Quick WooCommerce tutorial: Sell craft letters or name signs

Sell individual craft letters in WooCommerce

In this quick WooCommerce tutorial, we'll show you how to sell individual letters with customizable heights, prices and colors. This is useful for selling craft letters, custom name signs, nursery decor, and more.

A potential customer asked us how to sell letters using our WooCommerce Product Options plugin. In particular, they were unsure of how to charge different prices per letter, and based on the size of the letters.

They wanted it to work similarly to this product on Etsy:

Etsy custom craft letters

Keep reading to learn how to set this up in WooCommerce.

Basic setup

To follow this tutorial, I'm assuming that you already have a WordPress website with the WooCommerce plugin installed.

  1. In the WordPress admin, go to Products → Add New.
    Add Product to sell custom letters in WooCommerce
  2. Set up the product which you will use to sell the custom letters as follows:
    1. Product name - Call it whatever you like, e.g. "Custom name sign letters."
    2. Description and/or short description - Add these as needed.
    3. Price - Enter 0.00. This is important because if you leave it blank then people won't be able to purchase the letters. (You don't need to enter an actual price amount because the WooCommerce Product Options plugin will handle that.)
    4. Product image - Add one or more images of the different letters that you are selling.
    5. Click 'Publish' to add the product to your site.
  3. Now install the WooCommerce Product Options plugin. Activate the license key in the setup wizard, then go to Products → Product Options and click the button to create a new Option Group.
  4. Call the Option Group something memorable like "Custom Letters" and then start adding options, depending on which choices you wish to give customers.
  5. Set up the group to appear on the product that you just created.

We'll discuss this in the next section.

Adding options to your custom letter products

Add a letter size option

If you want customers to be able to select a size for the custom letters, then add an option for this to your option group. In my example, I used the 'Text labels' field type because I like the visual way that this displays the different size options. I then added a different choice for each size option.

Add custom letter option group

You can add an extra fee for different sizes if you like. I didn't do that because I wanted to charge for the letters based on the quantity, instead. We'll do this next.

Let customers choose the number of letters (with size-based pricing)

Next, I wanted to allow customers to choose the number of letters that they would order in the selected size. I wanted to charge a different price depending on the number of letters and the size.

The WooCommerce Product Options plugin has a price formula field which lets you create complex custom calculators for pricing your products. However, for this use case I think it's simpler to add the pricing directly to the 'Number of letters' option. I set it up like this:

  1. Added a separate 'Dropdown' option for each size option. I had created 3 size options in the previous section, so I needed to create 3 different 'Number of letters' fields.
  2. For each one, I:
    • Added 10 choices to the dropdown, which would allow customers to select between 1 and 10 letters.
    • For each choice, I added a quantity-based fee of what that number of letters would cost. For example, if a single 8-inch letter costs $13 then 2 letters costs $26, 3 costs $39, and so on up to the maximum number of letters.
    • I opened the 'Advanced settings' section and used conditional logic to only display the dropdown when the relevant size option is selected. For example, the dropdown with the pricing for the 8-inch letters only appears when '8 Inch' is selected in the letter size option above.
Number of letters field in WooCommerce

Allow customers to select their letters

Next, I needed to give customers a way to tell me which letters they wanted to order. I did it like this:

  1. Created a 'Text input' option.
  2. Added a helpful description advising customers of what information to enter. Specifically, I typed "Enter details of which letters you require, for example '2 A's and 2 N's to spell the name Anna".
Select individual letters WooCommerce

Let customers choose a letter color or style

Finally, I decided to allow customers to choose the color of the letter. Alternatively, you might want to let them choose a fabric style, pattern, or some other design detail.

Since I was just adding color options, I did it using the 'Color swatches' option type in WooCommerce Product Options. If you were letting customers choose something else like a pattern, then you might use the 'Image button' field instead. This displays clickable images so that customers can see the different design options for their custom letters.

Sell letters in WooCommerce choose color

Bringing it all together

Once you've done all this, the product page that you created earlier will display the options for selling custom letters in WooCommerce. It will look something like this:

Sell individual craft letters in WooCommerce

Where to get the plugin

To add something like this to your own WooCommerce store, get WooCommerce Product Options and follow the instructions to set it up:

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