Many people dream of running their own store and launching their entrepreneurial careers. However, starting and running a brick-and-mortar business is challenging and requires a larger amount of capital investment. But, building an ecommerce website and selling your products online is well within reach for anybody.
All you need is a well-designed, fully functional eCommerce website that allows you to promote your products to a broad range of customers. Selling products via a storefront is limited, you can only reach a limited number of people, and sales are dependent on opening times, and available stock. In contrast, selling products online enables you to sell your products all over the globe.
With Elementor, WordPress, and WooCommerce, you can design a fully-functional and cost-effective eCommerce website without any coding on your part. Elementor’s features, templates, and drag & drop editor allow you to custom-design your very own eCommerce website that reflects your personality as a couple and provides practical details about the event.
Here’s how to create an awesome eCommerce website in WordPress and Elementor:
What should an Ecommerce website include?
Before we begin with our guide to creating the site, we first need to understand the key ingredients of an ecommerce website and its role. Here are some of the important pages and elements that every ecommerce website needs:
1. Homepage
The homepage is key to the success of your eCommerce store. The hero image should depict your latest products, or images of satisfied customers, along with a compelling message and the store’s name.
For an eCommerce site, the number one priority is usability. Customers must be able to easily and intuitively find the product they’re looking for, and the checkout process should be seamless.
So, the homepage should feature the top product categories and popular products, as well as products that are on sale, or new. It should also feature a clearly displayed search bar.
2. Categories
You need to consider carefully how to categorize your products. This can be determined based on industry norms, search volume, and market research. Each category needs its own lobby page with a description of the available products, a well-designed grid, with pictures of the product, and price information.
You should also include an ‘Add to Cart’ CTA, beneath each product to enable a faster checkout process.
Navigation is key for an eCommerce store, so when you upload your different products, make sure to tag and categorize them correctly, so that when a user looks for something specific, like a green, v-neck shirt, they’ll be offered the right product. Also, ensure that each category page has a filter, so users can easily find the precise item that they’re looking for.
3. Product Pages
Each individual product should have its own page, containing a product description, price, product photos, ‘Add to Cart’ CTA, and any relevant information, such as size, weight, etc. You should also provide shipping and delivery details.
To upsell additional products, you should include a ‘People also buy’ carousel with relevant related products. Other key features of a product page are product ratings, testimonials from satisfied buyers, and stock availability and inventory.
Depending on what you’re selling, embedding tutorial videos, interactive demos, and media galleries could also be useful additions to the product pages.
4. Checkout Funnel
The checkout funnel must be smooth, seamless, and fully optimized. The funnel includes:
Shopping cart:
This is where customers store the products they want to buy. The cart should provide the total cost price of all the selected items and a ‘Checkout’ CTA that directs the user to the payment page.
Checkout:
The checkout page should list all the available payment methods, shipping information and times, and a ‘Pay Now’ CTA.
See our guide for setting up payment processing on WordPress.
Confirmation:
Once the customer has completed the checkout process they should be directed to a confirmation page that thanks them for their purchase and confirms the order items and payment.
5. Blog
Lastly, your eCommerce store needs a blog. As well as selling products via your website, you also need to educate potential customers about the benefits of what you’re selling. Publishing high-quality blog posts related to your products also helps to promote your website in search e engines, which increases the volume of traffic to your site, and ultimately sales.
How to Create an Ecommerce Website — A Step-by-Step Guide
Step 1: Choose your domain name
When you set out to create your own website, the first thing you need to do is get a domain name and a web hosting service. Your domain name will allow visitors to access your website.
Step 2: Choose your web hosting plan
The hosting plan will allow you to house all the files that make up your site. Your hosting server is where you will install WordPress and the add-ons mentioned in this tutorial.
What’s great about WordPress hosting is that it’s optimized specifically for WordPress performance, security needs, installation, and onboarding processes. There is a long list of WordPress hosts to choose from, and many considerations to factor into your selection process.
As far as hosting plans go, they range from affordable shared hosting plans to more expensive managed WordPress hosting and premium dedicated servers. To make your lives easier, we recommend several hosting packages that are fully compatible with Elementor.
Once you’ve signed up for your hosting plan, you will receive a welcome email that will have all the details related to your account. Find the login link to your hosting account area and use the username and password to log into your account.
Step 3: Install WordPress
The next step is to install WordPress. After you have logged in to your hosting account, click on the My Accounts tab and then log in to your cPanel. In cPanel, click on the WordPress icon in the auto-installers area and follow the steps to install WordPress.
After WordPress has been installed, go ahead and visit your WordPress site. Enter the name and password you’ve set up and click ‘Log In’ to access your WordPress dashboard.
(Textual link) See our full guide on how to install WordPress here: How to Install WordPress
Once you’ve downloaded and installed the WordPress software, you can take advantage of the WordPress CMS platform. The flexibility of WordPress lets you choose from tens of thousands of WordPress templates, themes, and plugins.
Step 4: Install WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress. It converts the default WordPress theme into a fully-functional eCommerce store with secure payment processing, configurable shipping options, and all the extra features you need to maximize your online store’s profitability.
It also ensures that your store is mobile responsive, and can integrate with a range of additional features, such as email marketing, newsletter subscriptions, customer rewards, and coupon functionality.
To install WooCommerce, go to Plugins > Add New, then search for “WooCommerce”. Once you find the plugin, click ‘Install Now’, then click ‘Activate Now’ and you’re ready for the WooCommerce Wizard.
To learn how to use WooCommerce, see our complete WooCommerce tutorial.
Step 5: Install Elementor
The next step is to install Elementor, a visual website builder that greatly simplifies the WordPress website building process. Sometimes, WordPress can be an intimidating tool that seems too complex to use on your own. However, by using a visual site builder, you can create your site quickly, efficiently, and comfortably.
In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add New. Search for Elementor Website Builder and click Install. When Elementor has been installed, click Activate.
While Elementor is free, depending on the features you want you’ll also need Elementor Pro to take full advantage of Elementor’s capabilities. Visit Elementor.com and purchase the Pro version of the plugin then install and activate it in the same manner as above. Once Elementor Pro has been installed, you’ll need to enter your license by going to your WordPress dashboard and navigating to Elementor > License.
Because you’re going to be using Elementor Theme Builder and your template kit to design your entire website, you don’t need to look for any design elements in your active WordPress theme.
Instead, you just want the most lightweight, performance-optimized foundation, which is what the Hello theme from Elementor provides.
To get started, go to Appearance → Themes → Add New and search for “Hello Elementor”. Then, install and activate the theme.
Step 6: Choose an Ecommerce Template Kit
Once you’ve installed Elementor, the next piece of the puzzle is an eCommerce website template kit. These are individual sets of templates needed for a complete WordPress website: Header, Footer, 404 page, Blog Archive, Single Post, Single Page, Popup, and more. Our Template Library features websites of many niches, each kit catering to the needs of our user community. These include portfolio sites, digital agency sites, magazine sites, beauty salons, and so much more.
Elementor template kits are also offered by creative marketplaces, such as Envato or ThemeForest.
For this tutorial, we’ll use the Cerato Ecommerce Template. It’s for an online store that sells cosmetics and jewelry. However, it can easily be customized for any niche. The important features are the display, cart functionality, and product listings which are universal for any eCommerce website.
To install the kit, first, create a page called “Home” and click the Edit with Elementor button to launch Elementor.
Then, open the Elementor template library and search for “eCommerce” under Pages. Once you’ve found your desired template, simply click on install.
For more information about installing the kit, see here: Create a Complete Website Using Elementor Kits and Theme Builder
Step 7: Customizing the template kit
Once you have downloaded and installed the kit, you can use the drag & drop editor to customize each and every aspect of the design and layout to tailor it to your needs.
You can change the logo, color scheme, navigation links, website copy, and any other feature that you wish. You can also use the Elementor widgets to add specific functionalities to your website like a custom donate button.
To learn more about customizing your template, visit our help center.
You can also read our thorough guide to creating your Elementor website here
Step 8: Publish the website
Once you’re completely satisfied with your website’s design, interface, and functionality, then it’s time to publish it live.
- To preview the site, click the icon.
- If you are satisfied with the result, go ahead and click the button.
- Click ‘Have a Look‘ to view the published page
Conclusion
Creating a well-designed, and fully-functional ecommerce website can be a smooth, seamless process with Elementor’s template kits. No coding is required, simply download and install Elementor onto your WordPress site, choose your desired template kit, customize, and publish.
Ready to Build an Awesome eCommerce Website with Elementor?
