Table of Contents for
Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce - Second Edition

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce - Second Edition by Robbert Ravensbergen Published by Packt Publishing, 2015
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
  4. Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
  5. Credits
  6. About the Author
  7. About the Reviewers
  8. www.PacktPub.com
  9. Preface
  10. What you need for this book
  11. Who this book is for
  12. Conventions
  13. Reader feedback
  14. Customer support
  15. 1. Setting Up WooCommerce
  16. Installing WooCommerce
  17. Setting up WooCommerce
  18. Summary
  19. 2. Creating Your First Products
  20. Creating your first product
  21. Setting the categories, tags, and images for your product
  22. Summary
  23. 3. Using Downloadable Products and Variations
  24. Using attributes
  25. Setting up variable and grouped products
  26. Other product types
  27. Summary
  28. 4. Payments, Shipping, and Coupons
  29. Shipping methods and prices
  30. Using discount coupons
  31. Summary
  32. 5. Working with WooCommerce Themes
  33. Making or buying a theme
  34. Installing a WooCommerce theme
  35. Using the Storefront theme
  36. Summary
  37. 6. Customizing a WooCommerce Theme
  38. WordPress theme basics
  39. Developing WooCommerce themes
  40. Summary
  41. 7. Running Your Online Store
  42. Deploying your WooCommerce store
  43. Working with sales orders
  44. Reporting
  45. Summary
  46. 8. More Possibilities Using Plugins
  47. Popular and useful WooCommerce plugins
  48. A store in multiple languages
  49. Summary
  50. Index

Chapter 7. Running Your Online Store

During the former chapters, we've learned to work with WooCommerce themes. We even had a look at changing our WordPress theme, although this is a subject that requires a deeper knowledge of web design and coding techniques.

Once we set up our store, payment methods, products, and theme, we are able to start doing business! But what happens next? As a store owner, it's important to test the purchase process completely. Not only to check what your customers will see and receive, but also to know what will happen once your first orders start rolling in. In this chapter, we'll learn to:

  • Adjust the notification e-mails
  • Deploy our WooCommerce store
  • Work with sales orders
  • Manage the inventory
  • Look at the available sales reports

Adjusting the notification e-mails

Assuming that, up to this point, you've been setting up your store in a development environment, you're now almost ready to deploy your store.

A topic that we didn't fully discuss during Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce, is e-mail messages. We discussed the basic settings, but what if we wanted to do additional changes? Let's first go back to the WooCommerce Settings page and click on the Emails tab.

Under Email Options, there's a link available that shows a preview of your current e-mail template. We added a logo during Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce and changed some of the colors. Our example currently looks as follows:

Adjusting the notification e-mails

Note that, besides the general e-mail settings, every e-mail that WooCommerce can send has its own form with settings. You may use this to disable the e-mail completely or change its subject and title.

Tip

WooCommerce seems to offer an invoice possibility because it shows a couple of settings for the invoice e-mail. However, real invoice numbering doesn't exist in WooCommerce. WooCommerce uses post ID's, which means in practice that gaps will appear in your order numbering. In lots of countries, it's mandatory to use a progressive invoice number. You'll need an additional plugin to solve this issue. An example will follow in Chapter 8, More Possibilities Using Plugins.

If you like to have complete control over your e-mail templates, you have the following two possibilities:

  • Use an additional plugin that give the possibility to create the layout of the e-mail templates using drag and drop
  • Change the code of the default WooCommerce e-mail templates

In this chapter, we'll take a look at the second option. To be able to change the existing templates, you need to copy the template files to your own theme. By doing so, you will be able to change the HTML of your e-mails completely! Of course, you must have some PHP and HTML knowledge to be able to understand and change the files.

Don't just change the original WooCommerce e-mail templates in the plugin folder because, in that case, your changes will be lost when there's an update of the WooCommerce plugin.

If you want to use this possibility, copy the e-mail templates that you want to change from the following folder:

 wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/emails

Copy this to your theme folder:

 wp-content/themes/your-theme-name/woocommerce/emails

In our demo store, using the Storefront Child theme, this would be as follows:

 wp-content/themes/storefront-child/woocommerce/emails

WooCommerce has a handy function available that copies the necessary file for you. You can find it at the bottom of every individual e-mail settings screen:

Adjusting the notification e-mails

When you copy the file to your theme, it will automatically be added to your child theme if you're using one. Next, the view template button shows the code of the template file. It's possible to make changes here immediately and save your changes. Working that way isn't recommended though, because a small mistake in the code might break your website:

Adjusting the notification e-mails

If you made any mistakes that break your e-mail, it's always possible to restart. Use the button Delete template file to remove it from your theme, and you can copy the original file again.

Note that you only need to copy the files that you want to change. Don't just copy all of them if you don't need it. That would only become confusing in the future when doing updates.

In the WooCommerce plugin folder, you'll see a PHP file for every e-mail template. There's also a subfolder available named plain. In this folder, the templates for non-HTML e-mails are stored. Depending on the changes that you're making, it can be necessary to copy as well the HTML e-mail templates as the plain versions to your theme folder.

Besides the template files, there are also helper files like email-header.php and email-footer.php. If you want to make a change to these parts of your e-mails, you need to copy these files as well.

For more information, refer to http://docs.woothemes.com/document/template-structure.