Want to start selling online? Great! Creating and managing online sales in now not as difficult as it used to be a decade ago. Newer technologies and the ecommerce platforms has made it possible for every vendor to be able to create and manage an online shop for himself.

In this tutorial, we will show you how you can start an ecommerce website in minutes. With these simple steps, you will be able to start selling your products online and accept payments for it. Before we start, here are a few things you should know about WordPress and WooCommerce.

An Overview of WordPress and WooCommerce

WordPress is a name associated with blogs, isn’t it? But we all know that it is capable of many more things. It is one of the most commonly used content management systems used all over the world. There are many reasons that make WordPress the best of its kind.

• Free and opensource
• Extremely easy to use
• Flexible
• Large community
• Abundant add-ons and themes

Besides, there are several other reasons to use WordPress. Taking about ecommerce

Note : Besides WooCommerce there are several other ecommerce plugins designed to convert your WordPress site into an ecommerce website. Here is an article that will tell you about all the WooCommerce alternatives. However, WooCommerce is the best and most used ecommerce plugin. It’s free, simple and feature rich.

step 1: Install and activate WordPress

You can download the latest version of WordPress from here and install it. You can try using WordPress along with WAMP or XAMP in your local computer before you try it on server.

Step 2: Design/Get a theme

Next thing you’ll do is get a design for your ecommerce website. Preferably a theme, a theme that goes well with WooCommerce. WordPress, as I mentioned earlier has a great community working around it and there are tens of thousands theme available for it (Or even more!!).

When you are sure that you want to use WooCommerce you will need to find the themes that are compatible with WooCommerce. These themes are specially designed to work seamlessly with WooCommerce. There are many companies out there, providing premium paid as well as free ecommerce themes compatible with WordPress.

So find a theme that suits your requirements and install it.

Step 3: Download and install WooCommerce

Get WooCommerce and install it. Simply login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the plugins section.

Then Add new >> Upload plugin >> Upload the downloaded WooCommerce setup >> Install now.

Activate it

WooCommerce is now ready to use, just configure it according to your requirements.

Step 4: Configuring WooCommerce

Settings

One of the best things about WooCommerce is that it is very easy to use. Everything is very intuitive.

Navigate to your Dashboard. Find the settings option under the WooCommerce menu. This will let you set the shipping options, products management, checkout features and even edit the automated emails that the system will send on event triggers.

Pages

WooCommerce is amazing. Install it and these pages are ready to use. They don’t need you to do anything. You can start adding products right away.

Step 5: Adding products

Once you have installed and configured WooCommerce your website is ready to sell online. So, start uploading your products. Uploading Products using WooCommerce is really easy.

Creating product categories : Before you start adding products, you need to create proper product categories and subcategories. To do so, navigate to your dashboard and find “Products” from the left menu. Click on the categories. You can use this form to create categories and subcategories.

Note : If your theme supports categories icons, you can even add icons dedicated to the categories from here.

Now to add products, navigate to your dashboard >> Product >> Add product. This will allow you to add products. You can upload the particulars of your products with the straightforward and descriptive form.

And your website is ready to go.

PS : This article aims to help you create your ecommerce website. However, you need to market your website and products to gain traffic and conversions. Don’t worry! Here are the Best ecommerce marketing tips to promote your ecommerce website.