Managing WooCommerce Products, Variations and Inventories

If you’re planning to set up a store to sell either physical or digital goods using WordPress, you need to thoroughly familiarize yourself with WooCommerce products.

After setting up WooCommerce, configuring WooCommerce shipping, and WooCommerce payments, you need to set up your store, manage inventories, create product variations, and more. Luckily, WooCommerce has a comprehensive product management section that you can mold to your specific type of product.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about WooCommerce product variations, including affiliates, how (and why) to group them, and managing your inventory.

It’s important to consider all of the information below because these decisions at the beginning will allow you to scale your WooCommerce store so that you don’t have to backtrack and redo everything at a later date.

So let’s get started!

Understanding WooCommerce Products

In the earlier tutorial on setting up WooCommerce, I covered how to add a single, simple product. However, there are many different types of products from which you can choose when you create a new WooCommerce product as shown here:

Here’s a brief explanation of the most important types of products:

Product Type #1: Simple WooCommerce Product

This is the most basic kind of product and is the easiest to set up. These products are standardized and don’t have any variations such as size, or color. A good example would be, say, an electric toothbrush that doesn’t have any configurable options. Or a physical book.

If you want, you can create an entire store full of simple products and leave it at that. However, it will severely limit your flexibility and ability to expand your selection, as well as make future products hard to manage.

Product Type #2: Variable WooCommerce Products

A variable WooCommerce product is one that isn’t standardized. For example, you could be selling three sizes of t-shirts in four different colors. That makes for a total of 12 unique combinations.

Now you could create twelve different simple products, but you could also create a single variable product with two attributes – color and size, and manage the inventories and prices of each variation. This makes managing your WooCommerce store much easier.

To create a variable product, simply choose “Variable product” in the WooCommerce product creation screen as shown here:

Now in the “Attributes” section, create new attributes for each kind of variation. To keep it simple, I’ve created an attribute called “Color”, and in the “Value(s)” section, I’ve created three colors – purple, red, and green, separated by a vertical bar (|). You can add as many custom product attributes as you want.

Adding Variations

After creating the attributes, you need to create the variations for each attribute combination. To do this, click the “Variations” tab on the left:

You can click the “Generate variations” button to ask WooCommerce to automatically create variations based on the attributes you selected. Be careful, as this can lead to a large number of variations – not all of which might be on hand! So if you have only a few variations on hand, you can add them manually.

After creating the variations, WooCommerce will ask you to set the price for each of them:

Click the “Add price” button to set a general price for all variations, or click the “Edit” link next to each variation to set individual prices. Once you’re done, you can save your changes and now when someone visits the product in your WooCommerce store, they’ll see a dropdown box where they can select the values of the attributes that are available:

Depending on the selection, WooCommerce will display the price and inventory for that specific variation.

Product Type #3: Grouped Products

Grouped WooCommerce products are a way to bundle SKUs together so that your customers can purchase many of them at the same time. I like to take the example of a dinner table set. Using grouped products, you can create a “bundle” consisting of an assortment of cutlery, plates, and maybe even a tablecloth. As with product variations, you can make the customer choose each of these individually, but it’s much more convenient to do so from a single screen. And more convenience translates into greater ease of shopping and higher revenues. What’s not to like?

To create a grouped product, simply select the dropdown box option labeled “Grouped product” as shown here:

Now when you click “Linked Products” as in the screenshot, you can add all the products that make up the grouped product. To do this, you need to have already created all the individual products, so make sure you’ve done that first.

After saving your changes, here’s what you see when you view the newly grouped product:

As you can see, you can not only add individual items together in the cart, but you can also customize the number of SKUs for each type of product. In addition, you can also see the discounted price of each.

In all, grouped products let you bundle together related products, and can increase the overall sales of your store.

Product Type #4: External or Affiliate WooCommerce Products

You can also use WooCommerce to promote products and services on sites other than your own. These are called external or affiliate products and are hosted on other websites. To create such a product, just choose the “External/Affiliate product” label option as shown here:

There are two options:

1. The product URL
2. The button text

The URL must be one that leads outside your own website. After setting these, here’s what your customers will see:

As you can see, there’s no “Add to cart” button, and no display of the inventory. This makes sense since you can neither sell the product directly on your site nor can you control its inventory levels. Using this method, you can expand your WooCommerce store and increase the number of products available.

WooCommerce Isn’t an Ideal Affiliate Tool

Despite WooCommerce’s ability to display and redirect visitors to outside websites, I don’t see it as ideal for an affiliate management system. It provides a mechanism for cloaking URLs for ease of tracking, doesn’t have a vendor classification system, and doesn’t provide a way to manage links or audit them.

If you want a proper affiliate management system, I suggest you install a dedicated plugin like ThirstyAffiliates for link management and tracking. If you want, you can then use the generated links in your WooCommerce store. But by itself, WooCommerce doesn’t provide the tools to be an effective affiliate.

Many More WooCommerce Product Options

In this tutorial, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what WooCommerce has to offer in terms of product customization. There is inventory management that we can enhance with plugins, tags, and categories for easy maintenance. Plugins, in particular, allow you to customize WooCommerce far beyond the defaults. For example, you can implement a “One Page Checkout” that streamlines the payment flow even further, reducing the chances of a visitor abandoning their cart.

We will be exploring all the above options in separate posts. But hopefully, this brief overview gives you an idea of the power of WooCommerce, and how you can mold it to meet your needs.