March 10

WooCommerce Product Variation – A Viable Solution to Enhance Your E-Store Capability

WordPress is not just touted as the most sought-after blog publishing tool, but is also now considered as the most powerful content management system around the world. WordPress can be used to build almost any website, however, it is usually the last option to use when building an online store or an e-commerce site. But, with more shopping cart plugins than ever this CMS is used as an e-commerce solution as well. WooCommerce is one such great plugin that is widely used by website owners for adding e-commerce functionality into their WordPress site or blog. So, if you've made up your mind on building a WordPress powered online store, then WooCommerce is a plugin you can't miss to have. Especially, if you want to set up a store with enhanced e-commerce capabilities such as displaying products with variations. WooCommerce plugin comes with “Product Variation” feature, giving store owners the ability to add different variations to the products in terms of color, size, etc. Through this post, I intend to help you understand how you can add variations to your WordPress e-store products, through a simple step-by-step process. But before that, let's first understand how offering product with variations benefit in improving your online store capability anyway.

Understanding the Need Behind Creating Product Variations

If you're running an online store, your product pages play a crucial in converting your visitors into a potential customer. This isn't new, and everyone is aware of the fact how important product pages are for making their e-commerce endeavor a success. Each visitor will most likely make it to your store's product page, and it's up to you how you turn visitors into your customers. One best way is to define different properties of the products that increases the possibility of matching up to your visitor expectations. For instance, let's say you need to start a clothing store, selling t-shirts you may need a way to show up the t-shirts of different size (such as small or large). To accomplish such objective, WooCommerce product variation features are exactly what you need.

How You Can Create a Variation Of a Product?

The process of creating a product using WooCommerce is just like creating a standard WordPress blog post. You can create different product categories and tags. Additionally, you can add extra attributes to the products. So, when you need to add a product in the store, you will be presented with a page that looks similar to any normal post page except that it contains some more sections.

This screen will allow you to configure everything about your store products. You are presented with 4 different product types:

• Simple Products • Grouped Product • External/Affiliate Product • Variable Product To offer products with variations, you will need to choose “Variable Product” as your product type. Let us now look the step-by-step process to see how you can create variations of a product using the variable product type.

Step 1 – Set Up the Product Type

In order to set up a variation, you will need to add variable product. For doing this, choose “variable product” from the dropdown selection alongside Product Data.

Step 2 – Define Attributes For Variation

Next, you will have to define attributes for your product. Attributes help add more information to products, so as to refine your catalog making it easy for your visitors to browse for exactly what they need. For creating attributes, click on the attribute tab and then hit the “Add” button for adding attributes to your product. While defining attributes, you can either use global attributes or define custom ones.

For creating attributes, click on the attribute tab and then hit the “Add” button for adding attributes to your product. While defining attributes, you can either use global attributes or define custom ones

Now specify a “name” and “value(s)” for each Attribute. For example, I am adding an attribute named 'color' with two different values: Black and Yellow (as shown in the following screenshot). You can change the attribute name and its values according to your own requirements. Next, make sure to check the ‘Used for Variations’ checkbox to tell WooCommerce that the attribute you've defined is for your variations.

Lastly, hit the “Save attributes” button to make the changes visible on the variations tab.

Step 3 – Adding Product Variations

It's time to start adding variations to your product(s). To do so, click on the Variations tab and then click on the “Add Variation” button.

A variation panel will open up after clicking on 'Add Variation', where you will have to fill in product information for each of its variation as follows: • Image – Click the thumbnail button given in the variations tab to choose an image, you want to insert into your post. • SKU(Stock Keeping Unit) – Setting SKU of the variation help you keep a track of your product. • Stock Quantity – Specify the stock for specific variation • Weight – Specify the weight of the variation • Dimensions – Determines the dimension of the variation • Price – This is where you need to assign the variation price. This is a required field and shouldn't be left blank. • Sale Price – In case you want to offer any discount on your variation, enter the discounted price here. • Downloadable – If you want to make the variation downloadable, check this box. • Virtual – Check the bob if the variation is virtual • Enabled – If you don't want the variation to be visible, then uncheck on the “Enabled” box. • Shipping class – It helps you configure the shipping options for your online store. • Tax class – This option allow you to set tax options on the variations. Once you've completed adding the variations to your product(s), click Update/Publish.

Additional Uses of Product Variations

Following the aforementioned step-by-step instruction will help you create a variation(s) for your products. But, there's more you can do using WooCommerce product variations feature to increase your e-store capabilities, such as:

1. Bulk Editing: Boost The Process of Inputting Data

In the 'Variations' tab (as shown in the screenshot above), on the top there's a “Bulk Edit” option. As the name suggests, this option allows you to perform bulk edits on your products in a single step. And thus, help speed up the process of data input.

2. Linking All Variations All-At-Once

Adding each variation to your product individually can be time-consuming and frustrating. However, you can avoid yourself from such hassle by adding multiple product variations. This is achieved by clicking on the ‘link all variations’ button. For instance, let's assume, you have two variation attributes one is color (with black and yellow values) and size (having values medium and large), then once you hit the linking button, a combination of the variation attributes will be created as following: • Large Black • Large Yellow • Medium Black • Medium Yellow

How Variable Product Looks Like on The Front-end?

Remember that it is important to select variations before an 'add to cart' button gets showed up on the front-end. However, you can choose to set up default variations that will be displayed immediately once they're defined. When your visitors will see your variable product on the front-end, they'll be provided with dropdown selection containing variation options. From the selection, they can select the variation options – be it stock available, product price, etc.

Conclusion

If you want to set up a WordPress powered e-store with enhanced e-commerce features such as product variations, then the WooCommerce “Product variations” feature is what you need. Reading this tutorial will provide you basic understanding of how you can add different variations to your product(s) using the product variation feature. Author Bio – Sarah Parker is an well known WordPress developer associated with Markupcloud Ltd, a PSD to WordPress service provider company. She loves to share her knowledge regarding HTML, CSS , Wordpress and many more .

Alex Miro