How to Add a WooCommerce Product from Scratch

Transcript

Hi, Michele Bergh here with “Bergh Consulting”. Thanks for joining me today. In this video, we’re going to cover how to add a new product to your WooCommerce website, if you want to begin from a blank slate. So I’ve logged into the back end of this website and I’ve come down to “Products” and I’ve clicked on “Add new” and that’s brought me to this page specifically. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about some of the inner functions of the editing screen, but I will include some links to relevant tutorials and overviews that will be helpful with the nitty gritty details. This is assuming that you have some knowledge of how basic WordPress works. And then some of the detail down in this area here, would be covered in a different resource. But the basics of getting a new product listed are quite simple. 

You want to give your product a name. So you’re going to type right in this field here and that’s going to create a permalink that will show up right below that. You want to add your full description here. You want to click the type of product that you have. So we have “Simple products” where there are no variations, such as color, sizes, those kinds of things that a customer can choose from. A “Grouped product” is a group of products that you’re connecting to each other selling together. “External or Affiliate product” is something that you’re putting in your shop but when they click on the button it’s not going to say add to cart, it’s going to say something different and take them to a website that is not your own. This is most commonly used for affiliate type products. Just a note to remind you that if you have affiliate links you need to have a visible disclaimer, that shows up telling people that before they hit your button. It’s not good enough to have it in the footer, can’t have it at the end of your post it needs to be before the button. “Variable products” are products where they do have those options, such as color changes, size changes etc. 

“Virtual” is something that is not shipped. It’s more like an E-course or a service something like that. 

And “Downloadable” is something where they have access to a file as soon as they make that purchase. 

So when you come down here, you’re going to want to make sure that you fill in the price. It will not show up on the front end even if you publish it, if you don’t have a price. It can be zero, but you have to have something filled in here. And then if there’s a “Sale price” and you can “Schedule” that, make sure that the “Tax status” and “Tax class” are the same. This is assuming that you already have your WooCommerce fully set up. 

“Inventory”: some people manage inventory some people don’t. If you are managing inventory, you’ll want to go through and make sure that you enable that and that you set how you want it to show for stock. 

“Shipping”: this depends on the type of shipping that you’re using so whatever system you’ve set up for WooCommerce, you’ll want to make sure that you have the applicable information in here that’s necessary. 

Also covered in a different resource. You can link products to this one. “Cross-sells” or “Upsells”, if you’re not sure what those are, you can always hover over the little question mark to get the information about that. An Upsell is something that they might buy instead that’s a better price point maybe for them. Or just a better deal for you, you’d prefer they buy, you know, larger set or whatever. Cross-sells are something they would buy in addition to this item. 

“Attributes”: that shows up if you’re using a variable type product and this is where you would put in the information about the options that they have. You would specify, you know, size is an option and then these are all the different sizes we have available. 

And then the “Advanced note”: you can put a note that shows up when they get their receipt. You can change the “Menu order” of how they show up. And you can choose whether you want to “Allow reviews” or not on this item directly. This is also a shop set settings. So you may or may not have already enabled or disabled reviews for your entire shop, but this is specific to this product. 

And the “Get more options” is a link to other upsells that they have in WooCommerce to make your store more robust. 

The only other thing with these just to kind of show you, that you’ll notice when it’s a virtual product the shipping information disappears from here and if it is a downloadable product, you have a spot here in the general settings right under the price, where you can add that file. Highly recommend you do this. People will expect it, but it allows them to immediately download. They get a link in their thank you, they get a link in their email, and they get a link with their order details. 

So name the file and then attach the URL to the download. If it’s on your website, you can click on “Choose file” and find it or you can copy and paste into that field. And then you have some other settings here for “Download limits” and “Expiration dates” that you might want to check. 

The last thing on this side of the page is the “Short description”. Some people fill this out, some people don’t. It’s up to you. This is what shows up on the product page, right underneath the title and to the right of the product image. 

Moving over here to the right-hand side bar, these bottom two options here and yours could be in a different order but on this page there at the bottom. They are the product images. So the product image is the primary product image. Any other additional images you’d like to show would go under the product gallery. You don’t need to repeat this main image here. 

And then you’ll want to “Tag” the product, if you’re using tags. You’ll want to “Categorize” the product to the right categories if you’re using those. And the last field is the publishing area. So if you’re ready to go live, I always suggest that you preview it first and then you can publish. Preview will open in a new screen, where you’ll be able to make sure that the details are correct, everything looks right and you have–, you like the way that it looks. Save draft if you’re not ready to go live quite yet. 

The other thing I wanted to mention that I neglected to mention earlier is that if you are doing a “Variable product” and you create variations in here, you first create the “Attributes” and then you come into variations and you say use all the attributes for my variations. Every variation must have a price inside of it because sometimes those variations have different pricing. Sometimes it’s more expensive to get a larger size or a certain color. So you have to have pricing filled in in each of the variations. It is a very common reason that your product isn’t showing on the front end if you’re having problems and it’s a variable product. 

So just a little helpful tip for you. And yeah, when you’re ready to go you can just hit “Publish” and you’re good to go. I hope you found this video helpful. I appreciate you hanging out with me and I will see you in the next video.