With the rising dominance of online shopping, the e-commerce sector is booming efficiently. Especially, after experiencing the pandemic repercussions, businesses have strongly felt the need to thrive online. That is why every industry is keen to take complete advantage of the present situation by being active over their websites. Establishing an entire business over an online store takes a lot of passion and effort. Moreover, having your business presence online can be a perfect way to bring in some additional income. Already sounds beneficial right? Not only, a business’s website would amplify sales but represent exactly how you want your customers to perceive your products or services.
In fact, e-commerce sales are expected to make a market share of 18.1% of retail sales by 2021.
Despite these stunning statistics, nearly half of the American businesses still don’t have websites or are not aware of how websites can benefit them in the long run. That means, now is the perfect time to sit down, power up and get started to build your website. Still wondering, how to start an online store with a user-friendly website? Here is an ultimate step by step guide for you to uncover and utilize the potential of your business through the website. It will walk you through how to create a powerful e-commerce site with the world’s most popular web platform WordPress.
Within a matter of minutes and without acquiring any special skills, the things you need to start an online store will be:
To be precise, a domain name is your website’s address on the internet that users will type in their browsers to reach your website. Web hosting is the place or location where your website lives on the internet. Having an SSL certificate adds a special security layer over your website so you can accept sensitive information such as credit card numbers and other personal information.
Make sure WooCommerce was installed during the set-up.
The biggest mistake most of the users make is not choosing the right platform for their online store, but we won’t let you commit that mistake. Though there are many popular eCommerce platforms namely Shopify or WordPress + WooCommerce. But, because of the flexibility that WooCommerce offers, most of the users decide to go with it.
After selecting the domain and picking the reliable hosting provider, the next step will officially mark the beginning of your adventure with WordPress. If you are doing it from Bluehost, you will automatically have WordPress and WooCommerce installed on your site.
You may install WordPress on your hosting account as stated above. Click on it and follow the given instructions. You will be taken through the process step-by-step and there’s nothing to worry about! When you first log-in to WordPress, you would get a welcome message and asked what kind of website you want to set up. See it by going to your main domain name such as YOURSTORE.com and log in to the admin panel by going to YOURSTORE.com/wp-admin. Furthermore, it’s time to turn that blank WordPress website into a fully functional e-commerce store using the excellent WooCommerce plugin.
This plugin is free to install. However, if you’re already familiar with WordPress plugins, the fun starts by navigating to your WordPress dashboard / Plugins / Add New. Type “WooCommerce” in the search field. Click the “Install Now” button next to the plugin. In a while, the text on the button will change to “Activate” and you can click it. Thereafter, click on the ‘Return to WordPress dashboard’ link to exit the setup wizard. After finishing this, you are now ready to add products to your online store.
Adding or creating a product is similar to creating a post or page in WordPress with additional fields for pricing, images, and other details. Moreover, you should emphasize on the fact that product descriptions should be clear and informative. Think about how you want to group and classify your products as categories make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for right away.
Themes control how your WordPress sites look to the users. There are a plethora of paid and free WordPress themes available. Just head over to Appearance » Customize page and this will launch the section where you can change different theme settings.
Adding other usual elements on your website such as a contact form, about us page, and features like contact forms, galleries, sliders, etc, you need to use WordPress plugins. The WordPress plugins are over 46,000 available which you can utilize to add plenty of features.
All said and done, it’s exciting to launch a new eCommerce store and hopefully this guide has explained the basics of the process. To attain the website perfection and business success you want, you’ll surely need to never stop marketing, and innovating to meet the ever-changing preferences of your store’s target patrons. And, fortunately, there are WordPress web designing services available out there for you to get the website as you like.
