Preface

WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world. There are over 1,000,000 stores running WooCommerce for a huge variety of reasons. Some store owners like the thousands of themes they have access to, some like that they can build on top of their existing WordPress sites, and others really like the open source customizable angle and knowing that they can always read and customize the code any way they want. If you decide to build a store on WooCommerce, be prepared for an almost overwhelming amount of choice. Because it's so popular, you'll always have a lot of options in front of you.

Mastering WooCommerce 4 takes you from having absolutely nothing to having a fully functioning store. As the title of the book implies, we will go deep into WooCommerce and show you the basic options as well as some of the more advanced customizations. We'll do so in an orderly way, starting from the very beginning by setting up a test WordPress site and covering fundamental topics that we'll revisit throughout the rest of the book. Each chapter that follows will expand on the basics, allowing for a gentle progression curve that will allow almost any user to follow along. Each chapter will cover a new section of WooCommerce and thus can be seen as an independent unit, letting you tackle it separately from the others if you are already proficient in the other topics. 

We'll first introduce you to the basics of WooCommerce and WordPress, which will help you develop and debug any issue. You will then learn how to create a simple product and optimize it for SEO. We will then look at shipping, taxes, and payment. After that, we will look into integrating with third-party services for fulfillment and reporting. Furthermore, we will also dive into Point of Sale (POS) systems that let you sell in person. We will then end the book by creating a very basic custom plugin that you can use for any customizations you wish to make.