The WooCommerce plugin is one of the most popular ecommerce plugins for WordPress. It’s also one of the easiest to use. Adding products in WooCommerce is quick, simple and intuitive. This article will walk you through adding a product from start to finish so that you can have your own store up and running quickly!
Adding Products In WooCommerce
To add products to your WooCommerce store, navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard and click Products >> Add New.
You will come across a WordPress editor with which you are already familiar, with some additional features.
1. Add Title & Description
Add the product title to be displayed on the top of the product page, and then add a few lines related to the product information.
2. Select Product Type:
Depending on the product you are selling you, can select a product type accordingly.
WooCommerce provides you with six product type options to choose from:
- Single Product: It’s the most common and default product type. Simple physical products without any variations fall under this.
- Grouped Product: A Grouped product is a collection of two or more Single Products related to each other. These products are sold together, and generally, the product pages contain links to both items. Example – Shoes- Socks.
- Virtual Product: Virtual Products don’t require shipping and are mostly related to services.
- External/Affiliate Product: External or Affiliate products are the ones that are not directly sold on your site. You provide descriptions on the product pages and also the links to redirect the customers to the Seller.
- Variable Products: A product that provides multiple dimensions and variations are called Variable Products like T-Shirts come in varying colors and sizes
- Downloadable Products: Downloadable products also do not require shipping. They are downloaded directly from the site, for example, like e-books and music files.
3. Product Meta Boxes
Now that you have decided on your product type, you can enter the other specifications regarding the product you have just selected.
General:
Under the general section, you can add your product’s Regular Price and the Sale Price. If you are charging taxes on a particular product, you can also mention them here. Moreover, you can also use the handy Schedule feature to set your sales start and end date. So you don’t have to remove the sale price manually.
Inventory:
The inventory settings allow you to control and manage your product’s stock.
For managing the store stocks following settings are available:
- SKU: SKU stands for Stock Keep Unit, and it is a unique number assigned to every product for tracking. You can either set the SKU manually or use a WordPress plugin to generate unique SKUs.
- Manage Stock: Enable this option if you want to manage the stocks at the product level. This option will further give you more options to manage stock levels.
- Stock Status: To manually enter the product stock.
Sold Individually: Enable it if you want to limit the product to one per order.
Shipping:
Here you can set the details regarding the shipment of physical products. You need to enter the weight and dimensions of the product. You can also apply different shipping rules to specific products using the ‘shipping classes’ option.
Linked Products:
Linked products are a way to generate more revenue for your store. You can do it by either linking similar products to your product page that your customers might like i.e Upsells, or you can recommend more expensive products with better features, to add more value to the product in case of Cross-sells.
Attributes:
Attributes help you set variations for your product. Example: You are selling a T-Shirt in different color combinations like red, black, white, and yellow. You want to display them to the customers so that they can select their choice.
Advanced:
Under the Advanced tab, you can add a Purchase note to the customer after purchasing. You can also set the items’ order and check the Enable review option to get customer reviews.
4. Adding Short Descriptions:
Once you are done adding the product meta details, scroll a bit down, and you will see a Short Description meta box. The short description appears with the product details like price and others. The description you added in the first step is a bit detailed once and displayed later down on the page.
5. Adding Categories and Tags
Adding categories and tags helps you to organize products. You can add Categories and tags to WooCommerce products the same as we do in our WordPress blog posts.
6. Adding Product Image
Add a primary image of a product; this is the same as adding a featured image to our post. This image will be displayed along with the other product details.
7. Adding Images To Product Gallery
The Product Gallery allows you to add multiple images to the same product. You can use the gallery to show your products to customers from different angles and dimensions.
8. Publishing Product
Finally, after going through a series of steps, you can move to Publish your page. But before publishing there are few settings left to take a look.
Under the Catalog Visibility option you can also choose where your product will appear – either in the shop and archives, in search results, or to be hidden. You can also set you product as “featured” by enabling the Featured Product option.
After going through all the option it’s time to hit the Publish button.
Here is an example of what your WooCommerce store’s Product page might look like on the front end.
Wrapping Up
Saw how easy it was to add a product to your WooCommerce store! The series of steps covers all the essential functionalities required to set up a primary e-commerce store. Once you have added the products and designed product templates, you are ready to launch your WooCommerce store online.
