Step-by-Step Guides to Building and Growing Your Website
Ecommerce covers building and running an online store in WooCommerce — initial setup (products, payments, shipping, tax), and the ongoing work that follows: checkout and cart customisation, product pages, subscriptions, coupons, reviews, inventory, and recovering abandoned carts.
Most of this is written for owners configuring their own store, not developers building something custom. The focus stays on changes that actually affect conversion and day-to-day running, past just clicking through the setup wizard.
How to set up WooCommerce refunds and returns properly — EU/UK’s mandatory 14-day withdrawal right, the digital-content exception, manual vs automatic refunds, and rules by product type.
Selling PDFs, templates, or other digital files through WooCommerce only takes a few settings, but the wrong ones cause broken downloads, unprotected files, and skipped EU VAT obligations. Here’s how to set it up properly.
The PCI compliance tier a store actually falls under depends on a checkout detail most owners never think about — whether card fields are a genuine hosted iframe (the lighter SAQ A) or embedded via Stripe Elements (the heavier SAQ A-EP, which is most WooCommerce stores).
Forced account creation costs a real, measured 26% of checkouts (Baymard Institute) — the settings that keep guest checkout available while still getting customers to sign up, and the My Account setup that supports it.
Real recovery numbers (10.2% average, top performers reaching 10-14%) — plus the GDPR nuance most guides skip entirely: a cart-recovery email is legally marketing, not a transaction, and that changes what’s actually allowed to send in the EU.
WooCommerce Analytics reads from the same order data that moved to custom database tables under High-Performance Order Storage — worth knowing if a store recently switched storage modes and numbers look off.
WooCommerce shipping zones control where you ship and what you charge — set them up correctly and checkout rates stop being a mystery. Here’s the zone setup plus what live carrier rates actually require.
The order workflow itself hasn’t changed, but where WooCommerce actually stores your orders has — High-Performance Order Storage is now the default, and it’s worth knowing which mode your store is on.
Worth clarifying since it trips up a lot of stores: Google’s ban on “self-serving” review rich snippets covers LocalBusiness/Organization schema, not genuine WooCommerce product reviews — those still qualify for star ratings in search results.
The setting most inventory guides skip entirely: Hold Stock (minutes), which reserves inventory for unpaid orders so two customers can’t both “buy” the last unit during checkout, plus the honest caveat that it isn’t perfectly reliable.