Besides this, if your website uses cookies ( and it is highly unlikely you aren’t), then you need to make sure you get your users’ permission as well, to store their data in the cookies.
WooCommerce is an open-source platform just like WordPress and the most popular solution for building an eCommerce website. And is currently the most popular technology used for eCommerce. About 27% of all websites around the world use WooCommerce and that figure comes around 35,712 websites.
WordPress is an open-source CMS and it easily integrates with WooCommerce. With WordPress and WooCommerce, you can create your site the way you want it, depending on the products you’re selling. To add more functionality to your eCommerce site, you can easily install various WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. So, whether you are planning to start a small or large eCommerce store, WooCommerce gives you all you could ever need for building a high-quality eCommerce store with the power of WordPress.
7 Reasons why we love the WooCommerce & WordPress combo for making an eCommerce website
Later in this article, you’ll learn how you can create a website using WooCommerce & WordPress or directly jump to the section: How to create an e-commerce website using WooCommerce & WordPress?
BigCommerce is another top option to consider if you’re looking for a reputable and trustworthy eCommerce site builder. BigCommerce has features like bulk pricing rates, quote management, customer groups, and custom price lists. BigCommerce is specially designed to help larger eCommerce sites scale quickly. So, if you are willing to start a high-volume eCommerce store which is fully functional and has all the advanced features, BigCommerce will be perfect for you.
BigCommerce plans and prices:
Shopify is the most popular eCommerce platform which is used by more than one million online stores worldwide. Shopify is suitable for those who are planning to start a high-volume eCommerce store. Shopify provides 70+ free and premium themes that are easy to use and customize. The Shopify app store contains over 3,200 apps that you can choose from to add features and functionality to your eCommerce store.
Shopify’s plans and prices:
Magento is the most powerful CMS and eCommerce platform that perfectly suits any business type and size. More than 190k eCommerce websites are powered by Magento. Magento is an open-source platform and provides more than 3,000 third-party extensions that can make your store unique and adaptable for all situations.
If you are a beginner, then Wix is the most suitable eCommerce platform for you. Wix is amongst the top and most popular online site-builder platforms. Wix is easy to use and comes with a drag and drop feature. Wix provides specific plans made for eCommerce websites. All plans have unlimited bandwidth, a free domain for one year, visitor app analytics, and $300 in advertising vouchers. With the Wix store manager dashboard, you can easily track orders, inventory, and product pages.
Wix eCommerce plans and prices:
Top 5 #E-Commerce #website builders in 2020- @WooCommerce & #WordPress, @Shopify, @Magento, @Wix, and @BigCommerce Click To Tweet
A domain name refers to the web address of your website. An easy way to come up with the domain name for your blog is to use the name which is related to your niche and choose .com as the extension. Check whether the domain name is available using a website like Namecheap.
Web hosting is the place where your website data is stored. There are multiple web hosting service providers you can choose from, but for illustrative purposes, we will stick to Bluehost for this guide.
Go to Bluehost home page and click on the Get Started button to continue:
Upon clicking, you will be taken to their signup page where you will be asked to choose a pricing plan among the following 3 plans. We recommend you to choose the plus plan. You can always upgrade your plan.
(Note: While we were working on the article, Bluehost was offering a special discount on the choice plus/prime plan. We would recommend going for the Choice Plus plan if the offer can still be availed.)
After selecting the plan, you have to enter the domain name of your website.
If you’ve opted for the Choice Plus plan, you’ll get the domain privacy protection feature for free. For other plans, you can choose it as an add-on. Domain privacy protection is a useful feature as it keeps your details hidden from the public.
After adding the payment details, you’ll receive a confirmation mail. Once you’re registered with Bluehost, you’re good to go!
Bluehost and almost every major web hosting service provider offers 1-Click Installation for WordPress and other CMSs such as Joomla and Drupal.
Below are the steps to install WordPress using the 1-Click Installation feature:
Congratulations! You’ve successfully installed WordPress, and now you are ready to install the WooCommerce plugin and start building your e-commerce site.
Follow the below steps to install and setup WooCommerce:
4. Next, click the “Install Now” button next to the plugin and activate the plugin.
Next, you’ll see WooCommerce’s on-screen setup wizard. To start the wizard, click “Let’s go!”
The first step in the wizard is about creating below pages:
After creating the required pages, all you need to do is click the “Continue” button to proceed next.
The next screen you’ll see is to set up your store location, currency, preferred units, etc.
Once you’re done, click the “Continue” button.
On the next screen, you can select if you’re going to be shipping physical goods or not. If you check the box, WooCommerce will pre-set the remaining shipping-related details in the settings.
Next, check the main tax box, if you’re going to charge sales tax. Once you check the box, a new set of boxes will appear and inform you of what’s going to happen next.
Next, click the “Continue” button and you’ll be asked to set up your preferred payment method.
PayPal and Stripe are the most popular payment options. We recommend that you integrate your site with both PayPal and Stripe. When you are done, click “Continue” to proceed.
The next screen you’ll see is just a confirmation page. Now, you’ve just built a blank e-commerce store with WooCommerce!
The WordPress theme directory is a great place to find free themes or you can check this list of the top 100 free WordPress themes. In this guide, we will use the free Responsive theme(one of our own popular WordPress themes with 50,000+ active installations) that can be installed and used as any standard free WordPress theme.
Follow the below steps to install the Responsive theme manually from the WordPress admin dashboard:
Install & Activate Responsive Ready Site Importer Plugin
The Responsive Ready Sites Importer plugin extends the functionality of the popular Responsive theme by adding the ready site importer feature. It comes with free ready to use WordPress website templates that can be easily customized using the Elementor page builder.
First, download the latest free Responsive Ready Sites Importer by visiting https://wordpress.org/plugins/responsive-add-ons/.
After downloading the plugin zip file, follow the below steps to install the Responsive Ready Sites Importer Plugin manually from the WordPress admin dashboard:
Now that you have activated the importer plugin, it’s time to import an eCommerce website template that comes free with the Responsive theme. To do so, follow the steps below:
2. On the preview page, you will see the website and you can see the “Import Site” button.
3. On clicking the Import Site button on the preview page you will see actions that will be taken to import the website.
4. Now you can click on the Import Site button and the import process will start. You will see a checkmark in front of the actions that are completed.
5. After Import is complete you will see the Launch Site button which will take you to the newly imported site.
Next, you will need to add your site logo, add and style the navigation menu. With Responsive theme you can easily make these changes to your eCommerce site. Check this guide.
With the above steps completed, your eCommerce site is ready to display your first product. Follow the steps below to add your first product:
Once you’re done, click on the “Publish” button to make your first product live.
Follow the steps below to customize the store page layout using customizer:
Below are the options which you will see:
Follow the steps below to customize the product page layout using customizer:
Below are the options which you will see:
Best WordPress WooCommerce themes
Below are some of the best WooCommerce plugins available to help you grow your eCommerce business:
Legal pages are a must to safeguard from liabilities and prevent GDPR and CCPA penalties. WP Legal Pages can generate policy pages on your eCommerce website in just a few clicks. It is a popular plugin with over 190,000+ downloads. It is available for free in WordPress.org or you can buy a pro version from Wpeka.com.
Top 5 @WooCommerce #plugins for growing your e-commerce #website
Optinmonster generates opt-in forms to grow your email list, uses exit-intent popups to get potential shoppers to stick around, and more. It is available for free in WordPress.org. If you want to get pro features and want more insights on improving your website conversions, you can consider their paid plans.
Plans start at $9 per month.
It is very important to learn about how users engage with and experience your site. HumCommerce – A CRO tool with Visitor’s Recordings, Heatmaps, and User’s Flow features can help produce insights on user experience.
HumCommerce also features some powerful and cost-effective features to allow eCommerce websites to optimize the website at each stage to convert your visitors into buyers.
One of the crucial ways to grow your eCommerce business is by increasing your subscriber base. This way, you can send out new product launch, announcements, and any other communication periodically.
MailChimp is a popular email marketing tool that enables you to build an email list and send mass emails. Using Mailchimps’s WooCommerce plugin you can collect emails via your website. You can create forms on your site through which you can build your newsletter list. It also integrates with major contact form plugins giving you one more avenue to build your database.
Yoast SEO is a must-have plugin if you want to improve the rankings of your eCommerce website in the search engine. This plugin helps with SEO friendly content, XML sitemaps and provides an easy template to add a title, meta description, and other SEO tags.
Last but not least! Post a lot of reviews and testimonials on your website. People love to read other customers’ experiences before becoming a customer themselves. Post a few negative ones too. This section should not look all made up to suit your business.
Ecommerce has made the world a much smaller place, thanks to the Internet. It is convenient, fast, and easy. The number of people turning to e-Shopping is only going to rise as time goes by. So make your business go online, choose a good e-commerce WordPress theme and set up a clutter-free and easy to use eCommerce website, and see your sales and profits rise.
What Is An #E-Commerce #Website u0026amp; How To Build One (2020 guide)
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35 Comments on “What Is An E-Commerce Website & How To Build One”
Hi Pooja,
Thanks for great idea explanation about e-commerce!
i define e-commerce like this: Transacting or facilitating business on the Internet is called eCommerce.Buying and selling good on the internet is a very common example of eCommerce.
:)
Again thanks for sharing this helpful article!
Hey Pooja Thanks for sharing great article on ecommerce.
Just a definition of ecommerce is not enough. The word ecommerce has changed in many ways in recent years and whole thesis can be written on it.
As you mentioned perfectly, making good ecommerce is now more important than having just online store.
I am very interested in B2B eCommerce. Your definition is very elaborate. We are a photo editing company and most of our clients are B2B based. Thanks for your efforts on the proper eCommerce definition.
Hey, Pooja.
Accidentally I landed on your website. As you mentioned in the article eCommerce comes with diverse challenges and opportunities. Most often the challenges are quite extreme that small B2C eCommerce companies will not be able to compete with the international brands.
The consumers affinity towards freebies and discounts are extreme. They fall for high volume discounted sales. Where as a startup with limited budget needs to strive a lot, to identify their KPI and to differentiate their USP.
Hi Pooja,
Great article, I especially liked the “What Makes a Good e-Commerce Website?” section. However, like the comment above me mentioned, it can be hard compete with the big brands. With that said, one of the thing people can do is do niche specific stores.
Most of us are aware that being the next Amazon, eBay or even Etsy is nearly impossible. But niche sites are wide open and they seem to resonant with people. For example I’m in the process of starting an all cat store :)
Big Thanks. Its really Going to help me for my project on E-commerce and its details. Thanks Again
Now a Days Without E-Commerce Concept we can not get leads to our business.Big Companies are always interested in B2B eCommerce companies.Really Great Article Post,it will really help me to run out my business.
I think the main challenge for the ecommerce beginner is server speed. Because Google takes it very strongly nowadays to give ranking. High Quality hosting server can solve the issue.
Thanks a lot, Susmita.
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Thanks for elaboration of complete eCommerce journey. I Think the important metric of e-commerce which should measure each of us on our website are very important.
Hi Pooja Thanks for sharing great article on ecommerce.
Just a definition of ecommerce is not enough. The word ecommerce has changed in many ways in recent years and whole thesis can be written on it.
As you mentioned completely, making good ecommerce is now more important than having just online store.
I really enjoyed your article. I’m going to work on e-commerce. Your article has really helped me a lot.
In 2016 first i learn about eCommerce website this time i struggle to build my own platform, but now a day its become so easy and now i use Shopify they give me lot of support to build eCommerce platform very easily.
And thanks for sharing your content here. happy to see such as great article.
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Thank You for sharing such an awesome blog.
Helpfull writing. If you start any business like eCommerce and another, you must gather proper knowledge. here is rich full knowledge for eCommerce business. Thanks for sharing the best experience.
E-commerce is the trending business now but you can’t touch the giants like Amazon, eBay. The best thing you can do is start a niche e-commerce website to find a low competitive high search volume product start the keyword research, design and other related tasks. If things are going well you can definitely earn decent money from your e-commerce business. By the way, you have done a great job putting the information.
In my opinion, I understand E-commerce means who are selling products and services and their website is an E-commerce website. In trending online business E-commerce grabs a huge market in online as like Etsy, Amazon, Aliba etc.
Super
Nice topic and a great read. I don’t think these are must because not all e-commerce websites are using this. In contrary, this is very effective if the business is just starting, no doubt to that.
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Really useful in my every query related e-commerce.
Thanks again.
Keep sharing…
Hello, after reading this awesome article i am also glad to share my know-how here with mates.
Hi Pooja,
Recently I just wanted to open an e-commerce store to sell my own products but I didn’t know enough about opening a shop in e-commerce platforms. So I searched a lot for a step by step guide for it but I didn’t get something very helpful. Finally, I got your article and you have described all the things that I was searching for. Thanks for your article and information.
This article is truly helpful, it explains ecommerce from beginning to end how to set one up.
Thank you!
Hey, you have provided great info how to built it and I think this will even work in 2021 as well.
I would also like to share that the physical store will always be limited by a geographical area it can serve. An online store, or any other type of eCommerce business for that matter, has the whole world as its market. Going from a local customer base to a global market at no additional cost is really one of the greatest advantages of trading online. In 2018, 11.9% of global retail sales came from online purchases and this is only set to increase year on year.