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).
To learn more, see: Managing Product Categories, Tags and Attributes
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.
- Downloadable – much like a virtual product, but customers are given a downloadable file. For example, 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 Memberships.
Adding a simple product
Adding a Simple product is similar to writing a post in WordPress.
- Go to WooCommerce > Products > Add Product. You then have a familiar interface and should immediately feel at home.
- Enter a product Title and Description.
A familiar interface for adding product information- 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.
Product data is added in this panelGeneral section
- SKU – Stock keep unit (SKU) tracks products. Must be unique and should be formatted so it does not match any post IDs. For example, post IDs are numbers so a SKU could be WS01. That could stand for WooShirt 01.
- Price
- Regular Price – Item’s normal/regular price.
- Sale Price – Item’s discounted price that can then be scheduled for certain date ranges.
Inventory section
The inventory section allows you to manage stock for the product individually and define whether to allow back orders and more. If stock management is disabled from the settings page, only the ‘Manage stock?’ option is visible.
Ticking the Sold Individually checkbox limits the product to one per 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:
After adding, they are listed in the input field:
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.
Grouping – Used to make a product part of a grouped product. More info below at: Grouped Products.
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). More at: Managing Product Categories, Tags and Attributes.
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 customers reviews for this item.
Excerpt
Add a short product description. This typically appears next to product imagery on the listing page, and the long description appears in the Product Description tab.
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
You can add a main image and a gallery of images. More at: Adding product image and galleries.
Setting catalog visibility and feature status
In the Publish panel, you can set catalog visibility for your product.
- Catalog and search – Visible everywhere, shop pages, category pages and search results.
- Catalog – Visible in shop pages and category pages, but not search results.
- Search – 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.
Deleting a product
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.
You can find more documentation on setting up your products here: Set Up Products