How to use grouped products in WooCommerce

Selling grouped products in WooCommerce can boost your sales by making it easier for your customers to buy related products together. But how do you create a WooCommerce grouped product? And is there a better way to go about it?

Customers often go shopping with a single item in mind, but they rarely leave the store with just that one item. When an online store pitches complementary products to the customer alongside the product of interest, customers are more likely to purchase these products as a group. And that's where WooCommerce grouped products come in.

The standard WooCommerce setup comes with a special product type called 'Grouped product'. This lets you display a group of related products on the product page, allowing customers to buy any or all of them together.

In this article, you will learn how to:

Let's do it!

What is a WooCommerce grouped product?

A WooCommerce grouped product is a parent product which displays additional products on the same page. The selected products are displayed in a list above the add to cart button so that customers can select the required quantity of each one and add them all to the cart.

The standard WooCommerce grouped products can already achieve so much. However, it’s limited to grouping simple products. In situations where shops need to group composite products, variable products and those to be sold in bulk, some plugins need to be installed.

Grouped products are a useful way to sell products in a bundle. However, they also have quite a few limitations and there are better ways to achieve a similar result.

First, I'll show you how to create a WooCommerce grouped product. After that, I'll explain the limitations of this approach and tell you about alternative methods that you might prefer.

Benefits of grouping WooCommerce products

Adding grouped products to WooCommerce is a form of advertisement with no cost at all. It allows you to showcase additional products to the customer without them having to click around your store. This increases the likelihood that the customer will purchase more than one item. You can boost your sales and average order value at the same time 🚀

Grouped products can also allow you to showcase additional products that might otherwise get lost, and advertise new product collections. Woo themselves suggest that grouped products should be within a range or collection of products. For example, if you’ve just released a new collection of furniture that all matches, you can showcase all of these to the customer in one collection. If products are designed to go together, then grouped products are an excellent way of communicating this to customers.

An example

If you're selling a mobile phone then you could create a grouped product containing a range of items which are compatible with that phone. This might include a case, screen protector, earphones, and so on.

While each of these items might have their own independent product pages, you can display them as a grouped product on the single product page for the phone. That way, customers can buy the phone alongside the other recommended items - helping to increase your average order value.

Now we know what a grouped product is, let’s get one set up in your store. You can watch this video tutorial, or read on to see how it's done.

How to add a WooCommerce grouped product

Assuming you already have WooCommerce installed, take the following steps to create a grouped product:

1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Products → Add new.
2. Name the product and add other details such as the image, description, tags, categories, etc.
3. Scroll down to the Product Data section and change the Product data dropdown from Simple product to Grouped Product.
4. Once done, details like the price and other fields will disappear, this is perfectly normal.

6. Now click the Linked Products tab on the left.

7. In the search box next to Grouped products, type the names of the products you intend to add into the group and click on them to add.
8. Click the blue Update button in the Publish section of the edit product page and just like that, you’ve created a grouped product.

Now any time you want to add a new product to this group, you just click on the group, select edit, and follow the steps above.

The problem with grouped products in WooCommerce

Take another look at the screenshot above. Can you spot any problems with it? 🔎

WooCommerce grouped products look nice, but they have several limitations:

So at best, standard WooCommerce grouped products are a basic way of displaying related products. For stores that deal with a wide variety of products, composite products, or selling products in bulk, this might not be convenient or even practical. If you want a more fully featured method that avoids these problems, then keep reading for a better solution.

2 better ways to group products in WooCommerce

There are two plugins that provide a better way to create grouped products in WooCommerce. I'll tell you about each one next, and how to set each one up.

Alternative 1: Create more flexible grouped products with WooCommerce Product Options

WooCommerce Product Options provides a more flexible way to display grouped products or variations on the product page.

Most people use it to manually add extra options and add-ons to their products. However, you can equally use it to select other products or variations from your store which appear as options above the add to cart button.

Look at the screenshot below. Can you see how much more flexible it is compared to the screenshot of standard grouped products in the previous section?

This is better than normal WooCommerce grouped products because:

By using WooCommerce Product Options, you can easily overcome all of the problems with standard grouped products 💪

And there's more!

In addition, this grouped products plugin provides lots more flexibility for your grouped products. You can:

• Set sections as required so that customers are forced to choose at least one option. For example, you might want to force customers to choose a case whenever they buy a smartphone.
• Set minimum and maximum quantities for each section in the case. For example, maybe you only want to let customers buy 1 smartphone case to avoid confusion.
• Create product groupings centrally and automatically display the same grouped products on multiple product pages. For example, imagine that you want to upsell the same products on all products in the smartphones category. Simply create the group once and apply it to the entire category, saving tons of time!
• Use conditional logic to show and hide the grouped products depending on the customer's selections. For example, you might add a "Select accessories" checkbox and hide the group of related products until the customer ticks this.
• Use it with its sister plugin, WooCommerce Discount Manager, to reward customers for adding more items from the group to their cart. For example, you could give a 10% discount whenever customers buy 2 or more items from the smartphone accessories category.

As you can see, this is far more sophisticated than the basic grouped products that you get with WooCommerce itself. Next, I'll tell you how to set it up (which is actually easier than using basic WooCommerce grouped products 😀).

How to add grouped products using WooCommerce Product Options

It's easy to create product groupings with the WooCommerce Product Options plugin:

1. Get the plugin and install it on your WordPress site.
2. Activate your license key in the plugin setup wizard.
3. Go to Products → Options and create a new option group.
4. Add a 'Products' option type.
5. Choose which product(s) and or categories you want to display the group of products on. This could be just one individual product, or you could display the same grouped products on multiple product pages.
6. Select the products, categories or variations that you want to display in the group. If you select an entire category then you'll see additional options for choosing how many products to display, the sort order, and so on.
7. Configure any additional options, such as making them required or setting minimum or maximum quantities.

Tip: If you want to display all the grouped products in a single list, then you just need to create one 'Products' option. To structure it into categories like I did in the screenshot above, add multiple 'Products' options to the group as needed.

Alternative 1: Group products on a 'build your own bundle' page

WooCommerce Product Table offers a completely different approach to creating WooCommerce grouped products. Instead of listing grouped items on the product page, it lets you list multiple products or variations anywhere on your site. This allows customers to build their own bundle by listing products or variations in a table or quick order form.

This gives customers the freedom to create their own bundle. WooCommerce Product Table lets the customer choose which products they would like to purchase in the list. So instead of purchasing a whole set bundle or grouped product in your WooCommerce store, they’ll be able to build their own bundle.

For example, suppose you run a restaurant, you can list food items or add-ons individually so the customer has the opportunity to select some and leave others. For example, a burger with fries or one without. Or a burger with additional onion or not.

If you’re looking for a much more customizable and detailed way to create grouped and bundled products in WooCommerce, then WooCommerce Product Table is the plugin for you.

How to create a 'Build your own bundle' with WooCommerce Product Table

1. Get the plugin and install it on your WordPress site.
2. Activate your license key in the setup wizard and choose the main settings for your product tables. This includes important information like which columns you'd like to display.
3. Now create a page where you will list the 'Build your own bundle'.
4. Add the shortcode [product_table category=categoryslug"], replacing 'categoryslug' with the actual slug of the category that you want to display the products from.
5. Structure the page into as many sections as you like, each containing a different shortcode to list different products from the bundle.

Pro tips

You can use WooCommerce Product Table with other plugins to add extra features.

For example, you might want to use it with WooCommerce Discount Manager to give discounts when customers buy a certain number or value of products from a certain category. You could also use it with WooCommerce Quantity Manager to control how many products customers can select from each category.

I recommend clearly displaying information about the available discounts and quantity rules on the page above the product table. This will encourage customers to buy more, while staying within your minimum and maximum quantity limits.

Group your products together in WooCommerce

Using grouped products in your WooCommerce store is an excellent strategy that’s sure to help you showcase more products and boost your average order value. However, the default WooCommerce grouped products are very basic and probably don't have all the features you need.

Instead, you can add more advanced grouped products using one of these excellent plugins:

• WooCommerce Product Options - Add more flexible grouped products to the product page, complete with extra features such as extra styling options, the ability to structure grouped products into categories, set minimum and maximum quantities, and more.
• WooCommerce Product Table - Allow customers to build their own bundle by listing products in a table.

Both plugins come with a full 30-day guarantee so you can try them on your site risk-free. Install your chosen WooCommerce bundle plugin today, and let me know how you get on!