Who would have thought an e-commerce site was so difficult to set up. There are so many moving parts to this process and that is before sorting out the WooCommerce bits.
Don’t get me started on Etsy either. The next person I hear talking about “just set up an Etsy site and you’re good”.. I’ll laugh in their face.
Lets see… things that need to be done before even starting down the WooCommerce rabbit hole:
- Credit card and bank account specifically for your venture
- Paypal account linked to a bank account and credit card
- Venmo account linked to a bank account and credit card
- Stripe account linked to a bank account
- USPS account for commercial shipping linked to a credit card (this is to get Global Advantage shipping)
- WordPress.com account linked to a credit card
- Email account that you can link up to the WooCommerce and WordPress (that’s a whole nuther animal)
- WooCommerce account (actually log in via WordPress.com account). You need to give them your credit card here for necessary premium plugins (USPS shipping method for WooCommerce) and for paying for shipping labels.
- A photographer if you don’t have a decent camera and setup for taking pictures of your products. Yes – your cellphone will (probably) work for this but good luck navigating the site to get the pics in place.
Major roadblocks that needed to be overcome and decisions to be made:
- Email coming from your site will very most likely just end up in the recipients spam bucket. This needs to be prevented. Fortunately, there is a wordpress plugin called FluentSMTP that will connect to your mail service and send the emails from the website that way. It is secure but it is not trivial in any way. I understand email and OATH quite deeply so it wasn’t that hard for me aside from finding and setting up the correct stuff in my Google workspace.
- Product tracking. It sounds easy, but my products are each unique and will be sold separately on the site. The customer will expect to receive exactly what they bought. WooCommerce can help here (SKU is key) but you still have to figure a process for associating an item to a SKU for tracking. This is made much more difficult if you are also using Etsy.
- Product pictures. Take a picture of the product, upload it and associate with the product in WooCommerce and good. Right? In theory – yes. But you gotta get it right or you’ll be handling refunds.
- Shipping. Are you going to offer free shipping or have the customer pay? Either way, you pay for the shipping label up front. There are also a number of “gotchas” in the shipping configuration that can drive you nutty. My recommendation – free shipping for everything and up your prices by ~$5 and just go with USPS Ground Advantage.
- International or U.S. only customers. Shipping international opens a huge can of worms. GDPR requirements for Europe, VAT and so on. Throw in the daily uncertainty of the trump tax/tantrums and reciprocal tariffs and.. well, my hat is off to you who navigate that exhibition of poo.
- WooCommerce or Etsy or both?
- WooCommerce is a very very steep learning curve but things start to come together pretty rapidly after the initial huge frustration. You have fewer fees involved but make up for some of that with things like premium plugins you will need and so forth. You have a lot more flexibility on shop presentation also (but that learning curve).
- Etsy makes it easy to set up shop. Though it is a one-size-fits-mostly-nobody thing. Etsy also takes nearly 10% off the top of each sale also but they make it easy on you and they’ve got serious infrastructure and staff for which to pay. I’ve been in that world and know what it costs and those costs will cause your brain freeze. Etsy is also a very very crowded environment that is awash in slop and knock-offs.
It’s been quite a journey. Lot of frustration but also interesting and full of learning.
So yeah.. next time some one says “just set up an e-commerce site”… laugh in their face.