Let’s Look Inside a WooCommerce Store

Structure of a WooCommerce Store

A simple WooCommerce online store might have just a few products that are packed and shipped by hand. A complex WooCommerce store could have thousands of products distributed from a 3rd party warehouse.

Either way, WooCommerce takes the same steps. Your shop creates an order every time a customer completes the checkout process. You can also place manual orders yourself.  Orders can accept real time credit card payments as well as offline payments.

Every order has a unique ID number, and you can see a summary view and a detailed view of all orders on your website.

Each order has a status so that you know how far along the order is.

You can also update the order status yourself. You’d usually do this when you receive payments, ship orders, or offer refunds.

Every order has an order notes panel where WooCommerce keeps a history of order details as they happen. You can add your own manual order notes too. Your notes can be private, or shared via email with with your customer.

Products

Your WooCommerce store can sell all sorts of things. It can sell objects, subscriptions, memberships, vouchers, bookings and appointments. It can even collect donations.

Product Categories

If you have many products you can group them into categories. This helps your customers quickly find what they want.

Product Images

Beautiful images attract customers. You’ll need quality images (photos, illustrations or icons) for each product.  In the online world the image does much of  the selling. In certain market segments the quality of your images will make or break you.

Product Information

You need to gather a set of facts about each product.

Inventory

You can use WooCommerce to manage your stock levels in real time.

When you add a product to your store you have the option to set a stock level. This stock level fluctuates as products sell, and if you have product returns. You can also adjust your stock level any time you like.

Extra Features

There are many extensions and plugins you can use to teach WooCommerce all sorts of extra tricks. For example, you can set smaller or larger order quantities when selling certain products.  You can decide if a product only sells in multiples of a certain number.

This has been a quick look at how a WooCommerce store works. The same principles apply whether you are a tiny operation or an enormous online retailer.

If you’d like to find out more about WooCommerce you can check out the Features pages at https://woocommerce.com/features/.