In Today’s Journal
* Opening A WooCommerce Store on My WordPress Website
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Opening A WooCommerce Store on My WordPress Website
a guest post by Sylvia Auclair
I decided that I wanted to start selling my work myself rather than depending solely on Amazon.
I have only published my short stories, individually and in small collections, and I felt that the price I had to charge for them on Amazon was just too high. Would you pay $2.99 for a short story? I needed to get my work someplace where I felt it could be reasonably priced.
So the research started. I looked at the various options available to me and quickly narrowed it down to Payhip or WooCommerce. I liked that Payhip provided a website like format that I could actually use as a website. And if I didn’t already have a WordPress website I would likely have chosen that format.
WooCommerce is advertised as free for a WordPress user while Payhip costs varying amounts. Payhip’s “free” account has no monthly fee but charges you a 5% transaction fee. And they have two other plans for either $29/month with a 2% fee or $99/month without a transaction fee.
The decision to use either would depend on what you expect to get out of the store and how much traffic you expect. I would assume high traffic would justify the higher costs. But in my case, I don’t expect a ton of traffic or sales at this point, and I already have the WordPress website so free with no transaction fee was the obvious choice.
Also, WordPress advertises WooCommerce as simple and as easy as getting the plugin and opening your store. I don’t have any coding skills and feel proud of myself just for figuring out how to change the theme on my website, so “easy” worked for me.
But easy is also subjective. I don’t want to give the impression that it was hard, but it did take me awhile to figure out each step. That included research on the fly as terminology came up that I didn’t understand or options that I didn’t expect, along with laboriously reading the sometimes confusing (to me) instructions.
I did this over vacation, while staying in a hotel, whenever I had a free hour. And truthfully, being in a hotel helped me as there were few life interruptions to distract me from getting the job done.
First you grab the plugin for your site. Once it loads, you go to the admin page where you can customize everything on the website from the theme to colors, page order, etc., and there is WooCommerce. Then you go into it to create your page, starting with the Website WooCommerce specific settings.
The step-by-step instructions worked well for me, allowing me to concentrate on one step at a time. Also you are not doing it “live,” while still having the ability to see what it would look like live.
This was helpful while loading the books onto the site, giving me the option to decide on the size of the thumbnails, adding descriptions and the like.
As I did this over about a week, I did it in small batches and didn’t become too overwhelmed with the technology and any verbiage that I wasn’t up on (research!).
One thing I had to research was what to use to accept payments. I am selling ebooks only, so I don’t expect to be making sales in person, so Square and other in person options didn’t interest me.
I’m not expecting any international sales at this time, so I only checked out US sales using credit card payments. There are many more options, but I had to cut off the research somewhere.
Also, I wanted something easy for me and my customer, so I was thinking PayPal, Venmo, Stripe, and the WooCommerce specific vendor, WooPayments.
My first thought was PayPal as I am a PayPal user of many years. But as I did my research, PayPal seemed expensive to me. Each transaction costs the seller (me!) between 2.9% and 3.49% plus a fixed fee of $.30 to $.49. Venmo (which is a subsidiary of PayPal, I believe) is also expensive for a credit card transaction, costing 3.49% and a fixed fee of $.49. It is cheaper if a person is using funds from a balance rather than a credit card, but there is no way to regulate that as a seller.
Both Stripe and WooPayments were the most reasonably priced at 2.9% and $.30. So my choice was either WooPayments or Stripe and I chose WooPayments as it seemed the easiest to set up. I was already in WooCommerce, so I only had to click a button.
Picking the payment vendor was early in the setup process, but I wanted to do the research to analyze costs, and I was able to skip that section and return to it later before I finalized everything. That was very helpful for me.
Then once it looked like the page was ready to go live, I checked out what my website would now look like (still in limbo, thankfully). And it was much too busy!
The basic WooCommerce adds three pages – store page, cart page, and checkout page – on top of my already existing pages (Home, Posts, About, Contact, and Works), turning it into an 8-page website and who is going to look at all of that!?
So my first problem was to find a way to combine the store, cart, and checkout. This entailed a lot of research where I read articles on Google, Reddit and everywhere, including WordPress, plus watching some indecipherable YouTube videos.
There is probably another way to do it, but in the end, I used the plugin at WordPress. I was avoiding this plugin because it costs $6/month, and I was determined to do it with no cost. But WordPress won here, because due to my lack of skill in programming and the videos where I couldn’t understand the speaker, I gave up.
The plugin works very well, and while it still didn’t look quite the way I expected, it helped solve the too-busy problem.
After I changed the cart and checkout pages to be sub pages of the store page (which I was able to easily do on the admin page where you pick what order you want the website pages in) the store looked more as I had imagined it would.
The site still looked too busy to me, so I took the information on the About page and put that on my Home page.
Then, after pulling a little background information and adding it to my Home page, I dropped the Works page as everything left there was now on the store page. I kept the Contact and Posts pages, so now my site is just four pages: Home, Posts, Contact and Store. It looks much cleaner and more accessible.
It’s not perfect, as I have a typography problem that I have not been able to solve. If you go to my site, you’ll see that the font and color on the heading on the Store page is different than the rest of the pages.
I haven’t figured out how to correct that. None of the instructions I’ve found (including on WordPress itself) have solved the problem. And in all honesty, it probably bothers me more than anyone who visits my site.
I hope this helps!
*
Thanks, Sylvia.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week: Dignity
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1250
Writing of Blackwell Ops 47: Sam Granger | Special Duty
Day 1…… 3250 words. To date…… 3250
Day 2…… 1110 words. To date…… 4360
Day 3…… 3323 words. To date…… 7683
Day 4…… 1656 words. To date…… 9339
Day 5…… 1413 words. To date…… 10752
Day 6…… 3135 words. To date…… 13887
Day 7…… 3338 words. To date…… 17225
Day 8…… 1228 words. To date…… 18453
Day 9…… 1985 words. To date…… 20438
Day 10…. 1312 words. To date…… 21750
Fiction for September……………… 10998
Fiction for 2025………………………. 545147
Nonfiction for September.………… 11730
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 197980
2025 consumable words…………….. 735513
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 13
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 31
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 117
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 301
Short story collections……………………. 29