Posted by Welcome back to our tutorial to help you get up and running selling through a WordPress based E-Commerce store. We’re not far away from a fully functioning site. Now it’s time to work on the WooCommerce admin settings to make sure everything functions correctly.
Let’s start by visiting ‘WooCommerce > Settings‘ to get started. You will notice that there are a number of tabs: General, Products, Tax, Shipping etc. We’re going to be looking at each of these and how we can configure them for our business. I’m going to be setting up my business initially for UK customers only. Once my site is established I’ll open it up for international sales, and also syncronise my store with Amazon and eBay using WP-Lister.
WooCommerce > Settings > General
So here we’re entering our business address, this should be straightforward! We’re also entering the countries we sell to, and ship to. To keep my postage options straightforward for the moment my site is UK only. I’ve disabled Enable taxes as my business is not going to be VAT registered for the moment, I can enable tax settings and include VAT separately later if required.
WooCommerce > Settings > Products
The products tab has three sub options available to you: General, Inventory & Downloadable products. There’s nothing I’m going to change at the moment on the General tab, I could disable reviews if I wanted…
The Inventory tab is important here, especially when we begin to incorporate sales from our eBay and Amazon sales channels. We need to ensure that Manage Stock is selected, so we can keep track on inventory. We can also select an email for low stock, or out of stock notifications so we can order items when necessary to keep items available.
We can also select ‘Out of Stock visibility’, meaning that if an item is not available then it is not findable on your store. This may be a useful option if you have a lot of out of stock items that you don’t want to be prominent in your store, but hiding these items may have an impact on your SEO and visitor satisfaction if they find an item on a Google search, but it leads to a dead-end on your site. For the moment I’m leaving mine unchecked….
My store is not dealing with downloadable products so I’ve nothing to address on the final tab.
WooCommerce > Settings > Tax
There’s nothing to setup here at the moment. I’m going to leave ‘Enable automated taxes‘ selected and move along…
WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping
This is where it get’s a little more complicated. We need to think about how we’re going to charge shipping for our business. I’m going to be using Royal Mail. Royal Mail have two suitable services:
Large Letter – This will be adequate for small foldable items such as T-Shirts. Large letter mailing boxes can be purchased which are designed specifically for this purpose. This currently costs £1.32 for a 250g package. See Royal Mail Price Finder for up do date prices.
Small Parcel – This is for larger items (up to 2Kg) and will be adequate for hoodies or larger items. Again, custom packaging can be purchased specifically for mailing items as a Small Parcel with Royal Mail. A small parcel currently costs £3 for a package weighing up to 2Kg. Again please check Royal Mail Price Finder for other weights or signed for services.
Shipping Classes
So let’s get these setup as options. Firstly go to the ‘Shipping classes‘ tab and choose ‘Add shipping class‘. Add the class names as Large Letter and Small Parcel as shown below. The URL slug will be auto-generated by WooCommerce. You can add a description as a reminder if you wish.
Shipping Zones
Next we need to set how much we charge for the shipping classes we’ve just created. Go to the Shipping Zones tab. United Kingdom (UK) is highlighted in my case as it is my only permitted shipping destination chosen previously. Hover under the United Kingdom (UK) zone and select Edit. It will by default be set up as Flat rate shipping. We’ll add some options to this. Hover your mouse over Flat rate and select Edit.
Within the shipping popup, you will see that there are options to set a cost for the Large Letter and Small Parcel classes we created earlier. I’m setting these as £2 and £4 respectively. This will take into account packaging costs and payment provider fees that will also need accounting for.
For my store, I’m choosing the Calculation type to Per order: Charge shipping for the most expensive shipping class. I’ll be looking at alternative options such as weight-based shipping in a later tutorial.
You may also wish to charge extra and use a signed-for postal service to protect yourself against any ‘lost in the post’ items. This can and will occur and may eat into your profit margin if you’re not careful. Signed for items will provide you with proof of delivery and prevent potential PayPal chargebacks.
Shipping options
Next up we need to look at some general shipping options for our business. We can calculate shipping as we go, or leave it until the customer enters an address. I’ll be enabling the shipping calculator on the cart page.
The next option is to choose the Shipping destination. We can default to the customer shipping or billing address or Force shipping to the customer billing address. I’ll be choosing the latter option here to protect myself against fraudulent purchases. My finished tab looks follows:
To see our shipping classes in action we need to edit our individual products. Select one of your products and go to the Product data tab. Select Shipping and you’ll see ‘Shipping class’ to the right hand side. Use the drop-down to choose either Large Letter or Small parcel. Then Update your item. When you select this item in you shopping cart you will then see the correct shipping displayed for your item.
That’s all for now, next time we’ll look at configuring payment and notifications within WooCommerce. Our E-Commerce store is almost ready to go!
