WordPress / WooCommerce Tutorials

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have a WordPress site hosted by OmegaNet, DO NOT upgrade WordPress without first contacting OmegaNet. The version of WordPress is dependent on the version of PHP being used on your site and if you upgrade WordPress beyond the PHP version, you may damage your site. It is usually okay to upgrade plugins.

Below are several articles introducing various facets of a WordPress / WooCommerce blog, information site and/or retail ecommerce site. You can get much more information on the “Manuals” tab in your admin sidebar, at WordPress.org, on a specific plugin’s website or by searching Google or YouTube. These are user level tutorials. They may reference developer issues, but they are not intended for developers.

Click the icon in the lower right of the video to go to full screen.

Introduction to WordPress
Pages and Posts
Themes
Plugins
Menus & Widgets
WooCommerce Product Management in the Admin
WooCommerce Product Management Using a Spreadsheet
WooCommerce Product Management through EZB2C
WooCommerce Payment, Shipping & Sales Tax

Introduction

What is WordPress? WordPress a “Content Management System” or “CMS”

It is the most popular platform for building websites by far, with 75 million website installations. That is about 20% off all websites.

WordPress was originally a blogging platform and many bloggers host their blogs at WordPress.com. If your site is at WordPress.com, WordPress is your website host.

However, WordPress.ORG is the site you go to to get complete control of your website, hosting it anywhere you want. The WordPress platform is “open source”, which means anyone can develop features for it and websites built on WordPress can be modified at the code level by any developer. This distinguishes WordPress from other systems like Shopify, Squarespace and Wix, which are hosted solutions and only allow in-house or developers they approve to create new features.

Since WordPress is “open source”, there are literally tens of thousands of third-party themes, plugins and code snippets that extend the functionality of WordPress websites. No matter what you want your website to do, there is probably a WordPress plugin that will do it, and likely several to choose from.
To manage your WordPress site, you need to log into the admin. The URL or address of the login is usually your website domain, plus “wp-admin”. Your situation may be different, so if that doesn’t work, contact OmegaNet.

If OmegaNet set up and is hosting your website, we will create a username and password for you with Administrator-level privileges.

When you first log in, you will see the WordPress dashboard. For now, notice that this screen shows basic information about your site, such as the WordPress version number and if any updates are needed. You should not automatically perform updates of the version of WordPress on your site, however, because the version you use is dependent on other things on the server, such as the version of PHP installed.
The sidebar on the left is where you access the various features of your website. In future tutorials we will take the ones you will use most often in turn.

You may want to immediately change your password. For that, Go to “Users” and click on “Your Profile.”
On this screen you can add to your profile and make any changes you need to make. To change your password, Scroll down and find “Generate Password.” You can’t see your password, and therefore neither can anyone else. You can only change it. If you click on “Generate Password,” WordPress will suggest an extremely strong password, but you can choose to put in your own. WordPress will rate your custom password from “Very Weak” to “Very Strong”. You should use at least a medium password. If your desired password is less than medium you will have to click the box that allows you to use a weak password.
If you need to, you can create additional users with different usernames, passwords and privileges for members of your staff.
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Pages and Posts

In this section, we are looking at:
– Editing Existing Pages.
– Creating A New Page.
– Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO”.
– Creating and Editing Blog Posts.

… A very basic question is “How do I make changes to the pages on my website?” If OmegaNet built your site, we likely created the pages you wanted initially and populated them with content before launching the site. To make changes to the existing informational pages on your site, click on “Pages” > “All Pages” This will show you all the pages on your website in alphabetical order by the Title. To reveal the edit button, mouse over the Title of the page. This will reveal several options. “Quick Edit” lets you change certain characteristics of the page but not the actual page content. For that, You can click “Edit”.

Note the Title and the page content. You can easily make changes to the content. Once you are happy with your changes, click “Update” to save. Once you have saved the page, you can refresh your browser to see your changes on the website.

Even though WordPress lets you preview pages in the Admin, especially if you are using a third-party page editor, I like to keep two browser tabs open, one with the website and the other with the admin, so I can switch back and forth. If you don’t already have your site open in a tab, click “Preview Changes” and a new tab will open.

We have shown you the default WordPress post and page editor, which is known as “Blocks”, but there are a variety of both free and paid editors available for WordPress with differing levels of sophistication. We’ll talk more about them in the video on “Plugins”.

To create a new page, click on “Pages” > “Add New”. This will show you a blank page.

At minimum you can add a Title and click “Publish” to create the page. In some cases, that may be all you want to do except for adding a “shortcode” to display specialized content like a form or a slider.
WordPress uses “Shortcodes”, which are enclosed in square brackets, to display a variety of content that doesn’t actually appear in the page editor. This content is created and managed in one of the many plugins available for WordPress. We’ll look at plugins later, as well as more on managing pages, but this has been a good overview for now.

There are two ways to add an image to a page: First is the Featured Image.

A Featured image will be displayed at the top of the page and will most likely be the full width of the page. This is determined by your theme. You don’t have to use the Featured image if you prefer not to.
You can add a Featured Image by clicking “Set Featured Image” which will open the Media Library. This is where you can find all your website’s image, including product images. You can select an existing image by clicking to select it and clicking the “Set Featured Image” button.
You can add a new image to the library by simply dragging and dropping it onto the Library. It will be the first image in the list.

But you may prefer to have an image in the body of your page, in which case you would click the Plus symbol to add a block and select the “Image” module. This will give you three options: “Upload”, “Media Library” and “Insert from URL”.

Upload let’s you upload a new image, but you can also do that if click Media Library and drag-and-drop. Media Library is also what you want if you are selecting an existing image. The “Insert from URL” is what you want if you want to display an image from a different website, like your CAMEO EZ wholesale site.
Below the page content is a section for “Yoast SEO”. Your site should have the Yoast SEO plugin installed. “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. If you want your site to be found by Google and therefore by potential customers, this section needs attention. This will be a brief introduction. The makers of the Yoast SEO plugin have many videos on how to make your site Search-Engine friendly.

On the SEO tab, you’ll first see “Focus keyphrase”. This is a keyphrase you want Google to rank your content for. The keyphrase should actually appear several times in your content. Yoast will rate the keyphrase in your content as a green smiley face emoticon if your content has the keyphrase often enough and distributed through the content. If you haven’t done a good job of featuring your Focus keyphrase in your content you may get an orange emoticon or even a red “frowny face”, which means your content really needs work. Google will penalize you if your content doesn’t fit what your title and Focus Keyphrase say your page is about. You may also want to click the “Readability” tab, where you can get suggestions about improving your content’s readability.

Next “Yoast SEO” will show you a preview of what Google will display, including the description which we’ll add below. The SEO title, which appears in the HTML HEAD of the page, is VERY important to your Google rankings. The single product page will display as its title the variables you insert here. There are some there already by default.

The “slug” is the wording for the URL that will appear in the address bar. By default, WordPress will create a slug based on your Title or Product Name, but you may want to simplify and shorten it because Google likes short URLs better than long ones. The meta description is also very important, as it will complete the Google preview above.

The process of creating and editing blog posts is very similar to that of pages. You access them in the Posts menu.

Add a Title and your content, then click “Publish” to create the post.

Posts have Categories, which are not the same as Product Categories. If you are maintaining a blog, you should give some attention to Categories. By default, all posts are “Uncategorized” unless you select a category.

That’s all we have time for in this introduction to WordPress. In the Next Lesson we will do an overview of how WordPress uses themes.

Themes

What is a WordPress theme?

A theme is a collection of files that determine how a website looks and functions. A theme can be bare bones or extremely complex, intended for specialized sites like ecommerce, photographer’s galleries, etc. Every theme will have certain standard files, but specialized themes will have additional files for special-purpose widgets, page layouts, etc. There are thousands of themes available on WordPress.org and thousands more available from third-party vendors. Some themes are free and others require an annual fee.

… In your admin, themes are managed under “Appearance > Themes”. When WordPress is first installed it defaults to a theme named with the year it was introduced, like “twenty-nineteen” or “twenty-twenty-one”. WordPress doesn’t introduce a new theme every year, but every WordPress installation will include three or more free themes. The active theme will be first in the list.

You could use the free default theme, but if you want to change to a different look, you can easily do so by simply selecting a different one from those already on your site or clicking “Add New.”
This will take you to WordPress.org’s repository of themes. Here you can search for a theme type or click one of the categories, like “Popular”, “Latest” or “Favorites”, or you can use the filter to narrow it down. When you find a theme you like, simply mouse over it and click preview to see your site’s content with the new look. If you like the theme, click “Install” and it will become the Active theme.

No theme is going to be perfect for your site without adding elements like your logo, your tagline, etc., and you may want to make more extensive customizations like layout choices, colors, etc.

WordPress best practices recommend creating a “Child Theme” so that upgrading a commercially available theme won’t overwrite your customizations. OmegaNet usually will create a child theme by default. A child theme will include everything in the “parent” theme, but your customizations will take precedence over the “parent” theme elements.

The contents of the theme customization screen with vary depending on the features and complexity of the theme, but this is where you will make most changes to the look of your site. Most themes will have a few basic features:

Site Identity is where you put your site’s title and tagline if you have one. Leave tagline blank if you don’t. You can also upload a site icon, which is the little icon that appears on the browser tab.
The logo tab is where you can upload your logo. Your theme may have a default logo you can easily replace. The other tabs on your customize screen will depend on the features of your theme and the plugins you have installed.

For instance, if your site is a WooCommerce e-commerce site, you will have a tab for WooCommerce where you can make changes to your store.

You may discover that some changes you want can’t be made in the theme customizations, in which case WordPress gives you a way of customizing the style sheet without tampering with the actual style sheet.
Of course you have to know Cascading Style Sheets or CSS, in order to use this feature, but there’s plenty of information about CSS available free online.

Some changes may require actually changing the theme’s PHP code, for instance, if your theme has three widget areas in the footer, but you need four. Those kinds of changes may be need to be made in the site’s functions.php file and / or in one of the many page templates. Before doing this kind of change, it’s wise to back up your site and, even better make the changes in a child theme. These topics are beyond the scope of this tutorial, but Google and YouTube are a wealth of information about them.

Plugins

What is a WordPress plugin?

A plugin is a set of code files that extends and enhances the functionality of a WordPress site. So the difference between a theme and a plugin is that a theme is mostly about how a site looks and a plugin is about what a site can do.

… A new WordPress installation will have almost no plugins, so the plugins you add depend on the functionality you need. There are thousands of plugins available on WordPress.org and thousands more available from third-party vendors. Some plugins are free and others require an annual fee. A skilled and knowledgeable developer can create plugins for WordPress and many have made a career out of doing just that.

To see the plugins currently installed on your site, click on “Plugins > Installed Plugins” in the sidebar. Just because a plugin is in the list doesn’t mean it is active. If it is active it will have a “Deactivate” link, which will be replaced by an “Activate” link if the plugin is inactive. If the plugin is inactive, it will have no effect on the operation of the website.

Since WordPress was originally a blogging platform, it has what it needs for that function, but for most other functions, plugins are required.

For example, the Yoast SEO plugin enables you to do extensive Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO”, on your site. Some plugins are for creating complex online forms.

WooCommerce is the most common ecommerce plugin on WordPress and it has a large suite of supporting plugins which extend the functionality of your online store.

No matter what you want your site to do, there is probably a WordPress plugin that will enable you to do it, and likely several to choose from for any given task. There are many free ones from WordPress.org and many thousands more from third party vendors, some free some paid.

Before installing a new plugin, you should be aware of the requirements of the plugin as to the versions of WordPress it is compatible with and any other potential conflicts. You can easily install a new plugin by going to your plugins page and clicking “Add New”.

There are two options for installing a new plugin: You can use the Search to find the plugin you want in the WordPress.Org respository OR you can upload a zip file, if you downloaded the plugin from a third-party provider. You should upload the zipped version of the file, not after you unzip it.

You can also Activate and Deactivate plugins on the Plugins screen. Occasionally you may want to deactivate a plugin if you suspect it is conflicting with some other plugin or function of your site. That’s a quick way to troubleshoot an issue.

Let’s take a look at a list of important plugins every site should have:

I’ve already mentioned Yoast SEO for Search Engine Optimization and WooCommerce, which is necessary to have an online retail store, and the many supporting plugins that allow you to customize your store.
The next plugin that should be on every site is WordFence. WordFence provides security against hackers and attacks on your website. There is both a free and a paid version. The free version will allow you to protect your site to a great degree, but the paid version has much more functionality.

Next, you should have a Back up plugin so you can restore your site if anything goes wrong. There are a number of options, such as BackWPUp, BackupGuard and UpdraftPlus. The last one is the one I’m most familiar with. The paid version lets you schedule automatic backups. Related to this is a plugin called WP Reset, which is like an undo button for your entire website, in case you install a plugin or something that causes problems.

If your site is hosted by OmegaNet, we give you an SSL certificate to secure your site for credit card transactions and general security, but if it’s hosted somewhere else you need a plugin like WP Force SSL & HTTPS Redirect. Showing your site as HTTPS instead of HTTP is very important, not just for the obvious security concern, but because Google will downgrade your organic search position if your site is not secure.

OmegaNet tries to always install the Video User Manuals plugin, which gives you access to video tutorials on a lot of topics concerning WordPress and WooCommerce. If you have a question, the answer is likely in one of those videos. You can also simply search YouTube and find thousands of videos on various topics.

This list could be a lot longer if we were considering special purpose plugins, but I’ll end with another all-purpose plugin. The native WordPress page and post editor is loved by some and hated by many, so you may want to use an editing plugin like Divi, Beaver Builder or Elementor. I’m most familiar with Elementor, but they all do much the same thing, allowing you to drag-and-drop page elements and populate them more easily than with the native Page Builder. Modules even include things like sliders, galleries and WooCommerce customizations.
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https://youtu.be/ldGR6kDc03Q

Menus & Widgets

In this section, we will do an overview of menus and widgets.

First, the most basic application of menus is the main site navigation, but it is possible to have multiple menus on a site. To access your menus in the admin, go to “Appearance > Menus”.

… This page will display the menu most recently accessed. Or if no menu has been built, default menus for Main Navigation and Top Bar will be available or you can “create a new menu”.

Any menu you create can be assigned to any place on your site by clicking the Manage Locations tab and selecting the menu from the dropdown to the right of the location. You can select a different menu for mobile if you like.

The first block to the right displays the pages you’ve created on your website and you can choose whether or not to add them to your menu. It defaults to “Most Recent”, so if you don’t see a page, click “View All”. Simply click the “Add to Menu” button to add them.

You’ll probably want to rearrange the pages once you have added them. All you have to do is drag them to where you want them. Let’s say you want some pages to be in a dropdown under a menu item. All you have to do is drag the submenu items to the right so they are indented and a dropdown will automatically be formed, once you “Save Menu” of course!

But you can add all sorts of other things to your menus, like blog posts, links to other websites, Product Categories and more.

Let’s say you didn’t want the menu item with the submenu dropdown to actually link to a page. For that you’d use the “Custom Links”. When you click it, you can put in the URL and the Link Text. If you don’t want it to link anywhere, but simply activate the dropdown, simply put a hashtag in the URL blank. Then click “Add to Menu.”

It may be confusing at first to have “Categories” and “Product Categories” here. The difference is “Categories” are blog-post categories and “Product Categories” are your WooCommerce product categories. Again, don’t forget to Save your changes.

Now we’ll do a quick overview of widgets. A widget is a module that allows you to display certain information in a specific place, called “Widget Areas”. Depending on the theme you select, the Widget Areas available to you will vary. Widget Areas can also be added in the code of any theme.

This page will display the widget areas that are available in your theme by default over on the right. On the left are types of widgets you can load into the widget areas.

For Example, this theme has two Footer Widgets. I can drag any of the widgets to any widget area I choose. Lets say I want to display a list of the Pages on my site in Footer #1. Once I drag it into the widget area, I can give the widget a title, which will be displayed as a heading, a sort order, and I can list page id’s to exclude if I don’t want to display all the pages I have created in the footer.

Suppose you’ve installed a plugin that gives you a shortcode, such as to display a form. You could put that shortcode on a page to display the form, but you could also put it in a Widget Area. Just use the Text widget, adding the shortcode to the text content box.

A lot of plugins will create their own widgets and they will automatically appear in the Available Widgets when you activate them. A wide variety of things can be done with widgets, but we’ve seen the basic process.

Managing WooCommerce Products in the Admin

In this section, we will do an overview of product management, looking first at how to manage product information and images through the Admin.

In the left sidebar is a link to “Products” directly under woo commerce. Under products is all products. Over on the left is the Search so you can search for product by its a SKU number or a name.
… Mouse over the product name to reveal the “Edit” link. That lets you see all the product information.
You’ll first see the product name or title and the description. Note that you have tools to customize the style of the description. You can even use the “Add Media” link to add an extra image if you like.

Your site should have the Yoast SEO plugin installed. “SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization. It will show you a preview of what Google will display, including the description which we’ll add below. The SEO title, which appears in the HTML HEAD of the page, is VERY important to your Google rankings. The single product page will display as its title the variables you insert here.

Now scroll down to the Product data section, and you need to set the Product Type. The default is “Simple product” and you can leave it at that, unless your product has options the customer can choose, like different colors or sizes. Then it is a “Variable product”. “Variations” is WooCommerce’s term for product options. The others are special circumstances we won’t spend time on here.

To create options or variations for a “Variable” product, Click on the “Attributes” tab. Setting up a variable product lets you get very detailed about how you want the product to be displayed and ordered. It is beyond the scope of this video, but there is a very good video on Variable Products under the “Manual” link in your admin. If for some reason you don’t have the “Manual” plugin, contact OmegaNet.

Here is also where you enter the price of the product. The Regular price will be displayed on the site unless you enter a Sale price, in which case, on the site, the regular price will be struck through and the sale price will be red. You can limit the duration of a sale by clicking “Schedule” next to the Sale price.
On a related topic, if you want to create a coupon code for a site-wide discount, that is done under WooCommerce > Coupons, which allows you to set an ending date, limit the number of uses and limit the coupon to certain products.

“Tax Status” defaults to “Taxable” and “Tax class” defaults to “Standard”, which you can probably leave as-is unless your circumstance is different.

WooCommerce has a basic inventory system. Clicking the “Inventory” tab will let you indicate if the product is in stock or out of stock. If you check “Manage Stock? Enable stock management at product level” you can put in a quantity in stock and indicate if you’ll allow backorders. The quantity will increment down as the product is purchased.

You may not have to put anything for Shipping if you are using a Flat Rate for shipping, but if you are using an API for a shipper like FedEx, UPS or the postal service, you’ll need to have an accurate weight for the product and length, width and height of the product in its box. You should only have to deal with shipping class if you are creating shipping classes for oversized products that must be shipped by truck.
“Linked Products” lets you designate related products for Upsells, which are suggestions for more expensive products to replace the item in the cart, or Cross-sells, which are related items the customer might want in addition to what they have in their cart.

To add or change a product image, look over to the right under “Product image” You should see the image if there is one. If not, you can click “Set product image”. That will open the media library. You can drag and drop an image to the library and then click “Set product image” at the lower right. If there is already an image and you want to replace it, click “replace image” and that will also open the library and you can upload the image.

Don’t forget to click “Update” to save your changes!

Some themes will have a “Featured Product” shortcode that can appear on the home page to promote your best sellers. To designate a product as a Featured Product, find “Catalog Visibility” in the right sidebar. Clicking it will give you a checkbox to make the product featured. Click “Update” to save and you’re done.

You can assign a product to a category or multiple categories in the right sidebar. All the categories you have created will appear here with subcategories indented.

You also have the option of creating a new category right here within the product editor.
The product will appear in all categories you checkmark here.

You also have the option of creating a new category right here within the product editor. We will look at creating all your categories at once next.

There are a couple of other ways to create categories. You can import a spreadsheet, which we’ll look at in the next video or, if you have OmegaNet’s EZB2C plugin, discussed in a subsequent video, you can pull products and categories, as well as images, from your CAMEO EZ wholesale site.

But you may prefer to create all your categories at once in the admin. You can do that by going to Products > Categories.

The process is similar to creating a new Page or Product. First, under “Add new category” give your category a name. this is the name that will be displayed in the navigation.

Then create a “slug”, which is the wording that will be in the URL for the category. It should be all lowercase and, if it has multiple words in the category name, they should be separated by commas, not spaces.

You can also put in a description for your category.

We will skip Display Type until we are ready to leave this screen and just mention that here is where you add a category image. Clicking “Upload/Add image” will open the standard WordPress Media Uploader where you can drag-and-drop your image.

All right, back to “Display type”. You can choose to leave it as “default” or select display products, subcategories or both. The default is determined by what has been set in a different place.

To set the default category display, go to Appearance > Customize > WooCommerce > Then, depending on your theme, it may be under Archives or Product Catalog, find “Shop page display” and “Category display”. Shop page display will determine whether your first product page displays categories or popular products. You can display Categories, products or both.

“Category display” will determine what the customers sees when they click on a category. You can display Subcategories, products or both. This will be the default when you are creating a new category.

Managing WooCommerce Products in the Spreadsheet

In this section, we will do an overview of product management, looking first at how to manage product information and images through the spreadsheet.

In the left sidebar is a link to “Products” directly under Woo Commerce. Under products is “All Products.” At the top of the page you have “Add New”, “Import” and “Export”. We’ve already covered Adding New Products in the admin. Even if you intend to import a spreadsheet of all your products, there may be times you’ll need to make small changes in the Admin, or there may be some things that can only be done in the Admin.

… Now we will examine adding products through the spreadsheet import. The import/export here is the built import/export in WooCommerce, but you can also install plugins that do the same thing but may give you more flexibility. We will focus on the built-in feature.

If you are planning to manage your products using a spreadsheet, it’s ideal to create a couple of products in the admin and then export the spreadsheet so you can see what it looks like and what you will need to do to put the rest of your products into the spreadsheet.

When you click the Export button you’ll get this screen, which allows you to only export certain fields or columns, if you want, but I recommend exporting all columns, so you can see everything in your data and everything you can enter in the spreadsheet. You could also choose to only export certain products or categories if you needed to. The “Export custom meta” option will include things you may have entered through the Yoast SEO fields.

Click “Generate CSV” and your spreadsheet will be downloaded to your computer in comma-delimited or CSV format, which you can open and edit in Excel.

Like most spreadsheets the column header is in the first row and it tells you what data is in each column, although the names may not always be entirely obvious. Each row after that is a different product.
The first column is the ID number assigned by the system. If you are building a spreadsheet from scratch, you won’t know this number so you should just leave this column blank.

Next is “Type”. This will usually need to say “simple”, unless it’s a product with options or “variations”, which is WooCommerce’s word for a product which has one SKU number but you can choose to order different colors or sizes.

Next is “SKU” where you can put your unique number for the product on each row.
After that is “Name” where you can put the short version of what you call the product.
Next is “Published” which should be a “one” if the product is to be active or a “zero” if you want it to be inactive.

Column “F” in this export is labelled “Is Featured” which should be a “one” if the product to be a “Featured Product” for widgets that display featured products, otherwise it should be “zero”.
Column “G” is labelled “Visibility.” You can make this “visible” if you want it to be on the website, but if you want to make it temporarily inactive, you should make it “hidden”.

Column H is where you can enter a Short Description of the product, if you have one.
It will display directly below the price on the single item page.

Column I says simply “Description”, but that is where you want to put the full, long description of the product.

It will display at the end of the single item page.

We’re going to consider four columns at once now, because they all relate to the price. Columns J, K, Y & Z work together to display the price you want.

If you only have a regular price it goes in column Z and that’s all you have to do.

But if you want to assign a sale price and have the site display the regular price with strikethrough and feature the sale price you’ll need to utilize columns J, K & Y. You put your sale price in Column Y, the date the sale begins in column J and the date the sale ends in column K. Then the product will be on sale on the date you set for the sale to begin and it will go back to the regular price on the date your set for it to end.

Sales tax has two columns: “L” & “M”. “L” is “Tax Status”. In most cases for shippable, tangible products, this should say “taxable”. Likewise, in most cases you can leave “M” blank and it will default to the standard rate.

If you are using the inventory system, you can enter a “one” in column “N” if the product is in stock or a “zero” if it’s not.

Enter the quantity on hand in column “O” if you want the product to be gone from the website when stock runs low, and Column “P” lets you enter a “Low stock amount” for the number of inventory when you want the product to be taken off the website.

Finally column Q lets you specify if you want to allow backorders by entering a “one” or you can enter “zero” if you don’t want to.

This is a long video, but never fear, we’re almost finished! We’re going to skip a few columns to finish up.
You can assign your products to a category in column AA. Separate parent categories from their child categories with [space], “less-than”, [space]. Said another way, the top-level category is separated from subcategories by [space], “less-than”, [space].

You can add tags to your products in column AB. Tags correspond to Keywords on CAMEO EZ wholesale sites. Separate multiple tags with commas.

In the Images column, you need to put the full URL path to your images, starting with “https://”. The default path will have the domain name for your site, “wp-content”, [slash], “uploads”, [slash], the year, the month and the image name.

Managing WooCommerce Products through EZB2C

In this section, we will look at how to manage the products on your WooCommerce retail site using OmegaNet’s EZB2C plugin.

OmegaNet has created a product integration plugin, known as “EZB2C”, which stands for “Easy Business-to Consumer”. The plugin uses a custom API to sync the product data and images from a CAMEO EZ wholesale site to a WordPress/WooCommerce retail site.

Once the plugin is installed and activated it will appear in your WordPress Plugins like other plugins.
… To help describe EZB2C, we’ll also look at what it is NOT. EZB2C will not pull products from your retail site to your CAMEO EZ wholesale site. It only goes one way: from wholesale to retail.

Nor will EZB2C work with other platforms like Shopify, Wix, Zen Cart, etc. It is strictly a WordPress / WooCommerce plugin.

Four settings are entered into the plugin one time on the “Settings” screen: First, your CAMEO EZ site URL, which will be h-t-t-p-s-colon-slash-slash, your Admin username, [dot] “cameoez.com”. Second, your Admin username. Third, your Admin password. Finally, the REST API Consumer Key, which OmegaNet will generate. These settings shouldn’t need to be adjusted once they are in place.
If your site uses options like size or color, called “variations” in WooCommerce, you can decide how you want the price change to be interpreted under “EZB2C customization”.

For example, if on your CAMEO EZ site, the wholesale price is $10 and the retail price is $20, that means your price doubles for retail, so the price change will also be doubled. If the price change for the “Large” size on wholesale is $2.65, on retail the price change will be $5.30 for a total of $25.30, but you might not think the result is a “pretty” retail price. You can set the “variation” price to the nearest dollar or 50 cents or whatever you prefer, making our example $25.50 and then the system will subtract a penny to make it $25.49.

These settings should only need to be entered once.

To Sync your products from your wholesale site to your retail site, go to the Dashboard screen, which has a single “Start synchronization” button. This will pull all product data from your CAMEO EZ wholesale site to your WordPress / WooCommerce retail site. The amount of time it takes to complete the sync depends on the number of products you have.

The sync will include product data like SKUs, Item Names and Descriptions, retail prices, product images, plus categories and category images. Keywords are also pulled over as WooCommerce “tags.” If your products have options on your CAMEO EZ site, they will be brought over to the retail site. Also, If you are using the inventory feature on your CAMEO EZ wholesale site, that data will be pulled as well.
EZB2C does NOT sync wholesale features like Minimum Orders, Multiples and Class for Case Packs, Volume Discounts, etc.

This way all product management on both wholesale and retail can be done in your CAMEO EZ wholesale site spreadsheet or the Admin Console. There are a few things you need to make sure you do in your CAMEO EZ spreadsheet, or in the product editor in the Admin, if you manage your products that way.
First, you need to have “Yes” in the “Allow Retailers” field (Column N of the spreadsheet) for every product you want to appear on your retail site. If you don’t want a product pulled to the retail site, such as a display or sales materials, make Allow Retailers “No”.

Next, you need to have the retail price you want to appear on the retail site in the MSRP field (Column Y on the spreadsheet). If there is no price in the MSRP field, the EZB2C plugin will calculate the price by multiplying the wholesale price by 2.

Then, since EZB2C pulls categories (including subcategories) as well as products, there are a few considerations for going between the two systems.

First, you cannot use certain characters in category names, such as: back or forward slashes ( \, / ), less-than, greater-than ( <, > ), or Ampersand ( & ) symbols.

Also, you should not use extended UTF-8 characters such as the accented “é” in “décor”. These all cause problem in the synchronization with WooCommerce.

If you want to put products on retail that are not on your CAMEO EZ Wholesale site, you can. Simply use either the WordPress admin method or the spreadsheet to add the products as explained in the two previous videos in this series.

Also, if you want to create a coupon code on your retail site it will need to be done in the WordPress admin, because EZB2C can’t pull those from your wholesale site. Also, If you want to put products on sale on your retail site, you will need to change the individual product prices in the WooCommerce product editor, because those are not pulled from the wholesale site either since you wouldn’t likely have the same sale on retail that you had on wholesale.

Payment, Shipping & Tax

In this section, we will do an overview of Payment, Shipping charges and Sales Tax on WooCommerce sites.

You access these features under WooCommerce > Settings. Here you will see a number of tabs and before we jump into Payment, I want to call your attention to the Emails tab. This is where you set the email address you want to receive the order notification emails.

Now to Payment.

Click on the Payment tab on the Settings page. In a fresh WooCommerce installation, there are a few default payment options.

… It is unlikely you will use some of these, like Direct bank transfer, Check payments and Cash on delivery, but they come with WooCommerce by default. Also by default, you get PayPal Standard. We’ll take a close look at setting it up.

PayPal Standard is the most popular payment method on WooCommerce. It is simple to set up and the only requirement is that you have a PayPal Business account at PayPal.com. You will need information from within your PayPal Business account to complete the setup of the payment method.

PayPal Standard allows your customers to use their own PayPal accounts to purchase or to use a credit card to checkout without logging into PayPal. After entering their contact information, the customer will be taken to PayPal to input their payment information.

To setup PayPal Standard, click the “set up” button to the right and you’ll be taken to this screen. You’ll click to Enable the payment method once you’ve completed the set up. There will be some information in the Title and Description which will be displayed on the checkout page. You can modify these if you want it to say something different.

Then you’ll need to enter the email address you used to create your PayPal account. It must be the same email address as your PayPal account.

You should put the email address to receive the notifications in the next blank. This email could be different from the one used to set up your PayPal Account.

You will need to get a PayPal identity token from within your PayPal Account, especially if you DON’T check IPN Email Notifications.

In your PayPal Account, go to your Account Settings and find “Website Payments” in the sidebar, then “Website preferences” and click “Update”.

There you’ll see “Auto Return” which is where you need to put the URL for the page you want your customer to come back to after they are finished at PayPal. WooCommerce creates several pages by default, but a “Thank You” page for the customer after the order is paced is not one of them, so you’ll want to do that and put the URL here.

The next things you’ll need from your PayPal Account, are the API credentials, which include three things:
Live API username
Live API password
and Live API signature

To get the Live API Username, Password and Signature, from within your PayPal Account, go to “Account Settings” > “Account access” > “API access, click “Update”. Scroll down to find “NVP/SOAP API integration” and Click “Manage API credentials” on the next page, click “Request API signature” to see API credentials on the next page.

Enter your Live API Username, Password and Signature in the corresponding blanks.
You can now save the information. If you haven’t already, be sure to check the box at the top of the page to enable this payment method.

PayPal will now be available as the payment method on your site. It is wise to do a test order to ensure that the payment is working.

If you prefer another payment gateway, such as Authorize.net, Stripe or a gateway from your merchant account provider, those can be added by adding a plugin. the process is similar to what we just looked at. You will need to enter the information required by the plugin to connect your account to your website.

Now we’ll take a quick look at Shipping.

Like Payment, there are many plugins for Shipping, some work with shippers like FedEx, UPS or postal shipping. These plugins may require you to include weights, height, width, and length for all your products. They will then connect to the web service for these shippers to give you accurate shipping rates for the customer’s location based on the products they are ordering.

But there are also built-in options for creating your own shipping rates.

When you first click the Shipping tab, you’ll see a screen asking you to Add a “Shipping Zone”. You can create as many shipping zones as you need to. You may want to have different shipping rules for inside your country that for elsewhere in the world, so you could create a zone for your country and another zone for everyone else. Or you may want to get more detailed.

You will first give the zone a name, then select regions within the zone. Clicking in the blank will give you a dropdowns of countries and states or provinces to choose from.

If the zone is your country then the region may just be your country. If your zone is less than your whole country, the region will be less as well. If your zone is a region of your country with several states or provinces, you’ll need to select multiple regions from the list.

There is also a link that allows you to select specific postal codes if you want to get really granular.
Then you will add the shipping methods. You can have more than one shipping method for a zone, but WooCommerce has a few methods out of the box.

Clicking “Add shipping method” will give you this popup with the default shipping methods:
“Flat Rate”
“Free Shipping”
and “Local Pickup”

Like with Payment, you may prefer to use a plugin for different shipping options. One that is popular is Table-rate shipping, which lets you create different rates based on the dollar amount of the order or the number of products ordered.

You can find instructions for third-party plugins from the plugin developer or on YouTube.
Finally, Sales Tax is a big topic and is very complicated because the requirements vary from country to country and state/province to state/province.

For example, in the United States you are required to pay sales tax in any state in which you have a “Nexus”, which means anywhere you have a location, which includes your home office, any satellite locations, your fulfillment warehouse and even anywhere a remote employee might live. So at the very least you need to be charging sales tax for those states, unless of course they are one of the four states that don’t have sales tax.

Because sales tax is complicated and constantly changing, it’s a good idea to use a plugin like TaxJar, which keeps up with all the requirements, charges sales tax where you are required to charge it and can give you a report of what sales taxes you owe in each jurisdiction.

If you don’t use TaxJar, you can create tax rates for different regions much like creating shipping zones with different shipping rates. click on “Tax” in the WooCommerce settings. click “Standard rates” to create rates for states.