WooCommerce Archives | Modern Marketing Partners

7 Types of Stores You Can Power With WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 15:44:47 +0000

WooCommerce is a free ecommerce plugin for WordPress, one of the most popular and robust content management systems available today. Out of the box, WooCommerce has a ton of functionality like product and inventory management, shipping options, tax and payment options, marketing, reporting, and more. And for virtually every other ecommerce need there is a wide selection of extensions that can be downloaded.

Beyond your standard ecommerce model, WooCommerce can also power a variety of other online businesses. Click the links below to jump to the following:

Dropshipping
Digital/Virtual
Affiliate
Subscription
Membership
Auctions
Bookings

Dropshipping WooCommerce Store

Dropshipping, with its relatively low barrier to entry, is a great way for online retailers to learn more about running an ecommerce store while minimizing their risks. Instead of purchasing and storing inventory, a dropshipping store sells items from a supplier. Once the item sells on your website, you place the order with your dropshipper at your wholesale rate, they fulfill and ship the order to the customer, and you keep the retail margin as your profit.

If you are reading this post, you may already be familiar with dropshipping and wondering if you can run that sort of store on WooCommerce? The answer is YES!

Setting up a dropshipping store in WooCommerce is really not that different from setting up a standard ecommerce store. Typically, the only difference is what happens AFTER a sale is made. In other words, how do you notify your supplier of the new order and the customer’s details?

In WooCommerce you have two options:

Set the “New Order” emails in WooCommerce to be sent to your supplier
Or, use a dropship-specific plugin/extension (ex: WooCommerce Dropshippers)

One thing to keep in mind with a dropshipping store is that you will need to work with your supplier in managing inventory. They may have feeds you can integrate with your website, so be sure to discuss this with your supplier!

Digital WooCommerce Stores

Are you trying to sell your customers a download of something like an e-book or mp3? A service? WooCommerce can help. WooCommerce offers both virtual and downloadable product types and setup is a breeze?

Virtual products, like a service, are intangible and are not shipped. Downloadable products, like an e-book or mp3, allow customers to purchase and then receive after completing payment.

For downloadable products you have 3 download method options and some access restrictions which you will set in WooCommerce > Settings > Downloadable Products:

Redirect only – when a customer downloads a file, the link redirects to the file
Force download – file downloads are forced using PHP
X-Sendfile/X-Accel-Redirect – downloads are server by Apache. If you use this method, keep in mind that this requires the X-Sendfile module and not all servers have this

Then, choose downloadable as the product type in the top of your product data editor. A number of fields will appear, allowing you to upload your file, set a download limit, an expiration date, and the download type.

Affiliate WooCommerce Stores

WooCommerce has built-in functionality to sell external/affiliate products through your website, making it easier than ever to run an affiliate store!

Simply add all of the details of a product (learn how to add woocommerce products) and choose External/Affiliate product as your product type. As you can see in the example below, choosing this product type will enable you to add the external URL to the product and custom button text. When customers click on your product they will be taken off your website to the URL you provided to complete their purchase.

In the example below, we’ve linked externally to an affiliate product on Amazon and added BUY NOW as our button text. How simple is that?

Subscription WooCommerce Store

Subscriptions are the perfect way to manage recurring payments for services such as access to website content, newspapers, or subscription-based ecommerce models.

With the help of WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can easily offer products and services that require recurring payments. This WooCommerce extension offers a number of robust features including:

Add a sign-up fee, offer free trials, and set expiration dates for subscription products
Set subscriptions to renew on a variety of different billing schedules
Offer customers multiple gateway options
Variable subscriptions allow customers to choose from different levels/tiers of subscriptions
Manual of automatic renewals
Renewal emails

Membership WooCommerce Store

Are you looking to sell memberships? A combination of tools can help you create sell memberships, set group-based capabilities, and content access control based on membership levels.

To achieve the features mentioned above you will need the following plugins:

Groups – this controls the membership levels and access control capabilities
Groups for WooCommerce – allows you to sell access to the groups you’ve set up in the Groups plugin above
(optional) WooCommerce Subscriptions – if you’d like to sell memberships with recurring payments you will also need to use this extension (described in previous section)

Auction WooCommerce Stores

We ran into this store type when helping a client who wanted to auction off a product on their website for charity! With the help of a plugin called, WooCommerce Simple Auctions, you can turn your regular WooCommerce products into an auction.

The plugin enables you to leverage a number of awesome new functions. In the example below, you can see the new AUCTION tab on your product data editor gives you new data fields for: item condition, auction type, start price, bid increment, reserve price, buy it now price, auction dates.

On the front-end, bidders can even access a “My Auctions” section to keep track of their bids. Learn more here: WooCommerce Simple Auctions.

Sell Bookings or Appointments on WooCommerce

Do you want to take reservations? Offer appointments? Or sell services and rentals? With the help of the WooCommerce Booking extension you can turn your WooCommerce website into a powerful booking portal. This extension can help you sell time or date based bookings.

Here are some cool features:

You can create booking slots which are fixed (offer set times) or let the customers decide
Manage bookings and availability
Customer email notifications
You can even add extras for each booking by combining this with the Product Add-ons extension

Did you know you could run all of these types of online businesses with WooCommerce? While this is not an exhaustive list, we hope you learned something new! If you are doing something unique with your WooCommerce store let us know in the comment box below.

Need help launching your WooCommerce website?

If you are looking to launch an online store with WooCommerce and need some help, don’t hesitate to contact us, or check out the Ultimate Guide to WooCommerce. We’d love to work with you!

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How To Set Up Shipping Classes in WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 14:52:04 +0000

Product shipping classes are a great way to group similar products for shipping. For example, if your store sells a couple of very large, bulky items you may want to put them in their own shipping class with their own unique shipping cost.

Grouping these products together in a way that is similar to post or product categories allows you to define specific shipping costs for items. WooCommerce shipping methods such as Flat Rate Shipping and Table Rate Shipping allow you to use shipping classes to calculate their costs.

Below we will discuss:

How to add a shipping class in WooCommerce
How to add products to your newly created shipping class
How to set flat rate shipping costs based on your shipping class

Creating a Shipping Class in WooCommerce

To create a new shipping class go to Products > Shipping Classes from your WordPress dashboard.

Next, enter a Name for your shipping class and add a URL friendly slug (this will automatically fill in if you leave it blank). If you are going to be using several shipping classes on your website, we would recommend using a description so it is easier for you to tell them apart.

In the example below, we have created a shipping class for bulky items on our website.

Repeat this process for all of the shipping classes you will need on your website. Now you are ready to add your products to your shipping class!

Adding Products to Shipping Classes

Now that you’ve created a shipping class, it is time to add some products!

To assign a shipping class to a product, go to the Shipping tab on one of your products and select your shipping class from the drop-down list.

If you have a lot of products you need to add to a shipping class, you can add them in bulk. From your products dashboard, select all of the products you would like to add to the shipping class and select Edit under Bulk actions.

Then, under shipping class, select your shipping class from the drop-down list and click Update. Now all of the products you selected have been assigned to that shipping class!

Now that you have added a shipping class and added products to that shipping class, it is time to use that class to define your rate. Below we will cover how to set flat rate shipping costs based on your shipping classes.

Learn more about adding products in WooCommerce.

Flat Rate Per Shipping Class

To access your shipping options go to WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping.

Then, if you would like to charge a flat rate per shipping class select Calculation Type > Per Class – charge shipping for each shipping class in an order.

Then, you can define the flat rates per shipping class.

Then, you can define the flat rates per shipping class. In the example below, we are charging $5.25 for all products that are in the “Over 10 lbs” shipping class we created and $2.25 for all products in the “Under 10 lbs” shipping class we created.

So if a customer had 1 product that is in the “Over” shipping class and 1 product that is in the “Under” shipping class in their cart they would pay $7.50 for shipping.

Learn more about how to use WooCommerce flat rate shipping. Or, check out WooCommerce: The Ultimate Guide.

Do you need help setting up your WooCommerce store?

Having trouble setting up shipping options for your WooCommerce store? Modern Marketing Partners has helped many ecommerce business owners launch their online store with WooCommerce and WordPress. Contact us today for a free quote at 630-868-5060 or email us here.

WooCommerce Shipping Plugins (affiliate links)

WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro Plugin – helps you set up rules in order to calculate the shipping rates for a combination of conditions. If the user’s cart matches the conditions in the rule, the shipping cost you have defined in that rule is applied.

WooCommerce UPS Shipping Plugin with Print Label – helps you completely automate UPS shipping by displaying real-time rates in cart/checkout page, pay postage & print label from within your WooCommerce store, choose boxes automatically and enable tracking.

WooCommerce FedEx Shipping Plugin with Print Label – helps you completely automate FedEx shipping by displaying shipping rates in cart/checkout page, pay postage & print labels from within WooCommerce, automatically identify boxes to pack the items and enable tracking.

Multi-Carrier Shipping Plugin for WooCommerce – combines the power of table rate shipping with real-time rates from shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL Express & Stamps.com (USPS) to give you a complete shipping solution for your business.

WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro – helps to integrate Order tracking functionalities to the WooCommerce shops worldwide. By using this WooCommerce Order tracking plugin, you provide your customers with an easy way to track their shipments for various shipping carriers worldwide.

The post How To Set Up Shipping Classes in WooCommerce appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

How To Set Up Flat Rate Shipping in WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 18:49:39 +0000

In WooCommerce you can define shipping flat rates per item, per shipping class, or even per order. We will cover those and some additional options below.

WooCommerce Flat Rate Shipping – Getting Started

Based on your needs you may want to set a flat rate shipping fee per item, shipping class, or order. To get started, visit the shipping settings page in WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Flat Rate. Then:

Enable the shipping method
Name the shipping method (this is what customers will see on the front-end)
Set your price

In the example below, we have named our flat rate shipping option “Economy” and set it to $5.25.

Now we will move on to how to use the rate you’ve defined above on a per item, shipping class, or order basis.

Flat Rate Per Item

If you would like to charge a flat rate per item select Calculation Type > Per Item – charge shipping for each item individually.

In the example below, if a customer had 3 items in their cart they would be charged $15.75 for shipping.

Flat Rate Per Shipping Class

If you would like to charge a flat rate per shipping class select Calculation Type > Per Class – charge shipping for each shipping class in an order.

Note: it is important that you have already established and added products to shipping classes to use this method. Learn how to set up shipping classes.

So if a customer had 1 product that is in the “Over” shipping class and 1 product that is in the “Under” shipping class in their cart they would pay $7.50 for shipping.

Note: these are shipping classes we’ve created to define rules for our products, and we’ve already added products to each. Another example of a shipping class you may use is by vendor if you are using dropshipping methods so you can charge what they charge.

Flat Rate Per Order

If you would like to charge a flat rate per order select Calculation Type > Per Order – charge shipping for the entire order as a whole.

In the example below, a customer with 5 items in their cart would pay $5.25 for shipping and a customer with 1 item in their cart would also pay $5.25 for shipping.

Using a per order flat rate shipping option is a great way to encourage customers to buy more products and increase your average items per order.

Other Flat Rate Shipping Options

Trying to come up with a different shipping pricing structure than the ones listed above? WooCommerce will allow you to define some additional costs inWooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Flat Rate > Shipping Options. We will an example below.

Option Name: this will replace the main “Method Title” that you provided in the first step and will be what the customer sees when they are selecting a shipping option.

Cost: the amount that will be added to the “Cost per Order” and any other costs defined in flat rate shipping.

Per-order: (yes) the additional cost per order. If set to no, it will use the “Calculation Type” (order, item, or class) setting that you defined above.

In the example below, we add $5 per order for priority shipping and $10 per order for express shipping to the originally defined cost per order of $5.25. In this example, the following shipping options would be available to customers:

Economy $5.25 (defined above)
Priority $10.25
Express $15.25

Want to learn more? Check out WooCommerce: The Ultimate Guide.

Other WooCommerce Resources:

60 Tips to Increase Ecommerce Sales Today

Setting Featured Products in WooCommerce

Getting Started With WooCommerce

How To Add Products in WooCommerce

How To Set Up Product Attributes in WooCommerce

How To Add Sizes in WooCommerce

Do you need help setting up your WooCommerce store?

Having trouble setting up shipping options for your WooCommerce store? Modern Marketing Partners has helped many ecommerce business owners launch their online store with WooCommerce. Contact us today for a free quote at 630-868-5060 or email us here.

WooCommerce Shipping Plugins (affiliate links)

The post How To Set Up Flat Rate Shipping in WooCommerce appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

How To Set Featured Products in WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 18:21:27 +0000

Featured products are a great way to promote specific items on your website and are easy to setup in WooCommerce. Once you setup some featured products, you can either display them throughout your website with a shortcode or with a widget. Also note that many WordPress themes call for featured products in templates, so you can follow this process to add them.

Adding a Featured Product

To mark a product as featured go to Products > Products. Find the product you would like to feature and click the Featured Star. Featured products will have the star icon filled in.

Another option is to hover over the product title and click on the Quick Edit option. Clicking Quick Edit will open up a new menu of options.

Check featured and then click the blue update button.

Would you like to add featured products in bulk? You can also do that in WooCommerce! If you are familiar with bulk editing in WooCommerce you know it is a great feature and pretty easy to use.

First, check all of the products you would like to feature (the check box is located next to the product image thumbnail). Then, under Bulk Actions, select Edit and Apply. That action will open up the editor pictured below.

Select ‘Yes’ from the featured drop-down menu and then click the blue update button.

Displaying Featured Products

WooCommerce comes with a variety of useful shortcodes to allow quick and easy insertion of WooCommerce related content within posts or pages. To display your featured products, you could using something like:

[featured_products per_page=”8″ columns=”4″ orderby=”date” order=”desc”]

This would show 8 of your featured products in a grid (four columns, two rows) with the most recent appearing first.

Also, WooCommerce Featured Products is an available widget that you can use on your website

Under Appearance > Widgets, drag the WooCommerce Featured Products widget from the available widgets section to a sidebar on the right to activate it. Then, just give it a title and select the number of products to show.

For more advanced WordPress/WooCommerce users, you can display the featured products similarly to posts by using the WP_Query class.

Want to learn more? Check out WooCommerce: The Ultimate Guide. Or register for a free website review.

Other WooCommerce Resources:

60 Tips To Increase Ecommerce Sales Today

Getting Started With WooCommerce

How To Add Products in WooCommerce

How To Set Up Product Attributes in WooCommerce

How To Add Sizes in WooCommerce

How To Set Up Flat Rate Shipping in WooCommerce

Do you need help setting up your WooCommerce store?

Modern Marketing Partners has helped many ecommerce business owners launch their online store with WooCommerce. Learn more about our WooCommerce Development and Support services. Contact us today for a free quote at (331) 231-2068 or contact us here.

The post How To Set Featured Products in WooCommerce appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

How To Add Sizes in WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 19:42:52 +0000

One of the most common questions we get when working with a client on their WooCommerce website has to do with setting up variable products.

Variable products can have multiple variations/options, each of which may have a different SKU or price. For example, a piece of clothing that is available in a variety of sizes or colors.

Size is one of the most common variations we encounter for a product (ex: choosing between Small, Medium, Large, or XL). Therefore, below we will outline how to add a product in WooCommerce that has different sizes:

1. Set up a new attribute: size

2. Add a new variable product that uses the size attribute

Continue reading below for instructions on adding sizes in WooCommerce. Also consider checking out our WooCommerce services or register for a website review.

Set up a Size attribute in WooCommerce

1. The attributes settings are located under the products tab. Click here to open up the attributes menu.

2. Keep in mind that on the attributes menu you will add the ‘name’ of the attribute, not the individual options. Let’s add Size.

Put the name, slug (lowercase version without punctuation – url), whether you’d like to select from a list or type out the attribute on the product editor, and final ordering. Here you have the option to have a custom order or to order alphabetically by name or ID. We left it custom for size below so we can order it Small, Medium, Large, X-Large, instead of alphabetically.

3. Now that you have added size, let’s configure the terms of this attribute. This is where you will add the terms Small, Medium, Large, or X-Large.

Click the ‘Configure Terms’ icon at the far right of the menu.

4. Start adding your sizes. Depending on your theme, the description may or may not show. If not, then you don’t have to fill anything out.

Repeat for the remaining sizes.

After adding all the sizes:

5. You may recall earlier, we set the default sort order to ‘Custom Ordering’. This will allow us to drag and drop to rearrange the order of the sizes. As you can see in picture above, it is just sorted with the most recently added term at the top. Keep in mind that the order of these terms is how they will appear on the product page. Let’s rearrange them by simply dragging the size to the desired position.

6. Now the size attribute will be available to you when adding a variable product. Now we will cover how to add a variable product.

Adding a Variable Product in WooCommerce

Adding variable products is very similar to adding simple, but with the selection of variable as the product type, additional tabs are added to your product data section.

General

Enter SKU of your item. Note: you will enter SKUs for variations later on.

Inventory

Here you can set the stock quantity for the product, or leave it blank to use the stock settings on the variable product’s.

Shipping

Enter the weights and dimensions of the product, or leave it blank to use the stock settings on the variable product’s.

Linked Products

Same process as simple products. Refer to Linked Products section above.

Attributes

Here is where the differences between simple and variable products begin. In the following example, we will use an attribute we have already setup: size. Don’t have any attributes? Read How To Setup Attributes in WooCommerce.

Select size from the drop down menu and click add. Click select all to add all sizes. If you would like to remove any options, click the x next to the term name. Select visible on the product page if you would like customers to choose from these sizes. Then, click used for variations if each size has it’s own sku/price/weight/etc.

Make sure to click save attributes as these will not be visible on the variations tab until you do so.

Variations

On the variations tab you will add all of the product data for each individual size.

First, click the ‘add variation’ button 4 times if you will be using all 4 sizes. Select the name of your sizes from the drop down menus. Then, fill in the product data for each size. Note: variation price is required or the variation will not show up on the front-end of your website.

If you fill in all the product information for your variations, you will now be able to see them on the front-end of you website on your product page.

Advanced

On the advanced tab you can set up an optional purchase note to be sent to the customer after purchase, a custom ordering position, or enable/disable customer reviews for the product.

For a more in-depth look at adding new products, be sure to read A Guide to Adding Products in WooCommerce. Or, How to set Featured Products in WooCommerce.

Want to learn more? Check out WooCommerce: The Ultimate Guide.

Have questions? Modern Marketing Partners offers comprehensive ecommerce and marketing services. And we love WooCommerce! Learn more about our WooCommerce websites and support. Leave questions in the comment box below or contact us today!

The post How To Add Sizes in WooCommerce appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

Setting Up Product Attributes in WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 17:04:07 +0000

Variable products in WooCommerce can have multiple variations/options, each of which may have a different SKU or price. For example, a piece of clothing that is available in a variety of colors and sizes.

Options such as color or size for variable products are setup as attributes in WooCommerce. Below we will guide you through setting up an attribute.

1. The attributes settings are located under the products tab. Click here to open up the attributes menu.

2. Keep in mind that on the attributes menu you will add the ‘name’ of the attribute, not the individual options. First let’s add Size.

3. Now that you have added size, let’s configure the terms of this attribute. This is where you will add the terms Small, Medium, Large, or X-Large.

Click the ‘Configure Terms’ icon at the far right of the menu.

4. Start adding your sizes. Depending on your theme, the description may or may not show. If not, then you don’t have to fill anything out.

Repeat for the remaining sizes.

After adding all the sizes:

Now the size attribute will be available to you when adding a variable product!

This process can be repeated and duplicated easily for other attributes such as color. Check out how to add products in WooCommerce and skip to the variable products section to see how to configure attributes/variations when adding a product.

Want to learn more? Check out WooCommerce: The Ultimate Guide or 60 Tips to Increase Ecommerce Sales Today.

Do you need help setting up your WooCommerce store?

Modern Marketing Partners has helped many ecommerce business owners launch an online store with WooCommerce. Contact us today for a free quote at 630-868-5060 or email us here.

The post Setting Up Product Attributes in WooCommerce appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

A Guide to Adding Products in WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 16:42:53 +0000

In our last post we covered the basic settings and configuration settings to get your WooCommerce store up and running.

Here we will give an overview of how to add products in WooCommerce.

But first, let’s define the four different types of products you can setup in WooCommerce: simple, variable, grouped, and external/affiliate product.

Simple Products

Simple products have one SKU, are shipped, and have no variations/options. For example, a book.

Variable Products

Variable products can have multiple variations/options, each of which may have a different SKU or price. For example, a piece of clothing that is available in a variety of colors and sizes.

Grouped Products

Grouped products are related products that can be purchased individually. Note that, grouped products can only consist of simple products. For example, an iPhone could be a grouped product as there are 8GB, 16GB, etc. variations of that same product parent.

External/Affiliate Products

External or affiliate products are ones that you list/display on your website but they are sold elsewhere.

Adding the different types of products all take a similar process, however, based on the product you are adding there will be some different product data required. To ensure a seamless process, make sure to setup product categories, tags, shipping classes, and attributes before getting started.

Below we will give an overview of how to add each type of product. But first here are is some product information that you will need/can add regardless of the type of product.

Title: Add the name of the product at the top of the page

Full Description: Add your product description here (you can add a shorter one later)

Product Categories and Tags: Use categories and tags to organize your products depending on how you would like to structure your website.

Product Image: This is the primary image of your product. It will be used for the thumbnail, catalog, and as the first image on your product page.

Product Gallery: Product gallery images will show up as small thumbnails next to your main product image described previously. Product galleries, for example, could be used for alternate views of your product.

Product Short Description: The short description typically appears next your product image on its page depending on your theme. Use this for a brief overview of your product. Save details for the long description (described above), which typically appear within the product description tab.

Adding Simple Products

Adding simple products can be very straightforward, especially for experienced WordPress users. A simple product can also be virtual (not shipped) or downloadable (customers given access to a file after purchase).

General

On the general tab fill out the SKU, regular price, and sale price of your product. It is important to note that prices must be entered without $. Sales prices can be schedule for a particular day, week, month, etc.

Inventory

If you have products that will sell out, be sure to enable stock management at the product level. If selected, a stock quantity field will appear where you can enter/add your quantity. This number will reduce automatically as orders are placed. Depending on your settings, out of stock items can be hidden on the front-end of your website. On this tab you can also specify if you would like to allow back orders of out of stock items or if they are to be sold individually.

Shipping

Enter the weight, dimensions, and shipping class (if applicable) of your product here. The weight and dimensions of your product are required when using table rate shipping or shipping extensions that use this information to calculate rates.

Linked Products

Here you can add up-sells and cross-sells to your product, which is a great way to drive extra sales and increase revenue!

Up-sells are displayed on the product details page and encourage visitors to view other products. Think, “You May Also Like…”. An example of an up-sell would be to offer some of your other Aerosmith merchandise to a visitor who is viewing an Aerosmith t-shirt.

Cross-sells are displayed on the cart page and relate to the product(s) that your customer has in their cart. For example, if your customer has an iPhone in their cart, you may also suggest that they also purchase a case.

To add, simply start typing the name of other products you have already added and select. (Tip: you may want to add all of your products first and go back to do up-sells and cross-sells so you have your full inventory to choose from)

Advanced

On the advanced tab you can set up an optional purchase note to be sent to the customer after purchase, a custom ordering position, or enable/disable customer reviews for the product.

Questions? Contact us today for a free quote at 630-868-5060 or email us here.

Adding a Variable Product

Adding variable products is very similar to adding simple, but with the selection of variable as the product type, additional tabs are added to your product data section.

General

Enter SKU of your item. Note: you will enter SKUs for variations later on.

Inventory

Here you can set the stock quantity for the product, or leave it blank to use the stock settings on the variable product’s.

Shipping

Enter the weights and dimensions of the product, or leave it blank to use the stock settings on the variable product’s.

Linked Products

Same process as simple products. Refer to Linked Products section above.

Attributes

Make sure to click save attributes as these will not be visible on the variations tab until you do so.

Variations

On the variations tab you will add all of the product data for each individual size.

If you fill in all the product information for your variations, you will now be able to see them on the front-end of you website on your product page.

Advanced

On the advanced tab you can set up an optional purchase note to be sent to the customer after purchase, a custom ordering position, or enable/disable customer reviews for the product.

Questions? Contact us today for a free quote at 630-868-5060 or email us here.

Adding a Grouped Product

Group products are setup very similar to a simple product and consist of establishing a parent product and then child products within that group.

Setting Up the Parent Product

To establish the parent product, select a product type of ‘Grouped’ from the drop-down menu. Then fill in product information like description, images, categories, and tags in the same way you would for a simple product.

Now that the parent product is established, you will need to create the child products inside of that group.

To create a child product, create a new product. For the child product you will only be required to fill in the:

Title
Product type = Simple

However, add any necessary product data like descriptions or prices for each child product.

Next, navigate to the linked products tab. Now that a grouped product has been established, a grouping field appears below the Up-Sells and Cross-Sells. Select the parent product from the drop-down menu.

In this example, we setup an iPhone as the grouped (parent) product and the 8GB/16GB as the child products. If setup properly you should see links to each child product on the iPhone product page. Note: an individual product page exists for each child.

Adding an External/Affiliate Product

External or affiliate products are ones that you list/display on your website but they are sold elsewhere.

First, select this product type from the drop-down menu.

Enter SKU, the external URL to the product, the price, and the text you would like on the button that links externally to the product.

Be sure to fill in all other product information outlined in previous examples like description, tags, categories, images, up-sells/cross-sells, etc.

There you have it! You’ve successfully added your products in WooCommerce. We typically recommend adding some products like this manually to familiarize our clients with settings in WooCommerce. After getting to know the functionality, you can consider adding your products with a CSV, especially if you have a lot of products. Stay tuned for our future post where will we explain how to do product CSV imports.

Do you want to feature a product? Check out how to add featured products in WooCommerce.

Want to learn more? Check out WooCommerce: The Ultimate Guide. Or check out our tips for improving ecommerce sales.

Do you need help setting up your WooCommerce store?

Modern Marketing Partners has helped many ecommerce business owners launch their online store with WooCommerce. Contact us today for a free quote at 630-868-5060 or email us here.

The post A Guide to Adding Products in WooCommerce appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

Getting Started With WooCommerce

Lindsay Brown — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 15:45:25 +0000

Are you looking to sell your product online but not sure how to get started? Or, are you on a budget and need to get started quickly?

Enter WooCommerce – a free ecommerce plugin for WordPress, one of the most popular and robust Content Management Systems available today. With almost 4 million downloads to date, WooCommerce is the now the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world.

For reference, here are the top 10 ecommerce technologies and their market share:

(builtwith.com)

Out of the box, WooCommerce has a ton of functionality:

Shipping options
Product and inventory management
Tax settings
Marketing – discounts, free shipping, etc.
Some payment options
Robust reporting

And for virtually everything other ecommerce need there is a wide selection of extensions that can be downloaded. For example, payment gateways or shipping extensions can extend the functionality of your store. For more ideas, do a quick Google search for WooCommerce extensions.From subscriptions to dropshipping, learn more about they types of woocommerce stores you can create.

With an intuitive user interface, the variety of themes available, and the mountain of documentation and tutorials available, WooCommerce is a great option for online stores.

We’ve combined and organized some of our client instructions to share. Below we will discuss the basics to getting started with WooCommerce including configuring your initial settings.

Getting Started

Install the WooCommerce plugin through your WordPress dashboard, or download here and upload the ZIP file to your website. Then, activate the plugin. Note: if you are using a theme you will want to ensure it is WooCommerce compatible. You can check out some here.

Activating the WooCommerce plugin will add two new menus to the WordPress dashboard: WooCommerce and Products.

In this post we will cover the basic WooCommerce settings. Navigate to the WooCommerce menu and then click Settings. Here there are 7 different tabs to change the settings.

General

The general tab allows you to set your base location and also what currency you will be accepting. Will you be shipping internationally? Make sure to set what countries you will be selling to here. For example, if you only would like to sell and ship within the United States select ‘Specific Countries’ for ‘Allowed Countries’ and then ‘United States’ under ‘Specific Countries’. You can also change some of the front-end styles here.

Products

The products tab allows you to how products are displayed, product data, and image options. Here it is important to define what your products weight and dimension unit will be (ex: pounds and inches). Other options include:

Redirect to cart page after a customer adds a product to their cart
Enable ratings
Image sizes: catalog images, single products, and thumbnails

The products tab also includes inventory options, which allows you to enable or disable stock management. Be sure to enable stock management if your product can go out of stock. Enabling stock management allows you to also receive low stock or out of stock notifications to your email. Here you will also have the option to hide out of stock items on your website or show/hide stock amount on the front-end.

Tax

The tax tab allows you to enable and configure tax settings if required. Setup your default standard rate based on your stores base location and state law.

Checkout

The checkout tab allows you to define what payment options your customers will have. By default, WooCommerce includes CCNow, BACS, Cheque, Cash on Delivery, Mijireh Checkout, and Paypal. Again, there are a variety of payment gateway extensions available based on your credit card processor.

Note: it is recommended to Force Secure Checkout (option 3) – an SSL certificate is required.

Shipping

The shipping tab allows you to define your store’s shipping options. Out of the box, WooCommerce includes Free Shipping, Flat Rate, International Delivery, Local Delivery, and Local Pickup options, which can all be enabled or disabled. As mentioned before, there are a variety of extensions to extend the functionality of your store, including UPS/FedEx/USPS shipping options.

Here you can enable the shipping calculator on the cart page or hide shipping costs until your customer enters their address.

For the free shipping option you can decide when a customer gets free shipping. In the example below, customers who spend a minimum of $100 are eligible for free shipping.

For flat rate you can define the cost per order and even additional costs based on item, class, or even shipping class.. In the example below, customers pay a flat rate fee of $5.99 per order.

The international delivery settings allow you to specify specific countries that you ship to and additional costs per order/item/class. You can also add handling fees for international delivery.

The local delivery options allow you to specify what zip codes are eligible for this option as well as the fee you would like to charge for local delivery. In the example below, customers are charged $2.00 if they live in the 60504 or 60563 area code.

Similarly, the local pickup options allow you to specify what zip codes are eligible for this option as well as the fee you would like to charge for this option. In the example below, customers are eligible for local pickup if they live in the 60502 area code.

Accounts

The accounts tab controls the pages associated with your customer’s accounts. By default, these pages are created upon installation of WooCommerce. However, they can be changed/customized based on your needs. Here you can also set customer registration options.

Emails

The emails tab allows you to configure and customize your outgoing/automated emails to customers. First, define your from name and email address.

You have some color styling and text options for the default email template, which can be fully customized if desired with some programming knowledge.

WooCommerce emails include: New Order, Processing Order, Completed Order, Customer Invoice, Customer Note, Reset Password, New Account.

The new order email for example you should setup to send to yourself to notify of a new order. Another example, the Processing Order email automatically sends to your customer after their order if enabled.

You can enable/disable each of these automated emails based on your preferences.

With your WooCommerce store properly configured, you are ready to start adding your products! Check out: Adding Products in WooCommerce.

Or to take WooCommerce for a test drive, check out a live demo here.

Do you need help setting up your WooCommerce store? Modern Marketing Partners has helped many ecommerce business owners launch an online store. Contact us today for a free quote at 630-868-5061 or email us here.

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