Add and Managing Products
Last updated
Last updated
Before adding your first product, let’s get familiar with how product categories, tags, and attributes work.
Product categories and tags work in much the same way as the primary way to group products with similar features. There are two ways to manage product categories:
These can be added per product, or you can set up global attributes for the entire store to use.
To learn more, see: Managing Product Categories, and Attributes
When adding a product, the first thing to decide is what type of product it is.
Simple – covers the vast majority of any products you may sell. Simple products are shipped and have no options. For example, a book.
Grouped – a collection of related products that can be purchased individually and only consist of simple products. For example, a set of six drinking glasses.
Virtual – one that doesn’t require shipping. For example, a service. Enabling this, disables all shipping related fields such as shipping dimensions. A virtual product will also not trigger the shipping calculator in cart and checkout.
Downloadable – activates additional fields where you can provide a downloadable file. After a successful purchase, customers are given a downloadable file as a link in the order notification email. This is suitable, for example, for a digital album, PDF magazine, or photo.
External or Affiliate – one that you list and describe on your website but is sold elsewhere.
Variable – a product with variations, each of which may have a different SKU, price, stock option, etc. For example, a t-shirt available in different colors and/or sizes.
SKU, or Stock Keeping Unit number, is a unique number assigned to a product for, amongst other things, the purpose of keeping track of inventory.
Go to WooCommerce > Products > Add Product.
Enter a product Title and Description.
Go to the Product Data panel, and select downloadable (digital) or virtual (service) if applicable.
Note: Virtual products don’t require shipping — an order with virtual products won’t calculate shipping costs.
The Product Data meta box is where the majority of important data is added for your products.
Price
Regular Price – Item’s normal/regular price
Sale Price – Item’s discounted price that can then be scheduled for certain date ranges. The sale expires at 11:59pm of the specified end date
Tax
Tax status – Taxable / Shipping only / None
Tax class – Choose which tax class should be applied
The inventory section allows you to manage stock for the product individually and define whether to allow back orders and more. It enables you to sell products and allow customers to add them to the cart to buy.
When stock management at product level is disabled, you are responsible for updating the Stock Status.
Options when Manage stock level (quantity) is enabled.
Enter the Stock Quantity, and WooCommerce auto-manages inventory and auto-updates Stock Status as Stock, Out of Stock or On Backorder.
Select whether to Allow Backorders.
Low stock threshold – Enter a number upon which you are notified.
Tick the Sold Individually box to limit the product to one per order.
Select whether to allow Backorders from the dropdown, if you are managing stock on a product. You must check Manage stock to allow backorders.
When Managed stock is checked, there are three dropdown options for under Allow backorders:
Allow. This will allow backorders without any notice if the product is out of stock
Do not allow. There will be a notice on the product page that product is out of stock. If Stock notifications is checked, customers will be able to leave their email address to get notified.
Allow, but notify customer. There will be a notice “Available on backorder” on the product page.
To allow backorders, the Stock status must be set to In Stock even though the Stock Quantity is 0 or less.
When backorders are allowed, stock quantity can go below 0 following backorder purchase.
Please note that in order to fulfill backorders for your shop and prevent any missed orders, it would be recommended to integrate certain tools (which would require a separate purchase) from the web developer.
Weight – Weight of the item.
Dimensions – Length, width and height for the item.
Shipping Class – Shipping classes are used by certain shipping methods to group similar products.
Using up-sells and cross-sells, you can cross promote your products. They can be added by searching for a particular product and selecting the product from the dropdown list:
Up-sells are displayed on the product details page. These are products that you may wish to encourage users to upgrade, based on the product they are currently viewing. For example, if the user is viewing the coffee product listing page, you may want to display tea kettles on that same page as an up-sell.
Cross-sells are products that are displayed with the cart and related to the user’s cart contents. As an example, if the user adds a Nintendo DS to their cart, you may want to suggest they purchase a spare stylus when they arrive at the cart page.
A third and important way to group products is to use attributes. Product attributes allow customers to filter products based on the selected attribute in variable product.
To create a variable product, an attribute must first be defined for the product. These attributes can then be used to make a distinction between different variations. More info at: Variable Products.
You will see a select box containing global attribute sets you created (e.g., platform).
Purchase note – enter an optional note to send the customer after they purchase the product.
Menu order – custom ordering position for this item.
Enable Reviews – enable/disable customer reviews for this item.
Add an excerpt. This typically appears next to product imagery on the details listing page, and the long description appears in the Product Description tab.
On the right-hand side of the Add New Product panel, there are product categories in which you can place your product, similar to a standard WordPress post. You can also assign product tags in the same way.
Chooses a Parent from the main product categories if you want to list a subcategorised product. You can create a new parent/subcategorised product by keying the product title, and select Add New Product Category.
You can add, delete, and edit product categories from the Products > Categories screen. More at: Managing Product Categories and Attributes.
Product tags are another way to relate products to each other.
For example, if you sell clothing, and you have a lot of cat prints, you could make a tag for “cat.” Then add that tag to the menu or sidebar so cat lovers can easily find all t-shirts, hoodies, and pants with cat prints.
Tags can be added similarly to adding product categories and work in exactly the same way as post tags.
WooCommerce uses three types of Product Images for different locations and purposes:
Single Product Image is the largest image and refers to the main/featured image on your individual product details page.
Catalog Images are medium-sized images appearing in product loops, such as the Shop page, Product Category pages, Related Products, Up-sells, and Cross-sells.
Product thumbnails are the smallest images used in the Cart, Widgets, and (optional) Gallery thumbnails underneath the Single Product Image.
Adding product images and galleries are options available on the right-hand side when adding or editing a product in your store from WooCommerce > Products.
The Single Product Image is the main image for your product and is reused in different sizes across your store.
Select Set Product Image.
Select an existing image in your Media Library or Upload a new one.
Remove and Edit the product image if you’d like to change it, as needed.
Adding, removing and editing a product image is done in the same way as featured images for posts and pages.
Add images to the Product Gallery
Product galleries display all images attached to a product through the Product Gallery meta box.
Create a Product Gallery using the same method as adding a Product Image, but using the Product Gallery meta box.
Once a product image and gallery have been added, customers can see them in your store.
It’s also possible to Zoom and see a closeup of the image by hovering over it.
You can also set whether the product is promoted in product categories, up-sells, related products as a Featured Product. For example, you could tick the Featured box on all bundles you sell.
Other ways to set as Featured are described in the below section: Mark a product as Featured.
A grouped product is created in much the same way as a Simple product. Grouped products are like lists of other products in your shop, and as a result, do not have prices or stock numbers of their own. To create one, select Grouped Product from the Product Type dropdown.
Go to: WooCommerce > Products > Add New.
Enter a Title for the Grouped product, e.g., Back to School set
Scroll down to Product Data and select Grouped from the dropdown. The price and several other fields disappear. This is normal because a Grouped Product is a collection of ‘child products’, which is where you add this information.
Publish.
The Grouped product is still an empty group. To this Grouped product, you need to:
Create products and add them
Add existing child products from the listing
Having the choice to first create Simple products and add them to a Grouped product later; or first create a Grouped product and add Simple products later gives you flexibility to add Simple products to more than one Grouped product.
Go to: WooCommerce > Products > Add New.
Select the Grouped product you wish to add products to.
Scroll down to Product Data and go to Linked Products.
Select Grouped Products, and search for the product by typing
Click the products you wish to add.
Update
You can drag and drop to reorder the Grouped Products. Once you press Update, the new order will be shown on the product page.
When adding a Simple product, you can tick the Virtual checkbox box in the product type panel.
With Variable products this checkbox is moved to each variation.
Once enabling this, it will disable all shipping related fields such as shipping dimensions. A virtual product will also not trigger the shipping calculator in cart and checkout.
When adding a simple product, you can select the Downloadable checkbox box in the product type panel. This adds two new fields:
File path — Path or url to your downloadable file.
Download limit – Limit on number of times the customer can download file. Left blank for unlimited downloads.
For maximum flexibility, downloadable products also incur a shipping cost (if, for example, you were offering both a packaged and a downloadable version of a product, this would be ideal). You can also check the Virtual box if the downloadable product is not shippable.
Select ‘External/Affiliate’ from the product type dropdown. This will change the Product data metabox a bit. It first removes the shipping section from the left side. It then adds two new fields in the General section, the Product URL and Button text fields. The Product URL field is the destination where users can purchase this product. Then the Button text lets you change the normal Add to cart button text to your preferred text.
Variable products are one of the more complex of product types. They let you define variations of a single product where each variation may have a different SKU, price or stock level.
See our Variable Products for a guide on creating a product with variations.
To save time, it’s possible to use a product and duplicate it to create similar products with variations and other qualities.
Go to WooCommerce > Products and look through the list for a product you wish to replicate, then click Duplicate.
To delete a product:
Go to: WooCommerce > Products.
Find the product you wish to delete.
Hover in the area under the Product name and click Trash.
Quick editing is similar to Bulk editing, but applies to one product only. To access Quick editing, hover over a particular product to reveal its links, and then select Quick editing.
To access its power, navigate to Products > All Products, tick two or more products from the list, and select Edit from the Bulk Actions menu at the top or bottom of the list, and click Apply to enter the world of bulk editing.
An edit screen with the following fields are revealed, a change to which will affect all the selected products once you hit the Update button, visible to the bottom-right of the edit window. Click the x to remove a particular product from the active bulk edit session.
It’s exactly the same as Quick Editing, except that because only one product is involved, the product’s current values are shown in the fields instead of – No Change – as is the case when bulk editing.
Bulk editing works best with Simple products, and cannot edit the complexities of variable, grouped, or other complicated products.
To mark a product as featured, go to Products > All Products and select the Star in the featured column. Alternatively, select Quick Edit and then the Featured option.
Use the Filter function to get a product count, view products by type, or see which products are On Backorder or Out of Stock.
Go to: WooCommerce > Products.
Select a Category, Product Type and/or Stock Status, or any combination of the three.
Click Filter.
Sorting is different than Filtering, in that you can drag and drop products to re-order them.
Go to: WooCommerce > Products.
Select Sorting.
Select a Category, Product Type and/or Stock Status, or any combination of the three.
Click Filter.
You can now drag and drop products in an order to your liking.
Sort products by column ascending or descending by clicking on hyperlinked column headings. By default Name, SKU, Price and Data (published) columns can be used for this type of sorting.
A WooCommerce Product ID is sometimes needed when using shortcodes, widgets, and links.
To find the ID, go to Products and hover over the product you need the ID for. The product ID number is displayed.
