Tips To Build A Perfect WordPress E-commerce Website

Creating an E-commerce website can be a daunting and torturous job for beginners. Moreover, If you are unfamiliar with the latest E-commerce software and Internet technology, then having an E-commerce website seems like a pipe dream.

Fortunately, WordPress offers you a wide range of options, using which you can easily set up your E-commerce website. In this guide, we shall discuss how you can create a fully-fledged WordPress E-commerce website easily and quickly.

1. Obtain A New Domain Name and Web Hosting

Choosing the right domain name and a basic hosting account is the first step towards creating your WordPress E-commerce website. Make sure you choose the best the domain name for your website.

While selecting the domain name for your website, keep a few things in mind:

• There are several domain name extensions. If possible, choose a .com domain. If you fail to do so, go for other options,
• keep your domain name short and simple. Use your target keywords in domain name. It will help you to notify search engines about the business of your website and make it stand out,
• Don’t use hyphens and doubled letters,
• Make sure your site’s domain name is easy to pronounce.

When it comes to choosing the web hosting for your E-commerce website, it will be better for you to go for either dedicated or managed hosting services. By doing so, you will enjoy some benefits such as access to unlimited resources, protection of your websites against online security breaches and hacking attempts, timely support, 100% uptime for your website, etc.

2. Install WordPress

Once you have a new domain name and a web hosting account, you need to install WordPress on your hosting account. To do so, go to the user panel of your hosting account and look for “Install WordPress” option. Click on the option and follow the on-screen instructions to install the WordPress. Once, the installation process is over, you have a blank WordPress website.

3. Add an E-Commerce Plugin To Your Website

There are several WordPress plugins, using which you can add E-commerce functionality to your WordPress website. But, it is recommended that you should use WooCommerce plugin so that you can make use of its superior integration tools and beautiful potential layouts to set up your dream E-commerce website easily.

To add WooCommerce Plugin to your website, go to WordPress site dashboard and search for WooCommerce Plugin in the search bar.

Click on the “install Now” option and wait for the plugin to be installed. Once the installation is finished, click on the activate button.

After this, you reach  WooCommerce’s on-screen launch/setup wizard. Here, you need to add some essential pages to your E-commerce website.

4. Create Essential Pages On Your Store

When you operate E-commerce websites, you need to create some specific pages on your site to let buyers easily browse your website and take actions. Just have a look at some of them:

• Shop: Your products will be displayed here,
• Cart: It helps customers to add products to the shopping list and adjust them before the final purchasing,
• Checkout: It’s a place where buyers choose the shipping/delivery method and make payment for products/services they have purchased,
• My account: It’s a profile page for registered users, which allows them to have a look at their previous orders and manage their future buying items and other essentials.

Note: These are some basic pages you should have on your E-commerce website. Based on your specific needs, you can add more pages to your website to meet the growing demands of your E-commerce business.

5. Set Store Locale

It is indeed an important part of your E-commerce website set up. Based on your business needs, you need to define some parameters for your E-commerce website such as currency, preferred units, location, languages, etc. Customize your store in such a way that it fully supports both localization and internationalization as it helps you a lot when your E-commerce business grows rapidly in all directions.

6. Attach Various Payment Methods To Your Website

You need to integrate some popular payment gateways to your E-commerce website. It will help you to take payments from your customers and clients. Allow your customers to make payment through various means as it will allow them to buy products/services frequently from your website and contribute to your E-commerce website conversion rate substantially.

7. Add Products To Your Website

In order to make your store operational, you need to add products/services, downloadable items or whatever you want to sell, to your site’s database. In order to add products to your website, go to the site’s dashboard and click on Products/Add Product option.

While adding products to your website, you need to add various other things along with the products such as images, columns, headings, videos, etc. You also get tabs to display the products in accordance with various parameters:

• General – For setting the price and taxes,
• Inventory – For stock management,
• Shipping – For setting the cost of shipping, dimensions, and weight of the product,
• Linked products/similar products – for selling similar products (to promote upselling/cross-selling)
• Product Description – It is displayed below the product name. A concise introduction about the product,
• Product categories & sub-categories – Classification and arrangement of products in specific groups,
• Product tags – For organizing the database of products and
• Product image – The main image of the products

Note: These are some basic parameters you can use on your E-commerce to add and display products. Depending on your needs, you can add more parameters and demonstrate your merchandise accordingly.

8. Select A Perfect Theme For Your E-Store

When you create an E-commerce website, it is very important for you to choose a perfect theme for your site to fascinate buyers. WordPress has a lot of themes and new WordPress themes keep rolling out every day. So, it is very important for you to introspect various premium and free WordPress themes by all angles and choose the best one.

9. Follow Some General Rules Of E-Commerce Store Design

Have a look at some important points and implement it before launching your store finally,

• Make sure your website design is simple and clear
• The center content block of your website must grab the visitor’s attention once they land on your website,
• Your website must have adjustable sidebars to allow customers to use the website easily and quickly, You can decide the total number of sidebars based on your needs and can disable them later if they are no longer required,
• Make sure your website is responsive and optimized for mobile devices. It will help you to get a large amount of traffic to your site.
• Ensure easy navigation feature on your website and implement secondary navigation also to increase the usability of your website.

10. Test & Launch Your Website

By now, your website is ready to be launched. Just recheck all the settings, customization, product listings, etc, to ensure that everything is right. Consider launching A/B Split Testing in WordPress E-commerce website to find out possible flaws and remove them instantly. Once you complete all these steps, launch your website and start selling your products/services.

Final Thoughts

Setting up an E-commerce website is not an easy task. However, When you intend to create an E-commerce website with WordPress, the level of difficulty decreased a lot. Just follow the above-mentioned steps and have a WordPress E-commerce easily.