What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform due to its seamless integration with WordPress. With its user-friendly interface and customization features, WooCommerce allows you to sell anything from digital goods to physical ones with ease. Store owners can easily add, remove, categorise and customise their products. They can also use WooCommerce to sell complex products and show its variations using one of WooCommerce’s most popular features – Attributes
What are attributes and variations?
Product attributes enable store owners to add additional data to their products. Data such as dimensions, size, colours, materials, etc are a few examples of attributes. Attributes assist in creating variations in products.
For instance, If you were selling t-shirts in various colours and sizes the size and colour would be attributes while a combination of these would be a variation. An example of a variation would be – a medium-sized black t-shirt.
Adding attributes helps customers search for products depending on their specific requirements and helps shop owners manage and organise their online stores effectively.
Benefits of adding attributes to products
Adding attributes helps store owners provide tailor-made products and provides options and alternatives to their customers. This creates a dynamic shopping experience while increasing sales and customer engagement.
Provides more product information:
With the help of attributes, store owners can provide more information about their products so customers know the different available product variations.
Enhances the customer’s shopping experience:
Customers can easily find what they are looking for and choose how they would like to customise their products.
Inventory management:
By adding attributes to products, store owners can keep track of their inventory by ensuring they have the right products in stock while also being able to monitor which specific products are more in demand compared to others.
Decreases maintenance time:
Using attributes helps businesses keep track of their products, this saves time and aids inventory management and control.
Types of attributes
Depending on your business and the type of products you offer, you choose between the two attribute types that WooCommerce offers. The two types of attributes are global attributes and custom attributes.
Global attributes:
Global attributes are available across the entire product range. For example, if have an online garment store, sizes would be a global attribute.
Custom attributes:
Custom attributes on the other hand are specific to products. This can be for products that have specific features or single products.
Steps to add attributes to products using WooCommerce:
Step 1:
To start adding attributes to your products navigate to the Products ➞ Attributes tab.
Step 2:
Start by adding the attribute name, slug (optional) and sort order. Selecting the type of attribute allows WooCommerce to determine how this attribute’s values are displayed.
Enabling Archives allows customers to filter through the store’s product range depending on the attribute and showcases the products that only have the selected attribute. For example, if an attribute is “Size”, customers can select one of the sizes provided by you after which only products of that size will be displayed to them.
Once all the details have been entered, click on “Add attribute”.
Step 3:
The next step is to add the terms of the attribute. Terms are the options provided by the attribute. For example, the attribute “Size” will have multiple options such as “Small”, “Medium”, “Large”, etc. These options will be the terms of the attribute “Size”.
This can be done by first clicking on “Configure terms”.
After which the following screen should appear:
Here you can add the various terms of your attribute one by one, start by adding its name which will also be used to display the terms to the customers. Next, add a slug (optional) and a description for the same.
Step 4:
Now when you create a product or edit an existing one you can implement the attribute created by you. To do so, navigate to the Products ➞ Add New tab if creating a new product or navigate to Products and select the product you would like to edit.
Step 5:
Under the Product data section change the product type to “Variable Product” under the dropdown menu. Next, select the Attributes tab where you can either add a custom attribute for the respective product or apply the global attribute created by you.
Step 6:
To add the global attribute, click on the “Add existing” dropdown and choose the attribute that is to be applied to the respective product.
Next, click on “Select all” to apply the terms as “Value(s)” which have been pre-defined by you.
You can also create new values or select which ones are to be displayed for the respective product. Enabling the “Used in variations” option here is crucial in order to generate the many alternatives that customers can select from.
To add a custom attribute, click on “Add new”. Here, you can set the attribute’s name and values. Ensure that you separate each value using a “|” separator and that the “Visible on the product page” and “Used for variations” boxes have been checked.
Once the attribute values are filled in, click on the “Save attributes” button.
Step 7:
The next step would be to create the variations, to do so select the Variations tab, here you can either add each variation of the product manually or click on “Generate variations” where WooCommerce automatically generates the different product variants depending on the attributes added. Using this option is beneficial when you have multiple attributes like colour, size, material etc.
Step 8:
You can then customize each product variation by clicking on “Edit”.
Here you can set an image for the variation, add its respective price and other information such as the variant’s dimensions, weight, shipping class and description.
Note: If variations have the same pricing, you can add a blanket price for the variations that do not have a price already determined by clicking on “Add price”.
Step 9:
The next step would be to update or publish the respective product.
Customers can now view various options when choosing a product to match their requirements.
In conclusion, adding attributes to products in WooCommerce benefits both customers and store owners. By providing detailed product information and customization options, businesses can create a dynamic and engaging shopping experience for customers that drives sales and promotes customer satisfaction. WooCommerce provides a versatile platform to meet diverse business requirements, by adding attributes, store owners can efficiently manage inventories, and save time and management costs.
For any further assistance regarding WooCommerce, WordPress or other queries relating to setting up your online store, feel free to reach out to us at info@simplileap.com.
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