Product Variations in WooCommerce

Product Variations in WooCommerce : how to get started

Do you know how to manage product variations in WooCommerce? In this article we will look for what exactly product variations are and how we can easily manage them. Affinity with WordPress and WooCommerce will definitely help you use this article to its fullest.

WHAT ARE PRODUCT VARIATIONS IN WOOCOMMERCE ?

If you want to develop a webshop, it is very important to think in advance about your products and how you want to present them. Let’s take an easy example. You want to start a webshop with the sale of t-shirts (as if this has never been done before). You have 5 basic models but each available in Large and Small. You also only have them in Blue and Red. Some would argue : that would be 20 products (5 models x 2 sizes x 2 colours). But that’s actually a bit short sighted. In fact, we have 5 basic products that each have a number of variations, namely available in blue/red and in small/large. So we have a choice of 4 variants per T-shirt. Of course, this is still a fairly simplistic representation of the real reality where the number of variations can seriously increase. For the mathematicians: it is the total number of possible values multiplied by each other. Another example : We sell posters of the hard rock band “Kiss” in our webshop. In addition to size and color, these are also available in 3 types of fabrics. Now let’s take a look at the possibilities:

• 4 basic sizes : extra small, small, large, extra large
• color : red, black, blue and green
• base fabric : cotton, wool and nylon (:-)

Do you see the number of possibilities? 4 x 4 x 3 = 48

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PRODUCT VARIATIONS IN WOOCOMMERCE AND PRODUCT FEATURES?

The logic we described above for the T-shirt shop can easily be added at product level. And then we talk about product variations in WooCommerce. But what if we now need properties for the entire range of our products? Do we have to create and fill in these properties for each product again and again? That’s why we have the “product properties” section in WooCommerce. Here you can define a number of properties and use them for all your products so that you only have to add all values once. Typical values that you can enter here are for example raw material, sizes, weights, widths, heights, colours,… In addition, you must also enter values for each property that you can then reuse at product level.

HOW TO CREATE PRODUCT VARIATIONS IN WOOCOMMERCE

CHOOSE PROPERTIES

The first step to create your product variations in WooCommerce as outlined above is to change the status of a product from “simple product” to “variable product”.

ADD PROPERTIES

The second step is now to add the properties that apply as properties of the relevant product. So you only choose those properties that apply.

In addition, you also have to manually add the values of those properties. After all, not all values may apply. Don’t forget to mark (the checkbox) “use for variations”. We want to effectively use those properties as the basis for our product variations. Don’t forget: if several properties apply, you have to click several times on “addÃâ next to the dropdown where you first indicated the relevant product characteristic.

CREATING VARIATIONS BASED ON THE CHOSEN PROPERTIES

Once you are done with the properties (and you have saved the relevant product !!), click on the following tab in the WooCommerce meta window : Variations .

There you choose the second option in the dropdown (add variations for all properties). In this way you create a product variant for each value of each product feature. This can add up quite quickly (the number of options) but WooCommerce will notify you in time if it gets a bit “extreme”.

WOOCOMMERCE MANAGE PRODUCT VARIATIONS

Once all variations have been created, the individual properties of each variation can be modified. You open the tab for each variation by “hovering” with your mouse to the right of the variance. Then you will see an inverted triangle to the right of each variation. Click on this and you will see the details of the respective variation.

As you can see above, there is quite a bit of data that you can adjust. We name a few :

• image (if specific to the variations, e.g. a black cotton t-shirt in extra large)
• the unique item number
• the price of this specific variation: must be entered or the product variation will not be shown in the webshop
• shipping class and tax class (or tax class in WooCommerce)
• Stock status
• Some other items

Feel free to edit some variations before clicking “Save Changes” at the bottom.