 Today, I am really only giving you the basics because we don't have a long time to go through at least two hours of work or even longer. So at the end, if you email me, I will send you a copy, a PDF copy of the manual that I've actually created. It's just a basic guide, which is what lots of people are using. One believes that, and lots of clients of ours believe that as soon as you plug in WooCommerce, it takes a couple of minutes to actually get started. It doesn't. There's lots of factors that you have to think about. So we might go over those today and just see how far we get into it. I've cut them down from 80 slides to about 30. Okay. So how do you start your WooCommerce site? And it is all about the Woo because that's what we love doing. You need to decide what you're going to be selling, what products, whether they're digital, downloadable, or a physical product. When I first started putting this in, together we were just focusing on a physical product. So just a simple basic product that someone would buy, someone would be able to hold. So this is not about digital products here today, okay? The reason I'm crazy is because I love WordPress and I love WooCommerce. I have looked at other programs. I have dealt with other shopping cart programs, which have been easy and we're now transferring all our clients over to WooCommerce when we can. Some of those involve thousands and thousands of products. So we use third-party migration tools, which is really good. Some take seven days, especially when they have tens of thousands of products and lots of variations, but it's workable. Before you start, you need an idea. You need to plan it and then you can start actioning what you're going to be doing with your business or hobby or whatever you're going to be using WooCommerce and WordPress for. I always start with a checklist. You need a name for your online business. You need to register your domain name. You don't own your domain name just so that if you're very brand new, you don't own it. You have to register it. You set up your hosting and there's lots of hosting companies around here at the moment. And then you need to install an SSL certificate. It's very important to have that in place nowadays. We have to have it. Otherwise, I've lost. Have I? No. I'm right. There are payment options out there that won't even allow you to install them unless you have an SSL certificate, such as Stripe. You need to install and set up your WordPress site before you even start even thinking about installing WordPress, WooCommerce, sorry. So once you've done your WordPress site, that's when you start doing other things. One of the things to consider before you even start installing WooCommerce is to look at your themes. So you can use a free theme which is made by WooCommerce. It's called Storefront. They also have some child themes that you can actually install as well. Or you can set up your own child theme plugin to create your own. WooCommerce themes from WordPress.org. There's lots of those. And then you can also go to third-party places like Envato. There are other ones out there as well, but I tend to stick with the Envato themes. As long as they're themes-based WooCommerce themes. So you've got real estate themes. You've got car dealer themes. You've got many other themes that you can actually install. And they're already set up for you. This is just a Storefront theme, what it looks like. If you go and search for it, WooCommerce has it on their website, and you can just download it. It's just one of their extensions. These are the themes from WordPress.org. Just some of them. I've just taken a screen grab just of three different e-commerce-type themes because WooCommerce doesn't actually have to be an online shop. You've got to remember that. And then you've got your third-party themes like Envato. You do pay. I've taken the prices out so you can't see what they charge. I tend to look for the ones that are updated to what WordPress is now. Make sure that everything is updated. Make sure it's all GDPR set as well because that's going to be very important for you. And then what we need to consider is what is WooCommerce? So before you even install it, you need to know what you're actually going to be working with. So WooCommerce is an online e-commerce platform, and it's open source, and that means that it's free to use and many of the extensions are also free. Of course, there's lots of paid ones as well. You can create any style of e-commerce site using WooCommerce, including online shops, event and booking sites, subscription sites, and the list goes on. You can do membership sites. We've just set up a car dealer site, and we're using WooCommerce for that as well. Before you use WooCommerce, you need to also have a functioning website, of course, before you can install the WooCommerce plugin. You can manually download it from WooCommerce.com or you can add it to your WordPress site via the plugin section, which is quite easy to do. You can sell physical, virtual, and downloadable products. You can sell almost anything, including the kitchen sink using WooCommerce. If you can have an e-commerce for your business or hobby or more, we have some community groups that also use WooCommerce for their websites, and they do lots of different things. People pay you for your time, your product, or your service. So if you're running a service out there that you need to book time with, they can actually pay you before you even provide that service. You can sell anything, really. My sister does. She sells lots of costumes, lots of masks, lots of everything. She makes a lot of money, doesn't she? For example, every Halloween, her intake for a week could be 40-plus. It's worth thinking about. So you can sell almost anything, as I said, including the kitchen sink. You can sell cupcakes, you can sell cars, you can sell computers, you can sell boots, clothing, horrible masks like that one, and jewelry and lots of other things. So the question is what will you sell? You can have an e-commerce site that works with what you do and what you sell. So you can sell subscriptions, you can sell membership, you can sell physical products, your time downloadable items, event tickets, virtual products. Then you need to look at what sort of site you're going to be having. We're actually, at the moment, I'm just going off this a little bit, we're looking at setting up a huge marketplace for an Indigenous community, which will be government funded. So that is one idea that you can take. You can also run it as a catalogue site. You can sell drop shipping products, you can sell physical products, you can sell wholesale products, sell virtual and downloadable products, sell tickets to events and workshops. You can also sell affiliate products and services, which you can actually set up within your shop. And there's lots more. I could be here all week. Sorry if I'm putting you to sleep up there. Some examples of what you can sell. Here we go, some more things, food and beverages. Fishing tackle and accessories, clothing, workshop spaces, photos and artwork, jewelry services, and the list goes on. And that hat is from the steampunk era, by the way, if you know what steampunk is. Another thing that my sister is heavily involved in. But you need to think about the products and services that you will sell. And I keep going on about this because it is very important, because a lot of people do jump in and just set it all up and then they wonder what they're going to do with it. So the images are also important. Quality is important. We have a client out there who loves to take the photos from her supplier. So she has a clothing site. She sells jewelry as well. And a lot of the photos that she uses are very, very poor quality, or they're very small. And she will put them into her site hoping that they will expand and they don't. And it doesn't matter what we say, she still keeps doing it. So we can't change her mind. She just doesn't. And then you need to think of your payment options. There are lots of different payment options out there. You've got the likes of PayPal, direct deposits, Stripe, you can use Square, cash on delivery. There are so many different options out there. And if you do a search for them, you'll find them. Square is a good option for payments because if you are operating a physical shop, you can actually set it up as a POS that runs through WooCommerce and is also running through Square as well. And you can also take it to the markets with you. So if you're going to a market, you've got a market store, you can actually have everything interconnected and you're not losing anything. Same as your shipping options, there's lots out there. People always have a problem with shipping. They have no idea. They really have no idea how to charge a customer for shipping. They don't know how to set it up and what's the best way to actually ship an item. They don't know whether to offer free shipping, which you can do. Having a flat shipping rate, offering free shipping is really, really an easy option for many people. And then there's plugins in there that allow you to set it up as a table rate. But there's also paid options too, which allow you to do so much more. So you can actually have help by using Australia Post, TNT, there's DHLers out there too. I think for Australia, I just have to check that one. But there is a paid version of a plugin called AusPost. AusPost has been around for a while. It's OZPOST. And they allow you to ship using all the different careers and Australia Post. Okay, so it's really quite handy because they're pulling all the databases in from all those companies. So I think you get 60 days free to start with and then I think it's about $9.95 a month. So this is what I meant by image quality. This is off her website, by the way. And I took this screen grab just the other night. Okay, so this is something you don't do. Quality is really good. Clear photos are really good. I'm not going through all the good photos and the bad photos because we just don't have that much time today. But once you've got my manual, you'll see the difference. Also, with the images, you need to look at the sizing. Sizing is important. Choose between whether you're going to have portrait photos, landscape photos, or square photos. Don't have a variety. But if you're using a theme-based, a WooCommerce theme-based theme, of course, that's for that. So for this, she is using a theme that is based around fashion. They set the sizes, but she still chooses to use different sizing and it just doesn't give you the high quality that you want. It doesn't give you the perfect look overall. Although we have taught her many times how to do it, she just... Anyway, we just deal with it, don't we? But on her website, she also has the same size photos as well. So there's just a few that she just can't get right. So when you have the perfect size, it looks really good overall. The person who's viewing it sees that you're actually taking a little bit of time out to make sure that the website looks okay and the products are looking good too. Now, you've got your products. You're working out your shipping. As I said, I can't include everything, so when you get the manual, you'll have all the different options in there for shipping and various other things. But setting up means that you really need to have help and there is a wizard in there that actually walks you through all the steps of setting up so that you can get ready to start your online shop. So you go through your general settings, your payment options, your shipping options. Follow those steps carefully because the general settings, you're setting your addresses, where you're going to be sending to. So whether you're just going to send in Australia or whether you're going to send overseas, it gives you all those options to do that. Your payment options, this is where you can actually choose to do it through PayPal. What other things does it allow you to do, whether you're going to take offline payment so you can do all those things as well there, but it doesn't allow you to put your details in. You're just setting those options up. Same as your shipping options, it gives you the chance to decide whether you're doing flat rate free shipping for Australia and overseas. And that's it. You can't put anything else in there. Recommended, you're getting recommended, you get some choices of whether you want to use Jetpack, MailChimp and various other things and then it allows you to activate some additional programs if you want to, but re-thrill because everyone's store is different. I mean, I could show you different things that go into my stores, but then your store is different. So read the information carefully and then it says that you're ready to add your first products. But wait, you're not. Because before you add your products, you need categories. But with We're Commerce installed, if you look down the left hand side where all the navigation is, hover over your products, it allows you to set your categories. We've got some really pretty categories here. So we have plus size, we have dresses, we have swimwear, we've got tops and blouses. They were all set up before she even started putting any products in. And to do that, it makes your job easier. I mean, you can add additional ones in as you're going if you think about them, but she doesn't have some categories in there. She just has one level categories so that everyone just goes into that one area. And she covers a fair few. They're only just a handful of categories that she has on her site. Now, I've clicked on this one because I forgot to write about the other thing, but it is in the manual. It's your variations or your variants. So it allows you to set color, size, style, whatever else you want to add into there. We've just set up an events calendar using We're Commerce for a client and she has different levels of registrations for people. So we've actually set those up as variants. So we have the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and then we have Just Women and then various other people that can actually sign up depending on what registration they're signing up for. So they get to choose and each one of those has a different payment. You can remove how many is in stock if you want to just by going into your custom details but at the moment with the attributes, the attributes are there for you to use but you don't actually add those to your products straightaway. You have to have a product in there but that's what it will look like when you finally do add your attributes in there. These are just some custom, sorry, some We're Commerce plugins I use. They're all from We're Commerce or through the WordPress.org site. We tend to use the custom product tabs and the reason we do that is because we have dealerships. We have computer shops that like to give specifications to their customers. It is a free plugin. So for every product, you can have a different custom tag and you just set it up when you're setting up your products. Google Analytics, of course, is a must for everybody so you can track what you're doing. You can also get an enhanced one as well. MailChimp, not everyone wants to use MailChimp. I like MailChimp. It's one that I tend to use for our clients because they like to collect email addresses and the majority of people who are selling something want to send out a newsletter. So we do it the right way. Not many of them have over 2,000 users at the moment, so it's free. We're Commerce PayPal Checkout Gateway. The majority of our clients use PayPal so that's what I tend to set up for them. I've started teaching people how to use Stripe. Stripe is the one that you really do need. It's the source certificate in place for because they won't even look at you until you do. And then we have custom emails. This is a new plugin that I've found recently and it takes you away from having the everyday ordinary WooCommerce email. So you can actually set up a customized email for every client if you want to or just a set of clients, especially if you're doing events. You can have an email that just goes out to those people and it's directed at them. When you're adding a product and you're happy with your setup, you can start adding them. These are the things that you need to know and it's really interesting because I've actually added a few extra lines in there. We give our customers a list that they need to provide us each time or a spreadsheet and not one of them at the moment has been able to give us everything we need. Okay, so we need a name of a product. You need a long description and don't copy it. There are so many clients that just use the suppliers copy which means that you're having duplicate content on the net and a customer can see that. They can see that it's badly written and how bad it really is. Okay, you need a main image so you need one that's quality not like one of those other ones that were out there and you can also have a gallery of photos if you have more than one photo. So we have, like for the car dealership they have up to five to ten photos I think for each car that they put online so you really need to look at that as well but it's easy to add in and choose the category. That's why we put the categories in there because I've already listed down there but if you get to the stage where that you need another category just like your WordPress site, normal working WordPress site, you can add another category and a short description if required. So this short description will actually appear above the checkout, above the add to cart so make it short and that's what it is, it's short but that's not all, your product is not ready to go yet. You now need to move through the list that's below all that information and you need to add your product data so because it's a physical product there's no downloads or anything else we're just leaving it as a simple product you can do downloadable, you can do your affiliate and you can do a grouped product as well. You put your price in and your sale price if need be. So these are the steps that we do you choose your simple product you keep it simple, leave it because that's what I'm doing you give it a general price and then you move down to the next thing you do the inventory you've got to give your product an SKU which means it's an identifying number that's how I tell my clients because they have different suppliers it's a number that they're going to recognize so when someone buys something they know it's for that product and they can recognize it with their stock or their dropshipping supplier for example. So tick the box if you want to enable stock management when you do that it allows you to add how many you have of that product you can then decide not to allow back orders you can allow or allow but notify customers and you can also set a low threshold and now you can enable this product with one item per single order so if you only want one person to have one of that product which if you've got a limited number you can do that or if you've just got one product you can do that too and then you move on to your shipping you've got to put your weight in there the dimensions including length, weight and height and also choose a shipping class if you have it set or you can leave it as no shipping class you link your products if you want to link your products you've got upsells and cross sells so think about those because sometimes one product will sell really well with something else so you can actually link those and we set our attributes before so this is where we click on the attributes and we add it to the product that we're using in the manual there is more instructions I can't go through those today we don't have a lot of time and then when you've set that because you've set a colour or a size variations will drop down it's not appearing before that so the variations will drop down it'll allow you to create various variations so for each product you can set your stock quantity for each one so if you've got a green t-shirt you can have three pieces if you've got an orange t-shirt you can have two you can set it to whatever you want and then when they're sold out they're sold out and then the advanced is just really easy you can add a purchase note which means that a client is getting a note when they've purchased that product and you can also enable reviews or set it in an order in your menu so when you're finished doing that now you can save your product and you've actually got a product online and that's what you have and if you see the attributes now appear because I was able to do it it'll appear down with the drop down menu with different colours and that's it and that's where you can contact me and if you email me at info at crazylady.com.au let me know that you saw me here I will email you a PDF copy of the manual and you can find me in Happy Bay with an E