Up until just a few years ago, building your own e-commerce site was remarkably difficult. You had to install complex software, host it yourself, and hope that, whenever you made a change, nothing broke. That's very different from where we are now.
WooCommerce was released in September 2011 and, since then, it's taken the e-commerce world by storm. As of 2015, there are nearly 400,000 sites that run WooCommerce; that is approximately 18 percent of all e-commerce sites on the Internet and bigger than every other competitor by a wide margin (source: BuiltWith.com).
Part of the success of WooCommerce is because it's built on top of the incredibly popular WordPress platform. With just a few clicks, you can install the WooCommerce plugin and turn your WordPress site into an online store. With over 300 official extensions to customize your store, you no longer need a developer. You can add thousands of free plugins and themes to customize the rest of your WordPress site and the options are nearly limitless.
There are hosting companies that only host WordPress sites, services that maintain your WordPress sites for you, and professional products that handle every aspect of your site from creating contact forms to image optimization. The list goes on. What you need to know is that WordPress is huge and still growing. As WordPress grows, so will WooCommerce.
WooCommerce isn't only built on top of WordPress. It's also built on top of the WooThemes brand. WooThemes was one of the first companies to start building commercial themes and plugins for WordPress, and over the years they've perfected their techniques and poured it all into WooCommerce. Having to swap your e-commerce software would be a nightmare. That's part of the reason that WooCommerce has taken off so fast. It's backed by one of the biggest brands in the entire WordPress space. People know that they won't disappear any time soon.
In short, you can rest easy. WooCommerce is built on top of both a growing platform and a trusted brand.
Let's get started building your e-commerce site.
Chapter 1, WooCommerce Basics, covers how to install the software and configure the basic settings.
Chapter 2, Adding Products, deals with adding simple products to the store, downloadable files to a product, images and image galleries to a product and, variable products to the store; this chapter also covers bulk-uploading products.
Chapter 3, Changing the Product Organization, covers configuring your store to show off your products, adding more products on the shop page, adding a search capability, adding social media, sorting products, and adding extra information to the shop page.
Chapter 4, Running a Membership Site, deals with creating subscription products, using members-only pricing, creating premium content, and creating a pricing table.
Chapter 5, Setting Up Shipping Methods, deals with configuring Free Shipping and Flat Rate Shipping, getting live shipping quotes, tracking shipments, and creating advanced tables of shipping rates.
Chapter 6, Getting Paid, covers how to configure payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, and Simplify Commerce. It also covers how to configure HTTPS and adding e-commerce tracking with Google Analytics.
Chapter 7, Modifying the Checkout Process, deals with configuring terms and conditions, adding customers to your newsletter, adding and removing checkout fields, adding a one-page checkout, and adding default options to the checkout.
Chapter 8, Managing Orders and Taxes, covers refunding orders, importing existing orders, configuring order numbers, exporting order information, and configuring taxes.
Chapter 9, WooCommerce Theming, deals with adding a cart to the menu, using WooCommerce hooks, overriding WooCommerce templates and WooCommerce CSS, and creating product slide shows.
Chapter 10, Exploring More with WooCommerce, deals with enabling reviews, creating and cloaking affiliate links, creating coupons, and sending follow-up e-mails.