Your customers want to be able to buy from you not just in your store or the stores where you’re a vendor, but also online. [tweet bird=”yes”]If you haven’t added ecommerce to your income sources yet, you’re late.[/tweet]
So you’re thinking about adding ecommerce to your WordPress website, or perhaps you’re thinking about building an ecommerce website and toying with the idea of using WordPress. One of the questions has to be, what kind of functionality will the site offer?
We’re going to look at some of the product display provided by one of the most popular ecommerce platforms for WordPress, WooCommerce.
Straight out of the box, WooCommerce lets you make a Store page that shows all your items. That may not be exactly what you want, though. Fortunately, WooCommerce also has shortcode that lets you or your web firm do more. Here are a few of the options:
Here we’ve added a single product to a page.The shortcode for this is
, where “sku” is the actual sku number of your productWe can put the shortcode onto any page or post, anywhere we like, amid the text and images. Visitors can click on the “add to cart” button and buy immediately, or they can click through to the product page for more details.
Here we’ve added multiple products, using the shortcode
. Notice that both “product” and “sku” must be plural. We then list the product skus with commas in between.Again, we can put these anywhere on a post, page, or even on another product page.
For the third example, we’ve put a whole category of products onto one page. In this case, we have an interactive map showing regional products, and we’ve added the entire category of regional products to the page. We’re seeing just one row of products, but there is a nice grid showing all the products in the category. When visitors hover over their region, they’ll see the name of the product, and directly below they will see the picture of the product in a grid of photos.
The shortcode to use is
. Where you see “category,” you must put your actual category. So, if your products include hair care, skincare, and oral care products, and you want to show all your oral care products on one page, you could put all your oral care products into the category “oral-care” and your shortcode would be .Some more options:
- shows the newest products
- shows those in the “featured” category
- shows everything on sale
- shows products according to customer reviews
- shows all products with a particular characteristic, such as all the red items
- shows similar products (you can choose them)
In addition to this sampling of product code options, you can also add the WooCommerce cart, a variety of customer account pages, “Add This” buttons, and many more things to your posts, pages, and products. Find all the WooCommerce shortcodes at the plugin website. The examples above should help you envision how the various shortcodes will work — and of course you can try them out at your website. Use the Preview button to have a look at a page you’re experimenting with without publishing the changes and making them live.
The details of how your site will look are controlled by your theme — that is, the way your designer has built your website. However, this sampling should give you a sense of how many choices a WordPress ecommerce website can give you — without costly development work.
Leave a Reply