WooCommerce General Setup: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

In the previous article, we introduced WooCommerce. Now let’s talk about the general setup of WooCommerce.

Installation and Activation

is a WordPress-based plugin; its installation is very simple and can be completed in just a few clicks. For beginners who don’t know how to install WordPress plugins, please follow these steps:

• Go to your WordPress website dashboard.
• Click the Plugins menu and select Add New Plugin.
• You will search for WooCommerce here.
• You will find it displayed in the top results.
• Click Install now.
• After installation, just activate the plugin.

initialization

After installation, a window (magenta) will appear at the top, welcoming the user and saying: "You are ready to start selling :)" At the same time WooCommerce offers two options: You can "Install WooCommerce Pages" or "Skip Installation".

Click Install WooCommerce Pages so that you can install some pages (login, checkout, etc.) to ensure proper functionality of this plugin.

WooCommerce Getting Started

You will find two new menus in the admin dashboard:

• WooCommerce
• product

Let's start our discussion with the menu named WooCommerce, From here we will go to the sub-menu Settings.

set up

You can configure your online store here. In this section of the plugin, you can find various types of settings such as general, product, tax, checkout, shipping, account, and email settings. Let's take a look at the General Settings first.

General Settings

There are some simple options in the general settings. Let's configure each of them.

General options

As of this writing, there are four general options:

1. Base location

2. Sales location

WooCommerce allows you to choose which countries you are willing to sell your products to. Here you can choose to sell your products to all countries or to some specific countries. You can select them by simply typing in the Specific Country box. This "Specific Countries" box only appears if you select the Only sell to specific countries option.

3. Store Notice

4.API

One of the best changes made since the release of WooCommerce v2.1 is the introduction of the REST API. Enabling this checkbox will allow developers to interact with various API calls present in your online store data.

This read-only option can access data in JSON or XML format. There are five main resources you can access through this API, namely your orders, customers, coupons, products, and reporting data.

Currency Options

1. Currencies: WooCommerce offers a number of custom currencies, allowing you to choose a symbol or label for an existing currency. As mentioned before, setting the base location specifies the default tax rate, so configuring your native currency will make things more comprehensive. This helps control the prices of currencies listed in the directory and which currency gateways will accept payments.
2. Currency Position: This plugin provides a large number of currency setting options, currency position is one of them. You can choose the default currency position of the price, for example left, right, with spaces on the left , and There are spaces to the right of .
3. Thousand Separator: This setting option allows the user to set the thousands separator for displayed prices. For example, you can set (,) as the thousand separator and it will be displayed in the price, for example 1,000.
4. Decimal separator: You can use this option to set the decimal point for displayed prices. For example, you can set (.) as the decimal separator and it will be displayed in prices such as 10.00.
5. Decimal places: This setting is again used to beautify the displayed price. Setting the value (2) will allow prices to contain only two decimal places, for example 999.99.

Styles and Scripts

1. Front-end style

Scroll down to the WooCommerce Front End Styles Options, Scripts just below the Styles section. This way you can choose a color that suits your online store requirements. WooCommerce offers five different front-end styles, namely primary, secondary, highlighted , content and subtext. Each of these styles has its own meaning.

• Main Used to style call-to-action buttons, price sliders, etc.
• Secondary are the various buttons and tabs that can be styled using this setting.
• Highlight is used for different price tags and promotions.
• Content The page background can be styled using this setting.
• Paratext Allows you to add some extra text, such as breadcrumbs, small text, etc., and then you can choose a color for its style through this option.

2. script

Finally you can find two different script options. these are:

• Enable lightbox: If I think like a buyer, then I definitely want to have a 360-degree view of the product I plan to purchase. With this in mind, good sellers always upload photo galleries. When the Enable Lightbox option is checked, if the end user clicks on the product image, the product image will open in a pop-up lightbox.
• Enable enhanced country selection box: This option will help any customer during checkout. Checking or enabling this script will allow users to search the country field.

After exploring all these options, you can click on the final Save Changes button. This completes the configuration of the general settings in WooCommerce.

In the following tutorials, we will detail more settings.