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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Building an online store is often considered to be a difficult, complex task. Using the combination of WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin, this is no longer the case. WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform for WordPress and is being rapidly developed by WooThemes. It provides a strong e-commerce solution to set up your own online store in just a couple of hours.
This easy and practical book will help you make the most of WooCommerce to be able to set up and run your online store yourself. Installing WooCommerce is an easy task, but this book will explain in detail all the possible settings. After that you'll be adding products, different payment methods, and shipping solutions to your store. You will then customize your store by adding themes to change the look and feel. Once your store is running, you'll learn how to use discount coupons, process your orders, look at reports, and even expand the functionality further with additional plugins.
By the end of the book, you will learn everything you need to add a fully functional online store to you WordPress website and start running an online business.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 182
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: November 2013
Second Edition: December 2015
Production reference: 1211215
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78588-156-5
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Credits
Author
Robbert Ravensbergen
Reviewers
Matthew Allan
Rémi Corson
Nicola Mustone
Commissioning Editor
Priya Singh
Acquisition Editor
Manish Nainani
Content Development Editor
Arun Nadar
Technical Editor
Bharat Patil
Copy Editor
Tasneem Fatehi
Project Coordinator
Neha Bhatnagar
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Mariammal Chettiyar
Production Coordinator
Arvindkumar Gupta
Cover Work
Arvindkumar Gupta
About the Author
Robbert Ravensbergen is an experienced e-commerce and IT manager. He has been working in several international roles for various companies. He's also a passionate writer and blogger. WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento are the topics that he writes about.
Robbert released several books about Magento and WooCommerce for Packt Publishing during the last couple of years. Besides this, he's an important writer in the Netherlands and well known for his understandable books for beginners about WordPress.
Readers can reach Robbert on his personal blog at http://www.joomblocks.com.
I would like to thank the employees of Packt Publishing for making this new book possible. It has been a pleasure working with you again. Besides that, I would especially like to thank the reviewers of this book, whose inputs were very valuable in creating a better product. Thank you!
About the Reviewers
Matthew Allan works with a growing team of developers at Prospress to bring top-notch plugins and extensions to the WordPress and WooCommerce platforms. Some of Prospress' most well-known extensions are WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooCommerce One Page Checkout—both available from woothemes.com.
Over the past 3 years, Matthew has been reviewing WooCommerce books and developing new software for entrepreneurs wanting to jump into the e-commerce world and start selling online. Matt's experience in developing and supporting premium extensions for WooCommerce has informed his technical review for this book.
Rémi Corson built his first website in high school, where, after a few months, he realized he was teaching web languages to his own teacher. Then, he decided to build his own content management system called PHPforge, which was used by more than 5,000 users at that time. He finally switched to WordPress a few years later.
Formerly in the top ten of CodeCanyon's best sellers, the largest code-related marketplace on the planet, Remi worked on Easy Digital Downloads' early versions with Pippin Williamson, and joined WooThemes as a Happiness Engineer in 2013 before the acquisition by Automattic in 2015.
Rémi is a public speaker and code expert. He works on WooCommerce core code on a daily basis and he built/refactored many official add-ons. He was also involved in the first WooConf organization in San-Francisco in 2014, the major WooCommerce-related event. Rémi writes weekly posts on his blog, mainly about WooCommerce, and provides a lot of free plugins and snippets.
He is also passionate about woodworking, surfing, and video making, and is a great guitar player.
Nicola Mustone is a web developer based in Italy, where he studied economy and programming. He developed his first website at the age of 15. Since then, he fell in love with programming and web developing, so he started studying it in depth, improving his skill set.
He started working as a freelancer at the age of 19. In 2011, he accepted his first job at a local web agency.
In 2012, Nicola moved from his birth city, Lucera, to Acireale in Sicily to work with Your Inspiration where he learned about WordPress in its entirety, from end user usage to themes and plugins development. Working at Your Inspiration, he specialized in WordPress development and customer support.
In October 2014, he started working for WooThemes, and in June 2015, Automattic acquired WooThemes. He is currently an automattician working in the WooCommerce support team as an Internal Support Ninja. Nicola also writes articles and tutorials regularly to help customers understand WooCommerce and WordPress better.
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Preface
Back in the early days of WordPress, the platform was mainly used to create and run blogs. Soon plugins became available to add functionality to the platform. A couple of e-commerce plugins became available as well. However, often they were incomplete or buggy.
In 2011, the WooCommerce plugin became available on the market, developed by the popular creators of Woothemes.com, where you can buy premium WordPress themes. WooCommerce was an instant hit and reached over ten thousand downloads in the first couple of weeks. A few years later, the plugin was downloaded almost 1.4 million times and it received a complete makeover during 2013 with the release of WooCommerce 2.0. Meanwhile, the solution has become mature and is even used for larger online stores.
The reason that the plugin became so popular is that it is so easy to use. Millions of people were already using WordPress for their blogs and websites and were looking for an easy way to be able to sell products and services directly on their own website. WooCommerce made this possible for all of us.
This book will explain you how to set up WooCommerce, create products, and use payment and shipping methods. You will work with themes and add plugins to expand the functionality of WooCommerce. It will teach you how to create and run your own online store in a very easy, straightforward manner.
It's time to get started!
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce, shows you how to set up a test environment and install WooCommerce. After that, you'll learn how to set up WooCommerce and work with taxes.
Chapter 2, Creating Your First Products, helps you create your very first products. You'll learn what the minimum steps are to get your products available and be able to start selling them.
Chapter 3, Using Downloadable Products and Variations, offers various other possibilities when creating products. In this chapter, you'll create downloadable products, learn how to work with attributes, and create variable products.
Chapter 4, Payments, Shipping, and Coupons, shows you how to set up payment and shipping methods for your store. You will also learn how to use discount coupon codes for marketing purposes.
Chapter 5, Working with WooCommerce Themes, shows you what you need to pay attention to and where to buy or download good themes. Having a solid WordPress theme available for your WooCommerce store is very important.
Chapter 6, Customizing a WooCommerce Theme, gives you a brief introduction to themes to get you started. Creating a WordPress and WooCommerce theme is worth a book by itself. You'll actually make code changes to your theme and find some practical examples.
Chapter 7, Running Your Online Store, starts with explaining how to bring a development store live. What do you do when the first orders flow in? How do you use WooCommerce to make sure that orders are handled correctly? We'll also show how to manually create an order and speak about reporting. Time to bring your store online and start selling!
Chapter 8, More Possibilities Using Plugins, explains which plugins to use and where to look for other possibilities. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. On top of WooCommerce, you can install additional plugins to expand or change the functionality. But there are so many options, which plugins are a good choice?.
What you need for this book
In this book, we're assuming that you're familiar with using WordPress. You do not need development skills, but just a basic user-level knowledge of WordPress should be sufficient. Your WordPress website should be a self-hosted one. Using WordPress.com is not an option as it does not offer the possibility to install your own WordPress plugins.
If you're not yet familiar with WordPress, we highly recommend that you read one of the WordPress beginner's books or tutorials first. WordPress 4.x Complete from Packt Publishing is a good start (https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/wordpress-40-complete).
If you're already working with WordPress, we're also assuming that you know how to work with an FTP tool, like the free FileZilla.
Besides this, it's handy to have image manipulation software available, such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Fireworks, or Gimp.
Finally, you'll need a code editor if you want to be able to change or create your own WooCommerce themes, a topic that we'll cover in Chapter 6, Customizing a WooCommerce Theme. Well-known editors are Notepad++ for Windows users and Coda or Sublime Text for Mac users. There are plenty of alternatives as well; just use the tools that you like.
Who this book is for
This book has been written for everyone who wants to learn how to expand an existing WordPress website with e-commerce functions using the WooCommerce plugin.
WooCommerce is an easy-to-use, but fully-functional, e-commerce plugin that will turn your website into a fully-featured online store. The book is suitable for marketers, e-commerce (project) managers, and web design agencies working with WordPress. First of all, this book is meant for everyone willing to run their own online store on a relatively small budget.
Although this book is not aimed at developers, some WooCommerce code examples are provided in this book.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Next, simply enter WooCommerce in the Search Plugins field and hit Enter."
A block of code is set as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Plugins in the menu on the left-hand side, and click on Add New".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Questions
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Chapter 1. Setting Up WooCommerce
During the last couple of years, WordPress has outgrown any other Content Management Solution worldwide. Numerous websites are built using WordPress on a daily basis. WordPress is even popular among large companies. Currently about a quarter of all websites worldwide are powered by WordPress.
WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that turns your website into a complete online store. Practically in minutes, but that doesn't mean that the solution is very limited. This book will show you what you can do with it. WooCommerce is a versatile plugin that gives the possibility for everyone with a little WordPress knowledge to start their own online store.
Originally, WooCommerce was derived from the Jigoshop plugin. The WordPress theme developers of WooThemes quickly brought the solution to a higher level and soon it became the most popular plugin for e-commerce within WordPress. In 2015, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) acquired WooThemes and WooCommerce. So we could almost say that WooCommerce has become the default ecommerce solution for WordPress now. At time of print WooCommerce is even powering 30% of all online stores worldwide.
In case you are not familiar with WordPress at all, this book is not the first one you should read. No worries though, WordPress isn't that hard to learn and there are a lot of online possibilities resources to learn about WordPress solution very quickly. Or just turn to one of the many printed books on WordPress that are available.
The following are the topics covered in this chapter:
Setting up your test environment
Before we start, remember that it's only possible to install your own plugins if you're working in your own WordPress installation. This means that users that are running a website on WordPress.com will not be able to follow along. It's simply impossible in that environment to install plugins yourself. WooCommerce has recently become a part of WordPress itself. I can imagine that because of this WooCommerce might become available for WordPress.com users in the future. But so far there are no signs yet of an integration of WooCommerce into WordPress.com.
When starting with WooCommerce there are two situations that might occur:
Either way, you'll need a test environment to be able to play with WooCommerce and follow along with this book. Although technically possible to add WooCommerce to an existing WordPress website immediately, I highly recommend using a test environment. Things can and will go wrong and you don't want to confront your current visitors with your experiments.
Setting up a WordPress test environment isn't as difficult as it might seem. There are tons of tutorials available, whether you're working on Windows or working with a Mac. When you want to add WooCommerce to your existing website, this is what you need to do to setup a test environment:
Alternatively, install a copy of your WordPress website as a temporary subdomain at your hosting provider. For instance, if my website is http://www.example.com
