New: WordPress E-Commerce With WooCommerce
New course just dropped: WordPress E-Commerce With WooCommerce — Novice to Store Owner. Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.
The pitch: if you've ever wanted to put a real "Buy" button on the internet without paying Shopify $40/month for the rest of time, WooCommerce is the path most people forget exists. It runs on top of WordPress, it's free for the core plugin, and it powers about a third of all online stores in the world. This course walks you from "I have a WordPress install" to "I have a working store taking real money" in a single afternoon.
What's in the box
- WordPress + WooCommerce setup — clean install, theme selection, configuration that doesn't bite you later
- Products — simple, variable, grouped, downloadable, and which to use when
- Payments — Stripe, PayPal, the offline methods, and the security gotchas
- Shipping — flat rate, calculated, table rate, free, and the rules that make sense for actual products
- Tax — yes, you have to handle this; here's how without crying
- Themes & customization — the right way to customize a WooCommerce theme so updates don't blow up your store
- Plugins worth installing — the small handful that earn their keep, plus the much larger pile that don't
Who this is for
- First-time store owners who built a Shopify trial, balked at the monthly bill, and are looking for alternatives
- WordPress users who already have a content site and want to add commerce without rebuilding the whole thing
- Freelancers & agencies who keep getting asked "can you build me a store" and want a defensible playbook
- Side-project tinkerers ($5 in t-shirt sales counts as commerce)
What you'll be able to do after
- Stand up a working WooCommerce store from a fresh WordPress install in under three hours
- Configure tax and shipping for a US-based store without legal panic
- Customize the storefront without breaking on the next theme update
- Diagnose the three most common WooCommerce launch failures (broken cart, missing payment gateway, wrong shipping zone)
→ Take the course
Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.
Big thank-you to the small-business owners who let me build their first stores back in 2014-2016. The "but I sell handmade goods, the standard plugins don't fit" conversations became the whole sixth module. Thank you. And congratulations on actually shipping the store.
The five WooCommerce launch mistakes the course explicitly fixes
Skipping the staging site. New store owner installs WooCommerce on production, plays with checkout settings, breaks the cart 30 minutes before a planned launch. Course remedy: every change goes through a staging site, then gets promoted. Module 2 walks the staging setup in 20 minutes.
The wrong payment gateway. Owner picks PayPal Standard because it's the default, then discovers it redirects customers off-site and tanks conversion by 30%. Course remedy: Stripe-first for cards, PayPal as a secondary option, with the security checklist in module 4.
The "no tax zones" mistake. Owner ships to all 50 states without configuring sales-tax nexus. Six months later, an audit. Course remedy: the per-state tax zone setup, the who actually owes you tax table, and the TaxJar/Avalara integration walkthrough.
The "free shipping on everything" mistake. Owner toggles free shipping to feel competitive, then discovers margin evaporates. Course remedy: the shipping cost should be visible somewhere principle — either bundled into price or shown at cart, but never absorbed silently.
The plugin-stacking mistake. Owner installs 14 plugins to add features, every page-load takes 7 seconds, Google ranks them last. Course remedy: the "lean stack" — six plugins that earn their keep, plus the audit pattern for the rest.
When NOT to use WooCommerce
The course is honest about this: if you're shipping more than ~200 orders a day, or if you have a complex multi-vendor model, Shopify Plus is probably worth the money. WooCommerce shines from zero to about 1,000 orders/month. Past that, you're paying in maintenance what you would've paid Shopify in subscription — and getting less.
Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.