[00:00:00.00]
On most sites that I build these days that are going to process orders, including most membership sites, I use Woocommerce. That wasn’t always the case because I always thought it was a little bit big for what I needed to do, a little bit bloated. Thing is, it’s really not when you realize you can turn a lot of the stuff off. And that’s one of the things. When you install Woocommerce, it’s going to advertise some stuff to you and all that. But you can turn some of the stuff off that we don’t need. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to just quickly go to screen. I want to show you how I actually set up Woocommerce for almost every site, the exact settings that I use, the things that I turn off. And let’s go to screen. Okay, so what I’ve got here is a completely blank install of WordPress. Fresh. The only thing I’ve got in here is Woocommerce. So it’s completely… This is if you were to install Woocommerce for the first time, this This is what we got. So what we’re going to do is we’re now going to click on Woocommerce, and we are going to be greeted with the Wizard.

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Okay? So what I usually do is I skip right through this, okay? Because I’m not going to waste my time. We do need to pick our location So let me go ahead and pick Florida since that’s where I’m at. You go ahead and pick yours. It’s going to turn on the lights. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, so here we are. We’re going to be in this little screen here where they’re going to start I’m trying to walk you through setting things up. And you don’t necessarily need to spend a whole lot of time doing this. I certainly don’t. So what I do is I start going on here and I start hiding the setup list. I start hiding things that I’m just not going to need. I don’t need the inbox stuff. So let’s dismiss all this stuff. Let’s see what we can turn off here. Even on this with the stats, they’re trying to advertise jet pack. Don’t use jet pack. I really don’t recommend that you use jet pack for pretty much anything. It’s actually a big privacy problem for your site to use jet pack, and it also slows down the site. So I don’t care if it’s for stats or anything else.

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I just don’t recommend that you use jet pack. So we’re going to say no thanks to that. I don’t think we can hide that, and it’s fine. So that’s pretty much what we got there. That moves a lot of this stuff out of the way. Let’s go ahead and refresh and see what we got. Much simpler now. We don’t have all the garbage in here. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to pop on over to the settings. We’re going to start turning some stuff off that we do not need. Now, first of all, you would want to enter your address. This is something you’re going to just need to do for your site, so it shows up in the proper places. And then products is where you can set things up. But if we click on products, there’s a few things we’re going to do. One is that I uncheck this thing about product reviews because most of us just don’t need that capability on our stores. I I pretty much only use Woocommerce for selling virtual goods, services, memberships, courses, things like that. I don’t really sell physical products. And even if you were selling physical products, you just need to go, do I need product reviews?

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Most sites don’t, and so turn that thing off. Next is inventory. Most of us do not need to track inventory. Obviously, with virtual goods, there is no such thing as inventory. So we’re going to disable the stock management. That way, we don’t have that stuff showing up in our product settings. We just don’t need it. That’s pretty much all you need to do in that particular section. Shipping, there’s not much going on here. Now, most of us, if we’re selling virtual stuff, we’re not going to have shipping. So you just leave all this stuff alone. Now, under Payments, it’s going to be advertising WU payments to you. We’ll get to that in a minute because we are going to want to turn that thing off. That’s unless you want to use WU payments. Personally, I just use Stripe directly, and so I install the plugin for a WU commerce. Stripe integration. We turn that on, I integrate with Stripe, and that’s what I do with most clients as we work with Stripe directly. Now, WU payments, it works fine. It probably uses Stripe behind the scenes if I had to guess. It’s just that it’s a little bit better integrated into WooCommerce, and it’s because they make a cut on the back-end.

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So it’s a promotional thing to WooPayments. They’re going to try to lean you into using WooPayments, but you don’t have to. All right, let’s pop on over to the accounts and privacy area. Now, in this area, I do make a few changes here. The thing to keep in mind with a membership site is that we want people to have an account with the site, especially if they buy something, because that means they’re buying a course, they’re buying a membership, something like that. We do not want them to be able to place orders without an account. We want them to get an account while they’re checking out. Now, do we want them to be able to log in to an existing account during checkout? Yes, we do. So we check that. Now, do we want to allow customers to create an account during checkout? Of course we do. It’s a membership site. Do we want to allow customers to create an account on the My Account page? No, we do not. Now, the My Account page on Woocommerce is just a default page where people are going to go to it and they can view their order history.

[00:05:24.25]
They can make changes to their account and stuff like that. It’s a very convenient page for a membership site. Of course, The thing is, we don’t want people to be able to go to the My Account page and go, Oh, I want to create an account here. The thing is, we want people to go through our checkout pages. We want people to go through avenues that we control to get the account. We don’t want them to be able to just get a free account from my account, so we leave that one unchecked. These last two, I always keep them checked. When creating an account, we automatically generate the account username. I like to keep my checkout pages simple. I don’t want to have them pick a username and password. And so we just make the email address or username, and it’s nice and easy. And then when creating an account, do we send the new user a link to set their password? Yes. I do not have people set passwords on their checkout forms. Again, less fields, the better. Generally on a checkout form, it increases conversion rates where they don’t have to do too many things.

[00:06:22.17]
And so I don’t ask them to set a password. I have WordPress auto-generate the password. It will then send them an email when they They can click on the link in that email and set whatever password they want. I’ve never had a problem with it. Now, the next thing that I do is I pop on over. Let’s save that, of course. We’re going to pop on over to the advanced area. Then we’re going to we’re going to disable a few things in here. First of all, we’re going to go to the… I think it’s under woo. Com. I’m going to say we’re going to uncheck this thing about displaying suggestions within WooCommerce. I don’t need them cross-promoting stuff to me. It’s not necessary for me. Notice how that took off the payments area here. Then we can go over to Features. Now, you want to make sure you’ve got your high-perform performance order storage automatically checked. You should on any new installation of Woocommerce. But if you’re running an older Woocommerce store and you’re still on the legacy version, you might want to look at upgrading it to the high performance version. It is much efficient in terms of the database.

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But that’s a subject for another video. We’re going to go in and Disable Woocommerce Analytics, and we’re going to save that. And that’s pretty much it. Now, what we have now is a simpler version of Woocommerce that has some of the stuff that’s disabled that we’re just not going to need. The payments option is gone, and that’s because we’re not going to have Woocommerce advertising to us. For me, with Woocommerce Analytics, I I personally think that the reports information is enough, and so I don’t have the extra overhead of it tracking all kinds of stuff. And by the way, this little option here with order attribution, you may not need that either, especially if you’re not running paid traffic, you may not need that. So you could probably go ahead and turn that off as well. Just a little less work that your site needs to do. So that’s pretty much how I set up Woocommerce for almost every single site. Now, in terms of add-ons, you do need to add a few, okay? Most Woocommerce sites are not running a fully stock Woocommerce. You end up putting on some extensions. And so I almost always put Woocommerce subscriptions on there because as stupidly as this sounds, Woocommerce does not do recurring billing out of the box.

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And so you need to add the extension Woocommerce Subscriptions. There’s some other ones, but that’s the most common, and that’s what I use. Again, I also put on the WooCommerce Stripe integration so I can get it connected up with Stripe and process the credit cards. And then this is another one. This is a paid add-on, but I personally like to put on Cartflows, which is a plugin out there that works with WooCommerce, but it allows you to take a lot more control over the checkout process the checkout forms. You can actually visually design your checkout forms. If you have the pro version of Cartflows, you can actually do upsells and downsells and order bumps and all the cool sales funnel stuff that you might do with the fancier shopping cards. It’s also got a really nice stat dashboard, so you can just track your stats and conversion rates on your sales funnels and stuff like that. So that’s Cartflows. It works really nicely. You can go into the plugin repository and get Cartflows for free, and it’s actually pretty handy. I would recommend you use something like this on a Woocommerce store because it will allow you to take better control even over the standard checkout process of Woocommerce.

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Now, if you want the upsells and downsells and all that, you’ve got to go with the pro version of Cart Flows, which is an extra purchase, completely up to you. But I do use it. I use it on a lot of my client sites as well. And it really makes Woocommerce a really nice package to use. To me, it rivals what you could do with most shopping cart out there, having Cart Flows and Woocommerce put together. And so that’s what I use. Now, I want to make another just a quick commentary about the extensions, because I do know that Woocommerce, it’s free. The thing is, most of the extensions are not. And the thing is, unfortunately, a lot of the extensions seem somewhat expensive. I know the cost of Woocommerce descriptions has just been going up and up. Frankly, it isn’t worth what they’re asking anymore. I’m not going to BS you about that. I think it’s gotten too expensive. This should be core functionality at this point. But it is what it is. But I just want to remind you that if it’s something that’s core to your business, you may want to go ahead and purchase the extension.

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What you’re basically getting is automated updates. But I want to remind you that it’s all GPL software licensed, and so there are places you can go, you can get some of these extensions and install them and use them. You’re just not going to get any support. You’re not going to get automated updates, but you still usually have the ability to update it. And for some plugins, frankly, that’s what I because there’s one I use called Woocommerce. I think it’s called order status control. And all it does is it takes a virtual order and automatically completes the order because otherwise it’ll go into there as processing And it looks like the orders aren’t actually done when it’s just a downloadable product to begin with. And it’s so stupid that that is not part of Woocommerce already. Last time I looked, I want to say that extension was like $69 just for that drop down? No, I got it as GPL and I installed it, and that’s what I do. I would recommend you probably do the same thing, frankly. There might be some code snippet I could go out there and find and do that. I should probably look around.

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But anyway, that’s something you can keep in mind is that everything about Woocommerce is GPL open source software license, just like WordPress itself, and that includes almost all the extensions. Okay, so That’s how I set up Woocommerce. That’s what I use on almost all sites, and pretty much unless the client asked me to use something different. I’ve got a couple clients that really wanted to use Memberpress. So fine, we use Member Press. But generally speaking, I use Woocommerce, and is it the best solution out there? No, it’s not. Everything has pros and cons, but I will say I believe the pros outweigh the cons. Are there some complexities that come along with using Woocommerce sometimes? Yes. However, I can mold that thing into pretty much anything that I want, whereas I find that a lot of other tools, I’m a little bit stuck with how that thing works, and I personally don’t like that, especially when I have the ability to customize something. I like it when the tool will allow me to do it. And that’s one of the things about Woocommerce, is that it is a really powerful platform. You can use it for as big or as small as a site as you want.

[00:13:24.05]
You can make it look and act the way that you want. And I personally like that. Okay, so that’s Woocommerce in a nutshell, how I use it. If you’ve got any questions for me about that, feel free to ask in the comments below, and I will be happy to assist as best as I can. All right, talk to you later.