If you took on board everything we covered in my last blog post, then you should now have an online store that is highly effective at converting visitors into paying customers. You’re attracting attention, making your products look desirable and then maximising the profits from each sale you make.
All that’s left then is to make sure as many people as possible are finding your website. And if you do this right, then your business will start to scale and you can invest more back into marketing.
Here are some strategies you can use…
SEO
Before you start spending money on adverts, SEO might be a better first port of call. SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and is essentially the process of optimizing a website and link strategy so that your store is easy to find on Google when people search for it.
To do this, you will often begin by identifying a search term (key phrase) such as ‘buy hats online’. Only you won’t want to choose ‘buy hats online’ because that will very competitive and very difficult to rank for. This is why it’s such a good idea to have a particular target audience and a particular type of product. Remember how we discussed selling brightly colored shirts? Well ‘brightly colored shirts’ is likely a keyphrase that people look for but which isn’t quite as competitive.
To start ranking for this term, you need to ensure you have a well optimised website (meaning it’s fast, mobile friendly and easy to navigate) and that you include the keywords you’ve selected in your descriptions and on your blog occasionally. Aim for around 1% density, so for every 100 words, you can include the key phrase once. It’s also useful to include it in headers and in meta descriptions and then to try and build as many links as possible on relevant websites (that might mean getting a fashion blog to link to you for example). You might be able to do this by providing them with free content, which is called ‘guest posting’.
Content Marketing
Speaking of content, content marketing is also a fantastic tool you can use. This basically means you’re running a blog and the aim is to get people to subscribe and to look for your site when they want information relevant to your industry. So if you sell gardening tools, you should have an authoritative blog on gardening that peoples subscribe to.
In doing this, you’ll now have an audience that trusts your recommendations and that listens to what you say. You can now recommend them your own products and even provide them with special offers.
Email marketing goes hand in hand with content marketing. Try to build the trust of your audience to the point where they’re happy to hand over their contact details – then subtly sell your products to them.
Building an audience for your blog is of course the tricky part but you can do this by running a social media account and by using SEO.
Social Media
Speaking of social media, this can also be used to directly sell your products. One great way to do this is by promoting the value proposition and the lifestyle that your products support. So if you want people to buy your fitness books, this might mean running an Instagram account that includes lots of pictures of you training in the gym. You can also use ‘influencer marketing’ this way – why not get a big Instagram star to post a photo with one of your products?
You can even sell directly through several social media channels. Pinterest for instance now lets you sell straight through your account and so too does Facebook if you use the right WooCommerce plugin or Shopify plugin for your page.
Don’t be afraid to ask your friends to share your page and your special offers either!
Note that with both content marketing and social media the main objective is to provide value. If you don’t do that then people won’t follow you and you won’t have an audience to sell to!
PPC
PPC is ‘Pay Per Click’ marketing. This is an excellent tool for getting more sales but costs money. Basically, these platforms charge you only when someone clicks on an advert. This means that if the adverts don’t work, then you won’t be charged anything! You can set a maximum ‘cost per click’ though the more you’re willing to spend, the more your advert will show up in competitive niches.
The biggest platforms for PPC are Google AdWords (meaning your advert appears on Google) and Facebook ads. And they must work – Amazon spends up to $1M a day on AdWords!
And particularly useful is the ‘remarketing feature’ of AdWords that lets you advertise products that people have considered buying previously back to your old visitors when they’re on other sites.
More Ways to Generate More Sales With Pricing and Persuasive Writing
The design has a big impact on your ability to sell then but this is actually only one of the tricks you have up your sleeve. Also valuable is your ability to alter the pricing and to add smart descriptions to your store. This can not only make your items more affordable (and therefore increase the number of people who can and will spring the cash for them) but it can actually have a range of subtle psychological effects as well…
Pricing Strategies
Special Offers and Deals – Scarcity
A special offer is a great way to encourage more people to buy your products and if you price this offer correctly then the increase in turnover should help to increase your profits ultimately. In other words, you might lose out on each individual item but by selling more items you can still increase overall earnings.
But special offers and deals also have another effect – they introduce time pressure. People know that offers last only for a finite amount of time and thus, by introducing special offers and deals, you will automatically make people want to buy more quickly instead of going away to ‘think about it’.
This in turn is very valuable for you. Why? Because people are most likely to buy things when they act impulsively. People buy most of the time based on emotion – not reason. So if you can get them to act quickly, they’ll be much more likely to spend the cash than if you give them time to go away and mull it over. By using an incentive to act faster, you thereby make them more likely to act impulsively. And as such, they become more likely to buy from you.
Another way to make your audience act quicker is to make the products limited in stock. This creates ‘scarcity’ and doing that in turn also makes your items more valuable and thus desirable. People want things that no one else can have!
Contrast
We talked about color contrast earlier and making your products physically stand out on your digital shelf. But there’s another type of contrast to consider too – and that’s the contrast between your price points.
Whether we like it or not, our brains tend to automatically judge the value of something by comparing and contrasting it with other things. Something expensive only seems expensive (often) insofar as it is expensive compared to other things.
What this means is that you can easily make something look a lot more affordable by putting it next to something very expensive. And at the same time, doing this can also help make the expensive item seem more ‘premium’ and thereby luxury and desirable.
And furthermore, this means that you’ll have more luck selling ‘point of sale’ options and upselling when the customer is already spending more. When someone is spending $500 on your website, they won’t think much about adding $10 extra for a discounted product. But if they’re only spending $5, then they’ll be unlikely to want to add another $10 to the order. Think about this when choosing what to upsell and how to utilize POS.
Bundling
Another option is to let your customers create their own ‘bundles’. Bundling essentially means that your customers can choose precisely which items they want and which ones they don’t need and thereby save money by buying in bulk but not end up with items they don’t want.
Bundling is very effective because it ensures you have at least one option for every type of buyer. At the same time, it makes people feel as though they’re getting a better deal while actually encouraging them to spend more in your store. It’s a genuine win-win scenario.
High Ticket Items
When pricing your products, you might decide to include a ‘high ticket’ item that will land you a large amount of profit per sale. The aim is that just a couple of sales of this item will be enough to keep you in profit and in this regard, you might actually use your other products in order to encourage sales of those high ticket items.
For example, if you sell a lot of expensive products, consider adding something cheap so your customers can get used to shopping with you in a low-risk manner. This way you can overcome the barrier to sale, so that all you have left to do is encourage your visitors to spend the money on that product.
Persuasive Writing
Another thing that can make a big difference is the way you write the descriptions for your products. Here, your objective is to make sure that people act on impulse and are moved to spend the money right there and then rather than going away to think about it.
To that end, good persuasive writing for sales will need to focus on the emotional aspect of the product. And this means that you’re going to emphasize the ‘value proposition’.
A value proposition basically describes how a product will improve someone’s life. In other words, don’t just look at the sum of the parts but what people actually want to gain from spending the money. For example, people don’t buy dumbbells because they need something heavy. People by dumbbells because they want to be strong, toned, healthy, attractive and confident. This is what you need to emphasize in your pitch because it will ensure that your prospective customers start imagining what life could be like after they purchase your item.
Meanwhile, try to get people to imagine what your product will be like to own (companies like Apple always use words like ‘feel’ and ‘touch’ a lot) and emphasize how quickly they can get their hands on it.
Split Testing
We’ve seen how color, layout and even wording can improve the effectiveness of your store and help you get more sales. If you get all this right, then you’ll be improving your ‘optimization’ to increase ‘conversions’.
But the question is how you know if everything you’re doing is working. And to answer that question, you can use something called ‘split testing’. This basically means creating two different listings for the same product, one using a red font (for example) and one using a blue font. You then observe how each listing performs over time and ultimately compare the results to see which design got the most sales. Once you have your answer, you adopt the winning change and this way you can evolve your site over time until it’s perfectly optimized to convert the highest percentage of visitors possible into paying customers.
Now you have your online store up and running, you’re probably excited to start designing it and selling it! Creating websites using these kinds of tools is a lot of fun because all the technical stuff is done for you. All you need to worry about is choosing the themes you like the looks of, deciding what colors to use etc.
But don’t get too carried away. While it’s true that you can have a lot of fun here, remember that the end objective is to sell more items – and that means you need to think carefully about the layout and design of your site.
And specifically, you need to make sure that it is designed in a way that will encourage sales. This in turn comes down to a number of considerations and design choices.
Laying Out Your Store
If you were the manager of a highstreet store or a supermarket, then a big part of your job would be to decide how to layout all of the products in that store so that they would sell optimally. That means getting people to walk through specific aisles in order to find the best sellers, thereby being exposed to other products they might be interested in but hadn’t considered for example.
In other words, the way you set out a brick and mortar store can end up having a big impact on the number of sales you make and this comes down to basic psychology. Of course there aren’t quite as many factors for you to consider if you’re going to be selling products online but there are still some ways you can influence the decisions of your buyers. Here are just a few things to keep in mind…
Security and ‘Barrier to Sale’
One very important consideration for your store is the security and the ‘barrier to sale’. Remember right at the start of this book, we discussed the growth of ecommerce and why it hadn’t already grown to beyond brick and mortar store sales. The reason? People are concerned about spending money online.
If you want to sell to the broadest range of people possible, then you need to ensure that your site looks official and trustworthy. This is why it’s so important to use a professional looking design and to create a professional looking brand with a high quality logo. Something as simple as a low resolution image, a typo or ‘Copyright 2010’ can make your website look less trustworthy and cause people to leave.
Another way to overcome this barrier to sale is to let people leave reviews on your store. This is something that many people will be nervous to do, seeing as it can potentially mean people end up leaving bad reviews! But overall, letting people leave reviews means that your customers can see other people have bought from you and received your products. If you respond to negative reviews, this will also reassure your customers that you’re listening and that you care about what they have to say.
Easy Checkout
Another ‘barrier to sale’ is the time and effort involved in making a purchase. Believe it or not, this is actually a big deal and surveys show that people are much less likely to buy from a store if they need to set up an account first.
If you want to sell as much as possible then, you need to make the process of buying from you as streamlined and simple as possible. Amazon does this incredibly well with its ‘Buy With One Click’ system. But even if you were to mimic something like this for your site, your visitors might still be required to create an account the first time they shopped with you, which could mean having to input their card details, their delivery address etc. etc.
Again, try to make all this as simple as possible to make sure it isn’t off-putting for your visitors. For example, one thing you can do is to use PayPal to handle your checkout process. This can help people feel more secure shopping with your site (as they don’t have to input their details) and makes it a lot easier for them to buy from you.
POS
POS stands for ‘Point of Sale’ and is a concept that relates to the ‘barrier to sale’ we were just talking about.
In a highstreet store, you will often find something called a ‘Point of Sale Display’. This is a display that will promote and sell a cheap product while people are waiting in the queue. You’ve no doubt encountered these before and that’s because they work.
The thing to understand, is that when someone has made the decision to buy from you, they will already have made that important psychological step that turns them into a prospective buyer. Prior to this point, they are still umming and ahing about whether they want to bother setting up and account or whether they want the guilt of spending money.
Once they’re checking out then, they’ve already gone through the hard bit. Convincing someone to add something small to their order now then is actually relatively easy and means you can increase your profits further.
Of course you don’t have a queue online, so your ‘point of sale’ is the checkout page. That’s why you’ll often find sites offering you to add extras to your order like gift wrapping for a small fee.
Color Scheme
On an unrelated note, you also need to think carefully about the color scheme and palette of your ecommerce site design.
What’s key to understand here is that different colors can have different effects on your customers. For example, the colors red and orange actually make people feel slightly more impatient and have even been shown to elevate the heartrate. People find very red color schemes somewhat ‘uncomfortable’ and this can be used to your advantage.
For example, this is actually the reason that a lot of fast food joints are red or orange in their color scheme. The uncomfortable color palette means that people don’t quite feel comfortable to spend a long time eating and this means that the store can accommodate a higher turnover of customers and make more profit as a result! And likewise, it turns out that if a ‘buy now’ button is red, it becomes more likely to be clicked more regularly!
Conversely though, if you want people to take their time and leisurely explore your site, then you need to make sure that you use cool and relaxing colours like blues.
Also important is to make sure that your colour scheme allows you to use contrast. In other words, you need to avoid making your colour palette too bright and your layout too busy. If you do that, then it will be impossible to draw attention to anything. Your aim is to make sure you can control the attention of your visitors and to get them to look at the products you’re interested in selling. If everything is red and moving, then people won’t know where they should be looking.
If you have figured out what products you want to sell, the next thing to do is to start building an ecommerce store!
The good news is that this is fairly easy. To begin with, you’re first going to want to create a general website if you don’t have one already. This is not only going to be used to promote your ecommerce store but may also provide the backbone of your store itself by providing a way for people to easily access it and find your goods.
An Introduction to WordPress
To create a website that will act as part of an ecommerce store, you’re probably going to want to make something using WordPress.
WordPress is a ‘content management system’ (CMS) that makes it easy for you to build your site, customize the look and add, edit and remove content as you see fit. It can be likened to a blogging platform similar to something like Blogger or LiveJournal – but it’s much more powerful than that and can be used to build entirely self-hosted websites.
What makes WordPress so amazing is just how easy it is to set up. This is a website that can be built as easily as creating a Facebook profile almost. This is practically a one-click installation but from there, it’s incredibly powerful and can provide you with all the features you’re likely to need.
And I don’t mean that WordPress is ‘as good’ as the tools that professionals use – this is the tool that the vast majority of professionals use. Or to be more precise, 40% of websites and blogs on the net are powered by WordPress and that includes many of the biggest blogs on the web like Mashable, Forbes, BBC America, Sony and more.
What this means for you is that you have a simple way to build a website that can be just as successful as any of those. This is a tried and proven means to build a website and removes the need to worry about whether the underlying code of your site might be holding you back.
It’s simply good business to choose WordPress and it doesn’t really make much sense to choose anything else!
And as though all that wasn’t enough to make WordPress by far the best choice, it’s also important to consider the huge amount of support and extra features that WordPress offers. The simple fact that so many big websites are using WordPress means that there’s a near-infinite supply of people who can help you with any technical difficulties you might be facing and there’s just as many support forums, online guides and more as well.
WordPress is also endlessly customizable and upgradable due to the ‘themes’ and ‘plugins’. Themes let you change the way that your site looks and is laid out with a simple installation. Meanwhile, plugins let you install additional features which can include all kinds of things like widgets for the sidebar, like comment sections and like entire ecommerce stores (this is the point at which your ears should be pricking up…). Many of the options we’ll be looking at throughout this book require you to be using WordPress – so just don’t even think about it!
Setting Up
So with that said, how do you build your WordPress site? The first thing you’ll need is hosting. This of course means that you’re paying for space on a server that will remain connected to the internet. In turn, that means that anyone with an internet connection will be able to find your website as long as they have the right address.
From there, you’ll then also need a domain name, which is the address people will type into their browser in order to be directed to the hosting you’re paying for.
Fortunately, most hosting providers also offer domain names, removing the need for you to find both separately. What’s also good is that both hosting and a domain name are relatively affordable and shouldn’t set you back more than $10 a month if that.
There are plenty of great hosting/domain name packages out there and to begin with, you won’t need to worry too much about things like your bandwidth or your space – usually a fairly standard package will more than cover you until your site gains some real momentum. And once that happens, you won’t need to worry about the cost of upgrading your service!
While there are lots of options to choose from, a good choice that will suit most purposes is BlueHost. If you don’t want to spend time comparing hosting packages, then head over to BlueHost.com and sign up there.
Make sure that you choose a domain name that will be helpful when it comes to marketing your site. You need something that somewhat describes the nature of your business but avoid using obvious ‘key phrases’ in your title – Google has said that the best practice for businesses is to focus on creating a brand.
Installation
If you choose to go ahead with a BlueHost account, then your hosting package will come with something called ‘cPanel’. This is basically a control panel that provides access to a lot of useful features that can help you get started with your website.
One of the best things included with cPanel is option to ‘one click install’ WordPress. That does exactly what it says it does, so log into your BlueHost account, choose ‘one click install’ and then choose ‘WordPress’. You’ll be walked through the process and really does take less than 2 minutes. The only tip to keep in mind is to expand the ‘advanced settings’ as this will let you enter a store name and a username and password for your WordPress account.
cPanel isn’t unique to BlueHost either. A lot of other hosting companies also provide the same features and will make it similarly easy for you to set up WordPress with a single click.
Failing that, you might need to go through the installation manually. This is a very simple process too. It involves using an FTP program or your hosting account’s file manager in order to upload the files you need. From there, you simply navigate to the installation page through your browser and follow the few simple steps.
You can find the WordPress files as well as all the steps you need to follow over at WordPress.com.
Note that it’s also possible to set up a ‘hosted’ WordPress account. That means that you won’t need your own hosting account or domain name because your blog will be stored at WordPress.com. This is a great option for building a free website if you’re a hobbyist. For making money though, it’s not something you should consider as it will make your business appear amateurish and it will limit many of the things you can do with it.
Themes and Set-Up
Now just point your browser at www.yoursite.com/wp-admin and enter the username and password you chose. You’re now logged into your dashboard where you’ll be able to add or edit content, change settings alter your theme, install plugins and more!
The first thing you’ll want to do is to change some basic settings which will include the site’s name and its ‘tagline’ (at the moment it says ‘Just Another WordPress Site’). This is still a pretty generic looking site at this point though, which is where adding and editing your themes comes into play. Simply log into your dashboard and then select Appearance > Themes > Add New. You can then browse through themes (both free and paid) that can be installed to completely change the look and navigation of your website.
Failing that, you can alternatively look at another external site such as Theme Forest (www.themeforest.com). Here you can find some more premium themes which will cost more but will also be more unique, more professional and more professional looking.
To install plugins meanwhile, you just need to go to Plugins > Add New. There are again plenty you can choose from including both paid and free options. These can do some excellent things for you though, from pretty much handling your SEO for you, to adding comments or other interactive elements to your website. You can also find plugins that give you more customization options (changing your fonts for instance), that speed up your site and much more.
Have a play around and see what you can come up with. You’ll find that it’s fairly easy to build a completely unique and powerful website that looks just as professional as any of the big names we discussed earlier.
Creating Your Online Store – Best Ecommerce Store Platform
If you are ready to set up your website, this is very easy thanks to tools that practically automate the process for you. The only downside is that there isn’t as much of an ‘obvious’ choice when it comes to your ecommerce store. That is to say that no single ecommerce platform stands out in the way that WordPress does. That just means you need to think a little and pick the option that best suits your needs.
This blog will help you to make that choice and then talk you through the process of getting set up.
The Top Ecommerce Platforms to Choose From
Hosted Solutions
Hosted ecommerce platform is one that will be stored on an external website other than your own. That means you’ll create your store a little like you would add a profile to a social media site. It means less work for you but it also means you’ll have a little less flexibility.
Hosted on the other hand means that you’ll create your store by uploaded it to your server just like you uploaded WordPress to your server. Essentially this becomes a new website, or a part of your existing website.
Even once you make this decision, you’ll have a fair few options to pick from. Here are some of the top hosted platforms:
Shopify
Shopify (http://www.shopify.com/) is by far one of the most popular ecommerce solutions around and is one that nearly everyone has heard of. Like WordPress, it comes with a huge amount of support, plugins and themes meaning that you can tailor it to your exact needs and meaning that there are plenty of ways you can boost your sales. Some of these plugins let you do powerful things like tracking your visitors and integrating email marketing, or like selling digital products and delivering them automatically.
It does lack some of the customization of hosted solutions however. For example, there’s no option to create your own custom checkout page.
In terms of products, Shopify can support up to 5,000 different items, which is more than enough for most purposes. The basic Shopify membership is free but you might need to pay if you want to upgrade for more advanced features. Still, it’s not prohibitive.
Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce (https://www.bigcommerce.com/) is hosted much like Shopify and is also suitable for up to 5,000 products. It’s another solid choice but falls a little short of Shopify thanks to a higher price point. Moreover, Bigcommerce is less well-known than Shopify meaning that it doesn’t have quite the same number of plugins or features. If you want to create a store that is in any way unusual, you should probably check first to make sure that Bigcommerce can support whatever it is that you’re planning on doing.
Bigcommerce has one big advantage though and that’s that it provides excellent support for international payments out of the box. This might be a big deal if you plan on selling to the US and the UK for example and don’t know whether to display your prices in dollars or GBP.
Self-Hosted Solutions
Magento
Magento (http://www.magento.com/) is one of the best hosted solutions around in terms of its customization and features and is an excellent choice if you want to build something very unique with lots of power under the hood. This is the option that the big businesses with lots of money and tons of stock will want to use. If you have aspirations of taking on Amazon (you’re mad), then Magento is the best non-custom-built option.
Magento supports up to 50,000 items and is installed independently from your WordPress site. The downside is that it’s very fiddly and confusing if you’re a new user. In other words, unless you have a good development team behind you or you’re a developer yourself, you should probably stick with something easier at least to begin with.
And this is a point we should quickly make: when setting up your business always think about the ‘path of least resistance’. Don’t make extra work for yourself just because you want the pride of taking the less easy route – it’s not good business. Focus on keeping your overheads (time and money) low and getting quickly to the point where you can reliably start making money. Don’t let ego get in the way of good business sense!
WooCommerce
WooCommerce (http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/) is the self-hosted option that we would recommend. And what makes this such a great choice is that it is actually a WordPress theme. That means that you’re not installing anything extra at all and the whole process of setting up is incredibly simple. You just install WooCommerce as you would do any other WordPress theme and from there, you’ll have your store!
This does mean that your store is going to ‘replace’ the website you already had. This means you need to either consider this right from the start or you need to set up a secondary domain for your shop and then link the two together. Note that even if it does replace your site though, you can still have a blog on the store.
Like WordPress and like Shopify, WooCommerce has tons of support and an endless number of themes and plugins. This will make running your store significantly easier and makes it another great choice from a business perspective.
One limitation of WooCommerce though is that it can only stock 500 items max. This won’t be a problem for most businesses starting out but if you have plans to expand it’s something you certainly might want to consider.
Volusion
Volusion (http://www.volusion.com/) is a WordPress plugin but I’s also somewhat unique in a number of ways. That’s because it isn’t just an ecommerce but is also an email autoresponder and more. Volusion lets you track our visitors and your leads and see who is looking at your products and who is reading your emails. Volusion is something that many internet marketer types might feel quite at home with but note that it’s not particularly powerful or feature packed when compared with other ecommerce solutions and is really only suitable for small numbers of products.
Creating a Shopify Site
We’re not going to go through every single ecommerce platform’s set up process here. However, as Shopify and WooCommerce are probably the best hosted and self-hosted options respectively, it might be useful to look at at least these two platforms and how you get started.
Shopify offers a 14-day free trial which makes it easy to set up and start playing around and to decide if it’s the right choice for you. To get started with that, head over to Shopify’s site and then click ‘Start Your Free Trial’. From there, you’ll be prompted to enter your email address, password and name you want for your store.
Click next and you’ll be taken to a new page. Here you can add more details including your location and phone number for tax purposes.
On the next page you’ll be prompted to ‘tell [them] a little about yourself’. This involves answering a few questions such as whether you have a pre-existing store and whether you’re running the store for a client or for your own business.
And with that, you’re in! You’ll next get to select form a number of store options. In settings you can change the name of the store and you’ll also be able to start adding items to your store.
To start developing the store itself, click ‘Add Online Store’. You’ll then be given the option to choose from several themes which work just like they do on WordPress. And just like WordPress, the themes can be both free and paid. Most of the more creative themes will be found in the theme store.
Click ‘Customize Theme’ to alter the specifics of the themes and click ‘Publish Theme’ once you’re happy with it.
Browse to the next tab and you can select ‘Navigation’. This part is where you add individual pages and content. You can also choose to use either the current domain or to use your website’s domain to make your store appear hosted (so it can be found at www.example.com/shop) for example.
Adding Products
To add products, just select ‘Add Product’ from the front page. You’ll then have to enter a title and choose an image that should help to sell your product. As you can imagine, the image is rather important to make your products as desirable as possible!
You will also be able to set elements such as the price and to add details such as a description. Of course you also need to add payment details if you want to start getting paid.
With all that done, your store is ready to go live! It really is that quick and easy to start selling and to start profiting in a big way potentially.
Adding Apps
If you want to add extra functionality to your site, then you can start adding apps as well which work just like WordPress plugins to enhance the features of your store. There are numerous apps that you can add to a Shopify store and you can find them by selecting ‘Apps’ on the left hand side of the screen in the burger menu.
For example, if you want to sell digital products, then you can do this by using ‘Digital Downloads’. This app allows you to sell your products digitally and thereby make money from ebooks etc. without having to email them to your buyers.
Another great one is ‘Pre-Order Manager’. This does what it says and lets people pre-order your forthcoming products. The great thing about this is that you can use it to get people excited about your forthcoming products and to build buzz and it can even be a way to make sure there’s a market for your product before you invest too much time into creating it.
And finally for this section, consider ‘Recurring Orders’ by Boldapps. This app allows you to charge your customers on a recurring basis. This is excellent for selling your products on a regular basis – for instance if your customers want a monthly supply of protein shake, or if they want a subscription that will give them something new to read every week. Either way, recurring orders are very good for your cash flow as they provide you with a much more stable and predictable income and they convince your customers to potentially lay down more money for what you’re selling up front.
Creating a WooCommerce Store
Meanwhile, creating a WooCommerce store is even easier. All you need to do is to install WooCommerce via the WordPress ‘plugins’ store. Just search for ‘WooCommerce’ under Plugins > Add New and select it. Click ‘Install Now’ and then ‘Activate’. You’ll then be taken through some steps similar to those we looked at for Shopify. You can actually skip this to begin with though by just clicking ‘Not right now’.
It’s recommend that you do go through this process though so click ‘Continue’. On page one, you’ll be shown ‘Page Setup’. This is where you can add the four pages that your site needs in order to operate. These are: ‘Shop’, ‘Cart’, ‘Checkout’ and ‘My Account’. As you can see, each one is needed for the daily running of your site – but they operate just like any other page in on WordPress. Click ‘Continue’ to install them.
Next you will be asked to set up your store locale in order to choose your location. You can select a store currency too and set whether you want to use metric or imperial for showing the weight and dimensions of your packages. Note that if you want to, you can actually add a custom currency, though this may require a little technical knowhow.
Note also that you’ll have the option to support multiple currencies later on via plugins. Select Continue and you’ll then need to set up shipping and tax. You can choose your domestic and international flat rate shipping but you might not need to do this if you’re going to be selling digital products.
You can import tax rates, or just skip this for later. Seelct ‘Continue’ again and then choose your payment gateway. A handy thing here is that you can use PayPal, which simply requires you to enter your PayPal address.
Finally, choose whether or not you want to let WooCommerce see your site diagnostic data. Once you’ve done that, you’ll then have the option to create your first product, or to access other resources.
If you don’t want to do that, then return to the WordPress dashboard and you’ll find that it’s rather changed with new options like ‘Products’ and ‘WooCommerce’ in your menu. The WooCommerce menu lets you see your orders, coupons, ‘addons’ (plugins) etc. Under products you can change settings or add new inventory.
