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Improve Your E-Store Capabilities Using WooCommerce Product Variation Feature

by | Jan 19, 2015 | Articles, Web Development, Wordpress | 0 comments

WooCommerce Product Variation

If you’ve been planning on building an e-commerce website using WordPress, then WooCommerce is one plugin you can’t miss to have. This plugin comes packed with features that helps to embed great e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website. In case you’re looking for a feature that help you add different variations for any specific product In this post I’ll be talking about the “Product variation” feature of WooCommerce and will cover several aspects related to it.

What is Product Variation?

products

Product variation, as the name implies, offer variations of a product in terms of color, prices, stock etc. For instance, this feature offer different variations of a t-shirt, a large t-shirt vs a medium t-shirt. You can set different properties as well as prices to each product variation.

Before proceeding further, let’s discuss about the different product types among which you’ll be choosing one for using the WooCommerce product variation feature.

  • Simple Products: Choose this product type when you don’t want to sell some specific product without variations/options. Simple products contain only one SKU and are shipped.
  • Variable Products: You should choose this option when you wish to have a product with multiple variations or options of a product. Each of the variations contain a different SKU or price.
  • Grouped Products: This is an ideal option if you want to sell related products. For example, if you’re selling some decorative item, let’s say a lamp shades available in three sizes and styles, then you can create a grouped product to display all the three sizes.
  • External/Affiliate Products: They are the ones that you display or show as list on your website, but sold by some other website.

How to Use Product Variation?

In order to utilize the WooCommerce’s Product Variations feature, you’ll have to add attributes for variations. For doing so, you just need to follow below mentioned steps:

Step 1 – Set up your product type

In the very beginning, you will have to choose the product type for which you’ll be using the product variation feature. In our case, we’ll choose “Variable product” as our product type.

In order to set up the product type, open your WordPress website admin dashboard. Go to Products>>Add Product, the following window will appear:

variables-1

You simply need to select the product type as “Variable product”.

Step 2 – Define attributes for your product variations

Go to Products>>Attributes, click on the “Add” button to add some product attributes. You can either choose global attributes or define any custom attributes that match up to your product.

variables-2

Remember that you need to assign attribute values to the variable product – that will become options for users – visible on the front-end. In order to tell the WooCommerce about the attributes for your variations, simply check the ‘variation’ checkbox as shown in the below screenshot:

Once, you’re finished with the process of defining attributes for your product variations, click on the “Save attributes” button to save the changes you’ve made.

Step 3 – Add variations for your product(s)

Now its time to add product variations. For doing so, from your website admin dashboard go to Products>>Variations tab. Next, hit the “Add Variation” button.

Each product variation needs to be assigned specific details as listed below:

  • Image
  • SKU(Stock Keeping Unit)
  • Stock Quantity
  • Weight
  • Dimensions
  • Price
  • Sale Price
  • Downloadable
  • Virtual
  • Enabled
  • Shipping class
  • Tax class

If you’d love to explore more possible uses of the product variations feature, then continue reading further.

Pace Things Up With Bulk Editing

Time has always been a constraint for all of us. And we constantly look for ways to pace things up a bit. So, if you want to speed up the process of entering the data input for the variation fields (as discussed in the previous step), then you can use the ‘Bulk Editing’ option. As the name suggests, you can perform bulk edits using this option. You can easily edit any number of products in just a single step, and even edit any fields.

Linking All Variations

If you want to save yourself from the hassles of adding each variation one by one, you can add multiple variations for your product(s) using the ‘link all variations’ button. It helps to create a variation for a combination of the variation attributes. For example, let’s say, you’ve two variation attributes color (having values red and black) and size (having values large and medium), then the linking button will help create following variations:

  • Large Red
  • Large Black
  • Medium Red
  • Medium Black

How Variable Product Will Appear on The Front-end?

When your users will view the variable product on the front-end, they’ll be presented with drop-down boxes. Using these boxes they can select the variation options they would like to view – be it product price, quantity etc.

Wrapping Up!

If you’re running an e-commerce site and want to display different variation of your product, then the WooCommerce “Product variations” feature will come handy for you. Reading this tutorial would help you understand how you can make use of this feature.

About Author: Emily Heming is a professional WordPress developer for a leading PSD to WP conversion company. She also provides conversion services like HTML to WordPress theme and many more.

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