Product Name and Description

In the Products menu click Add Product and type in the product title and description.


Pricing and Measurements

Under the main dialog box is the Product Type panel. Here you define the product type (as outlined above) and whether it is a downloadable (digital), or virtual (service) product.


General tab

  • SKU – stock keep unit, used to track products. Must be unique, and should be named so it does not clash with post ID’s.
  • Price:
    • Regular Price – The item’s main price.
    • Sale Price – The item’s sale price.
  • Tax:
    • Tax Status – The items’ tax status.
    • Tax Class – Which tax class the product belongs to. You can set up tax classes in WooCommerce > Settings > Tax.

Inventory tab

The inventory tab allows you to manage stock for the product individually and define whether to allow back orders. If stock management is disabled from the settings page, only the ‘stock status’ option will be visible.

Shipping tab

  • 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 tab

Using up-sells and cross-sells you can cross promote your products with one another. They can be added by searching for a particular product and selecting the product from the drop down list:


After adding them, they will be listed in the input field:


Up-sells are displayed on the product details page. These are products which you may wish to encourage users to upgrade to 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 the tea kettles on that same page as an up-sell.


Cross-sells are products which are displayed at the cart and related to the users cart contents. As an example if the user adds a Nintendo DS to their cart, when the arrive at the cart page you may want to suggest that they also purchase spare Styluses.

Grouping – Set this option to make this product part of a grouped product.

Attributes tab

On the attributes tab you can assign attributes to a product. You will see a select box containing any global attribute sets you may have created (E.G. platform). See Managing Product Categories, Tags and Attributes for help on setting these up.

Once you have selected an attribute from the select box, click add and you will be able to apply the terms attached to that attribute (E.G. Nintendo DS) to the product. You can choose to hide the attribute on the frontend by simply leaving the ‘Visible’ checkbox unticked.

Custom attributes can be applied here too by choosing ‘Custom product attribute’ from the select box. These are added at the product level and won’t be available in the layered navigation.

Advanced tab

  • Purchase note – Enter an optional note to send the customer after purchase.
  • Menu order – Custom ordering position for this item.
  • Enable Reviews – Enable/Disable customers reviews for this item

Excerpt

Finally you can add an excerpt which should be a short description of the product. Typically this will appear next to the product imagery on the listing page whilst the long description will appear within the Product Description tab.

Taxonomies

On the right hand side of the Add New Product panel you will see your product categories in which you can place your product, just like a standard WordPress post. You can also assign the product tags in the same manner.


Product Images

You can add both a main image and a gallery of images

– see Adding product image and galleries

Adding a Virtual Product

When adding a simple product, you can check the ‘virtual‘ box in the product type panel. This will remove un-necessary fields (such as dimensions).

Adding a Downloadable Product

When adding a simple product, you can check the ‘downloadable‘ box in the product type panel. This will add two new fields:

  1. File path – path or url to your downloadable file.
  2. Download limit – a limit for the number of times the customer can download the file. Left blank for unlimited downloads.

Adding an Variable Product

Variable products are arguably the most complex of product types. They let you define variations of a single product where each variation may have a different SKU, price or stock level.

See Product Variations for a guide on adding and setting up variations.

Adding an External Product

Choose ‘External/Affiliate’ from the product type drop down. This will remove unnecessary tabs such as tax and inventory and insert a new product URL field. This is the destination at which users can purchase the product. Rather than add to cart buttons, they will see a read more button directing them to this URL.

To mark a product as featured go to: Products > Products and select the Star in the featured column. You can alternatively select the Quick Edit option to select the Featured option.