I’ve been helping a couple of clients with their e-commerce shop setup. It’s been an interesting learning curve for all of us. I had already used WooCommerce on my own sites, but I am primarily engaged in services. Preparing for my tutorials for these clients was quite enlightening as I scoped out the settings for physical products. Lots of pieces to corral.
The WooCommerce Process
Is it easy and fast? Well, not super-fast. It’ll take a couple of hours to go through the process of setting up WooCommerce and then learning to add a product. But once the basic setup is done (that bit only takes 15 minutes) and you’ve added a couple of products, you’ll see that WooCommerce takes care of a lot of things for you. People can come to your website, look through your shop, pick a product, commit to buying it and make a payment, all without your intervention. Nice!
I’ve built a checklist to help me remember what to cover when I’m giving tutorials on this topic, and you can download it here if you’d like to use it as a reference.
E-Commerce Has Come a Long Way
Back in 2010, I used a much earlier e-commerce system for my hubby’s coin-ring business, and it had all kinds of software glitches and restrictions. WooCommerce shows just how far e-commerce software has come. It also has hundreds of extensions (some free, most premium), that can shave off even more of your time spent dealing with the administration and logistics of selling products, as well as enhancing your marketing activities.
But It Doesn’t Do Everything
Although WooCommerce makes lots of repetitive things easy, it still does not take your product pictures for you (as far as I know—there could be an extension for that!) or make or buy your product for you. You are still in charge of the materials, production process, physical shipping, and basic marketing.
I am also happy to run the tutorial with you in a one-to-one session, or work with you to get a larger group of products added to your shop. Just contact me.