WooCommerce User Guide

As part of our Primal Space productivity blog series, we’ve put together this WooCommerce user guide. Helping you navigate your new WooCommerce for WordPress website.

Our goal throughout this post is to outline the most regularly used functions of the plugin. Allowing you to have the freedom and knowledge to update your online store with ease. Without the help of a developer. Of course, we’ll be here to support you if you have any questions that we haven’t covered in this post. However sometimes having a simple step by step guide. That’s supported by easy to navigate screenshots. Is all you need to allow you to move forward with the task at hand. Whether that be operating the admin area or updating an existing product. Adding a new product or changing your shipping rates.

We’ll continue to update this post ongoing with other WooCommerce skills that you may find useful. So be sure to check back for updates. However before we jump in and get started, let’s just take a quick look at what WooCommerce actually is.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free plugin which provides e-commerce functionality for your WordPress website. It’s also our e-commerce development platform of choice, so it’s not surprising that it also powers over a third of all online stores on the web today.

Why do we opt for WooCommerce over other CMS platforms? Mainly due to it’s easy to navigate admin area which you’ll learn more about throughout this post. Making it easier than ever for our clients to take control of their online store. Not only this but it’s also a WordPress plugin. Making it super easy to integrate within an existing WordPress site.

Why is this important? Well many of our clients start out with a simple brochure style WordPress site. However with more and more businesses now selling online,they often look to either move their entire product range online to market to a much wider audience. Or perhaps just a core range of their best selling products. Whatever you choose to do, we hope that this guide will help you speed up the learning curve when navigating your WooCommerce website.

A Guide to WooCommerce

Locating WooCommerce in the WordPress Admin Area

First off let’s take a look at the WordPress dashboard to find out where the WooCommerce admin area is located.

Here you’ll be able to update your business details such as address and shipping. You can also select from any of the tabs along the top of the page. As well as the menu options that will now be listed below where it says ‘WooCommerce’ on the menu at the left of the page.

Updating or Adding a New Product

You’ll firstly navigate to the ‘Products’ tab on the left hand menu just under WooCommerce. Here a new page will open with a list of your existing products. You can then decide weather to hover over the product you wish to update and then select ‘edit’ to open and then revise this product.

Or alternatively you can add a new product, there are two ways to do this. Firstly, you can add a new product from a blank template from scratch. On the other hand, if your product is similar to an existing product, you can select ‘duplicate’ by hovering over the existing product. This will create a new draft and will keep many of the existing features in place. You can decide which product features you need to change, such as product images, price, product name etc. This is a faster option, and handy if you’re new to using WooCommerce and aren’t yet confident in adding a brand new product from scratch.

How to Add a Product Name

Now that you’ve selected ‘Add New Product’ a new window will open. Firstly you’ll want to create a product name. Add this in the box shown below and be sure to click on the save draft button to the right of the page. By doing so this will save the product link too.

Adding / Selecting Product Categories

The next step when adding a product is to enter the categories that you’d like your product to be displayed under. You can select from pre-existing categories by simply ticking the box. Or adding new categories below. As well as this you can add product tags which are beneficial from an SEO standpoint.

Adding Product Images

You’ll need to select an image for your post. Ensure that it’s been edited before uploading to be the correct size to fit the area that it will show. If you aren’t sure how to do this you can read out blog post on how to resize images for your web use.

When you click on either of these options, a pop up will appear to show the media library. Here  you’ll be able to select an existing image from the library. Or upload your own image from your desktop. To do this you can simply drag and drop the image across.

Be sure to add a name for the image which corresponds to that specific product. As well as the alt text as this will improve the SEO for the product on search engines. Finally click on the blue button at the bottom right of the media library to confirm your selection. Allowing the image to show live on the product page.

To add multiple images to the image gallery area, simply follow the same format outlined above. Only you’ll have the ability to select multiple images instead of just the one.

Adding A Product Description

The next step in this WooCommerce guide is to add your product description. Navigate to the bottom of the page to locate the text box for a short description.

Like all WordPress plugins, the text editing panel is present above the text box. Giving you many customisation options to allow you to format your text. Allowing you to create headers and spacing as well as editing colour etc.

Adding or Updating Product Data

Towards the middle of the product page you can see that there’s an entire section dedicated to updating your product data. Here there’s a wide range of options which include updating pricing and adding a sale price. As well as adding shipping options and also inventory.

Meanwhile if you’re looking to add customisable options in the way of colours and sizes then this can be done under attributes. Here you can select from pre-added attributes that have been created within the WooCommerce dashboard.

Saving Your Updates and Publishing Live

Be sure to save your updates to your WooCommerce product as you go. You can also preview your updates throughout, which we would highly recommend doing before publishing live. It’s a good habit to get into as it means that you’ll spot any errors early on in the process and have time to correct them, or if all else fails, start again. Before the product is showing live on the website.

When you’re happy with all of the changes you have made then be sure to click on the Publish/Update button which is the blue button to the right of the page in the product admin area.

Updating Your WooCommerce Website

Hopefully this user guide for WooCommerce has helped you understand some of the basic features of the plugin, allowing you to update and add products to your WooCommerce website with confidence and ease. There are many other features within WooCommerce which you may find useful, and we’ll continue to add to this post teaching you more about what the plugin has to offer and how it can benefit you.  You can also refer to the WooCommerce website for more information.

You may also find our WPBakery Page Builder user guide helpful as a means of getting to grips with some of the most commonly used elements within WordPress.

Is there anything else you’d like to learn in this post? Do let us know and we can add more features ongoing.