Every WooCommerce store I’ve helped launch has the same three or four settings wrong. Not because the person setting it up was careless, but because the defaults were chosen for a generic store, not for a solo founder selling three digital products from a laptop.
So here’s the list. Go through it in order. It takes about twenty minutes and it will save you a week of confused customer emails.
**Guest checkout is off by default in some builds.** If your checkout page asks people to create an account before buying, you are losing a meaningful chunk of first-time buyers. Go to WooCommerce, then Settings, then Accounts and Privacy. Unless you have a real reason to force registration, let guests check out. You still get their email for the receipt.
**Your checkout page might not be assigned.** This is the one that produces the classic ‘my cart is empty’ bug. WooCommerce needs to know which page is the Cart, which is the Checkout, and which is My Account. If a page got deleted or you built a new one and forgot to reassign it, the shortcode renders nothing and the customer sees a blank page. Settings, Advanced, Page setup. Confirm all three.
**Enable guest checkout AND enable account creation after purchase.** These aren’t contradictory. The customer buys as a guest, and WooCommerce quietly creates an account for them behind the scenes so their download links live somewhere permanent. One dropdown, big payoff.
**Coupons need to be enabled, and then you need to actually create one.** The setting is on by default, but a lot of people never create even a single coupon and then wonder why their launch discount code doesn’t work. Make one test coupon, apply it yourself, then delete it. You want to know the flow works before a customer finds out it doesn’t.
**Free shipping is meaningless for digital goods, but the shipping section still shows up.** If your store sells only downloads, go into Settings, Shipping and delete every zone, or at minimum don’t create any methods. A checkout page that asks for a shipping address for a PDF is a checkout page that gets abandoned. If you sell both digital and physical, use the ‘virtual’ product type for downloads so WooCommerce skips the address fields automatically.
**Tax display settings change how your prices read.** Are your prices inclusive or exclusive of tax? For a US-based solo store selling digital goods, you’ll usually want prices entered exclusive and tax calculated at checkout, or no tax at all if you’re under the threshold and not registered anywhere. Pick one and be consistent, because switching later makes your old orders look wrong.
**Order status emails can be turned off individually.** This is the setting people miss. By default, WooCommerce sends a processing email, a completed email, and sometimes a customer invoice. For a digital product, ‘processing’ is noise. Go to Settings, Emails and disable the ones that don’t apply, then edit the completed email to include your download instructions. Fewer emails, clearer message.
**The terms and conditions checkbox is optional and off.** For digital goods you may want it on, since it’s your record that the customer agreed to your refund policy. If you turn it on, remember you need an actual page for it to link to. An empty terms page is worse than no checkbox.
**Checkout field order.** WooCommerce lets you reorder and remove checkout fields with a plugin or a few lines in functions.php. For digital-only stores, stripping out the company, address line two, and phone fields consistently reduces friction. Test it — remove one field at a time and buy something yourself after each change.
Here’s the part that matters more than any individual setting: buy something from your own store with a real card, on your phone, in a private browser window. Every problem on this list surfaces in that one test. The settings you forget are the ones you never see from the admin side.
Once you’ve done this once, export the settings. WooCommerce has a built-in exporter under Tools, and it produces a JSON file you can reimport on your next store. That’s how you go from a three-day setup to a forty-minute one, and it’s the reason I stopped writing these lists from scratch.