How to Create Your Online Store in simple way (5 minutes)

WooCommerce Starter Pack: How to Create Your Online Store in 5 Minutes

Editorial Team November 29, 2018 4 min read

When our entrepreneur mind becomes active, we want to do something on our own. In this age of eCommerce, starting an online business is what comes in mind while thinking about doing a business. There are many examples out there – Alibaba, AliExpress, Flipkart, Amazon, Etsy etc.that motivate even an introvert to kickstart their own venture.

Today, we will look into the ways of creating your own online store in 5 minutes. This might sound unbelievable, but trust me, my friend, it’s easy as a pie even for a non-coder. Without further ado, let me walk you through the process.

Choose your hosting & domain name

The first step of creating your own online store is to choose the domain name and a hosting server that will hold your store. There are many hosting service providers in the market. Among them BlueHost, NameCheap, GoDaddy etc. are the most popular ones. You can get started with as low as $10 as there are offers going on all over the year.

Install WordPress – The Best CMS Solution

When you have chosen your hosting server and bought your own domain name, you can easily install WordPress from your CPanel.

Installing WordPress is very easy. Most of the hosting providers have one-click installation process for WordPress. All you have to do is put necessary details and click on the install button. It will be installed automatically. Here is a small video that can help you understand the process.

You can also install WordPress Manually from WordPress.org. Just download the zip file and extract it on your folder. Here is full guide curated by WordPress itself on how to install WordPress manually.

Turn your site into an eCommerce store with WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It is used by 4 million websites all over the world. Around 30% of world’s eCommerce stores are built with it!

The most amazing thing about WooCommerce is – it’s completely FREE. You can download and install it for free and manage your shop easily. To install WooCommerce, log into your WordPress Admin Dashboard.

Now, navigate to -> Plugins -> Add New ->Search Plugins (WooCommerce)

Then Install WooCommerce Plugins and Activate.

As soon as you activate WooCommerce, you should see its Setup Wizard. You can go through either the Wizard or skip it to set up everything manually.

WooCommerce Setup Wizard

In the very first page you will be asked:

Your Store Location and Currency
Type of Products/Goods you plan to sell.
And a tick box to confirm that whether you sell your products or services in person.

If you did NOT put tick on the box for selling in person, you are shown a Payment screen like the following:

For those people who are living in U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan or UK, if they select the box for selling in person they will get Square as the Payment option beside Stripe and Paypal.

In case your location is in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, or UK you will get Klarna as Payment option.

If your location is in Australia or New Zealand you are shown eWAY as a payment option.

If you are located in South Africa, you are also shown Payfast as a payment option.

Choose how you want to be paid by sliding buttons on/off. All payment gateways offered as in Setup Wizard are free plugins that are auto-installed and activated.

There is also an Offline Payment option by toggling the arrows which open a panel like the following:

After completing the Payments screen, click Continue, which takes you to the Shipping setup screen.

If you’re based in the U.S. or Canada, WooCommerce gives you a handy Live Rates option that connects your store to USPS or Canada Post. This lets you charge actual shipping rates plus print shipping labels from your WooCommerce dashboard.

If you don’t want to use Live Rates, you can also select Flat Rates and enter a flat-rate shipping charge to be applied to all orders. You can also select Free Shipping to have no shipping charges added to orders.

Of course, you can change your shipping zones or rates anytime. Click Continue to save your Shipping settings.

In the Next screen you will see your store’s design Storefront Theme and Automated Taxes.

If you don’t have a Theme installed to control the overall look of your WordPress site, WooCommerce can automatically install and activate the free Storefront theme.

You can always start with the free Storefront theme now and change your design to a different theme anytime you wish.

In the same screen, you can choose to use WooCommerce’s Automated Taxes, which makes it easy to set up and track sales tax for all of your customers. Or you can toggle that selection off and manually set up sales tax later on. If you select Automated Taxes, WooCommerce will prompt you to set up Jetpacknext. This is a free tool that empowers many online sales features (live shipping rates, taxes, etc.) within WordPress and WooCommerce:

Jetpack will connect your store to Jetpack services via WordPress.com If you don’t have a WordPress.com sign in, it will prompt you to create one. Then, it will automatically connect your WooCommerce store to Jetpack.

After that, in the last screen you will prompt to Create a Product or Import Products into your new WooCommerce store. You can click on either option and continue or you can also exit the wizard and return to your WordPress dashboard.

That’s it of setting up WooCommerce with the Setup Wizard.

How to create a product

Go to Products > Add New.
Enter a product Title and Description.
Go to the Product Data panel, and select downloadable (digital) or virtual (service) if applicable. Add
Product price.
Short description of product.
Featured image.

Here is a video of the above steps.