Settings
If you ran the quick setup wizard, a lot of these settings should already be set. Let’s take a look at the other features included in WooCommerce.
General
The General section control settings such as your location, the locations you sell and ship to, and how WooCommerce collects your customer’s location. You can also choose to enable taxes and tax calculations. Additionally, there is a setting to enable a banner notice site-wide. The section called Currency Options allows you to set your default currency, the format your currency is shown in, such as ‘$9.99’ or ‘9.99$’ and how your currency denominations are separated.
Products
The Products tab has four sections.
General
In the General section, we can set the weight and dimension units, these units are used to calculate shipping. You can also enable reviews for your products, allow only ‘verified owners’ to post reviews and have these comments labeled as such.
Display
From the Display section, we can choose how products are arranged on which specific page. We can also manage which page the default category-pages is displayed.
You can also manage the cart functionality from here. The ‘add to cart’ behavior has two options. You can choose whether your page redirects to the cart page after successfully adding an item and you can also enable AJAX add to cart buttons on archive pages.
The Product Images section lets you set the size of the product images on different pages, you can also choose to ‘hard crop’ the uploaded images to the preset size.
Inventory
As noted before, WooCommerce can manage your stock for you. In the Inventory section, we can set how long a customer can ‘reserve’ an item in stock while they browse your site. This is helpful because by setting a lower amount of time we can allow other –more eager– customers a chance to purchase the item.
You can also set low stock and out of stock parameters. Based on your set number, you can receive notifications before you run out of stock, you can also display on the front end ‘out of stock’ before you physically run out, this can be helpful to avoid back orders. Lastly, you can choose to hide out-of-stock items once they reach that point. You can choose to show how much stock you have, only how much once you reach a lower supply, or never show the amount of stock at all.
Downloadable Products
There are three ways to serve the downloadable product to your customer:
Forced Download: The safest way to send the file, this uses PHP to protect the file from being shared to anyone but the end user.
X-Accel-Redirect/X-Sendfile: Must be enabled server side, this module allows you to securely send larger files.
Redirect Only: The least secure option, a redirection link to the file will be sent to the user, this link can be used by anyone (you can password protect the page, but anyone with the password can download the product)
You can also choose to require a login to access the download and also allow access to the download before the payment has been completed, or is in the processing stage.
Tax
The tax section lets you decide whether to include the tax in your pricing, show the tax in the shop, or just in the cart, set additional tax classes, round the tax, set price display suffix, decide how to calculate the tax or even apply taxes to shipping based on shipping class.
The additional tax classes field allows you to set your own tax rates such as reduced rate or zero-rate. You will notice at the top of the page links to the different rates.
And if you click on these rates you can adjust a number of tax related fields or import/export a csv.
Shipping
WooCommerce divides shipping into zones. As they put it: “A shipping zone is a geographic region where a certain set of shipping methods are offered. WooCommerce will match a customer to a single zone using their shipping address and present the shipping methods within that zone to them.”
Once you set your zones, WooCommerce will estimate the costs based on the customer’s location. In the shipping options section you can enable/disable the shipping calculator on the cart page, choose to hide shipping costs until an address is entered, decided whether to ship to the customer’s business or shipping address and also enable debug mode, this will bypass the shipping rate cache.
You can also setup your payment options for printing shipping labels from this section.
Checkout
Checkout process
WooCommerce allows you to set coupons for your shop. From this section you can enable/disable coupons and decide whether to calculate your coupon discounts sequentially, i.e., each subsequent coupon would discount from the previous discounted price.
You can also allow for guest checkout and ensure that all checkouts are secured with SSL (HTTP), the latter requires an SSL Certificate.
Checkout pages
If you went through the setup wizard then this section will be mostly completed, otherwise, you can choose which pages handle your cart, checkout and terms & conditions functions. If you define a terms page the customer will be asked if they accept them.
Checkout endpoints
Endpoints are appended to your page URLs to handle specific actions during the checkout process. Keep these unique! These will ultimately be used by WooCommerce to handle moving the user through the checkout process, the setup wizard should predefine these for you.
Payment gateways
The next few sections will describe each payment gateway, these are the primary methods of payment your customers can use. This section just gives you an overview of which gateways are currently enabled.
BACS
Bankers’ Automated Clearing Services, or BACS, is a direct bank transfer/wire service in the UK, you can enable the service and enter your account information directly in order to receive payments.
Check payments
A strange gateway, why would you want to accept checks via the internet? WooCommerce agrees, but they suggest using this gateway to test purchases in order to test order emails and success pages.
Cash on delivery
This is an interesting option, Cash on Delivery allows your customer to pay for goods at the time of delivery. This could be useful for customers who do not have access to credit or debit options.
Paypal
One of the leading credit payment processors, Paypal allows you to collect credit payments by just adding your Paypal API credentials. You can also create a Paypal sandbox in order to test payments.
Accounts
The Accounts section allows you to choose the ‘endpoints’ used by WooCommerce to handle your account creation process. It also allows you to choose when and on what pages your customers are asked to register and/or login.
The Email section lets you set your notification emails that are sent to your customers are certain points in the checkout and shipping process.
