Get started with WooCommerce

What WooCommerce is

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that turns a regular website into a store. You get products, a shopping cart, checkout, shipping and order management, and everything is handled from inside WordPress's own admin panel. The plugin costs nothing at its core, while web hosting, domain names and a payment service cost as usual. The cheapest route to Klarna, Swish, cards and bank transfer in the same checkout is often Mollie, which has its own plugin for WooCommerce and charges per payment with no monthly fee. More about that in Payment gateways.

What makes Woo interesting for a company is the control. The store sits at your address, the product texts are yours, and the day you want to switch you can take everything with you or shut it down without asking anyone. The price for that control is that you are responsible for updates and backups yourself. On a ready-made platform, someone else does it for you, and charges for it.

What you need before you start

A WordPress site that is up and running, meaning a web host with WordPress installed and an admin account you can log in to. If you do not have a site yet, that is the part you need to solve first. WooCommerce runs on the web server, not on your own computer, which is the difference from most other tools in this list.

Installation from Windows and Linux Mint

The installation is done in the browser and is therefore identical on both systems, and on a Chromebook as well. Log in to er-adress.se/wp-admin, go to Plugins and Add New Plugin, search for WooCommerce, choose Install Now and then Activate. The setup wizard opens by itself when the plugin is activated, and there you fill in the store's details, country, currency and what you sell.

If you want to practice locally on your own computer, you can run WordPress in Docker, and the guide Install Docker is then the starting point. We leave out that setup here instead of copying a compose file we have not tested ourselves. Practice instead in a subfolder at your web host, or ask the web host for a test site.

Three things to do first

1. Run the setup wizard all the way through and set the currency to Swedish kronor. Prices including or excluding VAT are not chosen in the setup wizard itself, that is done in a separate step under Settings, the VAT tab, after you have checked Enable tax rates and calculations under General. Decide now what you will choose there, and write it down.
2. Add a single product with an image, price and a short description, then order it yourself. All the way, right through to checkout. You learn more in ten minutes that way than from an hour of settings.
3. Set up shipping before you tell anyone that the store exists. A store without shipping options lets the customer fill the cart and then stops her at checkout, and that customer will not come back.

The most common trap

VAT. If the company is registered for VAT, you check Aktivera momssatser och beräkningar under Inställningar, fliken Allmänt, and then enter the VAT rates under the Moms tab: 25 percent as the standard rate, 12 or 6 percent for goods with lower VAT. There you also choose, under Priser anges med moms, whether the price you enter is what the customer pays, meaning including VAT, or the price before VAT is added. If you sell to private individuals, including VAT is usually easiest. If the company is exempt from VAT, you leave the VAT rate box empty. The exemption applies automatically to a company that sells for no more than 120,000 kronor per calendar year and has not exceeded the limit in the two previous years; if sales exceed the limit, VAT must be charged on the sales that passed it, and then the store needs to be switched over.

The choice between including and excluding VAT is made once. If you change it after twenty products are set up, the same entered price is interpreted differently, and what the customer pays at checkout shifts. The same applies when importing products from a CSV file: the price column is read according to the choice in effect when you import. Decide at the start, enter the first product and check what the checkout shows before product number two is set up.

We describe the VAT rules as we read them. What applies to your company is decided by the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket); check there before the store opens.

Not sure whether WooCommerce is the right choice for your idea? Get in touch and we will sort it out.