Getting Started with WooCommerce Print

What WooCommerce is, and who it suits

WooCommerce is an eCommerce system built on top of WordPress. Where a dedicated platform is a shop from the ground up, WooCommerce turns a WordPress website into a shop, which is its defining strength and the thing to understand before you choose it. You get everything WordPress does, pages, a blog, a vast library of themes and plugins, with a full online store added into the same system.

That makes WooCommerce the right choice if you want your shop and your content site to be one thing, if you value the enormous WordPress and WooCommerce plugin ecosystem, or if you already know WordPress and would rather build on it than learn something new. If instead you want the simplest possible path to just a shop, our article on getting started with ThirtyBees covers the more focused alternative. Both are good, they suit different people.

Before you start: the honest requirements

• It needs the right hosting. WooCommerce does more than a basic website and will not run well on a standard shared plan, it needs one of our WordPress or eCommerce packages, built for the job.
• It is self-installed, and because it is WordPress plus a shop plus the plugins that support them, there is genuinely more to set up and keep running than with a focused platform. None of it is beyond a capable owner, but there is more of it.
• Or we install and optimise it for you. We know WordPress extremely well, and our paid install service for WooCommerce sets up WordPress and WooCommerce, secures the site, installs and configures caching so the store stays fast, handles the core WooCommerce setup, and includes training on running it. Because there is more involved than a ThirtyBees setup, this service costs more, and for many owners it is worth it to have a store that is fast, secure, and correctly configured from day one rather than something to wrestle with.

The setup, in the order that makes sense

• Install WordPress, then add the WooCommerce plugin, which walks you through an initial setup wizard.
• Configure the basics, your store details, currency in Rand, and legal pages.
• Connect a payment gateway, which for a South African store usually means PayFast or Paystack through their own WooCommerce plugins, as covered in our article on payment gateways for a South African store.
• Set up delivery, the part that catches everyone, using the province-average approach and flat-fee courier options in our article on setting delivery and courier fees.
• Make sure your emails send properly, through authenticated SMTP rather than WordPress's basic mail, so order confirmations actually arrive, covered in our article on making sure your store's emails send.
• Add caching and keep everything updated, which matters more with WooCommerce than a plain site because a slow or outdated shop costs you real sales, our WordPress articles on speed and updates apply directly.
• Load your products, then test a real order end to end before you open.

Just browsing: catalog mode

Not every store needs to take payments on day one. WooCommerce can run in catalog mode, showing your products, with or without prices, but without the cart and checkout, so it works as a polished online showcase rather than a transactional shop. It suits businesses that want to display a range and take enquiries, that sell offline but want to be found online, or that are launching in stages and want the catalogue up before the payment side is ready. We can set this up for you, and it converts to a full transactional store whenever you are ready, the same option is available on ThirtyBees.

Why host your WooCommerce store with us

WooCommerce lives or dies on how well the underlying WordPress is run, and that is squarely our strength. We know WordPress deeply, we keep it updated and secured through our WordPress update service and WP Security Manager, and we tune it to run a shop fast. A WooCommerce store is only as good as its hosting and its upkeep, and a fast, secure, well-maintained store is one you host with people who actually know the platform underneath it.

Good to know

Everything here you can do yourself, and these articles are written to help you do exactly that, the platform is yours and the knowledge is not a secret. What we sell is speed and certainty: a WooCommerce store installed, secured, cached, and configured correctly the first time, with training so you can run it confidently. Whether you build it yourself with these guides or hire us to set it up and teach you, the aim is the same, a shop that works and an owner in control of it.