Things to Think About Before Starting With WooCommerce

By now, you must be getting excited about starting your WooCommerce store. In this article, we will discuss some of the considerations you should take into account before getting started.

Check Your Market

WooCommerce lets you sell all kinds of goods. It’s up to you how you will use these tools to move your product. You can sell physical goods and digital goods just as easily. This all depends on what you want to sell. You do the research and the marketing, and WooCommerce handles the technical part.

Here are some examples of physical goods:

• clothing
• textiles
• foods

Likewise, these are some digital goods you could sell:

• eBooks
• apps
• games

Location is Everything

It is often said with any business that location is everything — not only your own store location, but your customers’ locations as well. Are you going to be shipping good internationally? Or, will you have customers order online and pick up their goods from your brick and mortar store?

If you are going to be charging sales tax for your goods, be sure to take into account the tax setups required in different areas.

Shipping costs are calculated by both weight and volume. This is definitely something you must consider beforehand so you can properly allocate a shipping budget.

Security and Customer Relations

It’s good to get to know your customers and imagine using your store from their perspective. Will your customers create unique accounts and store private information? WooCommerce allows customers to log in and save personal and payment information to speed up the payment process.

This is very convenient for the customer, but it means you must take your customers’ security into your hands. You must protect their data.

Securing your website is a big task. There are lots of security plugins that can be installed, and settings that can be tweaked to help keep the bad guys out. At bare minimum, you should know how to update WordPress so you’re always are running the latest security patches.

To optimize security sufficiently it would be best advised to consider a VPS/Dedicated hosting platform. This is necessary for PCI Compliance. But, this adds significant cost to your budget.

A more affordable alternative that does not sacrifice security involves using a third party payment gateway. Your customers will be routed to the third party server to submit payments and be routed back to your site at the end.

We will cover these options in greater detail in the subsequent articles.