This guide covers exactly how to set up a WordPress ecommerce website with the WooCommerce plugin.

The WordPress platform originally began as a way to blog online. Over the years, it has evolved into a full blown “content management system” – in other words, a backend software that can “power” any type of website – including an ecommerce website.

That said, WordPress as an ecommerce platform isn’t a good fit for everyone. Here’s a brief run down of reasons it would be a good fit:

You want full control over your website
You want to easily build out other portions of your site that aren’t ecommerce (blog, pages, etc)
You don’t want the monthly & transaction fees of an integrated ecommerce platform like Shopify orBigCommerce
You want to start small and build out your site as you grow (ie, and avoid the fees while doing so)
You aren’t daunted by some technical work – ie, hearing the acronym “FTP” makes you more curious than scared (note – WordPress is built to be easy for first timers, but it’s not a click, click, done software either)
You don’t plan on having a complicated payment processing system at first (ie, you’ll be using PayPal, Amazon or Google Wallet, not processing payments on your own server). WooCommerce works perfectly fine on SSL, but again, you’ll need that expertise to implement it properly
You want a common platform where you can easily pull developers in on a project basis as you grow
With wordpres, you can integrate customer payment directly into your account, via their credit cards. You can build an online shopping website which can be compared with one f these big online stores with wordpress





Getting Started – Installing WordPress
Your absolute first step for using WordPress for an ecommerce website is to actually install WordPress on a hosting account with your domain name. Here’s my guide to setting up WordPress step by step on a hosting account if you don’t have it already.



Ecommerce sites need even more memory for PHP than a standard WordPress install since they are larger and more complex than a simple blog. Having thousands of products + thousands of visitors can add even more resource requirements to your hosting account.



I recommend Betahost24/7 when hosting your website since you want to make an Ecommerce site, I recommend you go for their VPS or Semi VPS hosting which we use here on our site.

If you’re starting out big (thousands of products, many thousands of visitors), I recommend you go for VPS hosting to avoid server timeout on your site due to oversized traffic. Also check Betahost24/7’s VPS Plans

Intro to WordPress Ecommerce Options
There are really 3 components that make a “regular” website an “ecommerce” website – product pages, shopping cart, and a checkout process.



You can add the ecommerce functionality to WordPress with a plugin. Plugins are separate pieces of software that you install and activate into WordPress that basically adds to what it can do.

In this case, we need a plugin that will create custom product pages, that will have a shopping cart functionality allowing individual visitors to add products to a cart throughout the time they are on the site, and that will sync up with a payments system to accept payments, and match those payments up with the visitors’ products purchased. Wow.

There are a lot of plugin options to turn your WordPress site into an ecommerce site, but by far and away the leader is WooCommerce byWooThemes.

It has the functionality, the ease of use, the reputation, community, and versatility to be a solid long term choice for an ecommerce plugin.

It’s the most search engine optimization-friendly ecommerce platform I’ve seen. I’m an SEO Specialist who’s worked on major brands’ platforms, and from an SEO perspective, I would love to be able to work with WooCommerce. It gets rid of most all duplicate content (a SEO plague for online stores) and has Schema markup built-in.

Plus, the company that creates it, WooThemes, has been a core part of the WordPress community for years. In fact,Woocommerce has been acquired by the same company that owns and supports the WordPress.org foundation. Since they’ve open-sourced the software…it’s not going away anytime soon.

It has support, and plenty of versatility for what you’ll need.

Oh – and it’s free.

Here’s WooTheme’s sales pitch & overview. continue reading at http://www.itk.com.ng/web-developement-blogging/wordpress/create-online-shopping-website-like-jumia-konga-aliexpress/