Starting an online store is becoming the best source of income from home. According to Statistica, there will be more than 2.14 billion global digital customers in 2021.
That’s a lot of customers who are converting from usual shopping mall customer to the potential online buyers.
In fact, 17.5% of global retail sales will be done using online store and E-commerce websites in 2021.
So, what are you waiting for? It is high time you started your own online store to facilitate your earnings. In this article, I am going to help you to start an online store with WordPress.
You might be thinking about why you should go with WordPress to build your E-commerce website. According to W3Techs, more 34.1% of websites found on the internet is made with WordPress. In fact, WooCommerce- the most popular plugin for E-Commerce in WordPress holds 24.56% of all websites with e-commerce technology.
Above all, WordPress is the best easy-to-use content management system to create any kind of website. Setting up an E-commerce site on WordPress is always a lucrative option for the entrepreneur who wants to spread the business globally.
If you have the right plans with the right product, you can easily launch a profitable online store with WordPress without spending much money. Not only that, WordPress allows you to take full control over your store with the user-friendly and easy-to-use Wp dashboard.
Let’s see what you need to do to set up your E-commerce website in WordPress.
1. Purchase Domain and Hosting
A domain name is the identity of your online store and hosting is the storage of your website data. You can purchase your desired domain name and hosting form either local providers or from international providers.
Before purchasing your desired domain name, you can check the availability with the help of some domain name generators.
After purchasing the domain, it’s time to select proper hosting. You have the option to purchase either shared or dedicated hosting. The main difference between shared and dedicated hosting is that shared hosting is cheaper but hosted with several other websites on the same server. On the other hand, dedicated hosting allows you to use the server solely, but it is quite expensive.
2. Install WordPress
After purchasing the domain and hosting, your next task is to install WordPress on your host. There are mainly two ways you can install WordPress:
- One-click Installation: As you are going to build your online store with WordPress, it is always better to purchase WordPress hosting. It allows users to install WordPress with its one-click installation feature.
In one-click WordPress install, you don’t need to do much with the installation process. Your hosting will do the installation with just one-click. WordPress itself recommends some popular hostings like Bluehost, Dreamhost, Pressable, Flywheel, and Siteground.
- Manual Installation: In the manual install, you need access to your server and FTP client to install WordPress manually. Before the installation, you also need to set up the database from phpmyadmin or cPanel. As the manual installation is quite technical, you need to learn a lot about WordPress and how you can use it manually.
3. Install Themes and Plugins
After the installation of your WordPress site, you’ll be able to see the Wp Dashboard with the use of credentials. Now, it’s time to make your WordPress site ready to sell products.
WordPress itself is the combination of theme and plugins. Without themes and plugins, seems to be a deadlock. As you are going to create an E-commerce site with WordPress, you will need the e-commerce theme and plugin.
To make your WordPress site available for selling products, you need to choose the best ecommerce plugin for the e-commerce website. Do you know why?
There is no native function in WordPress that can enable e-commerce functionalities. That is why you need to depend on the plugins and themes.
Let’s see the most popular e-commerce plugin that can boost your sales….
WooCommerce:
About 30% of all online stores use WooCommerce due to its easy-to-use features. Its highly customizable features allow you to take control of your online store without being a tech-savvy.
WooCommerce allows the owner to build and maintain a successful online store with the in-built product pages, shopping cart, and checkout process.
Two years back, WooCommerce is just a normal e-commerce plugin that helps the user to sell products. But, when Automattic acquired the plugin, it’s become the most popular in its species. You can use WooCommerce free of cost. However, you can extend its functionalities with various paid and free plugins that can do anything including the AI-driven recommendations of products to the digital buyers.
There are some other e-commerce plugins available that can also help you to set up your e-commerce website. Among them, Easy Digital Downloads (highly recommended to sell digital products) and WP eCommerce are the most popular plugins after WooCommerce.
When it comes to choosing the best WordPress theme to create an e-commerce website, you should consider a theme that has all the required functionality you want. You may choose a free or paid theme but make sure that the theme is compatible with the e-commerce plugin.
4. Set Up Required Pages
Now, it’s time to set up all the required pages that include product pages, about us, contact, etc to start selling your product.
The most important page is your product page where you will display all of your products. There are two kinds of products you might have to showcase on the product pages:
- Physical Products
- Virtual Products
Tips to Upload E-commerce Products
The following tips make your products more attractive to the customers and make it easy to find either from your website or through the search engine.
1. Create a Lucrative Title!
Don’t forget to add the proper title to your product. You can use SEO tools like YOAST to set the best title that can be easily discoverable through the search engine.
2. Write a Catchy Product Description
The product description is the heart of a product to boost your sales. But, don’t copy product description from other sources as search engines hate plagiarism. Your product description should be small (150-200 words) but attractive enough to catch customers’ eyes.
3. Upload Correct and High-Quality images
An image is the first thing a customer notice after the first visit to your product page. So, it’s very important to upload a high-quality and large image of your product. You should also make sure that the image is not blurred at all.
4. Categorize Your Products and Give Proper Tags
When you are uploading products on your store, make sure that they are under the right categories. You also ensure that you placed the correct tags to your products. It will help customers even search engines to find the right products and rank them on SERP.
5. Setting Up the Payment and Shipping Strategies
The last but not the least step is to set up the payment option of your online store. There are several ways where you can receive payments from the customers. The most popular way to get payment from the customers is Paypal. You can use Paypal Express or 2Checkout to the get the payment.
To use most of your payment gateways, you also need to ensure that your website is well secured and all transactions and other financial information between you and your customers are safe. To ensure that, don’t forget to enable an SSL certificate for your site.
Final Words
Turning an E-commerce website into a selling machine is not so easy. There are also a lot of things you need to consider while setting up your online store. You have to focus on a user-friendly website along with the payment gateway, SEO, eCommerce shipping strategies, on-page SEO, email marketing, website speed, and social media influence to increase your sales. You need to focus on how you will deliver your products to the end users. All the best to your ecommerce journey.