 And he is a happiness engineer at automatic by day, where he helps business owners work all of the kinks out of their WooCommerce stores. If working with WordPress all day wasn't enough, he spends more time each week recording his WordPress podcast called Your Website Engineer at http yourwebsiteengineer.com. He enjoys helping people understand and use WordPress to its fullest capacity and spends time tinkering with code. When he's not in front of the computer, which is rare, he enjoys spending time cross fitting, reading and traveling. He lives in Dayton, Ohio with his wife, 3.5 year old daughter and nine month old son. Thank you so much and give a hand to Justin. All right. Hello. Does this work? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I try not to shout the whole time, but I want to keep some energy going because it's late in the day and we've all just had another round of snacks. So we're going to get started and we're going to talk about WooCommerce. Yes, I am all the way from Dayton. I'm excited to be here with you because one of my goals this year was to teach more people about WooCommerce and I help people every single day, well, every day that I work, which isn't every day, but every single day that I work, I help them, like you said, work out the kinks, the bugs. There's lots of things with WooCommerce that makes it a very powerful platform, but there's lots of things that make it a tricky platform and a platform that can run into some issues. So we're going to talk through some of those. So it just a show of hands. Does anybody have a store already connected to their website? Handful of people? Handful of people? Perfect. One of the questions earlier in one of the earlier sessions was about how do you plan on making money with your website? Well, you know what? A store is a great way to make money because you sell things and you make money. Like that's a great, great thing. So today we're going to dive in. We're going to talk about WooCommerce. I'm going to try to show you as many settings as we can. You've got an hour and there's about 13 million settings. And so it's going to take us a little while to dig through all of them. But by the time we're all said and done, like the goal is that you should be able to just add WooCommerce to your current website and you can start the process of selling things. Selling things with WooCommerce or any of the digital platforms that are out there, specifically though, we're going to spend it on WooCommerce because that's what I know, is it's awesome because you have the ability to sell really anything. Anything you could think of, like you can sell with WooCommerce. Do you want to, maybe you have a consulting business and you are a, I don't know, a roofer and you want to send your roofing quotes and estimates through WooCommerce and people can pay you online instead of writing archaic checks. So that's something that you can do. You can sell digital ebooks. You can set it up so you can sell things and then you have upsells. So maybe if they bought product A, you can say on checking out, like Amazon does like, well, so and so looked at this. So they probably bought this too. Like you can do all of that stuff with WooCommerce. And a lot of this you can do with WooCommerce right out of the box. As much as I'm going to show you today is going to be all free WooCommerce stuff. But we have 350 to 400 premium extensions that can extend your site even more. So if you need some sort of special payment gateway because you're building a site for somebody that is in Nigeria, like you need a special payment gateway there because they don't take PayPal or Striper and those. So you may have to pay for premium gateways and stuff like that. So that's kind of in a nutshell where we're going to go. We're going to start with a demo site. I built this very nice site for WordCamp. Well, wait, let me refresh. I have a nice menu so you can see all my gibberish here. But basically this is a site and the thought process was that WooCommerce can be added to any website, can be added to any website even with anything that you currently have. Now some of the styling and things may not look perfect right away, but those can all be fixed and they can all be merged together. So your site looks like or your WooCommerce site looks exactly like your site. I've seen it in the past that some people have like their regular website or maybe they have their website, a static website. And then they go to store.websitenomain.com and have a store listed there. Like that's perfectly fine. It's a lot easier to manage your website all at one place. So it's easier if you have one WordPress site for your business. Like you're just your website and then you have one for your WooCommerce store. Like then you've got to do updates twice and you've got to do security things twice and then you have to log in twice and it's a real pain in the rear. So the thought process is just add WooCommerce to your website and you're done. Well, you're not done. You have to start setting it up and configuring and all that kind of stuff. The next hour we'll show you how long that takes. But that's what we're gonna do and that's how we're gonna get started. So I have just on the dashboard, we're gonna just go to the plug-in section and do an add new. I have one just in case the internet goes down. I have it saved to my computer, but I'm pretty sure that it is right here. And it's WooCommerce, it's got more than one million installs. There's tons of people using WooCommerce. The other great part about WooCommerce is it is fully extensible or extendable or you could do a lot with it. I don't know. If you think about Shopify, Shopify is one of WooCommerce's big competitors. And yes, they have a nice elegant interface. They have some really cool things that they can do with selling with their store, but it's like their platform. Like if they control the entire experience. Like if you need a new X, like you have to contact their developers and they have to think it's worthy to add to every Shopify store across the entire world, which is very unlikely. With WooCommerce, if it's something that maybe you have a very specific need, then an additional plug-in, you could hire a WordPress developer and they could add that functionality right there for it. Maybe sometimes the plug-in's already there. You can just go out and buy a plug-in and it can do exactly what you want. So we're gonna go ahead and activate this. And it's gonna start walking us through the process. This is the coolest part. WooCommerce didn't have this a few years ago, which made it hard to set up. But this is a very simple way to get started with WooCommerce. So it kind of removes the dashboard and lets you kind of forget about WordPress for a minute. And it just goes through the steps of setting up our WooCommerce site. So we want to say that our store is based here in the United States. And we can even pick New Mexico, it's here in the list. We can say where our store is. This information is really good and it'll be used later. Like if you have shipping rates generated or sales tax and stuff like that, we're not gonna put an address in for right now. But we basically want to say what currency we use. So there's tons and tons of currencies. And then you want to say what you're planning on selling. And so you can say I want to sell physical and digital goods. I want to do physical, only physical. I want to do digital only. And most of the time you just leave it set as physical and digital because you never know what you might offer. You may want to sell these widgets and sell them on your store. Or you might want to sell some sort of consulting package or whatever. Again, it's up to your imagination of what you can sell. Well, apparently we have to add the address here. How about 123 Main Street? Is that a thing in New Mexico? What's this? Albert. I know. I know. You know how many times I had to look this up to try to spell it? Do you? Is that close? Oh, there's a J. Yes? Did I get it? Post of code. 8, 7, 102. On Main Street. 123 Main Street, wherever that is. OK, so I should have just put Ohio because that's way faster than riding in Albuquerque. But our next thing is we've got options now for what kind of payment method do we want. And these are just the ones that are built in with WooCommerce. Like I said, there's a ton of other ones out there. If you have a brick and mortar store and you're already using authorize.net or square or some sort of other payment provider that you already interface with, we have extensions to interface your website with that as well. So you don't have to say, oh, my website's going to take PayPal payments, but then my other store takes authorize.net payments. And now I somehow have to consolidate and configure all this. You don't have to do that. We have the extensions to do that. So by far, Stripe is one of the most popular ones. PayPal's another one that you can add. These are just basically turning them on in the settings in the dashboard. And I'll show you this in just a second. But it just helps us to kind of get through and get set up and get going. Another thing that you probably want to do is when you are starting a WooCommerce store. And it doesn't make any sense to have these on a real store, for the most part, in the digital age of 2017. Like, you don't really want to sell things on your e-commerce store and then wait for a check to come so you can actually ship things. Because that doesn't make sense. It would just kind of be a pain. But if you do a check payment, if you turn this on, that is the best way to test WooCommerce to make sure it's working. Because you can say, oh, I'm going to buy this, a $1,000 product, and then I'll send them a check, wink, wink, and then hit submit. And then those start seeing the emails that says, okay, you've ordered this, and then you'll get an email, and you make sure all the emails are working right inside of WooCommerce. And then as an admin, you can set the order to completed, like yes, I've got it, and make sure all the rest of the emails go out right. So this is always a great one to do a lot of testing because you don't actually have to use your own money to do it. You know, when you're using Stripe and you're checking for PayPal to make sure those work, like you'll want to have an actual product that's a dollar, a 50 cents or something, so you can test it to make sure the payment gateway works. But for anything else, it's just a big hassle to pay yourself and then refund yourself and pay yourself and refund yourself. It just gets annoying. So we're going to turn on the check payments right now because I'll show you how that works and that just will make it easier for testing. Next we want to do is we want to, how are we going to ship our products? If we would have selected earlier just digital products, this whole page wouldn't be here because there's no need to set up shipping if you're not actually sending things through the mail. There's lots of different options that you can do this. The one that's going to be built in here is called WooCommerce Services and we'll click this and that's with the live rates. So with WooCommerce Services, what happens is it basically will take the user's information, when they plug it in they say where their postal code is, they'll say what country they live in, it's going to take the product, how big the product is and it's going to say maybe they bought two of these widgets and this other thing and WooCommerce is going to package it into a box. It knows what box sizes that you typically ship things with and then it's going to take the size and the weight of the box and it's going to use fancy API calls to go to usps.com and see like oh okay, it's going to cost actually this much money to send this package. So the user that's buying things from your website can actually get a specific rate like $7.20 for a flat rate box and they'll pay that and then you can pay, then you'll have to pay UPS or whatever or USPS. So we'll turn that on and I will show you how that works in just a little bit. They also have the settings here to say how you want to measure your weights if you're in a different country, you may want to do kilograms or grams or pounds like depending on how big your products are maybe everything's in pounds instead of ounces or whatnot and then for dimensions like if you're selling gigantic things you can measure them in yards. That would be kind of silly for most things but that's that. Another thing that's built in if you want to you can do automated taxes. So taxes is one of those things that it's just like oh it's a big pain and just to do all of the setup of taxes we've built in this new system in this WooCommerce services plugin that will automatically poll in the tax rates for your areas. So in general when you sell things online you only have to charge tax for the state that your business is located in and so with this WooCommerce services it's smart enough to know that. So that's one of the things I've seen people set up like they've had taxed charts that are like 370 lines long because they have specifically lined out every zip code in the entire state specifying the exact rates. So WooCommerce services with that you don't have to do that. We'll turn that on to just for the fun of it and then it's gonna ask us to activate jetpack some of these features you need jetpack and that's gonna be those live rates it's gonna be those live tax settings and so you need jetpack to do which I don't know if that'll actually work on a development site here but we will find out. Sorry we can't connect. It's because I'm offline here but that's like the setup to get started with WooCommerce. You kinda walk through the process and now we officially have a store. We've got an email address here that I can get more updates if I wanted to and then the first thing we can do is create a product. I'll click on this just to show you but I wanna go through some of the settings first so you'll see these new two areas right here. We don't need all this. We'll see these two new areas. We've got WooCommerce and we've got products and where we're gonna spend a little bit of time first is in the WooCommerce settings and that's where we're gonna see all of the well this big dialog box saying that I don't have jetpack but that's not a big deal. So we see the store address. This is all the information that we added earlier. We also have the ability in these general options so you'll see these tabs across the top. First, can I get rid of that? Guess not. Across the top here, this is where all the plugins will add their settings. So right now you see general products, tax, shipping, checkout, accounts, email and API. Those are all ones that are built in. If we wanted to sell a subscription site there'd be like WooCommerce subscriptions. That would be a tab there and I've seen websites that have 30 tabs across the top because they've got a lot of extensions that are doing a lot of things. So we're gonna look at the general settings. We have the store address right there and this is under the general options. You have the ability to set where you wanna sell things. Like do you only wanna sell to people in the United States? Do you only wanna sell to people in New Mexico? Do you only wanna sell to people in this zip code of 87102? Like you can specify all of those things. That way you don't have to open up WooCommerce and see that somebody wants you to send this giant widget that's gonna cost $1,000. They want you to send it to Mexico. Like you don't have to sell it to places that you don't wanna deal with the headaches and hassle of shipping. So that's one of the things you can do in here. You can also set your currency and so if you're setting up a website for somebody that's in a different country, you can set up that currency as well whether it be euros or pounds or whatever. That can all be set here in the general store options. Excuse me, if you restricted it to only New Mexico for example to sell to, somebody from Arizona comes to your site, are they gonna just not see the product or? That's a great question. You're not gonna be able to buy it but you're gonna be teased that you might. Right, so the question is what happens if you only send to New Mexico, what if somebody from Arizona comes and tries to buy something, what happens? They're actually gonna be able to work through the whole process of going through the store. They'll see the products, they can add to their cart and then when they add in the checkout page it asks for their zip code and it's gonna say no shipping available to this state. So that's one of the things like you can always put a notice like on your site that says we only ship to New Mexico. There's lots of things that you can do to if you're gonna restrict it that much. That's another one of those R50 is missing stories which came from Ohio that you get. It's being from New Mexico. Okay, I did not get it but we'll continue on. Under the product section this gives us some settings of how to specify and what the settings are for our specific product. So we've got the pounds and the inches like we set up before and then we have the ability to add reviews. So if we wanna allow people to come and leave reviews for our products we can turn those on and off. We can show a verified owner label for customer reviews like if we wanted to be able to do that and we can do star ratings on products and all kinds of things. So those are all in the general product settings then the display settings and I'm just walking through these menus real quick here and then we'll do some more fun stuff but basically the first thing is saying where do you want your shop to be? So you have to set up a page like WooCommerce goes in and it actually created this page called shop for me and then it automatically selected it because it knows that that's probably what I wanna do but so now if I go to the website.com slash shop it's gonna show me all the products in the store if I had any. And then just some more settings on how you want your page to display whether you wanna show all products or if you want your products on your store page to be grouped in categories. So if you go to your store page it's gonna say like product or category A, category B, category C and then you have to click on the categories and then it shows all the products underneath those. So just a few different things and then the product images those are all just about like how big of a rendered of an image do you want WooCommerce or WordPress to show when it comes to your product pages. What's the implication of the Ajax option? What's the implication of the Ajax? Basically what that is is when you if you click the button it's gonna stay on that same page. Instead of doing a full page refresh within WooCommerce if you add if you click the add to cart button it normally just refreshes that page and then it adds a little link across the top that says view cart like if you're ready to check out view cart or continue shopping. If you uncheck that then it's gonna be a full page refresh which you don't want. I don't know. You can want it. It's just it looks slicker with the Ajax. The inventory is basically if you have stock like some people have like 30 widgets that they're selling and then once they're gone like I can't sell anymore until I get more in. Other people have like if you're selling cakes online or something like you can always make more cakes like you don't really have well to an extent like if somebody buys a million cakes then I don't know what happened then but if you have stock management what this is is that you'll hold stock for 60 minutes is what the default is. So that means somebody can come to your store on your site and they can put an item in their cart and it will save it for 60 minutes to their user session before it pops it out of so it'll take it out of inventory for 60 minutes if they don't do anything with a 60 minutes then it puts it back into inventory and then if they refresh that page or they try to add it later and inventory's out they can't get it. So that's what that's all about and if you wanted to do that have that a little lower of a stock you know if you have a real popular site and you don't want people holding on to things for that long then you can set that down to five or 10 or 15 minutes or whatever. You also have the ability to set threshold for stock and there's some notifications that you can display if you wanted to you can say down here you can say like oh there's 12 left in stock and you can always show that or you can say there's only two remaining so get that urgency so people will buy things so once there's a low stock threshold you can do some things like you can have emails triggered to you or if you're out of stock you can have emails triggered to you or whatnot so you can do all kinds of things with the inventory. And then on the last tab under the products is the downloadable sections and this basically just tells you how to download things we normally keep it at forced downloads and then if you wanted somebody to actually be logged in to the site so they have an account with your maybe I don't know like some people don't like they sell an e-book but they only want somebody that is able to log into the site to be able to download it. It's an extra step in somebody's sharing it online with their social followers or whatnot but you know once they've downloaded then they can share it with anybody so it's like one extra step but you make them log into your website so they can download it first and it's just an option that you can do there. So that's for downloadable products only. All right next is tax settings and I'm not gonna go through all these because they're super super boring because taxes are boring but you have the option on this page to either say the prices are included with tax or the prices are excluded with tax so if you say it's included with tax then it knows where the person lives and it knows the tax rate in that place and it takes the subtotal and then adds it so like every visitor if they're in a different tax bracket we'll see different prices on your website which makes it really confusing and really complicated and then there's rounding issues and all kinds of things The easiest way to do this is just say no taxes included everything is without tax and then taxes calculated at the end and then that's how most stores work like most of the time you're not going to the gap and buying something from the gap and they oh like that's a subtotal like that's the subtotal then you get to add the tax on with the shipping and all that kind of stuff at the end so that's what that is all about then if you wanted to use your standard rates again if we were using the WooCommerce services with Jetpack I'll show you this with a different site here in a little bit but that would auto populate if you don't want to use that then you have to populate them yourself and so you basically would say US state code of NM and then if you wanted to just do all of the state like if you wanted the entire state of New Mexico to pay the exact same tax you would put in 6.5 or I don't know what the tax is here it's probably 10 or something I don't know but if you wanted to restrict that down by zip codes or cities you could do that as well so if you wanted to say like everything that's you know eight one whatever eight seven or whatever you guys said you could restrict that to certain geographical cities or whatever so taxes are complicated and you can have hundreds and hundreds of lines of rows in this section you can import an Excel spreadsheet yes so which would be you can probably find like spreadsheets online and just import them which makes it really nice you can also set up so you have the standard rates and then you have reduced rates and you have zero rates so those are three tabs across the top and how those work out is like some country or some states I know that it's really weird in New York we've got some weird cases like New York clothing is taxed higher than like other goods and so if that's the case like you can set different tax zones or you can have each product can have its own tax category I guess and so it knows that it's a shirt and so that's gonna get taxed at 10% but this digital download is taxed at 0% and this book is taxed at 5% or something so you can have all of those different tax rates set on each of those different individual things and then WooCommerce will do all the calculations and then it'll serve it up as one tax rate at the end so there's all kinds of confusing tax things going on any questions about taxes? Okay go oh sorry so maybe set that up for the state where you have stores yes yes but all you know you'd have to talk with your tax provider person guy lady I don't know I don't know like I don't know all the implications of actually selling and the reporting back with sales tax and all that kind of stuff like you have to as a business owner like you have to figure that out because I'm not and I don't know the next most complicated part about WooCommerce is shipping and shipping zones and I've seen people they come up with the most ridiculous things like I don't know why people want to ship things in different order like they're like oh if they buy one t-shirt it's $5 shipping but the second t-shirt's $2.50 and every third t-shirt after that it's like 13 cents that's the most ridiculous thing and it's like okay well that's gonna take a lot of extra programming like why don't we just make it a little bit easier you know it makes a little bit more sense but first before we can do shipping we have to set up these shipping zones so you see right now we have a shipping zone of United States and then we have a shipping zone of locations not covered under your other zones so what does this mean the shipping zones are geographical regions across the United States where you could offer your shipping two things so we can't if we wanted to one of the best examples is okay we're in New Mexico maybe we have a store and we want people to have local pickup maybe you sell some big widget that's something that's big it would cost a lot to ship but if somebody lives in the general vicinity they could drive and pick it up for free you know that's a good case so what you would do is you have to create a shipping zone and we would call it like New Mexico five county region or something we could call it like the the names over here the zone names these are arbitrary you label them so you know what you're talking about and what zone you're thinking through so we would say New Mexico local zone and then what we would do is we would put the maybe five to ten zip codes that's right around where my store is okay you put whatever the numbers are I don't even know but we'd have that option and then we could add a shipping method of local shipping so people could see local shipping on their checkout we wouldn't somebody like if I'm buying something from your store here in New Mexico in Ohio I don't want to see the option for local shipping because I'm not going to come and pick up you know when you can ship it to my house like hundreds of thousands of thousands of miles away so what this is is it basically gives us geographical regions so we can really specify what we want and what options we have I have some people that they come and say that if we live in Ohio but we only want to use UP or USPS the postal office is much cheaper when we ship to the five states around the state of Ohio but everywhere else we want to ship UPS okay so I would go in here and I would create let's just do that as an example I would add a new shipping zone and I would call this one I would call this zone like USPS five state just so we know and we could do zone regions so I will say Ohio I don't know the states around here so I'm going to do Ohio, Indiana whoops is next to me Kentucky no making fun of my typing you guys are laughing Michigan what's the state on the other side Pennsylvania there we go so I'm saying that I want to only ship USPS to this range or I could offer free shipping to this range if I wanted to and I probably just do free shipping because that's already built in and we'll just say we'll get free shipping there and we will also give local pickup to the people that are in the five state region so I'll just say instead of USPS because we don't have that plugin installed we'll say five state region so I'll show you this in a second but then that will give us the opportunity when we are checking out when somebody puts in either a postal code or the state for either for those five states it will show them these two options either free shipping or local pickup and we can configure free shipping if we wanted to this is built in with WooCommerce we can say that it's free shipping if they spend $50 or more or $100 or more or it's free shipping if they have a free shipping coupon or if they have hit a minimum threshold or they have a minimum threshold and a coupon you can set all of that up as well and the local pickup doesn't really have any options you can charge them if you want to like it's going to be $10 so you can pick up at our warehouse because it's an inconvenience for us and then the other option is flat rate flat rate's kind of cool because you can charge obviously a flat rate but you also have the ability well I thought you did thought you had the ability to go in okay maybe not we'll call it 10 oh you do it's right here so when you hover over this they WooCommerce has a lot of like hidden little things and you guys can't read this probably because it's way too small but if you want to do a flat rate based on the number of items so like t-shirt example we said earlier you could say I want to charge $10 per t-shirt to ship so I could say $10 and then if you put it's actually it's $10 times and then QTY QTY again if you hover over this thing it shows right here you can do quantity for the number of items you can do a cost for the total number of items or you can do a percentage so if you wanted to say like I want shipping to be 10% of the total cost and they spend $100 shipping's gonna be $10 like you can set that up if you want or you can do you know a combination of other things it's not super super powerful like there's other extensions that you can get very fine tuned and do some really cool like refined things but that's in general like how you set up your shipping settings if we had the if we had installed Jetpack with the WooCom or services thing we would have seen an option to add USPS shipping options there and then there's a whole bunch of settings that go through that I'll get to that in a little bit if we still have time so that's shipping so we set up our taxes we set up our shipping now we got to set up whoops let's let's save this that'd be a good thing to do right it says it's saved okay if it's not saved well we won't have any shipping options the next thing is the checkout and so this is the checkout process where we earlier when we said we wanted to do Stripe we wanted to do PayPal and we wanted to do the checks and this also is the area where you say enable coupons or allow coupons to work process multiple coupons if possible and then you this is another place where you say you want guest checkout if you don't if you have that box that says enable guest checkout unchecked then as as somebody's going through the checkout process they're going to have to add a password and that's going to create an account for them and then they'll have to log in to you know whatever so they can manage your account if you do enable guest account that people can just check out and then they don't have to have an account on your website and then probably always want to have the force secure checkout just because we want to make sure that we're always sending all these credit card details through our website through a secure protocol the cool part about how WooCommerce works and even like the Stripe Payment Gateway and some of these other ones is none of the credit card details are actually stored on your WooCommerce site so hack into your site and and even on like WooCommerce.com where we process all the extensions and whatnot like we have no access to any of that data so someone's like oh I use the card that ends in four, five, six, one or you know four, five, six, one we can't even see that it sends a special transaction key from your WooCommerce site to Stripe and then Stripe sends something back and it knows that the payment has went through so all the details gets gets right through it goes right to Stripe or PayPal or whatever so that's that there's the payment gateways down at the bottom and it shows which ones we have enabled and then since these ones are enabled we have to go in and actually set them up we're not going to have time to do all this but just in general here's here's what it looks like you just you go you within within Stripe for example this is the one I collect on you have to have a Stripe account and when you go set up a Stripe account then it gives you these login or these publishable keys and secret keys and they give you test ones and they give you real live ones so the test ones will allow you to actually make purchases with a test card and the transactions will look like they go through but they don't actually charge anything and then you have to like this you have to put in the live key codes and then you that way payments will actually start to go through so that's a little bit of along along those lines it's kind of a the boring part like what you need money but you need this part to work to make sure that it all all all checks out we'll we'll leave that's okay accounts this this is an area that's mainly set up for folks that have a an account on your website so if you're selling some sort of subscription or membership or digital download or people signed up when they and through the checkout process they create an account on your website then they have to have a place to go to find all this information so it's the my dash account page by default is what WooCommerce sets up and it allows people to if they go to the my account page if they're not signed in it shows them they can sign in or they can sign up they have the ability to to go and look at their past downloads they can see all kinds of information I can show you that on the front end as well so all kinds of stuff in the my accounts area emails another boring part of WooCommerce is you have to send emails when things happen and here's where all the settings go when you get a new order a canceled order a failed order those come to the store owner which makes sense like those are transactional emails that something has happened on your store you get those emails and then all the rest of them go to the customer so whether the order is on hold or it's processing or completed it's refunded all that kind of stuff those go to the customer one of the biggest sticking points in this is like when you're testing this if you're testing this on a local environment most of the time those emails won't fire just because your local environment like your your local installation of WordPress doesn't have a mail server provided like set up and even some WordPress hosts don't have the ability to send email out so when you get to this point when you when you're doing some tests and you're figuring out okay what's going on here you buy something but you never get any emails one way or the other when you're testing or when you're the store owner then most likely there's something going on within your server itself you may need an extra plug-in there's plugins out there they're called SMTP they're SMTP plugins and they allow you to hook in with your Gmail account or other web server and it allows you it allows WooCommerce to actually send data via email so some of the it's like I've got a bunch of test sites on Precipile some of the other like big name companies have a mail server and it's just gonna work but if those emails don't happen to be going out for some reason then that's the first thing to look at there's also a plugin called email log that you can install and it's going to take a log and a record of every mail message that's trying to be sent from WordPress so that's something to look at as well you can also try like the lost password reset within WordPress like if that email doesn't send then most likely it's not a WooCommerce issue it's an issue with your web host and something along those lines so that is the email section and then the API section there's not really much here unless you want to uncheck the unrest API but most of the time we just leave that that blank or don't do any settings there and then the next one that you may see is like an integration tab this one happens a lot if you're integrating your WooCommerce site and say with MailChimp or you're using some of the other plugins that are out there there'll be integration tabs so you can go in to log into your MailChimp account make sure that's all set up properly and then you can work from there so those are all the settings that's taken like half the time just to get through the settings of some of the things so we're going to go through a product now and then we'll show you some more things so any questions about settings do I miss anything is there anything that is just some things are boring yeah Disable I don't know they move things quite often on us let's see it might be under this area under tools under status and tools no I don't know I will have to look and see if I can find that there's a very specific question it's not prepared so we get to the products oh yeah go ahead how how possible is it to set up in the commerce where you're building products and testing each of your products before you're going to go live maybe you don't even have an SSL set up then is it possible yeah that's a good question so he's saying well how do we test like if we want to test every single product before we even have the SSL certificate set up like can we do that with those other gateways some of the gateways will let you and other ones won't like square for example will not work will not even show up unless you have an SSL certificate installed so it just really depends on the payment gateway most of the time like I like to make sure the product like everything with the emails and all the transactional things are working perfectly with the check payments and then you can go and do a couple transactions with Striper PayPal or whatever for the most part they're always it's it's not going to be any different like if two or three go through with Stripe and you've tested a hundred with the checks like it's going to it's going to work out like it's not like some of them will work and some of them won't as long as they go through with the checks they're going to go through with Stripe as well that's a good question so when you get to the the products area this is a if you've never created a product they've got a little tutorial here that will walk us through or there's also the ability to import products from a CSV file which is super nice if you have your inventory somewhere and you've got 10,000 products and you've got all this stuff like you can import things with a from a Excel spreadsheet another the cool thing that you can do with the Excel spreadsheet or the CSV file or whatever is say you've set up your entire website you know you've got 15 products say and you want to you want to make edits to all of them maybe you want to put them all on sale for a while or you want to do something with them you can export them out of WooCommerce they're into a CSV file you do all the edits then you upload that information back up and it will overwrite the new data on the current products so that's really nice and yeah so the so the question is what about uploading photos? So this is probably a look of a sticking point but how you can do this there's two ways you can first upload all of the media the photos to the library itself and then take those URLs and put them in your spreadsheet or you can have them all like on a public Dropbox folder and put those links in the CSV file and then if they're not located on your site as part of the import process it's going to go grab them from wherever they are upload them to the media library and then then link it to the correct thing inside WooCommerce so it's pretty awesome so let's go ahead and create our first product creating a product as you see here is okay we do not need all the steps here but as you can see it looks very much like creating a post creating a page creating like most things that are on our WordPress site that's what it's all about what we're going to do is we're going to sell orange shoes because I like orange and I like shoes and I'm wearing orange shoes and we can say like cool things about my orange shoes it's just some gibberish text here just to kind of show you what happens but here's where the this is what makes it WooCommerce this is where the money is with WooCommerce and if you don't put a price on a product it's not going to show an add to cart button on your site so if you ever run into that why can't I put in my cart it's because there's no price if you want it to be free you can put zero in the price point and that's what you're going to do so I'm going to say my fancy new shoes are $100 I can put them on sale if I want to this is kind of cool it uses the power of WordPress and the schedule ability of things but we can say like if you wanted to set up your store for Black Friday you can say like on whatever that Friday's date is through the Monday or whatever you can say this is my Black Friday sale I can set it up I can forget it and I can say what the new price is when it's on sale if you don't want to schedule the sale you can just say a sale price of $90 and then WooCommerce will say they'll put $90 as a real price and it'll do a strike out through the $100 line item so you can do that as well here's the boxes where you can say where the tax status is whether it's taxable or no tax or shipping only tax and then if you wanted to say if you were in the crazy state of New York and say like this was clothing and it's going to be a different higher tax bracket or whatever you can say you can specify right here what type of shipping or what kind of tax class it's going to be in then you go down to inventory if you only have one set of these shoes you can put that in if you can do managed stock and whatnot this is where the SKU number so we talked to about all the importing of things importing really looks at the SKU number and the title so if you really want to make sure that you can import and export and all that good stuff make sure you have some sort of SKU number there that's going to be one of the driving factors to make sure that the product is unique it also looks at the post ID number so there's plenty of ways for WooCommerce to know what product is what so it doesn't overwrite the wrong product so we can say our SKU number is maybe we should call it like orange one, two, three orange is my favorite color and so I'll reference that several times we'll say a quantity of one you can do back orders so if you want people to be able to buy even though they're on back order you can enable that as well and then if you wanted to only limit people to buying one pair of orange shoes at a time you can say sold individually and they can only buy one of whatever that product is then with shipping in order for shipping most of the time to work right you have to say what the size and the dimension is this is where we get a lot of people that when my shipping calculations aren't working right what's going on it's because the product doesn't have a weight and it needs a length, width and height in order for calculations to work if you're only offering free shipping or if you're doing flat rate shipping you don't necessarily need to add this information but when you're setting up your site like just go ahead and do it because someday you're gonna have a thousand products and you're gonna say oh well now I have to go back and add all the like it's gonna be a pain to do it later so if you can take 10 seconds to measure your box and weigh it then that's good so we'll say these are super light shoes we'll say they're 0.2 weight and this is important like this is the weight and the dimensions of the actual thing that's going in the box so if it's like I'm not gonna take my shoe and measure like the size of my shoe I'm gonna measure the size of the box and if I'm selling something like some sort of perishable good and I'm shipping it on dry ice like you have to include the dry ice weight either in the packaging or in the product itself so you have to kind of make those calculations as well so it's not super super easy but it's possible and doable and another thing you can do is you can set things by shipping classes I know that I'm just like pouting off like more information than you'll ever want to know but shipping classes gives you the ability to like manage the way that things are shipped so maybe you have like stickers stickers can ship free you're gonna throw into an envelope or put into a package that's already being shipped but then sometimes you may have like something that's gigantic and it weighs 50 pounds and it has to be shipped via freight or something else so you can set up all these shipping classes to say like if it's in this shipping class it's gonna go freight if it's in this it's gonna go by envelope if it's you know whatever so you have tons of options the easiest way is to set up and just put them all in the same shipping class figure out what's gonna happen when you actually start shipping sometimes you're gonna lose a little money on shipping sometimes you'll probably gain a little money on shipping depending on what size box it goes in if WooCommerce calculates a bigger box then the customer will pay a little bit more for shipping than it actually costs but then other times you know it's gonna work out in the end you'll be very very close the linked product area is the next part of setting up a product and this allows you to do upsells and cross-sells so upsells are, I think cross-sells are the ones that go across the bottom so it says like oh you like orange shoes maybe you'll like an orange jacket and you'll like an orange vest and you'll like an orange this but upsells are the ones that you see on the cart page like you're almost ready to check out and it's like oh well you might like this and you might like this and you might like that so if you had other products set up you can just start typing like it says three or more characters then it'll go through and look at all your products and you can add that specifically to those areas so that's a kind of a way for you to market yourself or you know promote your other products across your store attributes are set up for in case you have like these are really good for product variations and what a product variation is is like t-shirts is a great example like you have one actual product like this WooCommerce t-shirt there's one of those but maybe I offer those in purple and orange and small, medium, large and extra large like you don't want to just have to set up how many products is that and if you offer them in men's and women's sizes that's like 18 products you have to set up well with a product variation that is which is another subset of products what that allows you to do is say I have this t-shirt this is the design and then you can say a variation is a purple men's small purple women's small and orange men's small you know like all of those you set all of those variations up and then with each variation you have different sets of colors like you can put actual pictures like you can see how this can get very complicated very very quickly especially if you're selling lots of things a lots of products if you're doing a variable product like the example of the t-shirts and you're doing a lot of them probably the best thing to do would be to create one product export it see what that looks like in a CSV file in that file make a bunch of edits and add a bunch of other products to that CSV file then upload them back in and then that way you don't have to go through it's a little bit cumbersome to go through because you have to set the price for every variation you have to do like all kinds of things for each separate variation so that's that and then we've got the if there's any purchase notes that you want to give the purchaser you can put those there if you want to put them in the menu if you want to enable reviews you can do that as well if you want to set the product image you just click the I did that kind of quick but there is the product image button right here this works kind of like the featured image in WordPress and it's kind of using the same type of technology I guess I mean it's WordPress or whatever but if we wanted to add the orange shoes like I'm wearing we can add those just like so and we set that as the product image and then we publish we can always come back and fix and change but let's go ahead and see what that looks like when we when we do that so we can see that that's what it looks like because I uploaded a rectangular image and my theme is calling for a square image you were missing part of the shoe so that's an issue so that means I either have to resize the dimension of the product that I've uploaded and make that a square image you know make it have more white on the top and bottom or I have to resize and do some configuration with my theme to get it to look right so that's another step of the process more and more steps it has this cool zoom feature so you can see how awesome they are especially in orange but then if we go to it's not funny I like orange if we go to that shop page this is going to show like all the products that we have in our store so this would be like kind of the landing page for our store so if I had more products if I would have thought ahead and had a CSV file with a bunch of stuff I could have uploaded them all and then we could see all the products right here we'll just add to cart to show you what this whole experience looks like so that add to cart that was the Ajax response right there I don't know if you saw it or missed it but I clicked the add to cart and all of a sudden it shows me this button that says view cart and so I can click on the view cart and now I see the view cart it goes to the like I can add a coupon code if I had set up coupons I'll show you where that is in just a second and then here's the button where it does calculate shipping so remember I set up the I set up the shipping zone for Ohio only it was for Ohio and the four states around it and so if I go in and I put New Mexico what's the zip code here again? seven, eight, eight, seven, one, oh, two and we do an update it's gonna say there's no shipping methods available because we didn't set any shipping methods up for that we only did the ones in Ohio so if we do Ohio there's no shipping methods available in Ohio either because I didn't save it I know, I know that's why I'm going back when you are setting up WooCommerce sites you will get to know different oh, I see why this was another problem that happens a lot with WooCommerce sites I'm glad that I did this I'm glad I messed up so I can show you how to fix it yes, this is gonna save all my support requests so the way that WooCommerce shipping works is it comes to this page WooCommerce is smart it comes to this page and it's like okay, I'm gonna look for the first zone that meets the criteria for New Mexico so it goes in and it looks at the top of the list and it's like, oh, United States New Mexico is in the United States I am gonna look there and it says there's no shipping methods offered in that zone okay, that makes sense we didn't set anything up for all of the United States we didn't set anything up specifically for New Mexico that makes sense all right, now, Ohio let's go at the top of the list oh, Ohio is in the United States there's no shipping methods you have to have the most specific shipping region at the top so if I wanted the 87102 as a specific region that one has to be very top because it works top to bottom as soon as it matches one it's gonna display every rate that's here I've seen people this is another support request happens all the time they have United States then they have United States free they're like, why doesn't the free shipping ever trigger? well, because it's never gonna trigger because it's always gonna hit United States at the top first so that's the reason so that's why I made the mistake purposely I made the mistake so if you do have this problem you run into this issue you see the little, I don't know what they call them they, if they're a menu it's called a hamburger menu if it's a drag and drop thing I don't know if there's even a name for it but you just click and you drag and now we can go back and we can refresh and it's going to say here's my shipping options so that is that so now we have shipping and then you proceed to checkout and you can see what the checkout page looks like this is where you kind of walk through the process make sure everything looks good works right and then since we have the check payments that's the only option that we have then we can go ahead and place the order it does pre-populate some of this information based on if you're logged in like this is another really confusing thing like if you're logged into your website and you've, the last time you're on your site you specify that you know your zip code in Ohio then the next time you come to the site you're going to see like the shipping rate for the zip code in Ohio like it automatically knows who you are and what you're doing so that's a kind of a confusing piece if you, most of the time you can do the incognito window just open it up or another browser don't log in and you can see make sure that everything's working properly so that is that try to think if there's anything else let's, by chance, let's turn these this would be another product that you could turn into a variable product kind of silly to sell shoes by a simple product and you just like buy the shoe because it'd be any size, right? So we want to say that we have a few different sizes of shoes available so you can change a product from a simple product you can do group products so that this is all what's built into WooCommerce is group products have the ability to like say you buy this product and you get this product at the same time or these two products are grouped so you have to buy them both at the same time you can do an external link to an affiliate product so this is pretty cool so if you wanted to promote like you're selling all these things in your own store but you have all these affiliate relationships you can set it up so it looks like a shop but when they click the button it opens up in a new link and it's your affiliate link to whatever product it is so then it looks like it's in your store or whatnot and if you want to change it to variable product if you have WooCommerce memberships or WooCommerce bookings or subscriptions or any types of like extra things that you want to sell or different extensions then you would see all of those options here as well but if we go into variable product we'll see these things called attributes and you're gonna have to add a custom product attribute and so we're gonna say like sizes because we're gonna sell different sizes of shoes so we'll say eight and then you have to separate these by the little pipe thing 10, 11 and 12 we have to say that we're used for variations and then we save that attribute and then we come to this other page and we say create variations from all attributes it's the weirdest thing, I have no idea but this is just how you do it so it adds five new variations so the eight, nine, 10 and 11 and if we save this we can go over and we can look at it, we'll go back we'll go back to the shop uh-oh, orange shoe can no longer be purchased I didn't buy it, I changed the product type and so it's telling me that so now you see that we're looking at this product and now it says read more this used to say add to cart why is that? because you can't, this is a variable product you have to pick which variation that you want so you have to say oh I'm gonna go to this page and now I'm gonna select an option like what size of shoe do I want? Change the text to that button? You can, it would change site-wide if you change the text the read more you can say you can change it to whatever so anytime it would be the read instead of saying read more it would say whatever like you could do those customizations then would it show up in the rest of the WordPress installation elsewhere? Probably not, just in the WooCommerce part so now it says, what? It's still looking for the auto right, that's something that has to be that isn't changeable through the WordPress dashboard but with a line of code to do a filter you'd have to filter the text okay, we'll find it okay so I created the product I saved it, I've got five variations but now it says it's unavailable any ideas why? No stock, it's a good guess anything else, any other wagers? No, I don't think it's due to that let's see, we've got inventory we've got a stock quantity there we can turn off the stock here and see if that's it so we have unlimited orange shoes whoops okay this product's not available what? I just took that off I just changed the inventory to I'm not managing stock anymore nope, I just took that all off I took all the managing stock off so then that's not gonna be the issue yes, I don't know who said it you were listening you have to set the price per variation variation price just sold, I just saved another support ticket from a hundred people, yes so you have to go in and do it you could go one by one you could say they're a hundred dollars or you can go up here this is another thing that is so bonkers about WooCommerce that it's hard to see and I don't know why but at the top here you can say what the default value is so if you wanted people to come and when they land on the page like it automatically pre-selects 10 because most men have size 10 I don't know, you could do that if you wanted to so then that's gonna be pre-selected when they come to the cart the other thing you can do here is this this tab here, it says add variation but what we can do is here we can set regular price and we do set regular price and we hit go and we say the value is a hundred and so we've just done that and we'll save that so then we didn't have to do that five times and expand that box five times one of them was a different price the regular price would apply to all of the other four and then you could set a specific price for them it would set all of them if one of them has a different price like if you're selling an XXL T-shirt or something that's $2 more or whatever then you would do a set all price to be $10 then you would go in and edit that one variation for $12 or whatever so instead of going like the other process is doing this and you're clicking the down button then you're scrolling and adding the price you're updating the inventory yada yada yada then you're gonna do this one and you're gonna do the next one and hope not to hit the remove button when in the whole process while you're doing it so that's how you set up a product variation so that's, I only have five minutes left but I have about five more hours of content so I don't know how that's gonna work there's tons to do with WooCommerce probably the biggest thing is like first kind of map out what your plans are for your store if you're thinking about a store like what kind of products like it's always great to start with one product start with two products start with something small start with something that is a reasonable shipping like you don't have to go in and try to configure USPS shipping so you get these live dynamic rates and try to figure out what you know just say $5 shipping like whatever like if you're starting to sell a product like you are gonna make some money you're gonna lose some money on shipping but it's going to you're gonna get to learning experience there the stores like that sell hundreds of thousands of dollars a day with this stuff like those are the ones that are really tweaking all the settings like getting the most performance out of their websites they're making sure that pages are cashed and not cashed and they're doing a lot of like really intense things but as a store that's just getting started people are driving traffic to your store like get them to those pages use what Mark was saying about the Google analytics like you can see what pages people are looking at and like you can set up these you can set it all up so you can say like oh if they come to this site and if they don't hit the add to cart button that's a failed conversion or these ones are good conversions like you can do all kinds of stuff you can set up your store in all kinds of different ways let's just go to WooCommerce.com real quick I'll show you some of the extensions that we have like you can there's tons of them there and we have a couple bundles that are happening right now that basically take like five or six premium extensions bundle them all into one thing and then give you a really good discount on them so if you wanted to sell if you want to have a membership site that's a good example there's a bundle that includes memberships and subscriptions and a few other miscellaneous plugins but that will allow you to turn your website say you want to have like I'm going to produce this type of content or I'm going to teach people how to do copywriting or I'm going to teach people how to do whatever and then they have to have a membership to my site they pay $15 per month you have the subscriptions plugin which manages all the payments so every month their credit card gets charged and then you have the memberships payment or the memberships plugin that allows you to restrict certain content on your website to people that are paying like you can do all kinds of things with WooCommerce which is pretty awesome but here's a list of all the things like if you go to WooCommerce.com and click on the extension store there are literally hundreds of things in there you can integrate with Zapier so if something happens on your store you can kick off some sort of integration to your Google Docs account or whatever like you can do fulfilled by Amazon through your store like there is literally not a thousand but 300, 400 plugins to do specific things so if you're coming up with a you know you're coming into a problem like with anything with WordPress like if we come up to something that we don't have the functionality for in our website what do we do? We look for a plugin like we look for a plugin to do X for our WordPress site we look for a plugin to do X for you know whatever but if it's in WooCommerce like the best place the first place to go is go to the WooCommerce like extension store and see what's out there like these are some premium plugins some of them like this one WooMembers bundle is like $300 but you're getting like so much value in the fact that we have developers that have put hundreds of hours into these plugins like and the big thing is like I know the WordPress community is on the frugal end of things you know they want everything for nothing and that's how I am too like I don't like paying for things but if you're running a store your goal is to make money if you can if you can sell five products or 10 products or 15 products you know whatever the number is based on what you're selling to pay for you know a $300 plugin like say you have for $300 you have a $10 a month plan or a $30 a month membership site you need 10 people to buy that per year to recoup your costs so if you buy an extension too you get live chat from WooCommerce and people like me are sitting behind the computer in Ohio like trying to answer every question that you guys throw at us so that's my spiel I guess that's WooCommerce in a one hour time block if Sam was in here I would tell him he should have gave me three hours but that's probably all you need to know right now if you have any questions I'll be here the rest of the day and part of the day tomorrow so that's it