1. Documentation /
  2. WooCommerce Setup

WooCommerce Setup

Note: The WooCommerce Setup has been revised in version 7.9. If your current screen interface varies from what is presented in this documentation, we strongly recommend updating your WooCommerce to the latest version.

Introduction

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Having a customizable eCommerce platform means that there are a lot of available settings to tweak. The Onboarding Wizard and Setup Checklist takes you through all the necessary steps to set up your store and get it ready to start selling!

Immediately after activating the plugin, you are taken to the Onboarding Wizard. The store profiler will allow you to provide the most important details about your store: where is it based, what industry, which products, etc.

Once you’ve gone through that, we’re providing a checklist to make sure that all aspects of your online store are ready to start selling.

Onboarding Wizard

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Welcome to Woo!

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It’s wonderful to have you! We are excited to guide you through the setup process, which will help us customize your experience and ensure that it aligns perfectly with your needs and preferences.

Your input is invaluable, and we appreciate your time and collaboration as we embark on this exciting process together. Click on “Set up my Store” to go to the next step.

Which one of these best describes you?

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Let us know where you are in your commerce journey so we can tailor your experience. Are you just starting out in your commerce journey, selling online, selling offline, or both? Or you are setting up a store for your client?

In this step, please let us know where you stand in your commerce journey so that we can personalize your experience accordingly.

Tell us a bit about your store

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In this step, please provide some information about your store. This information will be utilized to assist in setting up payments, shipping, and taxes for your store.

If the store location you specified does not match your current geolocation, a warning message may appear. This warning is designed to ensure accuracy and alignment between the store’s physical location and the setup process.

However, if you are indeed located elsewhere at the moment or if you are setting up a store for a client who is in a different location, you can safely ignore the warning and proceed by clicking on the “Continue” button to complete the setup process.

Get a boost with our Free Features

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Based on the information you provided in the previous steps, we will now recommend free business features that can be beneficial for your store. These features are designed to enhance your commerce journey, and the best part is that there is no commitment required.

You have the flexibility to remove any of these features at any time throughout your journey, ensuring that you have complete control over your store’s setup and customization.

Jetpack Connection

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In this step, please connect your WordPress.com account so you can take advantage of the benefits offered by Jetpack.

Let’s Roll!

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Once you completed the above steps, we will start rolling out your site with features. So sit back and relax and enjoy the fun facts about WooCommerce!

Skip Setup

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If you skip the step, please enter the location to set up your store.

Store Setup Checklist

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After you finish or skip the Store Profiler stage you’ll have access to a list of the most important tasks that you need to complete to get your store up and running: products, payments, shipping, taxes, marketing and store personalization. You can skip the checklist whenever you want.

Add your first product

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In this step we’ll guide you through the process of adding your first products using WooCommerce manually:

  • Add manually. See the documentation on Adding and Managing Products in order to know what to expect during the steps of creating a product. 
  • Start with a template. You can choose to start with a pre-filled template of different product types: physical, digital, and variable products.
  • Import. See the documentation on the built in Product CSV Importer and Exporter in order to know what to expect when importing products. You can use this sample CSV file for products import testing.
  • Migrate. See the documentation about the Cart2Cart extension to know more about using a product migration service.
  • Import Sample Data. Not ready to commit to a product, but want to test out the store? Add in fake data to see what a full store would comprise of. See the documentation on the Importing WooCommerce Sample Data for instructions.

Personalize your store

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Here, we will help you get started with customizing your store’s look and feel.

If you still don’t have any products we can automatically import some demo products, so you can see how they look both in the store and in our product management interface. You won’t see this step if you already have products.

Then we can automatically create a homepage for your store and you can always edit it later.

You can also upload your store’s logo right away in a simple step.

Finally, you can easily display a prominent notice across all pages of your store. Note that the visibility of this notice and its place in your store will be affected by your theme choice. You can leave it blank in case you don’t want to display a store notice.

Set up shipping

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You can confirm your store location or add it if you haven’t done it before. You can also set the shipping costs for your country and for the rest of the world as well. Adding shipping cost for the rest of the world can be disabled in this step.

If your store location is the US, you can install WooCommerce Shipping and connect your store to wordpress.com to enable label printing at home.

Set up tax

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You have four options available in this step: use WooCommerce Tax, use Avalara, set up taxes manually or not charging sales tax.

You can confirm your store location or add it if you haven’t done it before.

If you selected WooCommerce Tax and have Jetpack installed, you can start automatically calculating taxes by connecting your store to WordPress.com. Visit this page if you want to learn more automated taxes and the countries where it’s available. 

If you click to connect your store you’ll be redirected to the WordPress.com flow, so you can create an account or login to an existing account. 

After you finish that process, you’ll be redirected to the tax task where you can enable the automated taxes calculation by selecting “Yes please.”

Selecting Avalara will redirect you to woocommerce.com to install the extension and finish the Avalara set up. Learn more about Avalara here.

If you choose to set up tax rates manually you will be redirected to the WooCommerce Settings. See the documentation on setting up taxes in WooCommerce to learn more about how to set them up manually.

Set up payments

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In this step, you can select and activate one or more options to accept online payments and offline payments. All payments extensions are free and we automatically install and activate them upon selection.

In some payment gateways, such as WooPayments, Stripe, and PayPal, we help you create an account in the payment provider, go through the authentication flow and complete the process within this step, so you can start accepting payments right away.

There are a few possible scenarios, depending on where your store is located and the information you provided during the store profiler.

WooPayments is currently available in 15+ countries. You can see the availability here. If you have WooPayments pre-installed or if you install it during the Store profiler flow, we’ll display a specific task to finish the WooPayments setup.

If you live in another country than the United States you’ll have Stripe and PayPal at your disposal if these providers are available in your country. We also show other options, depending on your store country, such as: Square, Klarna, Mollie, PayFast, PayU, Razorpay, Mercado Pago, PayFast and Eway.

Through the Payments task, you can also easily set up offline payments such as Cash on Delivery and Direct Bank Transfer.

Set up marketing tools

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Through this step you can easily install and finish the set up of our recommended marketing extensions: MailPoet, Google Listings & Ads, Mailchimp for WooCommerce and Creative Mail for WooCommerce.

Store Management

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Once you complete the Store Setup Checklist (or choose to hide it), it will be replaced by the Store Management widget, which contains useful links to most of the most used WooCommerce pages for managing your store.

Questions and Support 

Do you still have questions and need assistance? 

  • Get in touch with a Happiness Engineer via our Help Desk. We provide support for extensions developed by and/or sold on Woo.com, and Jetpack/WordPress.com customers.
  • If you are not a customer, we recommend finding help on the WooCommerce Support Forum or hiring a WooExpert agency. They are trusted agencies with a proven track record of building highly customized, scalable online stores. Learn more about WooExpert agencies.