so you'll want to create that and then
select this from the drop down they
don't create that for you because you'll
need to create that for your business
now that we have everything set up now
we need to create a product the easiest
way to do that is to come over on the
left and we have products here
and we can click add new this is where
you can create your first product and
you can go in and do this manually or if
you have a csv or an excel file of
multiple items and you can import but
we're going to just show creating a
product from scratch you want to create
the information here
scrolling down you can give a regular
price and then you want to do a sales
price and then that way when it's
showing it'll show that sales price and
the regular price so that they see it's
a a a sell for them you can go in and
choose inventory shipping
linked products so if there's other
items that you want to sell that are
related to this you can do that here you
can also do a short description down
here and now over on the right this is
where you want to select
images
you won't have any images to begin with
but i have some here already so just to
show you you can add one image and then
if you want to add more
gallery images or more images about this
product you can do that here as well but
now we've created a very simple
product we can click publish
and now we can see what this looks like
on our site and we haven't seen our site
yet so let's go ahead and take a look so
you can visit the site and then from
here you can also click on shop and this
will take them to the store now i have
added a few others in testing so you see
those here but normally you'll only see
one where you can look at it
click on it and then this is
the
product this is also the theme this is
the storefront theme that's the regular
theme that comes or the default theme
that comes but you can set up any other
theme that you want as well now the
other thing we want to look at is you
notice this is our
web url address or the address of this
t-shirt we don't want to have that so
you want to click on change permalinks
and if you ever need to come back here
go to the left go all the way down to
settings
and go to permalinks this is where we
want to make some changes going here we
see plane and so this is what's set up
we don't want that we want to do post
name
and basically that will be the name of
the product which i named it t-shirt and
that will be
after my web address so we're happy with
that so i'll scroll down save changes
and now when i go to my site and i click
refresh and now we have t-shirt as my
product name now let's look at
customizing the theme the theme is what
your site looks like and you can
customize it even further than what the
base theme is so we can go back to our
dashboard
and over on the left we want to
go to appearance
customize to make the changes what's
cool about the customize is whatever
changes we make we will see them here
this is the site title
and you can do a tagline
you can do a site icon so that would
replace this little world right here you
can select it you want it to be in 512
by 512. i'm simply going to choose this
just because i have that image
and then it'll want me to crop it so
we'll do that great now that'll be my
site identity logo or the favicon as it
used to be called
and here you can choose a background
image i'm just going to show you what
this does
that will be up at the top just so you
know we will remove that
and then you also have the color scheme
here so if you wanted a different color
than just white you can change that here
and you see it in real time and what's
cool about this is you're testing
everything out but you're actually not
making the changes none of these changes
will actually go live until you click
publish so right now you're just
previewing it all and making the changes
if you don't like that color you don't
know what to do you can click on default
and it'll go back to what it was
initially so you can go through this
whole process and make any changes but
if you actually don't like the theme
that you have then we can actually
change the theme so we're going to get
out of this
and if you want to actually change the
theme altogether then it will go back to
appearance
themes
and again just like before we see all of
these themes available to us from here
we can either choose premium themes
those are paid for themes if you want or
you can choose the wordpress.org themes
these are free but they are vetted by
the wordpress theme team to make sure
that there's no
horrible code or things that might hurt
your site and what i like about the
freemium is you can do a feature filter
so with the feature filter you can say i
want e-commerce so it's basically
anything that is created with e-commerce
in mind we'll go ahead and apply filters
and then you can choose any of them from
here so you can scroll through pick the
one that's closest to how the brand how
you want your brand to look and feel
just going to pick astra because it's
actually a really good theme with some
starter stuff and it gets you up and
running pretty quickly as well and then
you'll also want to make sure you
activate it otherwise it won't be
the active site on your
website so now we can go to our website
and refresh it
and now this is what we can work with so
now when i go to shop i see it a little
bit differently set up i kind of like
this look a little bit better it's just
a little bit grander shop for me to work
with you notice when i keep going to the
home page it's kind of showing
whatever blog post is there i want to
change that as well instead of hello
world maybe i want the shop to be the
home page so i'm going to go back to our
wordpress dashboard i'm going to go down
to settings
and reading from here you can change
what the home page looks like so right
now it's just showing your latest post
that's why we're seeing that but we
actually want the home page to be
our shop and so then all of our products
will show there and then if you want to
you can create a new page and then make
your posts if you're creating a blog
attached to your site you can do that
and then
attach the blog post or the blog page as
your post so all the posts will show on
there
so i don't have a blog page yet we'll
just save changes because i just want
the home page to be my store
so now when i go and refresh
now that is my home page on
my website and i like that a lot better
now that we've created products we want
to set up a a few other pages for our
site we want to do a blog page we want
to do about
a contact page and then we'll set some
other things up as well so to do that
let's go into pages we'll go to all
pages
and from here you see all the current
pages and right now all of the pages
except for the sample page that's just
the sample when wordpress is installed
we can actually trash that
but all of these others are set up and
they were initially installed when
woocommerce was set up so we can create
a couple more
pages so for instance if i want to do
add new
and i'm going to create a contact us
page because we want to set up a
contact
form
and i'll show you how to do that
contact us
and anywhere you see a little plus sign
we're going to click on that and we're
looking for form
wp forms is what we want to do
and it'll say select a form we haven't
created a form so we're going to create
one and then we'll come back and add it
but we'll click publish and so now we
have a contact us page
we'll go back i want to create an about
page
and i want to create a blog page
about us that's where you set in your
story so people know
what you stand for what your site is
about what you are selling
and now we're going to go back and we're
going to do one more like i said we're
going to do a blog page and then we can
go back into settings and change
that all the blog posts will come here
so we're going to publish that
and now we've created three of them
i'm going to go back
and now we have more and i want to add
some of these to
our menu we haven't looked at menu yet
so we're going to go to appearance
menus
and we don't have any menu yet so this
is just pulling in our pages that we
have so we're going to call this main
and the main will be up here
crete i'm gonna name it let's go ahead
and create menu and now we need to pick
what pages we want to bring over you can
bring over pages you can bring over
posts categories there's several things
that you can bring over but i'm going to
go to view all because it's not showing
all of them so i'm going to do shop
about us blog what else do i want
contact us and
do
check out and my account if they're
logged in they'll see that as well so
i'm going to add all these over to the
menu you can rearrange these however you
want that looks good we'll save menu and
now we can refresh now we'll see this
changes a little bit so we've got our
about us we've got our blog we need to
when i click on blog nothing's there
because i need to add that all of the
blog posts will go to this page so let's
go back to our dashboard scrolling down
we're going to go to settings reading
and you remember under reading this is
where we set up the static page for home
page now we have a blog page so we want
to make all the posts go to this blog
from here you can choose how many blog
posts will show on one page before it
starts going to next the next the next
10 is good and for each post in a feed i
want this to actually be summary because
by default it'll just show the full text
so you'll just have scrolling for days
so let's go do summary and so just be a
little bit portion of it and say read
more to read more of it so we're good
with that so save changes
now when i go to my blog page there's
one blog post that is here and now it's
going to show when i have more those
will all show underneath as well and
then we created the contact us page but
now we also need to create the contact
form wpforms is the easiest
drag-and-drop form builder for you
what's great is bluehost installs this
for you but you'll need to go into all
forms to create your first form you can
also go to add new so we'll create add
new here and since it's simple contact
form this is the one we want to use so
i'm going to click on that
and the beauty of wp forms is now this
is the form that i can use you can make
some changes if you want you can change
the name of it
to just contact us you can change what
the
submit button says i'm happy with that
go back to fields this is really good
out of the box the only thing i like i
always like the simple field here and
now everything else looks good so we can
save this and now we're going to go back
to contact us to embed that the contact
us page to embed that so i'm going to
exit out of this we're going to head
back over to our pages and we're going
to go to our contact page
and from here now we have wp forms here
we can select the form from the
drop-down
and it will pull this in so we can get a
preview of what this will look like so
that's perfect that's all i want for
contact i'm going to save that and now
my contact form is set up now that
you've created your website you also
want to make sure that you've got
tracking installed on your website so
you know what customers are what people
are coming to your website where they're
coming from so who's referring your site
what type of pages are the most popular
pages and so much more to do that you
can do it with google analytics and you
can watch this video where i walk you
through step by step on how to set up
google analytics but to get google
analytics installed and connected with
your site you want to use monster
insights monster insights is also set up
on
installed by bluehost so you can just
click on the button here or you'll also
see it down here under insights now with
muster insights i would actually
recommend you use their pro feature or
your pa their paid feature so go to
monster insights so you want to get the
pro feature or higher because that
installs the e-commerce report tracking
and it makes it super easy to find your
average order value of your website and
it brings in a lot of other tracking
features for your website as well once
you get an account you can go to your
downloads area and you can download it
i'll also copy the license key we'll
head back over to our wordpress
dashboard from here we want to go to
plugins
add new and these are all the plugins
that are available for you to search for
and these are all of the ones that are
in the wordpress repository we're
actually going to come up here and
upload a plugin because we just
purchased it and you can either choose
file or because i have it installed
right here i can see it i can left click
drag this over i'll install it now and
you'll want to stick around to activate
the plug-in as well once it's activated
because we have the light version also
installed let's go ahead and click
deactivate the light plug-in now we see
monster insights pro that's the one we
want so let's go ahead and activate this
from here we can launch the wizard and
when you launch the wizard it'll ask a
few questions about what your site is
and based on that it'll automatically
turn on some features for you now we'll
paste in our license key
and now let's connect monster insights
and what it'll do is with monster
insights it will go out and connect to
your google analytics so if you've
already created the google analytics
account for this it goes out and finds
it if you haven't make sure you watch
that video i mentioned where it walks
you through that process i have several
but you just want to find your website
and then complete the connection
and now monster insights will talk to
your google analytics so you can see the
data and how it's how your site is
performing from here it'll automatically
turn on some items for you which is what
we want we'll scroll down save and
continue
now monster and size ecommerce that's
the one that we do want to install so
let's go ahead and install add-on and
let's activate it you can also turn on
monster insights for forms so that'll
track how many forms have been converted
how many people have seen it and then
they convert or submit a form those are
the two main ones that you want to do so
we'll save and continue
and now everything should be good to go
so now we can finish and exit the setup
wizard and now monster insights is
connected and now what we can do is
we'll see some data on our reports
section and go to insights and go to
reports and now we'll see this data
since you're just setting it up you
probably won't see any data it'll take a
little bit of time for the data to start
reporting also takes traffic to your
site for the data to start reporting we
also want to set up the e-commerce
section to do that let's go down to
settings under insights
and we want to go to e-commerce
and from here we want to do enhanced
e-commerce
you see a little toolbar it also tells
you that you need to set up enhanced
ecommerce on your website so in order to
do that you go to your analytics you go
down to admin and over here
on the right you have e-commerce
settings you'll want to make sure that
this is toggled on and you want to make
sure that enable ecommerce is toggled on
you want to make sure that enabled
enhanced ecommerce reporting is also
toggled on when both of those are
toggled on then you have a lot more
reporting functionality for your site so
enhanced e-commerce is turned on here it
automatically turns on woocommerce
because it sees that that is also
installed on our site and so now we're
good to go now we can see
advanced report tracking for e-commerce
again you won't see any data here until
you start making
sales but then from here you can see the
conversion rate on your site which is
huge because this gives you a starting
point so how what is your conversion
rate on site how can you improve it
gives you the number of transactions so
the number of sales gives you the total
revenue and it also gives you the
average order value once you start
knowing this information and then it
helps you tremendously in improving
these conversions or improving these
sales now once you start learning about
how your traffic is doing and the
ecommerce report tells you the
transactions the average order value a
way to improve the conversion rate of
your site is by using something like
optinmonster you can create little
pop-ups little reminders to get even
more clicks to your site once you
connect it you can then create a pop-up
or a floating bar or a full screen
in-line slide-in and gamified the
gamified is perfect for e-commerce to
get somebody to sign up then they like
spin the wheel so we'll use this
template start building it from here you
can say whatever you want add your
information this looks pretty good i'm
not going to go through too much because
i think it looks great and then this is
the opt-in so then you can do the
display rules so when do you want this
to show up by default it shows up when
time on page is at least five seconds
but you can go in even further you can
also do
ecommerce product targeting so if
they've visited a certain product then
you you can turn this on so for this one
just to show you i'm just going to do
time on pages at least five seconds and
then we can do integration so if you
want to start collecting emails for your
ecommerce store that is perfect you
either add a new integration and they
integrate with dozens of email service
providers most of the top ones that you
see here if you don't have an email
service provider don't let that stop you
by default they will collect them under
monster leads so it's collected locally
for you which is perfect to get you
started then under analytics they will
do their own analytics but then you can
also connect to google analytics which
is what we just set up if you want to do
that here then whenever you're ready go
to the publish screen now that
everything is connected we can also
click preview and we'll see what it'll
look like on our site so here's our site
and it does the spin twins that should
help with you growing your email list as
well as increasing your conversions for
any other products congratulations
you've set everything up now make sure
you watch this video next as chris from
seedpro will walk you through step by
step on how to create a customized
product page using woocommerce and
thanks for watching