How to start your WordPress E-commerce website like a Pro?

If you are running a brick and mortar business then there can’t be a better time to build an E-commerce website for your business. In today’s digital world having an online presence for your business is a must if you really wants to get ahead on your competitors. Although there are many options but an E-commerce website is best if it is designed by the world’s most popular content management system WordPress. A WordPress based E-commerce website has lots of features and is capable of doing many functions and is easy to use. You can also easily manage your WordPress based E-commerce site.

You can also contact a WordPress development company if you want to develop your initial WordPress site from experts and later on want to install the required plugin to enable your WordPress website ready for e-commerce. Now we will discuss about how to start your E-commerce business on WordPress yourself.

Developing your Own Online Store with WordPress

Now we will provide you about some of the steps that will help you understand the steps you need to take in order to build your own online store.

- Get a Domain Name and Web Hosting

For building a website the first thing you need is a domain name and a web hosting service provider. You should select a hosting service provider after doing thorough research. You should choose a domain name which reflects the nature of your online business. Domain name is the first thing which your customer will notice about your online business hence it should be unique. We recommend choosing a hosting service which provides you best and quality services.

- Install WordPress in your Hosting Account for Free

Most of the web hosting service providers provide WordPress as it is free to download, install and use. You just need to go to the cPanel of the service provider and install WordPress in your hosting account. This will give you authority and power to manage everything on your website right from here.

- Install the WooCommerce Plugin for Free

After installing the WordPress in your hosting account now you can access the WordPress dashboard directly from the cPanel of your hosting account. WooCommerce plugin has made the life easier for the WordPress developer who wish to make an E-commerce website based on WordPress. WooCommerce has lots of functions that will help you to make online store function rich. To install WooCommerce plugin just visit the WordPress plugin directory and simply download it and install it.

- Do Settings for your Store Locale

The next important thing is to do settings for your Store locale. In this step you need to give all the details about your store location, currency and measuring parameters which you will prefer to use in your E-commerce website.

- Add the Taxes and Payment Methods

You need to understand the tax system of your country and follow it and do the appropriate settings in your E-commerce website. After that comes the most important thing i.e. The payment method. WooCommerce provides you two type of payments i.e PayPal and Stripe. PayPal is the most popular payment platform hence it is highly recommended. However you can use Stripe payment method also which is equally good.

- Add your Products which you want to sell on your E-commerce site

Now in this step you  need to add your products which you want to show to the public at your E-commerce site. Just go to the WooCommerce option in the WordPress dashboard and select “Add Products”. After that fill out the information like product name, description and the product data section which have the options like pricing and taxes, stock level, cost of shipping, product attributes etc. After this you have to add the product category, tags, image etc.

After you have done, just click on the publish button at the bottom of  the page.

Conclusion

We have just discussed the steps which are needed to be followed if you want to get a proper and user friendly WordPress E-commerce online store. In today’s competitive environment having a WooCommerce powered WordPress E-commerce website will definitely give you a competitive advantage in your business and you can easily build and run your E-commerce business like a professional.

Applying Conditions to Menu For WooCommerce Subscribers

Have you been planning on starting up a WordPress powered membership site? Well, then you might have heard of the difficulties associated with creating membership sites with WordPress. Thankfully, building a membership site using WooCommerce can make the task considerably easier.

But remember, once you've created a membership site it's imperative that everything on your site oozes exclusivity for your logged-in users or WooCommerce subscribers. Thankfully, many plugins are available online that renders the ability to control the pages or portions of your website content that you want to show to active subscribers and hide from inactive subscribers.

Understanding the need to show/hide menu items

Of course, if you don't want certain pages to be accessed by non-members (or non-logged in users), you won't want those pages to be displayed in your site's navigation menu as well. Likewise, there will be some pages that might not be of much use to members. For instance, the pages that sell WooCommerce subscription products and/or services to guests aren't useful for active subscribers. And so, it's better to keep such pages hidden from the subscribers.
In essence, for a membership site, you should consider adding conditional logic to show or hide menu items based on user role. After all, it isn't a good practice to make your members (or active subscribers) shuffle around the content every time they visit your site. Rather, you should make it easy for your members to find quickly the features and services they've signed up for. In short, you must make your site's navigation menu more member focused.

So, what's the solution?

This is where the “If Menu” plugin comes in handy. The plugin helps in controlling the navigation menus for members. Through this tutorial, I'll help you learn how you can create a menu adjusted for your active WooCommerce subscribers. Also, you'll get to know about the plugin and how it can be used to determine whether a subscriber has an active or inactive subscription. In reference to this post, we'll be using the following two plugins:

• If menu plugin
• WooCommerce Subscriptions

Note: Before proceeding with the process of using both of the above mentioned plugins, make sure that they're installed on your site.

Let's get started

For adding conditional logic to menu items you'll need to configure:

• Active or inactive roles of your WooCoomerce subscribers.
• Menu items for members (i.e. active subscribers)
• Menu items for guests (i.e. non-logged in users)

A list of sample memberships included in the image.

Let us now have a detailed overview of all the above listed key points one by one:

Step 1 – Configuring Active / Inactive Roles of WooCommerce Subscribers

Before you configure the menu items for your WooCommerce subscribers, you'll first need to set up the roles of active or inactive subscribers. For this purpose, click on the WooCommerce option from your WP admin navigation menu. Next, click on the Subscriptions tab, and from here set up the active/inactive subscribers roles.

Bear in mind; active subscribers are assigned the “Subscriber” role, and inactive subscribers are assigned the “Customer” role by default as shown in the below image:




Note: You can also choose to set up custom roles for your subscribers, by using WordPress plugins such as User Role Editor.

Keep in mind that the roles we'll assign to active and inactive subscribers will help us in showing or hiding certain menu items.

Step 2 – Configuring Menu Items for Active WooCommerce Subscribers

So, now that you have set up the roles of active (and inactive) WooCommerce subscribers, next you need to decide which menu item you would like to show to your active subscribers. Here, we'll need to make use of the If Menu plugin.

The 'If Menu' plugin lets you show/hide your website primary navigation menu items on the basis of conditional statements, such as user roles, whether a user is logged-in or not, etc. But, to make use of the plugin, you'll first have to make sure that the plugin is enabled.

As soon as the plugin gets enabled, a new checkbox option labeled “Enable Conditional Logic” will be added to each menu item. For this, go to Appearance → Menus, and from there you can start making edits to your navigation menus.

Next, click on any of navigation menu item and then make the ‘Enable Conditional Logic’ checkbox checked. And then, you just need to select whether you would want to show or hide the selected menu item. You will then need to choose any one of the corresponding conditions from the drop down box.

Since we need to show particular menu item just to your active subscribers, we have to choose to show the “Subscriber-only” page link only if “User is Subscriber”:

Once you have selected a condition, just hit the “Save Menu” button.

Step 3 – Configuring Menu Items For Non-Logged in Users

In this section, we'll talk about the process of showing your menu items to guests (or non-logged in users) of your membership website. To do so, you just need to click on the “Hide” option if the corresponding condition is set to “User is logged in.”

Click here, to get more information about subscription


Wrapping Up

Apart from making your membership website pages or part of the content to members, you should also consider adjusting the navigation menu items based on user statuses. Doing so will save the time and efforts of your active subscribers directly shuffle through the useful pages that can be accessed by them. Likewise, you don't necessarily need to show the pages that cannot be accessed by guests or inactive subscribers.

Hope this post will guide you in controlling the navigation menu items of your WordPress membership site with utmost efficiency.