Daily ArchivesSeptember 9, 2021

Online store owners spend hours meticulously tinkering and tweaking their ecommerce site’s look and design, yet give less consideration to how their customers will actually pay for their products and services. Given that 12 percent of customers will abandon their cart if the checkout process is too complicated, choosing the wrong payment gateway can hurt your sales numbers.

Although all WooCommerce payment gateways perform the same basic function, not all of them are right for your ecommerce business. Just like your customers, you want the best fit for you, a choice that brings the best value at the lowest cost. Happily, WooCommerce site owners have plenty of options to choose from. Here’s what to consider when choosing between WooCommerce multiple payment gateways.

How WooCommerce Payment Gateways Work

All online credit card transactions have three parties: you, the customer, and the payment gateway. Think of the payment gateway as a mediator that authorizes payments between your customers, their credit card company, and your bank. Here are the steps:

1. Customer places an order and submits their payment information.
2. Payment information is sent from the ecommerce site to the payment gateway.
3. Payment gateway forwards request to the customer’s lender (bank, credit card, etc.)
4. The lender determines the availability of funds and authorizes payment through the gateway.
5. Payment gateway deposits funds into your merchant account.

Although this is a simplified version, it’s clear how integral payment gateways are to the transaction process.

WooCommerce Multiple Payment Gateways: Factors to Consider When Making Your Choice

Every payment gateway has a variety of options, fee structures, and other capabilities that will be valuable to specific business needs, such as recurring payments.

Should You Look For Lower Fixed Cost or Lower Transaction Percentage?

Every payment gateway will have a percentage transaction fee and a fixed cost charge for every sale you make. These charges and fees will determine how much money you get to keep from your sales. Transaction fees also change depending on whether the sale happens within the U.S. or across borders. If you’re outside the U.S., the fees will be different in your country.

Generally, if you’re selling high-priced items, you want to minimize your percentage transaction costs. If you’re selling low-priced items, you want to minimize your fixed costs. Choose a payment gateway that fits your business model to get the best bang for your buck.

Subscriptions and Recurring Payments

If you’re offering subscriptions, memberships, installment plans, or similar types of payment models with multiple transactions, you’ll need a payment gateway that supports automatic recurring payments. Recurring payment support is one of those indispensable features that create positive customer experiences. But, because of the additional security measures associated with storing customer payment information, not all payment gateways are designed to support these payment models.

Many major WooCommerce payment gateways like Square, Stripe, PayPal, and Amazon Pay have payment features or flexibilities that include setting up automatic recurring payments and managing subscriptions. WooCommerce users also have the option of using the platform’s recurring payments plugin, WooCommerce Subscriptions, for monthly clubs, weekly service subscriptions, or yearly software billing packages. The premium extension supports both automatic and manual types of recurring payments. While manual payments require customers to log into your store, all payment gateway extensions can be used by customers to renew their subscription. Not all extensions support automatic renewal, but here is a list of those that do.

Integrated vs Hosted Payment Forms

Your customers are going to pay for their purchases through your gateway regardless of where the transaction takes place. An integrated gateway performs all of the information collection and authorization on your website (on WooCommerce this typically happens on a page like yourstore.com/checkout/), while a hosted payment form takes the customer offsite to complete their transaction (such as yourstore.paymentgateway.com) before sending them back to your site to view a confirmation page.

PCI Compliance

Whether your payment gateway is integrated or hosted, it needs to be secure. Your customers’ data and your business’s livelihood depends on the safety of your gateway. Most payment processing services comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). These information security requirements apply to all organizations that handle credit card transactions. But don’t assume that a payment gateway is in compliance. Check the gateway’s compliance page to find out their PCI Service Provider level. Level 1 is the most stringent.

• Level 1: Processing > 6 million card transactions per year.
• Level 2: Processing 1 to 6 million transactions per year.
• Level 3: Processing 20,000 to 1 million transactions per year.
• Level 4: Processing

Level 1 Service Providers like Stripe will require all of their providers to also validate their PCI compliance annually through a Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ). Validation requirements vary, depending on how you integrate the gateway and collect customer data. Gateways with the highest security levels will also include 3-D Secure as an extra layer of authentication that helps reduce credit card fraud.

Multi-Currency Processing

The biggest advantage of online sales is that you can sell almost anywhere. Even if the majority of your customers are local, finding a payment gateway that can handle different currencies will let you eventually expand into foreign markets. Multi-currency processing brings advantages for you and your customers.

A customer feels safer and more comfortable with your business when they can buy with their local currency. More trust means more repeat business and a competitive edge. Customers also save time because they don’t need to calculate exchange rates, expediting the checkout process and lowering cart abandonment rates.

Merchant Account Requirements

If you own a retail store, you probably already have a merchant account — those special bank accounts that let you collect funds from credit card sales. However, newer payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal no longer require you to open a merchant account. Instead, these “aggregators” use a single merchant account for all of their users, making payment management easier by creating an all-in-one account.

If you’re moving to or adding online sales to your current brick-and-mortar business, you may consider sticking with your current platform if it offers a payment gateway that easily integrates with WooCommerce. If your existing merchant account doesn’t offer a robust integration option with WooCommerce, it’s probably best to sign up with a payment processing option that’s optimized for your website, rather than using the same one that’s for your brick-and-mortar operation.

Single vs Multiple Gateways

WooCommerce users already have PayPal right out of the box, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t expand your gateway selection to accommodate customers in different countries or to add different online payment methods like eWallets.

Related reading: What Are Multiple Payment Options? >>

It’s nice to give customers choices, but you don’t want to overload them. Customers who don’t use PayPal or Amazon Pay may abandon their purchase if those are the only options. Others may use one payment method exclusively and may abandon their cart if they can’t use their preferred payment option. There are plenty of pros and cons to having either a single gateway or multiple ones.

Cost

Multiple gateways mean multiple contracts, paperwork, and integration setup. In the end, having more than one of anything usually means more work on your end. There will be a cost to your time managing multiple payment gateways. That’s why many smaller merchants tend to choose a combined payment provider like Stripe or PayPal. While these gateways usually have lower monthly fees, their transaction costs tend to be higher. In the end, you’re either going to pay with your time or your money.

Volume Pricing

Larger stores usually set up their own merchant accounts so they can negotiate better transaction fees and volume pricing. Using one payment processor makes this easier. A gateway with a volume pricing discount will lower your transaction fees as your volume of sales increases. However, having multiple gateways effectively splits your total sales among them all, which makes hitting your volume quotas more difficult.

Failsafe

Although a single gateway consolidates administrative tasks and simplifies integration, the strategy does leave you vulnerable to lost sales if the service goes down. If PayPal has an outage, and it’s your only gateway, you won’t sell anything until they fix it. But if you’re using multiple gateways, customers have options. It’s not ideal, but at least your shopping cart lane is still open. Multiple gateways create redundancies in your payment plan.

Multiple gateways also offer you a way to expand your services if your traffic spikes. If your site is hit hard on Cyber Monday, and Amazon Pay is overloaded, your other gateways can take up the slack at checkout.

WooCommerce Payment Gateways Comparison

Whether you’re going with single or multiple gateways, you’ll want to choose from those that are already popular among consumers. Here are five of the most commonly used WooCommerce gateway plugins today.

PayPal

With 237 million customer accounts, PayPal is one of the most widely used WooCommerce payment gateways for credit and debit cards. PayPal setup is easy, and the gateway doesn’t require sellers to have a separate merchant account. Customers on sites that use WooCommerce can complete a PayPal purchase without leaving the website. Customers don’t even need a PayPal account, they can use their credit or bank card to check out.

PayPal offers multiple payment solutions with a variety of features. You’ll want to research them before you decide on one. PayPal Standard doesn’t require a monthly fee but limits your ability to customize the design of your checkout page. PayPal Standard customers also can’t process payments by phone, fax, card reader, or by mail. PayPal Payments Pro has many more features but requires a $30 monthly fee. You can compare the features of these plans along with PayPal Express Checkout on the company’s website.

Stripe

Stripe is built with mobile in mind — supporting Apple Pay and Google Pay — as well as other payment gateways around the world. Localized payments help you win the business of international shoppers who prefer to use payment methods popular in their country or region. For businesses looking to expand globally, Stripe is a good choice. Currently, the service accepts credit and debit cards in more than 135 countries.

Stripe is built for developers. Rather than being an out-of-the-box solution, the gateway gives developers a wide range of integration tools to develop customized payment processes. Stripe is easy to set up and supports recurring payments, subscription billing, and one-click checkout. The Stripe WooCommerce plugin lets you accept payments on your site, and it’s free to use.

Amazon Pay

Amazon isn’t just a world leader in online sales; it also knows the checkout process. With Amazon Pay, the company enables millions of customers to buy from you using their Amazon accounts. Like PayPal Express Checkout, customers can log into their Amazon accounts without leaving your website, giving you more control over their experience.

Amazon Pay supports recurring payments through WooCommerce Subscriptions and offers volume pricing options. It also supports automatic rebilling for subscription payments that fail. For example, if an automatic payment is rejected because a customer’s credit card is maxed out, rebilling can issue another charge at a later date, increasing your chances of winning back lost revenue.

Square

Square is a popular gateway for organizations that attract both online and point-of-sale purchases. Square is often used with mobile devices like tablets and smartphones for remote transactions, like those at fairs, trade shows, or festivals. The gateway typically keeps their in-person transaction fee lower than competitors’ online transaction fee, making it a good choice if you sell face-to-face.

Square integrates its inventory management system with WooCommerce. When someone buys an item from you, the inventory is automatically synced between the two. Square has limited international availability—Canada, Australia, Japan, and the UK only—and you must set up a Square account before using the WooCommerce plugin.

Authorize.Net

Authorize.Net is a payment processing platform designed to make transactions as simple and secure as possible. It works for both online and point-of-sale purchases and accepts payments from all major credit cards and digital payment options like Visa Checkout, Apple Pay, and PayPal. Authorize.Net works with small, medium, and large businesses and has a variety of options, from an all-in-one payment gateway plus merchant account to an enterprise-level option with tailored pricing. If you have a merchant account already, Authorize.Net also offers a payment-gateway-only option.

With Authorize.Net AIM extension, WooCommerce users can integrate the gateway onto their website and keep the customer experience consistent. Authorize.Net is a leader in payment security, and its Accept.js API is designed to capture a customer’s payment data before it is passed to your server — processing it instead through Authorize.Net. That keeps your customers’ personal data safer.

Conclusion

There’s nothing more exciting than designing and launching your ecommerce site, but don’t forget to give full consideration to one of the most important steps in the sales funnel — closing the sale. WooCommerce payment gateways are the checkout aisle of your business, and the one(s) you choose will impact your customer’s experience and your bottom line. The choices for gateways are only growing in number as businesses look to expand across borders to new customers, and identify more local points-of-sale for existing ones. Meanwhile, the rise in cryptocurrency use will prompt merchants to continually evaluate their current payment processing services as these innovations disrupt the financial and retail industries.

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Gutenberg is a new visual editor rolling out to WordPress. But to truly understand WordPress Gutenberg, you need to know it’s also a lot more than that.

WordPress Gutenberg is a block-based layout engine. But more than making things look pretty, Gutenberg really opens the door for new possibilities in WordPress. Wix and SquareSpace and other website builders have challenged the claim WordPress has on easy website building. Gutenberg is an answer to those drag-and-drop approaches—but it also does a lot more.

Chris Lema, our vice president of products and innovation here at Hostdedi, shares his insights on Gutenberg in his one-hour webinar, Preparing for Gutenberg. Check out the webinar for all of Chris’ wisdom, but we’re going to summarize what he shared.

What Is WordPress Gutenberg?

Most people say that Gutenberg is a new editor for WordPress. But that’s not entirely true.

Gutenberg is a block-based layout engine.

That means there’s a lot more going on under the hood. WordPress Gutenberg is more than a cool new drag-and-drop editor. This is a big and potentially powerful change.

To understand WordPress Gutenberg, you need to get the seismic nature of this shift.

More Under the Hood

Gutenberg is a refactoring of the entire WordPress platform. It’s streamlining how things work in order to do more.

What does that mean?

Right now there are multiple ways of doing things with WordPress. We’ve got shortcodes, HTML, TinyMCE buttons, embedded URLs, plugins, themes, etc. Each of those solutions isn’t always the best way to do something, and often they can be misused or even abused.

WordPress gave us a lot of ways to break things.

What if we narrowed how many ways there are to get things done so we could enable getting more things done?

That’s what Gutenberg does. It replaces many of those approaches. It narrows how many ways there are to do something, giving us more control and thus more power.

More Than Pretty Presentation

Wix and SquareSpace and all the others offer layout solutions. You move stuff around and make it look pretty.

Gutenberg does that, but it also does a lot more.

It restores intention to the markup language, so rather than just noting that you want something to be bold or italics, you’re noting what it is and what your intention is. This is an ad or a testimonial or something else. Having that information means you can do more with it:

• You could introduce conditional formatting and only show content if specific conditions are met.
• You could share a piece of content outside of the traditional content architecture.
• You could reuse a piece of content across your site.

Gutenberg isn’t necessarily ready to do all these things right now, but it’s laying the groundwork for these kinds of changes.

It’s a wholesale change to how we think about content and presentation.

More than simply competing with other layout solutions, this is taking WordPress into the next 10 years of publishing. It’s a dramatically different infrastructure to compete in a dramatically different time. This is key to how you understand WordPress Gutenberg.

OK, that all sounds great, but it’s also a little lofty and pie-in-the-sky. Let’s get practical.

How Does WordPress Gutenberg Work?

Gutenberg uses blocks to handle each bit of content. Anything can be a block: an entire post, a single paragraph, a quote, an image, a gallery of images, an embedded video, a button, a table, and so much more.

You can edit these blocks independently of each other. Each one has settings with different options you can tweak.

Much of this has to do with presentation (changing the background color on a single paragraph of a blog post, for example), but it also opens the door to other options (such as reusing a block of text across multiple posts). These are functionalities that previously required knowing how to code or using a separate plugin. Now they’ll be built into the editor.

So Gutenberg introduces all sorts of interesting possibilities for content creation in WordPress. Now these features aren’t 100% there just yet. The user interface still needs some improvements, and this is just the first release. But we’re seeing the groundwork being laid.

What Do I Need to Do?

So what does all this mean for me? That’s the question everybody is asking. Let’s break it down into the two main questions:

1. Will It Break My Site?

Understandably, that’s the bottom line for a lot of people.

The short answer is no, Gutenberg probably won’t break your site.

When you convert to Gutenberg, it drops your entire page/post into a block. It doesn’t try to create blocks for you or determine how you would want content separated into blocks. So it’s not changing any of your existing content. That means there’s very little that can break.

Unless you’re doing something very strange (or using a theme or plugin that does things weird), your site probably won’t break. Of course we can never guarantee anything (especially with technology), so you’ll need to test it for yourself.

2. Is It Hard to Learn?

The other question everybody has is how is it going to change their process. What new things will they have to learn and how hard is that going to be?

So Gutenberg is a new editor in WordPress. It changes how things look, and we all know how people respond to change. It’s different, so it will take some getting used to. But it’s not such a dramatic change that everyone will be lost.

As you write content in Gutenberg, it makes each new paragraph a new block. It does it automatically, and it’s pretty simple and relatively unobtrusive. So if you just want to write in WordPress, just write. Gutenberg will create the blocks for you.

It’s not until you start manipulating the blocks that things become different.

And here you’ll see many of the same icons and options as we had before, just in different places because they’re being applied to each individual block and not to the entire page/post.

So yes, Gutenberg will take some getting used to. But it’s not that hard.

Just understand WordPress Gutenberg is laying the foundation for more change to come.

What Comes Next?

For right now, Gutenberg is a plugin you can install on your WordPress site and experiment with. Thousands of people are doing just that: testing it, seeing how it works, and imagining how it will change things for WordPress.

Gutenberg will be built into WordPress starting with the release of WordPress 5.0. It will no longer be a plugin and will become a standard part of every WordPress install.

But we don’t know when WordPress 5.0 will be released, so we’re not quite there yet.

Common Gutenberg Questions We’ve Heard

As always with new technology, there are lots of questions. Here are a few of the common questions we’ve heard:

• What if I don’t like Gutenberg? You can always go back to ‘that’s how we’ve always done it’ with the Classic Editor plugin.
• Will Gutenberg replace page builders? We don’t know yet. It doesn’t seem like it will, but it might change how those builders work. They may adapt as they take advantage of blocks. But Gutenberg isn’t replacing the functionality of page builders. It’s something different.
• What about metafields and custom fields? They’re working on it. The functionality you’re looking for may not be there yet, but it’s in process.

Conclusion

So Gutenberg is a fundamental change for WordPress. A lot of people are focusing on the visual editor aspect and how this seems to be focused on bloggers and content creators. Even the way WordPress is talking about this seems to underscore that use case.

But if you really look under the hood, Gutenberg is paving the way for some much bigger changes. You’ll need to give it a try and see how it works with your site. We’ll all need to experiment and see how this changes our content creation process. But it will also have other impacts as we realize some of these deeper changes.

For now, you can install the Gutenberg plugin and take it for a spin. Also, see Chris Lema’s full webinar to get his take on how WordPress Gutenberg is a big leap forward.

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When you’re building your eCommerce empire, whether on WooCommerce or another platform, thinking about SEO from the start is imperative if you want to minimize costs and have the best chance to succeed long term.

Last time, I talked about technical SEO for eCommerce. Using those strategies you can ensure that your website is crawl-able to search engines and technically able to rank, but that alone will not get you the traffic that you want or need.

To do that, we need to take the next step in SEO for your store and conduct keyword research for eCommerce.

What is Keyword Research for Ecommerce SEO?

Keyword research for eCommerce SEO is the practice of identifying the keywords that your potential customers are searching and using to find companies like yours selling the products that you do.

Keyword research is the foundation of a great SEO strategy, and especially so on eCommerce websites that have many SKUs and categories of products.

With great keyword research, you can build out an information hierarchy that makes sense for your users (for conversions) as well as search engines so that pages on your site have the best chance possible to rank for the terms that they are targeting.

9 Ecommerce Optimization Tips for Fast & Effective Sites >>

Types of Keywords

There are two main types of keywords that need to be kept in mind as we conduct keyword research for eCommerce SEO:

1. Informational keywords, which often begin with modifiers like “how to” and “what is”. These are terms that people search when they are beginning their research and trying to determine what to search for and ultimately what to buy.
2. Transactional keywords like [men’s dress pants], where the customer may directly buy or is further down the consideration path from the above mentioned informational keywords. They expect a list of or page containing men’s dress pants.

These two are high level types of keywords to help us wrap our head around the complexity of keyword research, and we must recognize that some keywords can be both informational and transactional depending on the searcher’s intent.

To figure this out, you need to do some manual searches to figure out what pages the search engines are actually ranking for the query.

For example, [best men’s dress pants] is an interesting search engine results page (SERP in the SEO world) that shows image ads, text ads, blogs with roundups of “best men’s dress pants”, a map showing me local businesses that sell men’s pants in Denver, and then some more roundup-type posts sprinkled with a few conversion-oriented pages (Nordstrom) before a few more ads:

This is a great example of a mixed-intent query. You might be able to rank a category page here, but you might be better off with a roundup post highlighting the “best men’s dress pants”.

But when we search [men’s dress pants], which is the exact same query minus the “best” modifier, we just get results for big retailers and image product listing ads:

So how do we identify these at scale? We look at the data.

Using SEMrush, which is my tool of choice for keyword research for eCommerce SEO, we can compare the two and find that the data can drive our decisions:

You can see that there is only one word different here, but the search volume, difficulty (KD stands for Keyword Difficulty which is SEMrush’s proprietary scoring for how hard a term is to rank for), and CPC (cost per click, aka average cost to buy a click for that term through AdWords) are all much higher for [men’s pants] because that term is transactional, not informational, whereas [best mens pants] can be both.

Keep this rubric in mind as you do keyword research. To drive real direct revenue and audience, we will first target transactional keywords for categories/subcategories. For informational queries which your content team can create content around, we can identify those keywords separately.

How to Do keyword Research for Ecommerce SEO

I’ll be honest – for a long time I hated keyword research. It can be tedious and very in-the-weeds when I prefer to operate at a larger strategy level, but I’ve come to find that keyword research and relying on that gathered data can help us make much better decisions to drive even more traffic and provide a better user experience than we could otherwise.

There are many different processes that professional SEOs use to do keyword research, but there are two tried and true strategies that you can use to find the right keywords for your business:

1. Brainstorming and topic expansion;
2. Competitor research.

In these next two sections, I am going to show you how to do both.

Brainstorming and Topic Expansion

Let’s stick with the example of [mens pants] above. You’re starting (or acquiring or operating) an eCommerce store that sells pants.

You should start with your highest level and most generic keyword, [pants]. There are three common tools that people use here, and you should use the one you have a subscription to. If you don’t have a subscription, then investigate all three as they’re similarly priced. The three tools are SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz Keyword Explorer.

For the purposes of this article, I am going to show how to do it in Moz Pro, specifically with their Keyword Explorer tool. They offer a free Community membership that gets you 20 queries a month, and their subscriptions start at $99.

Expanding Topics with Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz has long been a recognized brand in the SEO world. For a few years their keyword research offerings were not the best, but in 2016 they released Keyword Explorer which is now an industry leader.

Using my Pro subscription, I enter the word pants:

Click the Keyword Suggestions box and you will see an expanded list of keywords:

Moz does not give quite the same amount of data here as SEMrush, but their traffic data is more accurate because it comes from data collected by a company called Jumpshot about the clicking habits of searchers.

One great feature that Moz has is the ability to add keywords from the above view to a Keyword List:

When you have enough keywords in your list, you can then sort by Monthly Volume and quickly see the keywords that should be a category or subcategory (based on volume and difficulty, with the higher volume and difficulty keywords needing to be higher in your site’s information architecture) and those that can be further down in the architecture.

Once you have added all of the keywords that you think are relevant to your business, export them to Excel. I then like to open that Excel sheet, add a column for URL, and begin to define my URL structure:

Competitor Research

The above is the standard way to do keyword research for eCommerce SEO, where you begin with a topic and expand it.

While this is a great place to start, you do risk missing some keywords that your competitors are ranking for and driving business through. In order to not miss these, you can also use the tools already mentioned to conduct competitor keyword research.

The best tool, in my opinion, for competitor keyword research is SEMrush. They have a large (5.3 billion) keyword database and ranking data on most sites online.

To do competitor keyword research, go to SEMrush and enter the domain name of one of the top ranking sites for your main keyword. In keeping with the [pants] example, I am using Nordstrom.com:

Click the Top Organic Keywords section in the bottom left to view all the keywords for which the domain ranks:

Nordstrom.com is an enormous website that ranks for literally millions of keywords, so we need to refine the keyword set to only keywords containing the word “pants”, like so:

Now you have a much cleaner set of relevant keywords. If you want to only target keywords that Nordstrom.com ranks on page 3 or higher, you can also implement a filter for that:

Once you are happy with this list, then export it to CSV and de-duplicate it against your initial list that you gathered through topic expansion.

Putting Keyword Research for Ecommerce SEO into Action

Once you have your keyword set, the challenge is to now put it into action. All the research and data pulling in the world won’t move your business forward unless you create actionable insights and actions from it.

The keyword data you have collected should now guide your decision making around how to structure your site for optimal conversions.

If you run a pants eCommerce store then you need to recognize and will see within the data, that people shop for pants by gender type. According to the keywords we’ve discovered above, there will be some top level pages for main keywords like [pants], [trousers], and [slacks], but for the most part, pants are searched by type + gender or type.

The way I personally would structure this type of site, based on the keyword research, is by:

1. Pants type (pants, slacks, trousers)
2. Pants type + color (black slacks)
3. Gender + pants (womens pants)
4. Gender + pants type (womens yoga pants)
5. Gender + color + pants type (womens black yoga pants)

These are all ways that your customers are searching for the products that you have to offer, so building these specific pages will help you rank better for more terms and drive more business.

Every eCommerce business is different, but if you follow my advice and the strategies within this post to identify the keywords you should target, learn from your competitors to become more competitive with them, and then keep your customer’s needs in mind as you build your information architecture and URL structure then you will do very well for SEO.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Try Managed WooCommerce Hosting see how Hostdedi has included many of the tools you need to be successful with your eCommerce Business – right out of the gate.

One of the things we admire most about WooCommerce is its rich out-of-the-box functionality. A new eCommerce retailer can start selling in next to no time. They can focus on adding products and configuring their store without needing to install an array of extensions to add essential features.
But including every possible feature would result in a messy and bloated application, which is why WooCommerce also provides a way to add extensions that bring new tools, integrations, and features. Read More »

Customized t-shirts with fun logos are all the rage today. From sassy quotes to puns, and favorite superheroes to inspirational statements, we see people expressing their individuality in a number of different ways.

Are you planning to set up such a t-shirt store yourself? Well, there are a few things you’ll need to get your t-shirt store up and running.

In this article, we talk about how you can create your online t-shirt store with Printful and WooCommerce. We’ve chosen WooCommerce as our eCommerce platform because it is by far the best and easiest eCommerce platform to run (not to mention free) if you want to host an independent store. Printful is our choice of a printing, shipping, and fulfillment company because it is easy as wink to set up products with Printful and it integrates beautifully with WooCommerce.

The way it works: every time a customer places an order on your WooCommerce store, it is sent directly to Printful. After checking and confirming product availability, the t-shirt is printed and shipped by the company without requiring you to look into all the shipping details. All you have to do is upload your creative designs and the WooCommerce+Printful duo handles the rest.
So without further ado, here’s your 5-step guide to building a t-shirt store with Printful using WooCommerce.

1. Set up WordPress + WooCommerce

At this point, we expect you have your WordPress installation up and ready, with the associated hosting provider and plan.

Setting up WordPress is extremely easy, once you have your domain name and hosting service in place. You can read WPBeginner’s excellent guide to WordPress website installation.

Now that your site is ready, let’s start with building your eCommerce t-shirt store with Printful by installing WooCommerce.

• In the Main Menu of your website backend, navigate to Plugins → Add New
• Search for ‘WooCommerce’ in the search bar
• Install and Activate the plugin

2. WooCommerce Settings

In WooCommerce, there are a whole bunch of settings you need to configure. Fortunately, WooCommerce’s setup wizard guides you through the entire process, making it easy to understand the settings and configure them. As you set up your store, make sure that the following settings are configured properly:

• In the General tab, you can add the location of your store, locations you will be shipping to, the currency you prefer for the transaction
• In the Products tab, you can set the Page where you’ll be displaying your products, weight and dimensions units, and enable/disable reviews and ratings.
• On the Tax tab, simply enable application of taxes as we shall manage the details of the tax payments through Printful
• In the Payments tab, set up the payment options through the regular PayPal payment gateway. This will take you to the PayPal settings page where you can add your receiver e-mail address and your PayPal API.
• Have a good look at the Accounts and Privacy tab to fine-tune the details of guest checkouts and customer account creation. Don’t forget to frame your Privacy Policy and give clear information about why you are collecting customer data. This is important to ensure that the GDPR doesn’t end up costing you a huge fine for violation later.
• On the Emails tab, you can manage the email addresses to which all order emails will be sent. You can customize your WooCommerce email template here as well.
• In the Advanced tab, select the pages for Cart, Checkout, My Account, and Terms and Conditions, which your users will be directed to. In addition, this is where you enable secure payment on the checkout page; make sure you have an SSL certificate for your website.
  Important: Go to Advanced → Legacy API and make sure the Legacy REST API is enabled.

We are not making any changes on the Shipping tab right now since we’ll be handling the product shipping details in Printful.

P.S. Don’t forget to ‘Save Changes’ on every page.

3. Setting up a Printful Account and Connecting Your WooCommerce Store

Now that we have our WooCommerce Store set up, let’s turn our attention towards creating a Printful account and connecting it to the store.

• Log in to your account and click on ‘Connect to an eCommerce platform’. Here, we’ll be connecting to the WooCommerce store.

• Here you have two options – Set up through SiteGround and Set up for an existing store. Even if you haven’t built the store yet, you’ll want to choose the second option.

• To make Printful work successfully with your WooCommerce store, there are a few things you need to take care of, i.e. enabling REST API and changing the Permalink structure. We have already enabled REST API in the WooCommerce Settings.
• To change the permalink structure, go to your WordPress Dashboard → Settings → Permalinks.
• Make sure that the ‘Post Name’ permalink option is selected and save changes.

4. Integrating WooCommerce for Your T-Shirt Store with Printful

To integrate Printful and WooCommerce, you will first need to set up the WooCommerce-Printful Integration plugin.

• Go to Plugins → Add New
• Search for ‘printful’ and choose the ‘Printful Integration for WooCommerce’ plugin, by Printful.
• Install and activate the plugin
• Go to Printful from the WordPress Dashboard and hit ‘Connect’

• WooCommerce will ask you to authenticate the connection, click on ‘Approve’
• Printful will now link your account to your WooCommerce store and import and sync product data.

• You can now start adding your custom t-shirts as products in your WooCommerce store.

5. Creating a Product and Product Variations

When you click on ‘Add Product’, a variety of options will pop up – t-shirts, jeggings, mugs, caps, etc. All of these are available in different categories – men’s clothing, women’s clothing, kids, accessories, and more.

Since we’re focusing on building a t-shirt store with Printful, let’s see how you can create custom designs for t-shirts. Right now I’m choosing the men’s clothing section. You can iterate the same process for any other category, as you wish.

• On the ‘Configure Design’ screen, choose the image you want to print on the t-shirt. You can upload an image directly or choose one from your WordPress Library.
• If you are stuck for ideas, you can even create an impromptu quote/image there with the available fonts, clip art, and default Printful designs. Both front and back design can be customized as required.
• Select the t-shirt sizes, areas where it will be available, and colors.

• Align the final image and click ‘Proceed to Mockups’. A Mockup is an Image that will be displayed to potential customers when they visit your store. Select the type of image and proceed to the description.
• On the ‘Product Description’ screen, you can add your ‘Product Title’, describe it in detail and also add a size chart for reference. You can now proceed to Pricing.

• In the pricing section, you’ll see three columns – Printful Price, Retail Price, and Profit. Now, Printful’s basic price remains constant, considering their printing and shipping costs. The Retail Price is the cost that will be displayed to the customer and includes your profit margin as well.
• You can vary the Retail Price by changing your profit percentage. The greater the percentage, higher is your Retail Price. Under the profit column, you can see the amount you make per t-shirt, per size.
• You can sort t-shirts into different, previously-defined categories on your WooCommerce store. If you don’t have any set up beforehand, don’t worry. You can always go back to the store later, and create categories and assign products there manually.
• Once you have finalized the prices, click ‘Submit to Store’. Make sure that Product Visibility is enabled. This will display your t-shirt to your customers on the WooCommerce store.
• You’ll receive a notification when the product is added. To view the t-shirt in your WooCommerce store, simply click ‘View in WooCommerce’

Voila! Your t-shirt is ready for sale!

Quick and Easy, Right?!

There are no hassles of adding products manually at the WooCommerce backend, setting up all the product attributes, variations, and other details. One of the biggest advantages Printful offers is that it calculates taxes and shipping costs out of the box, based on your location and where the t-shirt is to be delivered.

Additionally, you can manage all of your orders from the Printful Dashboard directly, viewing order and delivery status there, once the order has been confirmed. The Printful plugin largely eliminates all of your stock management worries as well, as it handles inventory at its end. You can see the product availability while creating the product and your customers can see it at the front-end, with the product description.

TL;DR?

Setting up your t-shirt store with Printful and WooCommerce is super easy. At one end, WooCommerce gives you a robust eCommerce mechanism while Printful handles all your inventory management and shipping concerns.

All you have to do is set up your WooCommerce store, create an account on Printful, link it to the store and then create your custom t-shirts with Printful’s easy-to-use interface. While designing your t-shirts, make sure you properly select the specific type, material, sizes, colors, and location availability. Once your t-shirt is designed and ready, it will be displayed automatically on your WooCommerce store.

Yep. It’s that simple!

Have you built a t-shirt store with Printful + WooCommerce? Share your experience with us! Also, feel free to drop a comment in case you need some more help while setting up your store. For further reference, you can watch this t-shirt store setup video, in which WooCommerce expert Chris Lema takes you through the complete process.

Happy selling!

Are You Ready to Start Your Store?

See how easy it is to launch your t-shirt store (or any other store for that matter!) using our Managed WooCommerce Hosting solution.

You’ll also get:

• Automated scaling to keep your site fast during traffic surges.
• Automatically optimized images for fast loading times.
• Lightning fast load times thanks for our built-in CDN.
• And more!

Check it out or give it a try with a free two-week trial.

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