Shop

The shop was quite straight forward to construct as all the functions and pages are auto built and populated by the plugin itself. The challenge was creating the products. This was one of the problems with creating the site from scratch and not using an existing brand. There was no existing merchandise with the logo I had created on it, and so I had to create some.

So I took to Google to find some blank products I could add my brand to. I wanted to have at the very least a T-shirt, a hoodie and a guitar pick. So I found the following images:

These were my blank canvasses. With a little Photoshop jiggery pokery I managed to turn them into 4 different branded products:

I was pleased with the look of the products. I was worried they would look blatantly faked but especially at smaller sizes it's very tricky to tell they were made in Photoshop. I used the difference blending mode to add some detail and texture to the logo on the picks at the bottom there. That went a long way to add some realism.

With that I then constructed the products on separate product pages within the WooCommerce plugin. I found that by making them "Variable Products" as apposed to "Simple Products" meant that I could include the variable of size and allow for people to choose their size for the shirts and hoodies:

That was an important step I felt in the process that I almost overlooked. After that it was just filling in data and attributed like stock amount, name, description and price. Once that was complete I had a functioning shop complete with PayPal purchasing!

Below is a step by step journey of purchasing an item through my Store from shop to checkout:

And so that's that. I am really happy with how the products turned out and the shop looks and feels like a real shop. It's an amazing plugin that can be simple when you want it to be and intricate when you need it to be. It made creating a shop easy and fun and the end product I feel speaks for itself.