How to Turn Your Existing Domain Into an eCommerce Shop Using WooCommerce

If you have an existing WordPress website and are finally getting around to turning it into an online shop, the WooCommerce plugin is a reliable, affordable, and painless way of doing so.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular free eCommerce solutions on the market today. It is easy to set up, offers plenty of design and functionality straight out of the box, and even has free and premium extensions for taking your online store to the next level.

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Today I will explain how to turn your existing domain into a fully functioning eCommerce shop using the WooCommerce platform.

Who knows, you may even become inspired to open up shop and generate revenue from the loyal following you have built with your website’s killer content.

How to Use WooCommerce

Powering over 28% of all online shops, WooCommerce is a powerful and affordable eCommerce platform allowing website owners to quickly and painlessly turn their existing WordPress websites into online stores.

It has exceptional visual appeal, lots of built-in functionality, and gives you complete control over every element of your online store so you can sell physical, digital, and virtual products with ease from your website.

In addition, it comes with the ability to extend beyond what you could ever imagine, includes extensive documentation for troubleshooting, and in some instances has a support team on hand to help you with any glitches or security issues.

Step 1: Install and Activate the WooCommerce Plugin

First navigate to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard and search for WooCommerce.

Next, select Install Now and then Activate.

Step 2: Utilize the Setup Wizard

Once you activate WooCommerce, you will have the chance to use the convenient Setup Wizard to get your online store up and running quickly.

Click on Let’s Go, and follow the Setup Wizard’s prompts.

All you need to do is follow each step to get your WooCommerce store setup.

Step 3: Page Setup

The first step in the Setup Wizard is to create essential pages your website will need published to run properly. These pages include:

• Shop. The shop pages displays your online store’s products for customers.
• Cart. Here customers can view their shopping cart items and begin the checkout process.
• Checkout. This is where customers will be able to finalize their purchase transactions.
• My Account. Anyone registered on your website will be able to manage their account details and shopping orders from this page.

Click on Continue to have these pages automatically created for you.  You will then be able to make any necessary changes to them from your WordPress dashboard section by navigating to the Pages section.

Step 4: Store Location

In this next step, first choose where your store is based.  Next, choose the currency your online store will use and determine whether you will be charging sales tax. You will also need to decide whether your store products will have sales tax built into their prices manually or not.

Based on the information you provide about your store’s locale, WooCommerce will automatically import tax rates (such as state sales tax if based in the United States) into your shop’s checkout process. However, it is important to keep in mind that you may need to manually edit some tax rates depending on your product type and store location.

Step 5: Shipping

After your store’s location has been determined, you will be able to define the shipping details. For instance, I chose to define the weight and dimension units as pounds and inches respectively.  

Additionally, I chose to enable the WooCommerce Shipping feature, which will allow me to print shipping labels and receive discounts on USPS shipping rates, directly from my WordPress dashboard.

Step 6: Payments

Payments are essential to running a successful online store. After all, without the ability to accept payments from customers, you cannot sell anything. And, while this may seem obvious, those new to building an online shop are often unaware of how payment acceptance on a website works.

WooCommerce offers online shop owners multiple ways of accepting both online and offline payments from customers:

• PayPal. Accept secure payments from customers while allowing them to access and utilize their PayPal accounts.
• Stripe. Stripe is another popular payment gateway for accepting credit card payments online.
• PayPal Standard. Allow payments to be made using an account balance or credit card.
• Check Payments. Agree to accept checks from customers as a way of paying offline.
• Bank Transfer (BACS). Another offline gateway allowing you to accept bank transfers from your customer’s bank to yours.
• Cash on Deliver (CoD). Accept cash payments once a product is delivered.

WooCommerce offers several other methods for accepting payments online, offline, via forms, iFrames, and more. Moreover, you can filter your payment options by country when deciding to add additional payment options to your online shop.

Step 7: Choose a Theme

The thing about using WooCommerce on your existing WordPress domain is that you will need a WooCommerce compatible theme in order for your shop to run properly without having to deal with coding issues.

However, most WordPress themes are compatible with WooCommerce, thus cutting down on styling and function issues.

You have the option of using WooCommerce’s default theme, Storefront, while setting up your online store. And, if you decide to change it later, you can do this easily from the WordPress dashboard.

In fact, there are many free and premium themes compatible with WooCommerce available on the market today.

Storefront comes with features such as:

• Seamless integration with WooCommerce and any extensions
• Fully customizable in all aspects of design and functionality
• Child theme ready for a solid foundation
• 100% mobile-friendly design
• Built-in accessibility to reach all audience types
• Support for all major slider, shortcode, and page builder plugins
• SEO optimized for the best search rankings

In the end, you can ultimately choose whatever theme you want depending on your design desires and functionality needs. Some of the best premium WooCommerce themes are found on ThemeForest, a reliable theme marketplace that has an extensive filtering system so you can find the perfect theme to match your budget.

Step 8: Add Products

And that’s it. Your online store is not all setup and ready to go. All you need to do now is add products to your store to start selling (which will take an entirely new post to explain!).

Final Thoughts

Setting up an eCommerce shop on your existing WordPress domain is simple when you choose to use WooCommerce as your platform. This is especially true when you take advantage of the built-in Setup Wizard that allows you to configure all of the basic settings step-by-step.

Though WooCommerce is very simple to configure, keep in mind that running an online shop takes a lot of hard work and effort if you want it to stand out from the crowd. As a result, you will likely need to do some learning along the way.

However, since WooCommerce has such a large following, plenty of documentation, and has an intuitive interface, creating the online shop of your dreams is definitely within reach.