What this book covers
Chapter 1, Installing WordPress and WooCommerce, brings everyone up to speed. If you’ve never installed WooCommerce, we’re going to go through it together – step by step – looking at setting up our store settings, how we’re going to accept payments, and how we’re going to keep the admin interface clean.
Chapter 2, All About Configuring Products, digs into all of the settings for products. We’ll cover when you should use certain product types, how to give your visitors as much information as possible, and some of the premium product types such as WooCommerce Subscriptions.
Chapter 3, Organizing Products, explains how to add categories and tags to your store and looks into when you would want to do so. We will delve into intuitively organizing your products and enabling customers to find your products and checkout in a flash.
Chapter 4, Attracting Traffic with Search Engine Optimization, is all about getting traffic. We’re going to look into some of the common ways to bring people to your site, focusing especially on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing, which is very popular with WordPress.
Chapter 5, Managing Sales Through WP Admin, helps store owners manage and fulfill sales. Once you get that traffic, you’ll have orders and will need to ship your products. There are some subtle features in the WooCommerce admin realm that make this process surprisingly easy.
Chapter 6, Syncing Product Data, illustrates how tricky it is to keep all of your product data in sync. We’ll cover a manual process that you can use to update your products and investigate services that do this for you automatically.
Chapter 7, Configuring In-Store POS Solutions, will highlight the different ways in which you can sell products in person. We lay out several POS solutions, along with their benefits and drawbacks, to help you choose the right one for your store or your client’s store.
Chapter 8, Using Fulfillment Software, draws together another suite of tools, this time focusing on fulfillment (getting a package to a customer’s door). There are built-in options that are great for starting out but at a certain point, you’ll want to use a 3rd party service to save you money and time.
Chapter 9, Speeding Up Your Store, highlights several ways in which you can speed up your store and talks about the importance of doing so. If your store is slow, no one will want to check out, so look into these techniques to speed up your store.
Chapter 10, Setting Up Your Theme, will show you my two favorite themes for WooCommerce and how you can set them up to display your products.
Chapter 11, Customizing the Product Page, is all about building that perfect product page. We’ll look into 360-degree images, videos, and the process of adding social proof.
Chapter 12, Building a Landing Page, will show you some key principles of landing page design, how you can add e-commerce functionality to the landing page, and then how to measure the effectiveness of the page and how to optimize it.
Chapter 13, Creating Plugins for WooCommerce, is here for the developers or to give a store owner insight into how a developer does their work. We’ll write code to modify WooCommerce itself, customize an order status, build a plugin, and integrate a service with WooCommerce.
Chapter 14, Next Steps with WooCommerce, gives you a look ahead into further areas you can specialize in. We’ll look into the importance of accessibility and how you can build an accessible store, how you can keep your WooCommerce store safe and secure, and how you can follow the development of WooCommerce, and contribute code to WooCommerce itself.