Where to find a large sample data set of WooCommerce demo products
Discover the best place to download a large data set of dummy WooCommerce products with sample data.
If you work with WooCommerce, you sometimes need to create a demo site containing a large number of sample products for testing purposes. For example, you might need to do this in order to test the performance of a theme, plugin, or hosting setup. There's no point in testing performance on a site that only has a few products - it's much more valuable to test on a large site that replicates the biggest ecommerce stores on the market.
I ran into this problem myself when we were building our WooCommerce Product Filters plugin. One of the plugin's main goals was to provide lightning-fast filtering regardless of the number of products. As a result, we needed a demo site containing a large number of sample products. This would allow us to test the plugin's performance with more products, and create a plugin demo site that would showcase the plugin's capabilities more accurately.
Keep reading to learn about how to import the sample product data that comes with WooCommerce itself, and also where you can download a much bigger set of dummy products.
Does WooCommerce itself come with sample product data?
All WooCommerce installations come with 2 sample data files containing dummy products which you can import: sample_products.csv and sample_products.xml.
These sample data files contain 25 products divided into clothing, music and accessories categories. You might recognise them from the many demo sites that use them around the world, including many of our own plugin demos:
To import these demo products to a WordPress site which runs WooCommerce:
- Find the files in the woocommerce/sample-data folder of the main WooCommerce plugin.
- Import them via Tools → Import.
- Select the WordPress or WooCommerce importer and follow the onscreen instructions.
There are full instructions in the WooCommerce documentation.
As I mentioned above, this free sample data set only contains 25 products. It's a useful way to visualize a WooCommerce store before you start adding actual products. However, it's not much use if you need to create a demo WooCommerce store with a large number of sample products.
Fortunately, I found an excellent free sample product data set that you can use for this.
Large sample data set of WooCommerce products
GloverVentures has created a large data set of dummy WooCommerce products and kindly made it freely available to download and use.
The sample data set contains:
- 105 simple products
- 294 variable products with 1,848 variations in total
As you can see, that's far more than you get with the default WooCommerce sample products!
GloverVentures' demo site of the sample products isn't currently working. However, we use it on the WooCommerce Product Filters demo so you can see it in action there. It looks like this, with a large range of sporty clothing and accessories split across multiple categories:
The only problem with the data set is that all the attributes are added directly to each product, instead of being created as global attributes. This caused problems for our WooCommerce Product Filters plugin because the filters only work with global attributes, so we had to do quite a bit of rework. However, if you don't need your attributes to be global then the data set should be perfect for you.
You can download the large WooCommerce sample data set directly from the GloverVentures website. That page also contains full setup instructions.
Do you know of any other free product sample data sets?
If you know of anyone else who has published a large dataset of WooCommerce demo products, please let me know in the comments below. I would love to add it to this article to give people a choice!