Over half (58.4%) of internet users buy at least one item online weekly. Then it’s no surprise that E-commerce has become an indispensable part of the online economy. In fact, E-commerce sites globally brought in $5.7 trillion in 2023. This number is expected to jump to $7.4 trillion in 2025. Of course, the quality of your products determines whether you’ll be part of the $7.4 trillion success story. However, other factors, such as the quality of your site and your online presence, significantly impact the success of your E-commerce store. Fortunately, setting up an E-commerce store is pretty simple if you know where to start. One popular, affordable, and easy method is to create your E-commerce store with WordPress. But how do you create a WordPress E-commerce site?
In this in-depth guide, we explore everything you need to know to start an E-commerce site with WordPress.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of building your online store, here’s a quick bulleted rundown.
- You’ll need WordPress hosting and a domain name.
- Next, choose a WordPress E-commerce plugin. There are several, but WooCommerce is the most popular.
- Choose a theme. WooCommerce has a free theme known as Storefront, but you also have other E-commerce-friendly options such as Astra and Shoppe.
- Set up your payment gateway integrations. If you go with WooCommerce, you can integrate your shop with Paypal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.
- Set up the shipping zones, and configure the shipping and tax rates
Setting Up Your Online Store
Because WordPress is not specifically built for E-commerce sites, it takes a little more work to tweak and create a fully functioning online shop. On the upside, WordPress gives you more options to customize and align the online shop with your brand.
Below are the necessary steps to building a WordPress E-commerce site:
1. Purchase Hosting and a Domain Name
Hosting varies depending on plan and company. There are more affordable providers such as Bluehost, goDadday, and NameCheap that are between $5—$100 monthly range.
However, if you are not too savvy with setting up security around hosting servers for your e-commerce site, managed hosting such as Pantheon or WPEngine. They provide over 99% up-time, scheduled backups, technical and security to support your e-commerce needs.
The hosting plans might offer a free domain name as part of the package. If there’s no offer, a domain name costs $10-$20 annually. The domain name is your store’s unique address (for instance, Petcare.com) if you deal with pet grooming products. Some of the popular places you can register your domain are , and NameCheap, goDaddy or register.com
So, you’ve secured a hosting plan and a domain name for your store. It’s time to install WordPress and start building your E-commerce site.
2. Installing WordPress
Most hosting platforms offer easy one click process to install WordPress from the admin dashboard from your hosting service. You can also manage various tasks and jobs such as databases access and install the software for running a WordPress E-commerce store.
With WordPress installed, it’s time to build your site.
3. Select an E-commerce Plugin
WordPress doesn’t have native E-commerce features, so you must install E-commerce plugins to create your store. But there are plenty of E-commerce plugins that can give you the online store features and capabilities you need. In fact, it’ll only take you a few minutes to install and set up these E-commerce plugins. (This video by MonsterInsights explains how to install plugins in a beginner-friendly manner.)
Here are some great E-commerce plugin options.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular E-commerce plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s also free, but you might have to pay to access some of its features.
The WooCommerce plugin can also help you run an online store in various ways, including:
- Inventory management
- Payment processing
- Handling shipping and tax calculations
- Customizing product and category pages
Pros
- Beginner friendly and easy to set up
- Most popular E-commerce platform— support and community will also be in plenty
- Plenty of WooCommerce-specific plugins to customize your site and extend flexibility
- No limits to how many products you sell, how many images you add, or how many categories you set up
- Integrates with over a dozen payment gateways and services, including, Stripe, Paypal, as well as Apple Pay.
Cons
- No dedicated customer support
- It’s resource-intensive
- Some features require payment to access (for instance, subscription and membership)
Shopify
Shopify is a popular standalone e-commerce platform that can also integrate with WordPress via the ShopWP plugin. The Shopify plugin lets you display Shopify products on WordPress.
With this integration, WordPress is the storefront, and Shopify is the backend.
Pros
- Intuitive and aesthetically pleasing
- Syncs Shopify data directly on your WordPress site
- Can sell both digital and physical products
Cons
- ShopWP is not free. You must have an active Shopify plan to use the plugin on WordPress.
- Extra set-up steps to make the two work seamlessly
WP eCommerce
WP eCommerce is another reliable E-commerce plugin for WordPress. It offers a range of features, including product management tools, payment gateways, shipping options, and more.
Pros
- Simple to set up and use
- Data reports and analytics
Cons
- Limited capabilities compared to other options such as WooCommerce and Shopify
- Occasional glitches
Other E-commerce plugin options also include:
- Easy Digital Downloads; for digital products
- MemberPress; for subscription-based digital products
We will continue our guide with WooCommerce as an example since it’s widely used.
4. Configure WooCommerce
To add the WooCommerce plugin, head to yoursite.com/wp-admin> Plugins> Add New> Search for WooCommerce> Install> Activate> Configure.
WooCommerce has a setup wizard that can help you quickly get started with the plugin. The wizard will also enable you to set up your store details, industry, product types, and business details.
1) Set up store details
This step requires you to fill in details such as country and city of operation, business physical address, and email address.
2) Choose an industry
Next, choose the industry or category your products fall under.
3) Select product types
It’s free to sell physical and digital products via WooCommerce. But if you want to include memberships, customizable products, and Bookings, there are extra costs.
4) Add business details
Business details outline how many products you plan to sell and whether you’re setting up a store for yourself or a client.
WooCommerce might also request permission to install other extensions, such as JetPack, to ease the creation of your store.
5) Choose a theme
Next, WooCommerce will ask you to choose a theme. You can choose to continue with an existing theme, like in our case. However, go with WooCommerce’s official theme, Storefront, if you want to skip extra setup tasks. But you can also go with other free themes like Neve and Astra.
6) Install Jetpack to start adding products
If you accepted WooCommerce’s request to install additional extensions, you could head to adding products. If not, you’ll need to install Jetpack before adding products to your online store.
Jetpack estimates the process of adding products to take two minutes or less. You can also import products from a CSV file if you have an existing store on another platform.
7) Set up payment options
You can integrate the E-commerce site with Stripe, Paypal, as well as many other payment options. In fact, all the options are there. It’s just a matter of choosing which payment option will best suit you and your clients.
8) Add tax rates
This option only applies if you charge sales tax.
9) Set up shipping options
WooCommerce also allows you to choose shipping rates, set up shipping zones, and integrate with shipping carriers.
10) Personalize the store
Now you can start customizing your WooCommerce+WordPress E-commerce site with the options offered by WooCommerce. Options include; creating a custom homepage, uploading a logo, as well as setting up a store notice.
11) Install complementary plugins
You might also need to add more plugins to further extend your E-commerce site’s functionality and customization capabilities. Here are our top recommendations:
- Yoast for SEO optimization
- Mailpoet/Mailchimp/ConvertKit for email campaigns
- Securi for enhanced security
- Site Reviews to display customer reviews and boost conversion
12) Add the necessary pages
Once you’ve added products and set up payment and shipping options, you’re closer to achieving a fully functional WordPress E-commerce site. What’s left is to create a few essential pages, such as the About Us, Home, refund, and privacy policy pages.
Since the E-commerce site is hosted on WordPress, creating these pages is only a matter of one-clicks and adding your copy. You can use plugins such as Elementor to design and customize the pages.
Now, your site is ready to go live!
5. Optimizing Your WordPress E-commerce Site
Although the setup is complete, there are a few other things you need to do behind the scenes to make your WordPress E-commerce site successful. Here are a few behind-the-scenes actions to start with:
- Improve the website speed. According to Google, a good website loads in 3 seconds or less. You can achieve this speed by compressing product images, using dedicated hosting, installing caching, as well as relying on lightweight themes and plugins.
- Optimize your store for SEO. This is achievable by writing relevant and detailed product descriptions, infusing keywords throughout relevant pages on your site, and implementing other SEO best practices.
- Simplify checkout. Try to make the checkout process simple and void of distractions or complicated processes.
6. Managing Your Online Store
Getting the site up and running isn’t the end. In fact, there’s still another aspect of managing the site and ensuring it’s optimized for performance. Below are a couple of tasks you’ll need to undertake to keep your store running.
- Product management: Editing product information, adding new products, updating prices, etc.
- Marketing and promotion: Setting up social media ads, promoting products on social platforms, and running email campaigns.
- Order fulfillment: Processing orders and sending them out for shipment.
- Website maintenance: Updating plugins, fixing bugs and errors, regular maintenance, and safeguarding the site’s security.
The management of an E-commerce can be quite challenging, so most online store owners opt to work with a website management service. This way, you can focus on core areas like customer support and marketing while the management service deals with all matters of maintenance, website security, and updates.
Wrapping Up
Setting up an E-commerce site with WordPress is simpler if you follow this guide. To summarize, have hosting+ a domain name, install WordPress, choose an E-commerce WordPress plugin and theme, and you’re ready to go.
But even with a guide, creating an E-commerce store with WordPress and WooCommerce can still be challenging for most. Here’s where Ndevr comes in with worry-free and expert E-commerce development and maintenance services. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you out.
