What do you need to take your business online and create a store with WordPress? You don’t need much, just the following.
- Domain and Hosting
- WordPress (and theme)
- Shopping Cart Add-on
- Payment gateway and SSL
- Bank account
Let’s go over each of these now.
Domain and hosting for WordPress stores
You need a domain so you can link your store to a web address that customers can easily find through searches or ads. Your domain should be the name of your business or the product you sell.
Once you have a domain, you will need to set up hosting so you can begin building your website and having it hosted online.
Setting up the store theme
Once you have set up your domain and hosting, you will need to start building your website in WordPress.
You can take a look at the following themes for your WordPress store. However, the WordPress store theme must be for the specific WordPress store plugin you choose.
WooCommerce Theme “Shop”
This is a clean and versatile theme built for the WooCommerce WordPress plugin which we will discuss below.
It is built by the WooCommerce team. Since they have intimate knowledge of the functionality of the entire system, you will find that it has many smart and easy-to-use features.
EasyShop Theme
This is a theme built on top of EasyCart by a third-party developer. It is primarily tailored for clothing businesses, but can be modified for other purposes.
Now let’s look at the actual shopping cart plugin.
WordPress Store Shopping Cart Plugin
When looking for a plugin to set up your WordPress store and manage purchases, you’ll need a few things.
- Good inventory management
- Easy to use admin interface (for uploading/changing products)
- Strong integrations to payment processors (like PayPal)
- Good front-end user experience (for those browsing your store)
The two plugins that tick those boxes are WooCommerce and EasyCart.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free plugin with a vast marketplace of free and premium extensions.
Basically, any feature and functionality you need can be installed on your WordPress store with extensions for reasonable monthly fees. However, for the novice user, WooCommerce should be good enough out of the box .
EasyCart
EasyCart is a one-time paid plugin option, ranging from $50 to $180 for a lifetime license. This includes all of their extensions. No monthly fees like WooCommerce.
There is a larger initial investment, but many people find that they end up spending a decent amount of money per month with WooCommerce once they start scaling anyway.
Personally, I prefer the look and feel of WooCommerce. It’s also the most popular choice.
Payment gateway, SSL and bank account
Once you have your website and WordPress store up and running, you will need to link the shopping cart plugin to your payment gateway.
If you are not sure which one to choose, I have placed the most popular ones below.
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Square
You can also use Payoneer or 2Checkout, which are two other options.
However, before you do this, you’ll need to make sure you have an SSL, which stands for Secure Socket Layer. It’s basically the technology that secures your website while processing your customers’ credit cards.
You can get SSL from most web hosting providers who include it by default.
Both WooCommerce and EasyCart have instructions that will tell you how to easily link your payment gateway and start selling. From there, all you have to do is make sure your bank account is connected so you can withdraw your earnings.
In conclusion
Now you’ve seen how simple it is to create your WordPress store. If you’ve always wanted to sell online but never knew how… now is the perfect time to get started.