How to set up a WooCommerce store

Before installing WooCommerce, decide what you will sell, where you will sell and ship, which currency you will use, and how products will be delivered. Gather product names, descriptions, prices, images, stock quantities, weights and dimensions.

Use a site with HTTPS before taking payments. Keep a backup available, and avoid installing several plugins that provide the same payment, checkout, shipping or optimisation feature.

In WordPress, go to Plugins > Add New, search for WooCommerce, install it and activate it. When the onboarding screen appears, choose Set up my store and enter your business location, industry, product type and other store details. The wizard can be skipped and reopened later from the contextual Help menu on supported WooCommerce admin pages.

Review every suggested extension rather than accepting everything automatically. Payment and tax recommendations vary by country and by the information entered during setup, so only install services you actually need.

Go to Products > Add New and create at least one product. Add its name, description, main image, price, stock status and shipping information. Use a variable product when customers must choose options such as size or colour.

WooCommerce normally creates the shop, cart, checkout and account pages during setup. If one is missing or points to the wrong page, check WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Page setup. The cart, checkout and account areas must be assigned correctly for the store to work.

Open WooCommerce > Settings and check the General, Payments, Tax and Shipping sections. Enable the payment methods you support and complete each provider's connection or verification steps.

For shipping, create zones under WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Shipping zones, then add methods such as flat rate, free shipping or local pickup. WooCommerce matches a customer to the first applicable zone, so put narrower regions above broader ones. A zone without an active method produces a no-shipping-available message at checkout.

Enable tax settings only after deciding what your business must charge. WooCommerce can calculate tax from configured rates or, where supported, use automated tax calculations, but it does not decide your legal tax obligations or file returns. Ask an accountant about what applies to your business.

For a small catalogue, WooCommerce's core features are usually enough. You can use the setup wizard, the standard WordPress editor and a compatible theme without writing code or buying a page builder. This is the simplest manual route and gives you fewer moving parts to troubleshoot.

The drawbacks appear when you need subscriptions, bookings, advanced product options, live carrier rates, complex tax rules, wholesale pricing or a heavily customised checkout. Those features generally require extensions or specialist configuration. A theme can change the layout, but it does not replace payment, tax or shipping setup.

Preview the shop on a phone and desktop. Add products to the cart, enter addresses from each shipping zone, apply a coupon if you use one, choose every enabled payment method and complete at least one test order. Check the order email, stock reduction, tax total, shipping charge and customer account page.

If shipping is missing, check the customer's address, the product's virtual or downloadable status, the order of your shipping zones and whether the matched zone has a method. If cart or checkout pages are blank or duplicated, recheck the assigned pages and temporarily disable recently added plugins or custom checkout templates.

If you want a child-focused shop without designing every template yourself, install Pippo from Appearance > Themes > Add New > Upload Theme, upload the theme ZIP, activate it and follow its setup instructions. Its colourful toy-store layouts, prebuilt product pages and Elementor or WPBakery support can reduce the design work.

Keep WooCommerce's product, payment, tax, shipping and page assignments under review after activating the theme. Importing a layout should not be treated as a completed store setup: replace demo products, check the navigation, confirm the cart and checkout pages, and repeat the test order.