Adding an online store to your WordPress website

Adding an online store or e-commerce component to your website doesn’t have to be as difficult as you think. Website technology has come leaps and bounds in the last 5 years, and with these changes, the cost of implementing features such as online stores into your website has come down. The availability of new payment gateways such as Stripe has made taking online payments a breeze and online accounting systems such as XERO allow integration between all facets of your online store.

So what is the best ee-commercesolution for your WordPress website?

Well ,our answer is Woocommerce.

Woocommerce is the leading ecommerce solution for WordPress and is used on millions of websites worldwide. Woocommerce is capable of running online stores with just one product, all the way up to 10,000. The power of Woocommerce is outstanding and believe it or not, the setup process is not overly difficult. If you are looking to start selling a few simple products with no fancy shipping or billing options, then Woocommerce is a breeze to setup. The installation process will guide you through the required settings and prefill a lot of the tax and shipping rules. Paypal is built in as standard, so you can be up and running in no time and taking payments straight away.

Adding Products in Woocommerce

When Woocommerce is installed a two new menu links will be added to your Dashboard – Woocommerce, and Products. Adding products to your store is much like adding a post or a page in WordPress. The option to “Add new product” is available from the Woocommerce submenu, and from there you are presented with a number of options to fill out. For simple products, it’s just a matter of providing some information about the product. The only required fields are a title or name for your product as you can run your store as a catalogue, and content such as a description, category, photo, price are all optional. To sell products you will require a price and this will then allow products to be purchased.

When adding photos you can set a featured image, much like pages and posts, and also subimages that act as additional photos shown under the featured image.

Woocommerce Features

The beauty of Woocommerce is its ability to integrate seamlessly with WordPress – and it’s FREE. It’s opensource technology allows 3rd party companies to build plugins or addons for Woocommerce which extend the softwares usability. There are thousands of plugins available for Woocommerce ranging from shipping solutions, product display, complicated tax scenarios, checkout options and automation. Here are a number of top features:

It’s opensource and FREE
Thousands of plugins and addons available (free and paid)
Minimal setup costs compared to other software
Great support and tutorials available online
Ease of use. Easily add products and manage orders online
Multiple payment gateway options
Add 1 product or 10,000
Built in reporting and analytics

So overall if you are looking at adding an online store to your website then take a look at Woocommerce. The ease of use and management of products and orders is exceptional and the product is easily scalable.

Woocommerce is the eCommerce software of choice at M2media and has been used on many clients website projects. M2media can take care of all the installation and setup along with any customisation that you might require.

Top Tips for Ecommerce Website Design

Ecommerce website stores are increasing every day. So how do you make your site stand out from the crowd?

Be it clothes, medicines and books or furniture, vehicles and jewelry, everything is available online. This upward trend can be seen globally and will continue for a few more years. If you have an e-commerce store, you must be aware of how tough it is to get customers since competition is not just high but just a click of a button away. Below listed are some points, which will help to make your eCommerce website attractive to your potential customers.

Easy to use Search Bar

Keeping the search bar handy and clearly defined within easy reach is very important because customers will be using it the most to search for things, they are looking for.

Using Good Pictures

Using good quality and plenty of pictures is a sure way to attract people in online shopping. Here users cannot touch anything; their buying decision relies purely on what they see.

Mobile-Friendly

Ensure that your website design is responsive and mobile-friendly as a huge percentage of people search for products and shop on their mobiles only. The importance of making a website mobile-friendly cannot be stated enough.

Shopping Cart

The shopping basket along with the search bar should be available on each page on the website so that the user can continue shopping without any hassle and know what’s there in the cart from every page he is on. Also, ensure that Add to Cart button is prominent and clearly visible on every product page.

Easy Navigation

The possibility is that there are going to be a lot of categories on your website. So, it is important to keep all the categories suitably defined under a proper menu without making them look cluttered. Using breadcrumb method makes the process of navigation an easy and smooth one.

Customer feedback and reviews

These play a key role in helping a visitor decide whether to buy a product or not. So don’t miss them.

Give Importance To SEO

As the competition is rapidly increasing in the online market, it has become very important to stay on top of search engines to ensure maximum visibility for your website. Having a good understanding of Search Engine Optimisation will help you build a website that complies with Googles best practices.

Social Media

Social media links should be placed strategically on your website design, where they are not very prominently visible yet not hidden either. People should be able to access them, as and when required. You can use Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest links.

Clean website design

This has been stated again and again that the website design should not be clumsy and product details and price must be right there. The product page should be hassle-free to use.

Fast Website Hosting

To keep your customers happy and ensure a sale, be sure your website loads fast. The best way to achieve this is by first choosing a quality web hosting company. Look for a hosting company with servers located in your country, ideally as close to your target customers as possible.

Easy and Secure Checkout

On the checkout page, no products or deals should be promoted. Prefer to use single page checkouts instead of multiple pages ones. The order, price and quantity of the items purchased should be clearly visible on the checkout page so that the customer can do amendments if needed. Also, make sure to get a trust certificate like Hacker Safe or Verisign to gain the confidence and trust of your customers.

If these points are kept in mind and put to practice, then you can be sure of having a successful e-commerce website.