What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a software module that powers the ecommerce feature of your website. It is a robust dynamic system that enables you to take orders online from your customers. No matter what you sell in your brick and mortar store, you can sell the same online using your website.
How it works?
When you will login to your website, on the left hand menu you will see the following options
WooCommerce
- Dashboard
- Orders
- Coupons
- Reports
- Settings
- Status
- Extensions
Products
- All Products
- Add New
- Categories
- Tags
- Attributes
Analytics
- Revenue
- Orders
- Products
- Categories
- Coupons
- Taxes
- Downloads
- Stock
- Settings
As you can see each of these Menu items "WooCommerce" "Products" "Analytics" has sub-menu items. We will discuss all of them at a later stage of this documentation page. But for now, we will just briefly discuss the basics.
WooCommerce > Dashboard
In this page you will be able to see the overall performance of your online store i.e.: Total Sales, Net Sales, Orders, Average Order Value, Items Sold, Returns, Gross Sales.
You will also be able to view these data in a visual way with graphs and charts from this page.
N.B.: These are not sales data occurred with POS purchase in the physical store. These are sales data that happened online on your website.
WooCommerce > Orders
Whenever someone orders a product or service from your online store aka your e-commerce website, it will appear here. In this example, the menu item is showing an orange notification bubble with number 1, this means you have one new order. From this page, you can click on each order to review details like Order ID, Payment date & time, Customer's Name & Billing Address, Customer's Email and Phone No. etc.
WooCommerce > Orders > Order Status
WooCommerce is an automated system. When customers purchase something from your website with their card it collects the payment with your payment processor reflecting the same order ID. In this example, WooCommerce automatically processed the payment and stored the money in your Squareup account
Order statuses and what do they mean:
Pending Payment: When a customer order a product or service from your website without filling out the payment information, it triggers the status Pending Payment.
On Hold: When a customer's card issuing bank holds the payment for a while for security reasons, it triggers the status On Hold.
Processing: When WooCommerce can collect the payment for a particular product sold online, it deposits the amount to your payment processor account and triggers the status Processing. When you will see this status, know that you got the payment and now its time to process/fullfill the order.
Completed: This is a manual Order Status that you will change from the Order Details page. You can select the Order Status as completed when you delivered the service or shipped the product with a tracking code.
Cancelled: If customer cancels an order at a later time you can choose this order status.
Refunded: When you refunded the amount for the cancelled order you can choose this order status
Failed: When WooCommerce cannot collect the payment for a particular product or service it triggers the order status as Failed after a certain period of time.
N.B.: Follow this screenshot to change the order status manually i.e.: Completed / Cancelled / Refunded