 How's everyone doing after eating pie? Good? Good pie? So if you're looking for the slides, there is a much shorter link on Twitter. And I just tweeted it out a second ago. So you don't have to type that, which is a little long. All right. I'll just wait one more minute, and then we'll get started. All right. So how many people here have ever built an online store? How many people here have? Let's start easier. We're going to start easier. Who here has sold something online, including eBay, including Craigslist? OK, most people. And now with an online store of some sort. Cool. And now with WooCommerce. That's like a third of the room. That's actually pretty awesome. That's pretty cool. So I want to talk today about WooCommerce and how you can build an online store. And I'm going to talk about it from the store owner's perspective. And also, if you build sites for clients, how you can do that in such a way that both the client can make money off the clients, helping them build that store. So e-commerce is a really complex topic. If you guys have, I think, the only e-commerce session in this WordCamp, and there are entire conferences on e-commerce and all the things you can do to make your e-commerce site better. There's special SEO just for e-commerce. There's special marketing tactics just for e-commerce. There's a lot you can do when we're only scratching the surface here. So what I'm going to do today is show you guys how to build your store. And I have a lot of slides at the end for next steps, books, and other resources you can use to learn more about e-commerce. So we are going to be talking about WooCommerce. If you haven't ever heard of it before, it is a plug-in on the WordPress.org repository. It is free. You can download it. There are over a million active installs. So it's pretty popular. And yeah, let's just jump in. So I got two slides of history. And then I'll actually show you the software. So this is the growth of WooCommerce. This is just the last year. The last, it's about five years old. And it's had, it's been growing pretty darn fast. In fact, when you look at the entire internet and how much market share it has, it's right around 30%. So Magento, if anyone knows e-commerce, Magento is like the, what's the word here? I'm thinking of the politics word. You're the, no. Establishment, that's the, there we go. That's the word that's, Magento is the establishment. And they've been around for 10 years. They still have a lot of really big sites, but a lot of the smaller sites are now WooCommerce, which is pretty impressive. So our goal today is to build a store and start selling. And the reason that I say that is because I think the best way to learn is by building your store, launching it, selling, and then learning as you go. You can't know everything about a WordPress site before you launch. Some of that you only learn as you build the site, launch it, and then figure out what happens. So let's start with just a little bit in like the late 1990s and the early 2000s. If, does anyone know Derrick Sivers? He's a motivational speaker. One, one, two people, okay. He created this website called cdbaby.com. And basically it was the exact copy of a CD store that was around like on his block except he put it online. But because he was the very first person to do it, he made millions of dollars and then he sold it to some company for millions more. So in the early 2000s, you just had to have an online store and you were good to go. Today it's a little bit more complicated than that. Today launching is just the start of the process and then it's all about getting more traffic, optimizing, getting more traffic, optimizing, getting more traffic, optimizing. It's a whole job. It's not just a, it's not a one-time project and then you just make passive income for the rest of your life magically. So this is what we're gonna do. We are going to add a product to our site. We're gonna, I'm gonna show you some of the shipping settings, I'm gonna show you how to do taxes, how to do payment, and then actually orders is not on here, I cut it for time, but all of the top part we're gonna do. The cool thing about WooCommerce, about any WordPress plugin basically, is that it's open source. So there are hundreds, if not thousands, of add-ons for WooCommerce that are free. So there's thousands of plugins for free and there's 246 themes for free on WordPress.org. And as of a month ago, that's 33 new themes since I checked last month. So that's pretty awesome. There's lots of free stuff out there. Let's go into installing this. So I'm gonna skip very quickly over the plugin pages. You guys know how to install plugins. If you don't, I hope you learn soon, it's pretty easy. You just click on add new. You click that little button there and that installs the plugin. We just released WooCommerce 2.5, Dashing Dolphin. I had no idea how popular that would be in Miami. It was awesome. We have stickers and everyone's taking the dolphin stickers, it's fantastic. That was good timing. We just released that last month. I apologize, but in about six months we're gonna put out a new version and it probably won't have a dolphin on it. I know, I'm sorry. I'll leave extra dolphin stickers here. Flamingo, fantastic flamingo. Instead of Dashing Dolphin, I'll pass it on. Fantastic flamingo, fabulous. Okay, so installing WooCommerce. So if you guys installed this before WooCommerce 2.4, which was last summer, there was lots of setting screens. What we've done is we've basically put everything into one welcome wizard that makes it a lot easier to do. So once you actually press the activate button, you see this little welcome and it says, hey, this is gonna take no longer than five minutes. We tested this with the user and it took them and they've never set up an e-commerce site before and it took six or seven. So that was pretty awesome. So the first thing we do is we install some pages for you. If you've ever built an e-commerce site, you need to have a cart page and a checkout page and a My Account page where you can look at all your orders and we're just letting you know that we're doing it so when you see those pages in your WordPress admin, you don't delete them. That's a little bit blurry, I think. But the next step is we just set where you are located, which we use geolocation so it'll figure out where you are and set your currency and units of measurement for you. You usually just have to press the continue button. And if you're doing shipping or taxes, hopefully you're collecting taxes. You just check those boxes and then it'll prompt you to fill in a little bit more information. This is one of the cool things about WooCommerce is so you see that shipping stuff up there? You know, the domestic shipping cost is blank per order and blank per item. The way we build our software is we build it in such a way that it's always, this is like the easiest way to do shipping and there's lots of other shipping options that you can configure later. So if you wanna have live quotes from USPS, you can do that but we're not gonna make you do it in the install screen. So there's lots of options later. We just make you do the very bare bones here. And we import tax rates so yay. Payments is a big issue. We're gonna be talking about payments a little bit later. Everyone wants to know how to collect credit card numbers or how to process credit card numbers is more accurate. I'll get into that but for right now in this little welcome wizard, we just ask you for your PayPal email address. That's all you need to start selling is just your PayPal email address and add a product. It's pretty cool. The last page is just hey, you're done. I do recommend our newsletter because we have lots of free information on there and then once you sign up for the newsletter, click on create your first product. Let's go into that. So I think most people here are probably pretty familiar with the regular WordPress page post editor. Adding a product looks just like that. So if you wanted to do the very, very, very bare bones, you could have a product with nothing else, press the publish button and it would look something like that. We of course want to have a lot more than that. You probably want to have a title, price, description and an image. So that is the regular WordPress page there. I've added a short description and a long description. You'll see that little product mailbox there, that big section right under the copy. I'll go into that in just a minute and I'll tell you everything that's in there. But for right now, this is all you need title, price, title, price and image. The descriptions are optional of course. And it looks like that. So it looks pretty nice. You just have to enter five pieces of content and you get something that looks pretty decent. So there's a lot of stuff whom commerce can do. We only make you do the bare minimum, right? We just make you enter a price. That's all you need to do to sell a product. But there's lots of other stuff that we can do. So if you want to track inventory, like if you only have 10 units, you can just put 10 in there and as soon as 10 orders come through or five orders with two each, all that inventory will be gone and the product will be marked as out of stock. There's dimensions which you use for calculating shipping costs. There's sale price, upsells, cross sells, downloadable virtual products if you want to sell like a downloadable PDF, all that stuff. There's also variable products. If you're selling clothing, there's a black t-shirt that's medium. You can do all that stuff. So these are all little sub tabs here. Not going to go into it, that'd be pretty boring. So at this point, you need to ship it. If you don't know that reference, go to that link. But you basically just need to launch it at this point. All you need to do is set up WooCommerce, add a single product or more if you have them and launch it. All that extra shipping stuff you can do tomorrow or the next day. It doesn't have to be perfect the day you launch. I was supposed to say that. Okay, so let's get into just a few of the extras because there's a lot of stuff that you do want to do. People do want to have USPS live quotes. They do want to understand how to process credit cards. Let's do that. Payment. Okay, I could talk for an hour on payments and you guys would all hate me because it'd be really dry and boring, but I'll try to simplify this as much as I can. There's basically two ways to accept, there's basically two types of payment gateways. And a payment gateway is the person that makes sure that your credit card has enough, your credit card can afford the order. And there's two types, modern and traditional. Okay, so modern is usually what I recommend and they do two things. They not only validate that the funds are in your bank account or in your credit card, but they also draw directly into your bank account. There's usually a couple day wait, but it'll draw it from their credit card to your bank account. Examples of this are Stripe, Amazon Payments, and a whole bunch more. There are hundreds of credit card gateways. These are just my two favorite modern ones. The other type is traditional and they only validate funds and you need something else called a merchant account to actually draw the funds from their account into your bank account. Obviously that's a whole extra step to set up and this was before they had modern gateways, they had these traditional gateways. These were things like Authorize.net. If you're working with a client and the client has been around for more than 10 years, there's a good chance they're using an older gateway like this or they're using a merchant account and you'll want to use something like Authorize.net to accept to process those credit cards. Traditional gateways are slightly cheaper. So if you are making, if you are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, then you can save a little bit of money unless, and this is becoming more and more common now, you can negotiate rates with a modern gateway. So something like Stripe, if you're processing hundreds of thousands of dollars, you might be able to negotiate a better rate with them in which case that's not necessarily true. But in general, traditional gateways are slightly cheaper once you start making a lot of money or processing a lot of money. Merchant accounts are a giant pain to set up if you've never set one up before. You basically have to talk to your business bank and they'll set up a merchant account, there are credit checks, lots of drama. Don't set one up unless you have to. So if the client already has a merchant account, use it. If not, use something like Stripe or Amazon Payments. Any questions on payments? Yeah, so the question was, do you need a gateway in addition to PayPal? So PayPal standard, which is what comes in WooCommerce, you can do a credit card, you can use a credit card there. The only downside I don't like is that it takes you to another site and you have to enter the credit card there. If you want a credit card on your own website, a credit card form on your own website, then you need something like this. Yeah, do we support FoxyCart? I don't know, is the best answer. Okay. Yeah, I have a blog post on this. So if you guys want to learn, read more about credit cards, it's right there. All right. Shipping is another one of those things that everyone wants to upgrade and there's a million things you can do and it's kind of complicated depending on what your client wants or what you want to do. So you can get live quotes with WooCommerce. Everything up to this point, sorry, I should say, everything up to this point has been free. These are usually paid add-ons. So the ones we make are paid add-ons. I just wanted to give that a disclaimer. You can get live quotes from these people. It's fantastic. The only, I don't recommend it though if you have one of those clients that isn't responsive because you need dimensions for every single product and every single box that they use. Otherwise, when someone tries to check out and there's a product that doesn't have the right dimensions, they won't get a shipping cost and then they can't check out. Does that make sense? Basically, if you want to use USPS, you have to have dimensions for every single product and the box. So it's just a little bit of a pain to set up and with clients, they don't always give you the stuff you need. If you've never set up any sort of shipping before, I highly recommend using USPS. It's just an easier integration. You don't need to create an account with FedEx or with USPS, but you do with UPS and FedEx and it's just one less thing that can go wrong. If you have multiple stores, check out ShipStation. That's all I'm gonna say on that. But if you have multiple WooCommerce stores and you want to aggregate everything, ShipStation is pretty fantastic for that. All right. Unfortunately, I can't talk about e-commerce without talking a little bit about security. Everyone here has probably seen HTTPS, something like that, the little S and the little green and the little lock. The short story is you're basically going to need HTTPS. You don't 100% need it, but you might as well just have it to be safe is the slightly longer answer. What they do is they protect your users from having any sort of information stolen. Anyone, so if you're at a coffee shop, anyone can watch your data pass between your computer and whatever other websites you're at, but with an SSL certificate with that HTTPS, all the data is encrypted, meaning that they just see gobbledygook. If you don't do that, then they can read everything that your user is doing. They can see what pages they're going to, what forms they're filling. So if they fill out a checkout form, first name, last name, phone number, email address, and credit card could all be stolen. So definitely a good idea to have SSL. Yeah. If you absolutely need it if you're handling credit card numbers, then it's 100% must need. Oh, I just wanted to say once again, everything so far has been free with the exception of the shipping methods, so. Okay, so this is the part that, so basically at this point, we've launched a basic store. I talked a little bit about shipping. You can look into different options. I talked a little bit about payment. You can look into those options, but at this point, you really do have everything you need to launch a very basic store. There's a lot more that you can do. I always start with trying to get more people to your site. So if you know how to blog, or if you do content marketing, whether that's on your own site or on a platform like Instagram, YouTube, whatever, that's fantastic. SEM is AdWords or Facebook ads. That's another fantastic way to get people to your site. And once you start having people to come to your site, I always recommend increasing your average order value, basically getting more money from each customer, which sounds really evil when you put it that way, but if you can give customers good suggestions on, hey, I see you bought this basic water bottle. Would you like the premium water bottle? That's helpful for customers and you. And after that, then you start looking at optimizing your customer lifetime value, and that's doing stuff like newsletter marketing, getting customers to come back and pay you more than once. It's really, really, really, really useful. So as I predicted, I went through this quickly, but I have a lot more resources. This slide is out of order. Ignore that, we'll come back. Okay, so if you've never looked at how to get a ton of customers to your site, Traction is a fantastic book. There's like 19 different traction channels or something. It's a really good way. It is for startups, but almost all of them also work for e-commerce stores. Contagious is about how you can have products like spread via word of mouth. Talks about how and why people share information. 80, 20 sales marketing, you know. And then positioning is about branding. So all of these are fantastic business books for anyone who wants to do any sort of thing with e-commerce. I wrote a book on e-commerce. So if you guys want to check that out, there's like code examples in there. And I made a Linda course. Woo. And oh, we have Wucon coming up. You guys should check that out. So we're having a conference in Austin, Texas in April. It's going to be amazing. So I'm going to go back to that previous slide now. So I'm the product manager for WooCommerce at Automatic. I live in Denver, Colorado. I do yoga and other fun active outdoor things. And now is an excellent time for questions. Anything on e-commerce or selling something online or yeah, let's start right up there. Are there any other differences between like an e-commerce website with SEO and a regular? So I think with SEO for e-commerce, you just want to make sure that you're sharing all of that product information with Google. So depending on how, if you send Google the right information and it thinks it's the right information to display to a customer, it'll display like your price in your search engine results and your SERP search engine result page. So as long as your e-commerce platform handles that, your users will always get the best information. Awesome question. Is there a difference between using basically a theme made by WooThemes and a theme made by someone else basically, right? So you can use anything WooCommerce is open source. We do have a free theme. I just took this slide out yesterday because I didn't think it was important but clearly need to add it back in. We make a free theme called Storefront and it's on WordPress.org. Use it if you want. It's a good exact, we mostly put it out there as an example for other theme developers. And you can use anything you want. I've custom built WooCommerce themes before I joined the team. My only reservation on other themes is sometimes a lot of themes on a certain marketplace will pack a lot, a lot of features into a theme. They'll be like, we also have an affiliate system built into our theme. So once you install it in WooCommerce, we have this WooCommerce affiliate system. They have all this functionality baked into the theme and I never recommend that. Your theme should only look pretty and plugins should do everything else. So long as you have a pretty looking theme, use it. Yeah. So what about WooCommerce with non-profit taking donations? So there's a lot of things you can do. You could definitely use just the free WooCommerce as is with PayPal. The one thing about donations is sometimes people want to donate a certain amount like someone wants to donate $10, $2,500, maybe more. For something like that, we have an extension, a paid extension of WooThemes.com called Name Your Price and then they can enter whatever amount they want. So that might be a useful add-on, but other than that, I think you can use WooCommerce as is. Okay, it was about the downloadable feature. It didn't quite catch it all. So can you combine WooCommerce's downloadable feature with someone opting into your email list? Okay. You might be able to do that. I'm trying to think, so I use MailChimp on my own personal site and I just have the paid plan and whenever anyone joins my email list, I send them an email with a link to a file in Dropbox. And that's just way easier. I think you could do something with WooCommerce, but really with WooCommerce, it sends them a downloadable file once they download a product. I think you'd just be going through extra steps to get it to work that way. So I would try to do something within your email application and just say, hey, thanks for joining my newsletter. Here's a link to the file. One more time, selling video. So if you wanted to sell some sort of video product, so I was talking about newsletters before. So if you wanted to sell a video product, here I'll go back to the page. So okay, so the WordPress product, acts just like a regular WordPress page in post. So if you drop a YouTube link into that page or post, it'll embed it just like it would on a product or post page, or post or page, page. Awesome question. How does WooCommerce handle credit card information? We do not store anything ever because that would be a big no-no. You would need to handle credit card numbers and you'd have insane PCI compliance. So there's various ways of handling credit card information. The long and short of it is we don't touch the information. We usually send it directly to the payment gateway. So with Stripe, for example, when someone fills out that credit card form, the information goes directly to Stripe and Stripe just says, yes, they have money and they paid. We never actually look at the credit card number. We do get back the last four digits, right? And then we start out the rest. So we never look at it and there's no way in a WooCommerce site to get that information without totally hacking apart the plug-in. Yeah? There are a few third-party plug-ins that do that. I don't even want to name them, but there are a few third parties that do that if you do not use those because you don't want a $10,000 fine or more for storing, you know, having someone's credit card information stolen. Awesome question. So can you still be PCI compliant or not have to deal with PCI compliance and have credit card form on your site rather than sending them to PayPal, right? Yes is the short answer. So with Stripe as another example, the Stripe checkout fields are actually hosted by Stripe. We actually don't host that. It looks like it's on your site, but it's not on your site. We use magic to do that. So because it's hosted by Stripe and it's not actually on your site, that information gets sent directly to Stripe, we never see it. The customer does look like it's on your site and they just fill out first name, last name, phone address, credit card number, expiration date, submit. There are multiple gateways that do that. Sorry, there are multiple that do that. I'm gonna say maybe a third of all of ours, not even. Okay, so that was Stripe, PayPal by Braintree, which is new and log in and pay with Amazon or pay with Amazon. Those are the three biggest that we usually deal with but there are plenty of others that do that. PayPal powered by Braintree. Someone over there had to stand up for a while. Yeah, I think you asked one of my favorite questions. Do you have any way of doing recurring payments? So I think if I had to brag about one feature in WooCommerce, it would be our subscriptions feature. I think it destroys all the other e-commerce solutions subscriptions features. So there is an extension called WooCommerce Subscriptions which you can get on withumes.com and it allows you to have any sort of interval you want, weekly, monthly, yearly, any amount you want and it works with 20 or so of our payment gateways, all the big ones. Oh, so it works with a whole bunch of payment gateways as well. You, and it'll automatically bill them every billing interval and then you just have to send them the product. It's pretty awesome. It also has upgrading, downgrading, cross grading, pausing a subscription, pro rating a subscription if they upgrade all that crazy stuff. So it's got a lot of stuff built into it. It's pretty cool. So, yeah. Oh no, that's an awesome question. So like basically how do you set up SSL? Okay, so while I'm a developer, I don't ever want to deal with setting up an SSL certificate so I just emailed my host. So please fix this for me. Make it SSL and they usually do it for you. Some hosts will do it for free or very, very little and SSL certificates can be pretty, you can find them pretty cheap. I would just email your host as the starting point and they'll do that. For SSL, right? Yeah, so do you recommend the whole site or everything? So nowadays you might as well encrypt the whole site. Google has slight SEO benefits for SSL, so you might as well just encrypt everything. Must have extensions or plugins. Okay, so I focus a lot on having people grow and succeed and so I care a lot about average order value and I care a lot about newsletter marketing. So basically stores, if you're not getting your existing customers to come back, you're gonna, it's a lot harder to succeed so I care a lot. We have an extension called newsletter subscriptions or I think we just have a MailChimp one I'll forget what it's called. We have a MailChimp extension and I would definitely have a newsletter subscription so when someone buys something on your site they have the option of signing up for your newsletter and that way you can reach out to them later, hey I have a related product or I have a new product or you haven't bought from us in a year, here's a 20% coupon. There's lots of ways of getting people to come back and it's like, it's a very cheap or free extension and it gives you access to all of your previous customers so I think that's really important and it's really easy to set up. Can you, okay, so can you integrate it with a calendar anyway so that you can sell sessions instead of products? Yes, there is another extension called WooCommerce bookings so if you're a massage therapist or a lawyer and you wanna book, build people by the five minute interval or build people by the hour or whatever you want there's an awesome extension called WooCommerce bookings that allows you to do that and on the product page there's basically a little calendar and you can select an appointment on all that sort of thing, yeah, it's pretty cool. I don't know how well the time zone support is, I believe it's based on their time zone, like I don't think, on the store's time zone, yeah. Okay, so the first question was about drag and drop themes and how those work and the second one was about international taxes and shipping, specifically that, value added tax, okay. So the first one, drag and drop builders, I think those are fine but I do think that they usually get a little bit, I see more problems with drag and drop builders than with something that's a theme that doesn't have one included. If you wanna use one, go for it, I would just, sometimes they get a little, sometimes they don't work well with plugins so like if you have a Ninja Forms, the forum builder or WooCommerce, they just don't always like if you wanna move up a certain part of the WooCommerce page to somewhere else, it gets messed up but if you wanna go for it, go for it. The second one, value added tax and my computer's sleeping, value added tax and shipping and international orders, okay. I'll preface this without I'm not an accountant. The second thing I'll say is the short rule is because of the EU's new digital VAT laws or you do have to collect sales tax from certain countries and send it to the EU which is kind of new. No, that hasn't really been done before where if you live in a totally different place that they, so if someone buys your downloadable album in Germany, you still owe Germany tax. What I would recommend is if you're, and that's only digital products right now, it doesn't apply to physical goods. What I would recommend is there is an extension and I believe it's free called taximo, if that's right and they do all of that EU VAT digital stuff so you can mark certain products as this one needs to have EU VAT tax collected and then it'll collect it all and I believe it helps you submit all the forms at the end of the year. I know taximo's a paid service, the integration is free on RN but basically you should look at someone who, it's a totally new thing, it started last year. We just, so I talked about signing up for the newsletter earlier. Last month we had a fan, we had someone who was an accountant on a webinar and he talked about all the tax stuff that, because everyone wants to know about taxes or wants to know enough about taxes and he answered all those questions. So, set up for the newsletter, it's got good stuff. Oh, up there, good question. So, good question, let me repeat that just to make sure I got it all. So, with subscriptions, how is payment information stored? Cool. There's something with credit cards that you can do, you can create these things called tokens and we store the tokens. And basically a token is something a store can use either one time or repeatedly but it's not the actual credit card number. So, when we process a credit card with Stripe, the first, usually the first transaction with Stripe, we won't remember your credit card but we will remember this token that Stripe gives us and it says PatrickRollinStore.com can use this specific token as a credit card. The cool thing is, is if your website ever got hacked and someone stole all those tokens, they couldn't do anything with them. That's kind of how a lot of websites remember credit card information without actually remembering credit card information. So, we don't ever store credit card numbers even with subscriptions, we just store these things called tokens that can do that for us. Good. So, does the new chip credit cards affect anything? I'm gonna have to, I don't know but I don't believe it's affected anything because we haven't updated anything and we have 400,000 sites and no one sent us an email saying their site's broken. So, I don't believe that the chip has affected online stores, only for physical, there we go. So, guys, I think unless anyone has burning questions come talk to me afterwards, otherwise I think I'm done.