Last updated - September 9, 2021
One of the first steps you have to take while setting up a WooCommerce store is setting up the WooCommerce Base Location and currency for your store. These settings determine how factors such as tax and shipping rates will be applied to your store. The currency and base location are set up in the general settings, navigate through the following path:
WooCommerce → Settings → General
On this page, you will see three different groups of settings – Store Address, General options and Currency options.
Let us look at each of the settings in more detail:
Setting the WooCommerce Base Location
The first field is where you set the Store Address. Tax rates will be applicable according to the location that you choose here. Select your preferred location from a drop-down. You need to set up Address Line 1 & 2, City, State, Country and Postcode.
Next, in the General Options section, you can set your Selling Location. There are three options in the drop-down, you can select from:
- Sell to All Countries
- To All Countries, Except For…
- Sell to Specific Countries
If you select either of the last two options, another drop-down will be displayed where you can select the specific countries.
Choose the locations to ship
You can use the next field to set up the Shipping Location. Four options are available in the drop-down. They are:
- Ship to all countries you sell to
- Ship to all countries
- Shipping to specific countries only
- Disable shipping & shipping calculations
If you select the third option, ‘Ship to specific countries only’, another drop-down will be displayed with a choice of countries to select from.
The commonly preferred option for shipping location is ‘Ship to all countries you sell to.’
Default customer location
In General Options you can set a Default Customer Location. This will help you to determine tax and shipping features before the customer enters the address information. There is a drop-down with four options:
- No location by default
- Shop base address
- Geolocate
- Geolocate (with page caching support)
If you choose No location by default, you can decide on the tax and shipping calculations only after the customer enters the address information in the registration form or checkout. A generally-preferred practice here is to set the base location of your store as the default customer location using the second option. There are also two Geolocate options to determine the default location based on the customer’s IP address. Remember, in this case, MaxMind GeoLite database will be downloaded to your wp-content directory systematically. If you are using any page caching support on your store, you have to use the last option.
Enabling taxes
You can enable taxes and tax calculations by ticking the Enable Taxes checkbox. The tax will be applied based on the local & international tax laws of your store’s base location.
When you tick the enable tax and tax calculations checkbox, a new tab is displayed in WooCommerce Settings that will have all the detailed tax settings.We will look into those settings separately later.
Enabling Coupons
Coupons help a lot in boosting sales on your WooCommerce store. Here, you can enable the use of coupons on your store. When it is enabled, you will also see another option about the way coupons are applied on your store. You can enable this option too, if you want to apply the discount code sequentially. This is applicable when a customer has multiple coupons to avail. In such a scenario, the first coupon will create a discounted price. The second coupon will be applied on that discounted price rather than the full price.
Currency preferences
The next part in General settings is Currency Options. You can set a preferred currency that you want to do your transactions with. WooCommerce allows choosing only one currency at a time. The choice that you make here will determine what currency is displayed in the product catalog at the front-end of the site. This also decides what currency the payment gateways choose for your transactions.
You can use the Currency Position drop-down to choose where to display the currency symbol.
The fields for Thousand Separator and Decimal Separator allow to select whether to use comma (‘,’) or period (‘.’) to separate thousands and decimals. Choose based on your location and currency, as in Europe and US these options are used interchangeably.
The last part of General settings is the text box to set the number of decimal points. You can enter your preferred value in the Number of Decimals text box, or use the numeric up-down control.
Once you complete updating all the settings, do not forget to click Save changes button.
Further reading
