How to start selling with Woocommerce on your Showit website

Are there advantages of using WooCommerce in my Showit website?

YES! Of course, there are some brilliant advantages!

This is going to be especially good for those that have a lot of products sell, or that are very limited in time to dedicate to the updates of their shops, or don’t want to be dealing with manually creating product pages for every single one of the products they sell.

Having Woocommerce means that your site will be using the WordPress area as much as possible, this reduces the manual designing that you do and Showit builder side.

Win-win!

Some of the advantages of using WooCommerce in your Showit website are:

Just to name a few! I particularly use Woocommerce for when clients need funnels (think upsells and downsells), complex ordering, affiliates to their shop, or integration with memberships or other parts of their business.

Installing and configuring WooCommerce

WooCommerce is pretty straightforward. How to install? Easy! You simply go to your WordPress admin backend and follow these steps:

1) Go to the “Plugins” menu on the left side — please note that this is only available if you have an “advance blog” subscription with Showit! That is the only way we can add new plugins 🙂

2) Click on Add New from there and search for WooCommerce. Install it by clicking Install Now and then Activate.

3) Done! Time to go into the Woocommerce settings and customize your shop and legal details. You will follow an initial setup wizard, so just follow the prompts.

Woocommerce is a free e-commerce plugin that helps your site sell digital and physical products alike! It adds all sorts of features (like an online store, shopping carts, order forms, payment gateways etc.), everything you need to start selling with your Showit site.

Is it hard to set up a Woocommerce shop?

Not hard but do take your time to make sure you are getting all the details in place. Setting up WooCommerce and styling it can be pretty straightforward if you have some basic experience with WordPress and web design but it works pretty much out of the box. Basically, the installation of the plugin is pretty simple as you saw above and the rest of the setup is really easy too.

You want to make sure that you have added your shipping information and your rates if you will be selling physical products. You can even limit what countries you allow shipping for, if they’re going to be multiple rates, etc. I really like the flexibility it offers!

Don’t forget to complete your legal taxes information, adding your payment gateways like stripe or Square or PayPal; linking to your privacy policies so that every customer agrees to them if they shop with you.

After those are done it’s time to start filling up your shop with products!

Setting up a product page with Woocommerce

I think this is one of the best things for those that already use Showit and WordPress to blog, because your products are actually added on the WordPress side you will feel a very familiar interface since the products have the same layout as a blog post. You will add your title, your description, images, among specific product information like the price, the categories, etc.

You can create your own custom taxonomies if you need them which is great for SEO purposes and allow customers to filter what they want to find using the product categories.

How to create the Woocommerce product template in Showit

You’re going to need to have a custom WordPress template inside of your Showit account, under the “blog pages” that is going to have the template custom information sent to “single-product”.

Go ahead and design this page however you want, just make sure that you have a content text box set to “Post Content” so that Woocommerce can auto-populate all of the product information inside this box!

This is going to allow you to have the look you want with the automation of Woocommerce.

How to add the product information in Woocommerce

Go to your WordPress dashboard and on the left-hand side go to Products > Add New and hit the Create button. Fill in all fields on the screen and click Publish at the bottom.

You can also add one or multiple images of your products, but at least make sure you have one for the product featured image 🙂

You may also want to categorize your products right as you create them (for example, if you sell food items, use Food as a category). Click on Taxonomies in the sidebar and then +Add Taxonomy to add a category or tag for your product.

For digital products don’t forget to add the actual file link, and you can even include notes!

What your customers see when they purchase a downloadable digital product:

At the checkout thank you page, Woocommerce will display the order details and give them immediate access to the downloads! Super convenient.

Here’s an example from our client’s shop, The Legal Godfairy, we created to match her website template, you can see the checkout info and the immediate button to get the download:

Must have pages for your shop to work properly:

In order for your shop to work properly, the system will automatically create a Shop page, Cart page, Checkout page, and My Account page for your customers.

As long as you have a Showit Page Template page in your Blog Pages you are good to go! That page template will be used in all the pages Woocommerce needs populating the information automatically.

Related: Using Shopify Lite with Showit

How can I make my store more visible in search engines?

Oh, I love that question.

Your store will be more visible in search engines if you create your products with SEO-focused descriptions! It will be the best thing to ensure it’s getting noticed and helping the products shine. Make it easy for people to find your shop!

Speaking making things easier, you may want to classify your product by using taxonomies such as categories or tags so people will be able to find what they are looking for.

Don’t confuse them, don’t make it hard for them to purchase!

Which products should be classified with taxonomies such as categories or tags?

I believe you should classify your products with Categories instead of tags unless you have a huge shop with products that have overlapping features — yes, you know me, it’s gonna be unique to your business and your selling strategy.

How should I set up the menu for these categories?

The simplest way is to treat your product category as a drop-down. Your visitors will appreciate it if the first level of your navigation bar is just wide enough to fit all of the sub-categories — very helpful when they’re searching for specific products.

However! I will say, if you have just a handful of categories, if you display them as a submenu inside of your shop pages, it will create a quicker move to what they need. Think of it as adding a sidebar or a simple banner menu for easy access to your categories and your customer to what they want faster.

User experience has A LOT to do with how your shoppers move around and how easy you make it for them to purchase what they need, and add more to their carts. Think about what products go great together so that you can display them as related, or even as features products so that customers can see there’s more for them!

What is the ideal number of products per page?

A good number I’ve seen when building Showit websites myself, as well as other shops’ websites, is around 25-40 items. If you have a large inventory with hundreds or thousands of products, then yes, you probably want to show more on one page.

This is also going to depend on how you’re creating your pages! If you’re letting the Woocommerce plugin populate your shop main page it created a grid of products, making it super easy to view multiple at a time.

If you’re creating a manual shop page (all created in Showit) then you might want to consider a more “featured” main shop page and then have the category pages populate automatically so that they’re all easy for the customer to see what you have and you don’t have to worry about creating another manual custom page.

That is one of the biggest advantages of using Woocommerce vs an embeddable or linked shop like Shopify Lite, the system simply needs the right template pages to be created in Showit and Woocommerce will automatically populate them for you, which is great!

In recap

If you want to sell your products on the web, there are a lot of options out there. Woocommerce is an e-commerce plugin that works seamlessly with Showit.

It will automatically populate pages for you so that selling your products becomes easy as pie!

You can also use this plugin to customize your store and add new features like wishlists or product reviews. If you want to create the perfect shop for your business with a profitable strategy based on your brand, we should chat 😉 See our signature shop creation process and send me a message!