How To Create An eCommerce Website With WordPress 2022 – In 10 Steps 

Last Updated on 2 years by Go Review Rite

Have you ever considered building an online store even when you don’t have enough funds to hire web developers or purchase website scripts?

However, with WordPress CMS, one can be able to build an outstanding eCommerce online store without the need to hire developers or purchase extra scripts.

While we have your attention here, we will share how you can build an online store in less than one hour with an Astra theme.

To help you understand the whole process, we divided every action you are to take into stages (steps).

Step #1: Choose Hot Selling Product Niche

Before you should venture into creating an online store, you should, first of all, sit down and think of the hot selling niche that your business is going to be focused on.

There are quite a lot of niches that you can choose from if you don’t have any niche in mind at the moment. 

For instance, if you intend to sell electronics, you should carry out in-depth research and find out the hot products that people are searching for on the internet and not saturated.

How successful your online store will be is dependent on the niche you chose when starting your online store.

When choosing a hot-selling niche, ensure that your chosen niche solves a problem for mankind. 

One of the easiest ways to make money online is by selling a product; in this case, if your product solves lots of problems, you will in turn make more sales.

However, you should endeavour to find out potential customers that are passionate about the product you are about selling to them.

If you can be able to discover a product that people are searching for but cannot find, you will able to have greater demand for your products once you launch your online store.

Besides this, consider products that people can buy repeatedly.

 For instance, a lot of people repeatedly buy hygiene and food products over and over again.

Step #2: Choose Domain & Hosting 

 As regards choosing a domain name, you should be aware that one of the factors that determine how successful your online store will be is the domain name you choose and also the company that you used to host all your website files.

In this scenario, we recommend that you use NameCheap when purchasing your domain name to save money on your domains.

 On the other hand, since we are considering cost and other factors, we advise that you use Hostinger for your hosting. [Bonus; Get Free Domain On any Hostinger Plan]

In as much as BlueHost has been one of the most popular hosting companies, they are quite recommended for people that tend to use their websites for blogging.

When it comes to eCommerce websites, BlueHost is not recommended because of the plugins and files that are needed for an effective online store.

Ensure that your domain name is short and can be easily remembered by your visitors. 

For instance, abbreviate your desired name to something like abcname.com instead of mywebsitedomainname.com.

Furthermore, we recommend Hostinger because they have almost 100% uptime. 

This means that if you host your eCommerce store with them, your website will always be available for visitors to access.

Don’t miss this; How To Choose The Best Hosting For Your ECommerce Store?

Step #3: Setting Up Hosting + WooCommerce Setup

In setting up WooCommerce as well as your hosting, we recommend the best and most popular CMS known as WordPress.

Right inside your hosting company cPanel, you will see the option to install WordPress through the provided software.

 Perhaps, if your hosting company does not have WordPress software, you can download the WordPress zip file and upload it through FTP.

When you are done installing WordPress in your hosting company, the next thing that we recommend is to set up WooCommerce on your WordPress website.

WooCommerce is a plugin that contains lots of features that will help you have an effective online store that allows users to easily choose their favourite product, add it to your cart and proceed to the payment page.

Through WooCommerce, you can set up features that can remind users of the products they added to the cart of which they have not made payment yet.

Step #4: Installing the Astra Theme and Plugins

One of the reasons why we recommend the Astra theme is because it is a FREE WordPress theme. 

As one who is starting an online store, you can use it for free without paying theme developers.

Also, you can even install it directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Below are the steps you should follow when installing the Astra WordPress theme:

1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard.
2. Go to Appearance > Themes > Add New
3. Search for – Astra
4. Install Astra
5. Activate it

The image below helps you to understand the steps involved in installing the Astra theme as well as virtual documentation that will guide you through the whole process of installing this theme.

If you don’t have enough funds to purchase premium plugins, you can start with free plugins that have the great features that you need.

Step #5: Adding Important eCommerce Pages

There are quite a good number of pages that every eCommerce website must have.

1. Home Page – This is the face of your website. You must design it to be outstanding because it gives a first impression of how your customers will react to your business.
2. Category Page – This is a page that allows your customers to browse and view a lot of products while on your website.
3. Product Page – This is a page where customers make a final buying decision before adding the product to the cart. You must ensure that this product page contains detailed information about the product you are selling.
4. Shopping Cart Page – This page shows the collection of all the products that have been selected and also the steps that users are required to follow before making a purchase.
5. Checkout Page – This is the page a user will get after adding a product to a cart.
6. Contact Us Page – This page contains information that your customers can use to contact you. Things that this page can contain include email address, phone number, physical address, contact form, etc.
7. Payment Method Page – This page provides users with the available payment methods that are available for making payments on your website.
8. Delivery Information Page – This is the page that contains all the information about available delivery options as well as the processes that are involved.
9. About Us Page – This page should contain an overview of your business. It should also educate visitors about how you are different from your competitors.
10. FAQs – The Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page contains answers to common questions that your visitors may be searching for.

Step #6: Setup WordPress Settings

To set up WordPress Permalink for SEO, from your WordPress dashboard, go to “Settings”> “Permalinks.”

Depending on your choice, you can include day, month, and year in your permalink before the title of your blog post.

Moreover, one of the recommended Permalink structures you can use is the “Post name” only permalink.

This means that your blog posts will have permalinks like https://mywebsite.com/my-first-post/

From the image below, you can see that we set our permalink to a custom link.

 When you are done, scroll down and click on “Save changes” to save the changes you have made to your permalink.

Moreover, you can further customize your permalink if you wish. 

Perhaps, these basic permalink settings will increase your website visibility in search engines. See the image below.

Besides this, you can also set your comment section, writing, reading, etc.

Related; How To Build An ECOM Website With Best Fiverr ECommerce Development Services

Step #7: Customizing the WooCommerce Theme

At this stage, you are to customize your WooCommerce Theme based on the niche that you chose.

For you to have an effective WooCommerce Theme, you need to install WooCommerce Plugin.

You can do this by going to WordPress Dashboard > Plugin > Add New > Install WooCommerce plugin and then setting it up.

Hereunder, you can customize how your products should be displayed to users.

 For instance, product image, product description, price, discount, etc.

You can as well automate certain messages that will be displayed to users when they take some actions.

Step #8: Work on the Main WooCommerce Settings & Sections

When you are done installing the WooCommerce plugin,

 You will need to use the setup wizard which will help you to set up important WooCommerce sections such as how you will get paid, shipping orders, recommendations, etc.

When choosing the type of payment for your online store, you can choose Stripe and/or PayPal. 

Also, you can use offline payments such as checks and cash.

When configuring your shipping options, you can choose to set the amount that clients will be charged for shipping.

 You can as well make it free; depending on your choice and the type of product.

You can further install recommended add-Ons since the setup wizard provides you with a few.

Step #9: Creating Categories for Your eCommerce Website

At this stage, we recommend that you set up your categories based on how your customer’s shop.

In this scenario, if your online store is all about clothing, your customers expect to see categories like men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, and each of these categories should have sub-categories such as dresses, pants, skirts, tops, etc.

Besides this, ensure that you use keywords when naming your categories.

 We recommend that you utilize keyword research to find out what people are searching for in your niche.

Furthermore, ensure that you are consistent when naming categories. 

This will help customers to easily find what they are searching for without navigating for a long time on your website.

We also recommend that you analyze your product categories to ensure the success of your online store when people are searching for a particular product.

Step #10: Add Products to Your Online Store

When you have successfully installed WooCommerce, to add products, quickly go to WooCommerce > Products and then click on create new.

Below steps will guide you on creating an effective product page in your online store:

1. Add product title and description – Here you are required to enter the name of your product in the title section.
2. Choose product type – There are quite a lot of options you can choose from depending on what you are selling. For instance, you can choose a simple, variable, grouped, affiliate product, etc. you can as well choose a virtual or downloadable product.
3. Fill out the product data meta box – In this section, you are to fill in the rest details of the product you wish to upload.
4. Write an engaging short description –  This is a short description that appears at a prominent spot on your product page.
5. Add other common files – These can be product images, galleries, categories, tags, etc.
6. Publish your product – When you have set all these, hit the publish button.

Step #11: Design Website Home Page with Elementor Page Builder

Since your home page is like the front of your house, you should endeavour to design it so that every visitor will be impressed with whatever you are selling on your website.

We recommend that you use Elementor Page Builder to drag and drop every element and design you wish to add to your homepage.

You can further download Essential Add-on for Elementor. 

With this plugin, you can be able to achieve a lot by writing any single line of code.

If you wish to use a custom product checkout table, Elementor is quite recommended for that.

Step #12: How to Create the Main Menu

When you have successfully created your shop and have added some products and categories,

 you will have some meta boxes which will be available in your WordPress menu editor.

To add products to your main menu, follow the below steps:

• Go to  Appearance > Menus
• Make sure you select the correct menu from the drop-down
• Click on “Select” to load the menu
• Select the “Products” tab
• Check the Product to be added
• Press the “Add to Menu” or “Add to Column” button

On the other hand, to add categories, follow the steps below:

• Go to  Appearance > Menus
• Make sure you select the correct menu from the drop-down
• Click on “Select” to load the menu
• Select the “Product categories” tab
• Check the Categories to be added
• Press the “Add to Menu” or “Add to Column” button

Conclusion

This is a detailed guide on how to build an online store in less than 1 hour with Astra Theme.

 If you have any questions, use the comment section to relate to us.

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