WordPress WooCommerce Product Entry
This article will teach you how to add a WooCommerce product. It assumes that you already have a WooCommerce website and simply need to know how to add a product. When I teach my students WordPress, I teach them how to add Posts, Pages, and Products to an existing website before I teach them how to create a WordPress website, so they have a better understanding of what we are trying to learn. If you are starting a job where you need to manage WooCommerce products, then this article will give you the background that you need.
The WooCommerce Plugin
Most WordPress e-commerce websites are made with the WooCommerce plugin. The WooCommerce plugin is free, although there are paid add-ons that can be purchased. (I rarely need them.)
Shopify is the #1 e-commerce platform with 28%. The minimum charge is $29 per month. WooCommerce is in second place at 25%.
In this article I explain the pros and cons of WooCommerce vs. Shopify: https://webdevstudents.com/shopify-vs-woocommerce/
The bottom line is that I have moved most of my clients to WooCommerce, although I will support Shopify websites.
Create Your Dream Destination Product
Now we are going to make a Dream Destination Product, using the same images and text you used for your page builder page. To create a product, we need to learn some new WordPress fields. In addition, WooCommerce uses the old text editor, TinyMCE, so the data entry is a bit different. When you are finished, you will have a product that looks something like this one.
Product Fields
Here is a list of fields we need to fill in:
- Product Description (Long)
- Short Product Description
- Product Price and Sale Price
- Product Image
- Product Gallery
The sections below will show you how to enter each of these.
Add a Product
We start by adding a product. Click new, and choose New Product.
Add a title for your product. (A good name for the product is the name of the destination.)
Product Short Description
Scroll to the very bottom of the product entry. You will see the Product Short Description. The short description appears underneath the price.
This is prime real estate for the product page. The Product Short Description should be kept short, so that the Add to Cart button is “Above the Fold”. Save longer descriptions for the Long Description.
Product “Long” Description
The product description is at the top of Edit Product. It is the longer product description displays underneath the other product information.
The Short Product Description and Product Description use the Tiny MCE editor at the time of this writing instead of the block editor. The Tiny MCE editor is likely to be very familiar to you. You can mix images and text in this area with the Tiny MCE editor.
Price and Product Information
This is a more complicated segment. For now, do three things:
1. Check the virtual box. Because the trip is a “virtual” product, there is no cost for shipping.
2. Add a regular price
3. Add a sale price
This is the segment where there is a lot more complexity. For example, if you need shipping on your website, then you wouldn’t check the virtual checkbox, and you would have to set up shipping. If you your products require options (like size or color choices) then you would create a Variable Product instead of a Simple Product.
Product Photos
WooCommerce has its own photo gallery built in. If you haven’t done so already, head on over to Pixabay.com to find some royalty-free photos for your website. Look for around 5 photos. (If you are following along, use the same set of photos you used in Lesson 6.)
Put your best photo into the Product Image, and your other photos into the gallery.
And that is it! Publish your product and take a look at it. There is a lot more to learn about creating and managing products in WooCommerce, but you are now on a path to managing a WooCommerce store.
This article is part of a teaching series on WordPress. To see the entire series, go to the WordPress Education page. If you are looking for more information about WooCommerce, we have that too.