I'm trying to customise the shop page in WooCommerce completely, but cannot see a way to do so without the use of plugins.

I imagine that if I do not set a shop page in WooCommerce (and it's just a page with a template for example), then I would need to set up redirects from the shop page to my new store page?

What I was expecting was that I could simply override the template by copying the file into my theme (i.e. woocommerce/store.php) as I've done with other templates. However, looking into the WooCommerce plugin codebase, it looks like the entire loop folder creates the shop page (woocommerce/templates/loop).

I can simply go down the route of create a custom template (i.e. archive-shop.php) and set up the redirect if needed. But, wondering if there's a more optimal way to do this, without plugins?

In response to @hhh:

I have added "archive-product.php" to my theme (woocommerce/archive-product.php), and pasted over the original file from the woocommerce plugin.

In my copied version, I changed the header to "this is a test":

THIS IS A TEST

I even further dismanted the file to only showcase the h1, but it does't override the default template from the plugin:

  

    
THIS IS A TEST