Adding and Managing Products

Adding a product

Before adding your first product, let’s get familiar with how product categories, tags, and attributes work.

Product Categories
Product categories and tags work in much the same way as normal categories and tags you have when writing posts in WordPress. They can be created, edited, and selected at any time. This can be done when you first create a product or come back and edit it or the category/tag specifically.

Attributes
These can be added per product, or you can set up global attributes for the entire store to use (e.g., in layered navigation).

Product Types
With attributes and categories set up and stock management configured, we can begin adding products. 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.

• Other types are often added by extensions. For example, WooCommerce Subscriptions adds new product types as does WooCommerce Bookings.

SKU
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.

The SKU field can accept up to 255 characters, which can include alphanumeric values and some special characters. The input is checked using the WordPress function sanitize_text_field, which means HTML, invalid UTF characters, and octets will be removed when saved (an octet is defined by % followed by 2 characters with a value in the range of a-f or 0-9).

Adding a simple product

Adding a Simple product is similar to writing a post in WordPress.

1. Go to WooCommerce > Products > Add Product. You then have a familiar interface and should immediately feel at home.

2. Enter a product Title and Description.

3. 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.

Product data

The Product Data meta box is where the majority of important data is added for your products.

General section

• 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

Inventory section / Stock Management

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.

Enable Stock Management must be selected in Products Inventory Settings; otherwise, only the ‘Stock status’ option is visible in the Product Data Inventory box.

Options when stock management at product level is disabled: You are responsible for updating the Stock Status.

Options when stock management at product level 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.

When an order is placed in WooCommerce it gets the status Pending payment. At this point you don’t see any inventory change in the order notes. Which is how WooCommerce handles the order statuses.

Stock quantity changes are added to the order notes once the order is considered paid.

Even though the stock quantity is not yet reduced, the way WooCommerce operates is that it actually reserves/holds the products in an order when the order is placed. This is so that a product can’t be sold out while a customer’s payment is being processed.

You can control this with the help of the WooCommerce Hold stock setting. If you for instance enter 5 minutes in the Hold stock (minutes) field, that is how long the product is held while awaiting order payment.

If no payment is received within these 5 minutes the order will be cancelled and the product will be available for purchase again. This only applies to orders with the Pending payment status, not On hold.

When setting the amount of minutes stock will be held you need to consider setting enough time to actually allow a customer the time to finish their order. You also need to consider not setting it too long, so that it remains unavailable for others if the customer decides not to complete the order.

Shipping section

• 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.

Linked Products section

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.

Cross-sells are products that are displayed with the cart and related to the user’s cart contents.

Grouping – Used to make a product part of a grouped product.

Attributes section

On the Attributes tab, you can assign details to a product. You will see a select box containing global attribute sets you created (e.g., platform).

Once you have chosen an attribute from the select box, click add and apply the terms attached to that attribute (e.g., Nintendo DS) to the product. You can hide the attribute on the frontend by leaving the Visible checkbox unticked.

Custom attributes can also be applied by choosing Custom product attribute from the select box. These are added at the product level and won’t be available in layered navigation or other products.

Advanced section

• 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.

Product short description

Add an excerpt. This typically appears next to product imagery on the listing page, and the long description appears in the Product Description tab.

Video embeds (oembed) may be used, as of version 3.1x.

Taxonomies

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.

Product images

Add a main product image and a gallery of images.

Setting catalog visibility options and feature status

In the Publish panel, you can set Catalog Visibility for your product.

• Shop and search – Visible everywhere, shop pages, category pages and search results.

• Shop only – Visible in shop pages and category pages, but not search results.

• Search only – Visible in search results, but not in the shop page or category pages.

• Hidden – Only visible on the single product page – not on any other pages.

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