WooCommerce has hundreds of settings and almost all of them can stay as they are. Half a dozen decide whether the shop works, and those are the ones this article goes through, in the order worth touching them.
The first-run wizard
When you activate the plugin, WooCommerce opens a setup wizard. Follow it to the end: it creates the shop pages, sets the currency and leaves nearly everything ready. Nothing you answer there is locked in, and it all changes later under WooCommerce and Settings.
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Shop address. Tax and shipping are calculated from it. Put the real business address, not your home one, if they differ.
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What you sell. Physical goods, digital goods, or both. This only changes the suggestions it makes next.
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Currency. Choose carefully: changing currency after you have orders makes a mess of the reports.
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Skip the extras it offers. The wizard proposes installing additional plugins. Start without them: every extra plugin is one more thing to maintain and update.
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General settings
| Setting |
What to decide |
| Selling location |
Which countries you sell to. If you only deliver in your own city, limit it here: it saves orders you cannot fulfil |
| Shipping location |
You can sell everywhere and deliver to only some places. They are separate fields |
| Currency and format |
Symbol, whether it sits before or after the number, thousands separator and decimal places. Write the amount the way it is written here, not the way it arrives by default |
| Coupons |
Leave them off until you need them. A visible coupon box sends buyers away hunting for a code that does not exist |
| Tax |
Switching it on adds a whole settings tab. There is a section on it below |
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WooCommerce works in one currency at a time. Showing prices in more than one takes an additional plugin, with conversion and rounding that become your responsibility. Before going down that road, ask whether one currency is not simpler.
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The four pages a shop needs
The wizard creates them, but check they are all there and correctly linked, under Settings and Advanced. If one gets deleted by accident, the shop breaks quietly.
| Page |
What it is for |
| Shop |
The product listing. This is the one that goes in the menu |
| Cart |
What the buyer has gathered, before paying |
| Checkout |
Where details are filled in and a payment method chosen |
| My account |
Where the customer sees past orders and addresses |
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Keep cart, checkout and account out of the cache. If you use a caching plugin, or caching on the server side, these three pages must be excluded. Cached, they show one person another person’s cart. If you also use Cloudflare, check its rules too: the cache that fools you.
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Page and product addresses
Under WordPress Settings and Permalinks you choose how product addresses look. Decide before you publish. Changing it later breaks every link already out there and forces you into redirects.
Accounts, e-mails and privacy
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Decide whether an account is compulsory. Guest checkout reduces abandonment. Accounts make repeat buying easier. You can have both.
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Check the shop e-mails actually leave. Order received, order processing, order complete. If they do not arrive, the shop looks broken. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
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Place an order with yourself before opening. From cart to confirmation e-mail, with a real product at a low price. It is the test that catches nearly everything, and it takes five minutes.
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Angola
Brasil
Kenya
Moçambique
Nigeria
Portugal
South Africa
United Kingdom
United States
International
