WooCommerce

WooCommerce turns an ordinary website into a full-fledged store. For free, right inside WordPress. This section is for anyone opening their first storefront, setting up payment processing, or dealing with abandoned carts at the checkout page.

We start with the fundamentals. Setting up payments and shipping so money actually arrives and parcels are calculated correctly. Connecting payment gateways, calculating shipping costs by weight and zone, store taxes and currency. Product types: simple, variable (one product with sizes or colors), grouped, digital, and subscription-based. The checkout flow, that very checkout where stores lose the most customers. We show how to remove unnecessary fields and not scare people off at the final step.

Out-of-the-box WooCommerce can't do everything. So we break down plugins for specific tasks. Discounts and coupons for sales, lead generation (collecting contacts from future customers), generating PDF invoices, extra tabs on the product page, attribute filters, quick view, and wishlists. For each category, there are roundups like "best discount plugins" or "checkout plugins." Not a dry list. We explain what to pick for a small store versus a serious order volume.

A store needs a suitable theme. In this section, we review templates built for product storefronts and how they work with WooCommerce. We also cover selling digital goods: courses, templates, licenses, files. And recovering sales when you have traffic but few purchases. Where the leak is and how to fix it.

Who we keep in mind when we write. A beginner opens their first store, gets confused by shipping zones, and worries about losing money on a test payment. An experienced owner is already selling but wants to raise the average order value, speed up checkout, and automate invoicing. For the former, we give a step-by-step launch from scratch. For the latter: conversion analysis, upsells, and CRM integration.

What we check before recommending a solution. The real performance impact on the site after installing a plugin. Compatibility with the current WooCommerce version and popular themes. How the cart and checkout behave on mobile. Support for Russian payment systems, not just foreign ones. Whether the developer is still active and how often updates come out. A plugin that looks great in a demo but slows a store to a crawl with a hundred products gets filtered out.

Typical mistakes almost everyone stumbles on. A long order form with a dozen required fields. Hidden shipping costs that only surface at the last step. A dozen duplicate plugins all loading the same script. A test payment mode left on after launch. We show how to catch these in advance.

The content is written by practitioners who have launched stores themselves and counted real money. We know how an order gets lost because of one poorly designed form field. That's why every guide is kept simple. First, a short solution. Then a detailed walkthrough with screenshots, settings, and pitfalls.

If you're just starting out, go through it in order. First, basic store setup, payments, and shipping. Then products and checkout. Only after that, plugins that boost sales. That way you won't drown in a hundred extensions at the start.

This section builds on three neighboring sections. General questions about the WordPress core, site migration, speed, and security live in the WordPress section. Universal extensions you'll find in WordPress Plugins: forms, SEO, caching, backups. Storefront design and theme selection, in WordPress Themes. Here, everything that's specifically about commerce.

Content is regularly updated for the latest WooCommerce versions and new payment system requirements. These are working solutions tested on live stores, not theory from documentation. Selling products, services, or digital goods? Come back here whenever you need to set up payments, speed up checkout, or improve conversion.