Articles About Product Catalog

Discover the easy way to create a table-based WooCommerce catalog. Ideal for large product directories, your products will be listed in a searchable table with filters.

This tutorial will tell you how to create your own e-commerce order form complete with variation pickers and add to cart buttons or checkboxes.

You'll also learn how to combine product tables with WooCommerce catalog mode, disabling the e-commerce functionality.

Whatever type of WooCommerce catalog you need to build, I'll teach you how to create the ultimate product catalog using the bestselling Product Table plugin, without the need for any custom PHP or CSS.

A WooCommerce catalog plugin is ideal for creating a 1-page view listing all your products. It makes it easy for customers to sort products and find what they're looking for. A catalog layout displays products in a neater and more compact way to the default Woo store layout.

A catalog layout makes it possible to display more products per page, so your customers can view them all together. It's perfect if you need a larger WC product catalog table, for example, you might have 100s or 1,000s of WooCommerce products.

Who needs a WooCommerce catalog plugin?

A WooCommerce product catalog plugin is useful for any website that needs a user-friendly way to present lots of products. The products are listed in a structured table or grid layout, so customers can view more products per page. Typically, a product catalog will include features to make it easier for customers to find specific products, including keyword search, filters or sort options.

Product catalog layouts have many possible uses, such as:

• WooCommerce order form - Your product catalog can include Add to Cart buttons or tick boxes to add multiple products to the cart. This lets it double as a fully functional order form for WooCommerce. Or you can hide the add to cart facility to create a read-only WooCommerce catalog.
• WooCommerce restaurant food ordering system - A restaurant or takeaway business can use the catalog plugin to let people view menus and order food online.
• Product directory - A product catalog can also function as a complete WooCommerce directory, with large numbers of products listed in an easy-to-find format.
• WooCommerce wholesale catalog - WooCommerce Product Table is hugely popular for wholesale catalogs. List all your wholesale products in a structured catalog layout to help trade users quickly find and order their products. You can use it with our other WooCommerce plugin, WooCommerce Protected Categories, to create a hidden wholesale area separate from your public shop page. You'll be able to certain user roles or by having users enter a password.

Would you rather create a simple product list view? Check out our other tutorial on creating WooCommerce product lists.

What features can a WooCommerce catalog table have?

E-commerce order form or catalog mode?

The best product catalog WordPress plugins give you a choice of whether or not to accept orders online. This gives you two options:

1. You might want to include full purchase functionality in the product catalog layout, with quantity pickers, variation dropdowns, add to cart buttons, etc.
2. Alternatively, you might want to put your store in read-only 'catalog' mode, disabling the e-commerce features. With this use case, you can still list individual products in a catalog-style table view, but this is for read-only purposes and customers can't make a purchase. You could use a contact form plugin to create an inquiry form that interested visitors can fill out to request a quote or start a purchase.

Keep reading to learn how to create a WooCommerce catalog view with both options.

Flexible information to display in the catalog view

The WooCommerce catalog plugin lets you create the ultimate product catalog, listing various product details, including columns for:

• Product name
• Short or long description
• Attributes
• Add to cart button (with or without quantity selector and product variations. You can also choose whether or not to use the Ajax add to cart functionality)
• Product image
• Product prices
• Stock status
• SKU
• Product categories
• Tags
• Custom fields (which can include various information. e.g. HTML links, shortcodes from other plugins, images, video, audio players etc.)
• Custom taxonomies
• And more

There are also lots of extra features relating to how the product catalog is displayed, and how customers interact with it. For example, you can add filter dropdowns for category, tag, attributes, variations, and custom taxonomies above the table. You can add sidebar widgets to filter by attribute, price or rating. You can show or hide elements, including the search box. There are even options to control how the responsive product catalog behaves on mobile devices.

You can either have a single product catalog page listing all your WooCommerce products, or, divide a catalog into sections. For example, you might have separate tables for products with specific categories, tags or custom field values.

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Use WooCommerce Quick View to provide extra product information

When you use WooCommerce Product Table to create a catalog of your products, you can choose which columns of information to include. But what if you want to display multiple product images, or extra information that won't fit in the catalog? That's when you need to add quick view to your catalog.

The WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin is designed to work with WooCommerce Product Table. It adds quick view buttons or links to the catalog, so that customers can open extra information and purchase from a lightbox instead of directly on the catalog page.

This is an excellent compromise because it keeps customers on the catalog page and doesn't take them to a separate page for each product. However, it lets you provide extra images, a longer product description, more data about each product, and you can also let them select variations from the quick view.

GET QUICK VIEW

Case study - Wavelength Electronics' table-based product catalog

Wavelength Electronics sell technical products in the electronics industry. The website uses our WooCommerce Product Table plugin to create detailed product comparison tables for each product category.

The website acts as a catalog for customers to compare products. The product table needed to display a lot of technical information so they created WooCommerce custom fields to display the extra data. They also included ticks and PDF icons with links to downloadable data sheets. By using the filter dropdowns, it couldn't be simpler to compare several different products all at once.

Carry on reading to find out how you can create your own WooCommerce product catalog.

How to create the ultimate product catalog

First, I'll show you how to list products in a table-based catalog. This is all about the layout, and doesn't affect whether or not people can purchase your products (although as you'll see, you can do this by choosing not to include an add to cart column in the table). If you want to fully disable the e-commerce side of things and prevent people from purchasing, skip ahead to the section on catalog mode.

To get started, your website should have 2 plugins installed:

• WooCommerce (free - download from the WordPress plugin repository)
• WooCommerce Product Table (purchase premium version here)

You can then follow these instructions to create the ultimate product catalog.

1. Create a page for the WooCommerce catalog table

First, create a new page for the product catalog by going to Pages > Add New in the WordPress admin. Call the page whatever you want, for example 'Product Catalog'.

2. Enter the default WooCommerce Product Table shortcode

Now, enter the WooCommerce Product Table shortcode which will create a table displaying your ultimate product catalog (we'll add more columns in the next step!). This shortcode will list your WooCommerce products as a searchable, sortable table.

[product_table]

Publish the page and click View Page to see your WooCommerce catalog table.

You'll see a dynamic catalog listing all your WooCommerce products. It's currently using the default column headers – these may or may not be relevant to your particular product catalog, but we'll edit these shortly. The default columns are product name, short description, price and add to cart button:

By default, the plugin displays all of your products, but you can also add an inclusion or exclusion list to control which products display or add related products. Learn more here.

3. Choose which columns appear in the WooCommerce catalog table

Next, I'll show you how to choose which product data to include. This will make the table more suited as a WooCommerce product catalog.

It's time to make some changes to the WooCommerce Product Table shortcode to control which columns are displayed in the catalog. Go back to the Edit Page screen for your product catalog and try replacing the default shortcode with this:

[product_table columns="sku,name,description,categories,att:size,tags,price"]

This adds a 'columns' parameter to the shortcode. In the example above, I've added the following columns:

• sku - the unique identifier for the product. Many product catalogs include a product code or ID to make products easier to identify.
• name - the main title for your product.
• description - the long description for the WooCommerce product.
• categories - this tells the catalog to display a filterable column listing the product categories each product is in. Customers can click on a category to filter the table for products in that category.
• att:size - this tells the product catalog to include a column for the 'size' attribute. Use this format for any product attributes you wish to include in the catalog. Instead of 'size', add the slug for the attribute in your WooCommerce store.
• tags - this adds a filterable column listing the tags for each product.
• price - this tells WooCommerce Product Table to display a price field.

Use the product table knowledge base to see which other columns are available. It also tells you how to rename the columns in your WooCommerce catalog table or hide column headings.

If you want your products to be purchasable from the catalog page, then you'll also want to include an add-to-cart column. Use the knowledge base to learn how to add quantity pickers, variation dropdowns, and other purchase options.

Now view your product catalog

Now Update and View your page. You'll see the table is now a very useful WooCommerce catalog and the 7 columns are those we listed in the product table shortcode.

Example without online purchasing:

Example with online purchasing:

4. Add filters to the WooCommerce catalog table

Another neat option in WooCommerce Product Table is the ability to add filter dropdowns and filter widgets so customers can quickly and easily find the products they need in your product catalog.

WooCommerce catalog filter dropdowns

To add filter dropdowns, add filters="true" to the product table shortcode. For example: [product_table columns="sku,name,description,categories,att:size,tags,price" filters="true"]. Alternatively, you can use the knowledge base to control exactly which filters appear in the product catalog view.

WooCommerce product filter widgets

The product catalog plugin also comes with its own version of all the WooCommerce filter widgets. These include a widget to show the active filters, a layered nav filter listing product attributes, a price slider and ratings filter.

Make sure your product catalog is on a page that contains the product table shortcode and has a sidebar area (e.g. left or right column). You can then add filter widgets by going to Appearance → Widgets and adding any of the filters beginning with 'Product Table' to your sidebar. The filter widgets will appear on your product catalog pages, but won't affect the rest of your website:

How to add quick view to your WooCommerce catalog

Earlier, we learned how you can improve your WooCommerce product catalog by adding a quick view plugin. If you'd like customers to be able to view extra information and/or buy products from a lightbox popup, this is how to do it:

1. Install and activate WooCommerce Quick View Pro via Plugins → Add New in the WordPress admin.
2. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Quick view and activate your license key.
3. Choose all the settings for your quick view lightboxes.
4. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product tables and add a quick-view column.

It's also possible to open the quick view by clicking on the product name or image in the catalog.

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How to create a read-only product catalog & disable online ordering

So far, I've shown you how to create a WooCommerce product catalog table, with or without an add to cart column. If you prefer, you can use it to list products without online ordering. There are 2 ways to do this:

Option 1 - Create a read-only product table

To create a read-only product table, simply make the following changes:

1. Remove the 'add-to-cart' column from the WooCommerce Product Table shortcode.
2. Disable the links to the single product page.

You can also add a custom button to link people to a contact form or inquiry form if you want - just make sure to enable HTML processing in your WooCommerce catalog.

This option is ok, but people might still access the single product page through the back door. And the single product page will contain add to cart buttons. If you need a more robust catalog mode solution, use Option 2 instead.

Option 2 - Use WooCommerce Catalog Visibility Options

WooCommerce Product Table works beautifully with the official Catalog Visibility Options extension. This great plugin lets you hide the price and/or add to cart buttons throughout your WooCommerce store, including the product table catalog page.

Install Catalog Visibility Options and go to the settings page: WooCommerce → Settings → Visibility Options. Here are some notes on how the different settings affect the content of your product tables:

Purchases

Use this option to enable online purchasing, disable it, or enable it for logged in users only.

If you're using the 'Logged in users' option, then you might want to include an add to cart column in the product table. If you do this, then it works best if you use add to cart buttons instead of checkboxes. (This is an option on the WooCommerce Product Table settings page.) The buttons simply don't appear for users where purchasing is disabled. Other elements such as quantity pickers disappear too - nice!

It's worth noting that variation dropdowns still appear even when Purchases are disabled. This is because the variations are listed for information only, and can't be purchased. If you don't want this, then you can disable the variation dropdowns in WooCommerce Product Table.

Prices

Finally, tick this to hide the Prices from the product catalog page. Again, you can hide prices for everyone, no one, or just logged out user/guests.

If you hide the price, then the 'Price' column in WooCommerce Product Table will appear blank. This might make sense if you want to show prices to logged in users. If you want to hide the price from everyone, then I suggest removing this column from your product tables.

Alternate text options

You'll also see 3 settings where you can add different messages to display when content is hidden. These are: Catalog Add to Cart Button Text, Catalog Price Text, and Alternate Content.

These all work correctly in the product table, and you can see them in the screenshot above. If you don't add anything to these fields, then they will appear blank in the product table.

Disable caching in WooCommerce Product Table

If you get any problems, make sure you disable the caching option in WooCommerce Product Table. If you're showing different pricing/purchase information to different types of user, then the table needs to be loaded fresh for each person. Caching will interfere with this, so disable it on the product table plugin settings page.

Option 3 - Use YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin

Alternatively, you can use a free plugin named YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode from YITH Plugins to automatically disable the ability to buy online. Please see our separate article for full details on using the 2 WooCommerce product catalog plugins together.

Whichever option you choose, customers will be able to view your products in the catalog but there'll be no way for them to add products to the cart or use your checkout pages:

Using your WooCommerce Catalog

Have a play with your WooCommerce catalog, or the catalog page on the plugin demo site.

As you can see, your customers can do many different things with the WooCommerce catalog. They can click on a title to view the actual product page (this link can be disabled if needed - see knowledge base). They can click on a product category or tag to filter by that category. Then they can use the search box to find products.

Customers can also click on the column headers to order your products by that column - for example, to sort by price.

Once they've chosen their products, they can easily add them to the cart and buy online. Or if you've disabled online ordering in WooCommerce, they can take whatever other actions you desire, such as phoning you to place an order.

Discover the top 10 ways to use product tables to improve your WooCommerce catalog's conversion rates. 

Easily create the ultimate product catalog

In this tutorial, I have shown you how to create an interactive WooCommerce catalog table. While the example I've given shows a popular use case, it may not meet your needs exactly. With almost 2 million websites using WooCommerce according to the latest stats, lots of sites need different types of product catalogs.

Don't worry, WooCommerce Product Table comes with many more options to refine your ultimate product catalog. For example, you can control how your table is ordered by default, and how many rows appear per page. You can let customers select quantities and variations directly from the WooCommerce product catalog view. You can add quick view lightboxes. Or even add-on options, if you're using Product Table with the WooCommerce Product Options plugin. You can control the responsive options and how the catalog behaves on different screen sizes.

The WooCommerce Product Table plugin knowledge base contains full details of what you can do with this simple but powerful plugin. In no time, you can create the ultimate product catalog to attract your customers and increase your sales.

You can now click here to buy WooCommerce Product Table.

Have you ever noticed how long it takes to add products to the cart in WooCommerce? Customers have to visit a separate page for each product so that they can select quantities, choose variations etc. You can speed up the customer journey by adding a quick WooCommerce bulk order form to your website. To do it, simply install a WooCommerce order form plugin.

Order forms allow customers to view and compare a longer list of products than the traditional WooCommerce layout. For lots of stores, an order form fits aligns better with how customers browse and buy products. They can see everything on one page, compare products and make quick buying decisions. This encourages more sales by enabling customers to shop quickly and efficiently.

WooCommerce Product Table is the perfect way to create a quick order form. In fact, people keep telling me it's the best WooCommerce order form plugin around! We've built a quick order form demo so you can see how it works – go ahead and have a play.

Of course, an order form layout isn't for everyone. In this post we'll help you choose between using a WooCommerce order form plugin and the standard WooCommerce shop layout, so you can rest assured you're creating the ideal product layout for your store. Once you've learned all about WC order forms, I'll provide step-by-step instructions plus a video tutorial on exactly how to set it up.

What is a WooCommerce order form?

By default, WooCommerce displays e-commerce products in a standard format, with each product occupying a relatively large amount of space.

This typical store layout has a grid format with 3 or 4 products per row. Each will have a large featured image, a title, a short description, a price, and an Add to Cart button. Customers click through to a single product page to read more information before adding the item to their shopping cart:

A WooCommerce order form is an alternative way to list products. Presented in a structured table format, each product takes up a single row in the table, and product images are much smaller. The layout is far more compact and often includes extra features, such as sort options and filters. The screenshot below shows what you can create:

An order form plugin lets you list many more products on a single page than you could in the default WooCommerce store layout. And, instead of clicking through to the single product page, customers can select variations, specify a quantity and add their chosen items to the cart – all directly from the order form.

Boosting sales with an alternative layout

Both the traditional category layout and order form view use the Woo cart and checkout. Once a customer has chosen their products, the process for placing an order is identical.

The real difference is how the products are presented in the first place. This is a key part of the buying process: it's the point when customers are exploring your products and making buying decisions. The layout has a big impact on your sales and conversion rates, so it's vital to choose the right layout for your products.

Comparing the two layout options for listing WooCommerce products, you can see how a WooCommerce order form plugin (or WooCommerce bulk order form plugin) makes much better use of space than a traditional store layout:

Using the product table, you'll fit twice as many products into the same amount of space. Because of the compact layout, it's also possible to fit in plenty of extra features, including filter dropdowns, a search box, sorting, and the ability to select quantities and variations. This is why we often refer to it as a WooCommerce bulk order form – because it's so much easier to order higher quantities.

What sort of websites need a WooCommerce order form plugin?

While the standard WooCommerce shop format is great for some stores, there are many cases when an order form gives customers a better buying experience.

A WooCommerce order form plugin is ideally suited to stores where customers don't want to hang around browsing, but instead want to quickly choose from a list of products. Let customers add multiple products to their carts from a quick one-page order form. 

How to create a WooCommerce order form

Watch this video tutorial below to learn how to create a order form in WooCommerce. You can watch me create the exact order form shown on the demo site then create your own on your WooCommerce site! Alternatively, read the quick setup guide or the step-by-step written instructions below the video:

Quick setup guide

1. Install the WooCommerce Product Table plugin on your WordPress site.
2. Use the plugin setup wizard to control how you want the order form to work.
3. Go to Pages → Add New and add the [product_table] shortcode.
4. Publish the page and view the order form.

Detailed written tutorial

To start, you need a WordPress website with WooCommerce set up and some products added.

Step 1: Install the WooCommerce order form plugin

1. Get WooCommerce Product Table and install it via Plugins → Add New.
2. Get your license key from the confirmation email and enter it into the setup wizard or WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product tables.

Step 2: Configure your order forms

The next step is to choose all the default settings for your product order forms. You can either do this on the plugin settings page or in the setup wizard.

The settings you choose here will apply to all the order forms on your site. If you plan to create multiple order forms, then you can override most of the settings directly in each order form.

For an order form, I recommend considering the following settings:

Choose what data to display in the order form

The 'Column' option lets you control which columns appear in the order form. You can display various data about your products including SKU, ID, name, description, short description, date, categories, tags, image, reviews, stock, weight, dimensions, price and Add to Cart button. The plugin supports product attributes and custom fields as separate columns in the table, e.g. size or color.

You can choose whether the 'Buy' column includes product variations and quantity picker, or whether you want customers to click through to the single product page to view the variations. And if you're using the Product Options plugin to add extra product add-ons, then these will appear in the order form too.

You can also choose whether to have normal add to cart buttons, multi-select checkboxes, or both. Or if you use WooCommerce Product Table with the free WooCommerce Custom Add to Cart plugin, you can even replace the cart button with a simple cart icon:

Use filters to help customers find your products

The WooCommerce order form can include filter dropdowns above or filter widgets alongside the table. This lets customers filter by category or product categories, tag or attribute. You can either include all possible filters or choose specific ones to appear.

Here's an example of the filters that come with the order forms in Product Table:

Or for even more filtering options, you can use it with our advanced filtering plugin - WooCommerce Product Filters. By using both plugins together, your filters can look more like this:

Change the sort order of the products in the order form

You can choose how the products on the order form are sorted by default. Customers can also sort the products by clicking on a column header.

Control the number of products per page

Your order form can be as short or as long as you like. Simply choose how many products appear on each page before pagination links appear at the bottom. (You can even choose the style of pagination buttons, or display all your products so that no pagination is needed.)

Use lazy load to improve performance in big order forms

The lazy load option speeds up the order form load time for WooCommerce stores with many products. This uses Ajax to load products one page at a time, so if you have thousands of products then this makes a big difference.

Step 3: Create an order form page(s)

1. Create a new page which you will use for your order form. If you prefer, you can tick the box on the settings page to enable the order form layout on your main shop and category pages instead.
2. Add any content that you like to the page. For example, you can add text or other content above and below the order form. You can also add subheadings (e.g. one for each category) and insert a different order form after each one.
3. Go to the part of the page where you wish to add a WooCommerce form. Add the following shortcode to the page: [product_table]
4. Publish the page and view it.

On your= order form page, you'll see all your products listed in a neat table layout. Tweak the settings to configure your order form in whichever way you like.

If you want to create multiple order forms - either on the same page or multiple pages - then that's fine too. Just use the shortcode options to control which products appear in each order form. You can include specific products by their ID, product categories, tags, and more. You can also exclude products by ID or category.

Step 4: Add bonus features to your order forms

Now we've looked at the essential features for a WooCommerce order form, I'm going to tell you how to supercharge it even further. You can do this by using other plugins to add bonus functionality.

Add an on-page popup cart and checkout

A WooCommerce order form is all about bringing the shopping experience to a single page. For this reason, it makes sense to also bring the cart and checkout experience to the same page!

You can achieve this by adding a cart popup plugin to the order form page. The Fast Cart plugin is designed to work alongside your WooCommerce order form like this:

And also this:

Either use it as a popup cart, or skip the cart and open the checkout as soon as customers add products to their cart from the order form. That's the quickest way to shop because customers can add products and complete their order from the same page!

Add product quick view

Your order form can contain various columns of information about your products. However, you may want to display extra information that won't fit in the order form layout. Or you may want to sell product variations or other options without cluttering up the order form page.

You can solve this dilemma by using WooCommerce Product Table with the WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin. This adds quick view buttons or links, which open extra product information and purchase options in a user-friendly lightbox window. It's a great way to show extra information without taking customers away from the order form.

Disable the WooCommerce single product page

By default, customers can click on a product title or image in the order form to view a separate page for each product. Most product order forms don't need this feature. You can disable these links if needed so that the only way to view a product is on the order form page - especially if you're using quick view instead.

Add additional fields and custom fields to the order form

WooCommerce Product Table makes it easy to add additional fields to your order form. This is useful if you need to add media such as PDFs with more information about a product, or you just need other meta information.

We have a full tutorial on how to use WooCommerce custom fields here.

Create a printable WooCommerce order form

Since publishing this article, some of our customers have asked about how to create a printable order form. The idea of this is that customers can print the order form on paper and fill it in manually. They can then post it to place the order the old-fashioned way.

In response, we've created a separate tutorial on how to create a printable order form.

What types of product sell best in a quick order form?

Now we've learned how to use the best WooCommerce order form plugin, let's consider when to use one. After all, all products are different and some lend themselves to the order form layout better than others.

Let's take a look at some examples of when an order form layout is the best way to go:

WooCommerce wholesale order form

Trade customers typically make regular orders of products they're already familiar with. They don't want to spend ages browsing multiple product pages.

A compact wholesale order form lets them quickly select multiple products and instantly add to cart. This is more efficient for wholesale users than a more traditional WooCommerce product layout, which is too visual and spaced out. It's ideal for bulk wholesale buying.

For best results, use WooCommerce Product Table together with its sister plugin WooCommerce Wholesale Pro. Product Table provides the order forms, and WooCommerce Wholesale Pro adds other B2B functionality like wholesale registration and pricing. You can choose whether to enable the order form view for all customers, or just wholesale users.

Large product directory

A lot of our WooCommerce Product Table plugin users have HUGE e-commerce stores with thousands of products. A WooCommerce directory plugin is a good way to list large numbers of products in a directory structure.

For example, one website uses WooCommerce Product Table to display thousands of ball bearings for sale. Customers can use the filters to find the type of ball bearing they require based on product attributes such as size and color. They can then tick the products they want, add to cart and buy online. This would be a cumbersome process using the traditional WooCommerce shop layout. Not to mention that large pictures of ball bearings aren't necessary! Check out our tutorial on how to create a WooCommerce product catalogue.

Here's a review from a customer who's increased sales by using Product Table to list thousands of products in a quick order form:

WooCommerce bulk order form

Similar to a wholesale order form, a WooCommerce bulk order form is useful for ordering large quantities of products. If a customer is buying products in bulk, they won't want to browse through the standard WC layout. A product table is perfect as a bulk order form because they can quickly order as many products as they like.

'Build your own product' configurator

Lots of WooCommerce websites let customers choose multiple items from a list to build a box, create their own pizza, build a luxury hamper, or similar. Customers can select items from a list and add them all to a cart with a single click. An order form is ideal for this 'build a product' format or product configurator.

Case study – using an order form plugin to sell hampers

Barks and Squeaks is an online store selling gifts and treats for fur buddies and their owners. As well as offering individual products, the Barks and Squeaks store sells hampers. To do this, they've created an order form using our WooCommerce Product Table plugin. This enables customers to quickly pack a hamper full of lots of products, without changing pages:

Which WooCommerce stores don't need a quick order form?

As you can see, a WooCommerce order form plugin is the right choice for lots of stores, but it isn't for everyone.

If you answer 'Yes' to any of the following questions, it's worth considering whether the standard WooCommerce shop format is a better fit:

• Does your store only have a few products?
• Do you sell highly visual products that will benefit from big images or multiple images?
• Do customers need to spend a long time reading detailed information about your products before deciding to buy?

As an example, imagine you own an online boutique clothing store. Think about how your customers would use your store. Big images will definitely play a crucial role in encouraging sales. Your customers will also be happy to take their time browsing items and reading detailed product information. They may then go on to make a considered purchase of one, two, or perhaps a few items.

With a WooCommerce order form, customers can click through to a single page for full product information. You can also increase the size of the product images for a more visual table:

But ultimately, deciding on the right layout to use comes down to which one best suits your particular customers. With smaller purchase quantities and less need for quick purchases, your imaginary boutique clothing store is likely to benefit from the highly visual layout characteristic of the standard WooCommerce shop format.

Create a quick WooCommerce order form today 🚀

How your customers want to shop should dictate your store's product layout. The default WooCommerce shop layout works for customers who are happy to take their time browsing images and reading descriptions. But, when your customers need to buy multiple items quickly, a WooCommerce order form plugin is a much better solution.

We'd love to see your WooCommerce form – share your website in the comments below. We might even link to it from the WooCommerce Product Table showcase!

WooCommerce Product Table is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for creating a WooCommerce catalog-style layout. WooCommerce Quick View Pro adds quick view lightboxes to speed up the buying process. Today, I'm going to tell you about an integration that lets you disable online ordering - putting your store into read-only catalog mode.

You can do this by using WooCommerce Product Table and/or Quick View with a popular WordPress catalog plugin - YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode. I'll tell you about each WooCommerce plugin and why you might want them. Then, I'll tell you how to use them together to create WooCommerce tables in catalog mode with quick view. Let's get started!

Tip: If you need role-based pricing and other features for a WooCommerce wholesale order form, check out the WooCommerce Wholesale Pro plugin instead.

What is the WooCommerce Product Table catalog plugin?

WooCommerce Product Table is our bestselling WordPress plugin. It lists the products from your WooCommerce store in a user-friendly catalog layout. It's very flexible and you can choose which columns to include in the catalog view, and much more.

WooCommerce Product Table is ideal for creating a product catalog because it lists products in a compact list view. This provides  similar experience to reading a traditional printed catalog. Customers can see more information on each page. They can quickly search, sort and filter the table to find the products they need. A product catalog layout is particularly useful if you have a large number of products, as it saves customers time.

As you can see, WooCommerce Product Table has options to include add to cart buttons so that people can buy directly from the table. If you don't want customers to order online, then you can achieve catalog mode simply by disabling the links to the single product page and removing the add to cart column from your product tables. And, there's no need for custom HTML or CSS code.

For a more fully featured catalog mode plugin, you can combine Product Table with YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode. You'll need this if you want people to be able to access the product detail page, but without add to cart buttons.

What is WooCommerce Quick View?

WooCommerce Quick View Pro lets customers learn more about your products and add products to the cart more easily, without having to visit the single product page.

You can use it to add quick view buttons to the default WooCommerce shop and category pages.

Or alternatively, you can use it to add quick view to your product tables (if you're using WooCommerce Product Table).

Either way, WooCommerce Quick View Pro is fully compatible with the catalog mode plugin that I'm going to tell you about next.

What is YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode?

This WordPress catalog plugin disables the ability for customers to order from your WooCommerce store. Your products are listed in catalog-only format, without the usual e-commerce functions.

For example, you might want to disable online ordering if customers can only buy from you in person or over the phone.

The free plugin is perfect for testing out the waters and the premium version of the plugin has extra features to build on the WooCommerce catalog mode.

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How to use product tables with YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode

WooCommerce Product Table and YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode work seamlessly together. You can use the product table plugin to create a dynamic, front-end catalog view of your products and the YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin to disable ordering features.

For this tutorial, we’ll assume you already have WooCommerce Product Table and YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode (free version) installed and activated on your WordPress website. Here’s what you need to do next:

Step #1: Configure YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode settings

Once you’ve activated the YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin, head over to YITH > Catalog Mode from the admin panel. From the Settings tab, configure the following plugin settings:

• Make sure the checkbox next to Enable YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode is ticked.
• Tick the checkbox next to the Hide in product detail page option.
• Tick the checkbox next to the Hide in other shop pages option.
• Optionally, you can choose to tick the checkbox next to the Hide and disable “Cart” page, “Checkout” page and all “Add to Cart” buttons This essentially lets you remove e-commerce features (i.e. cart and checkout pages) from your WooCommerce store.

Click the Save Changes button to continue.

Step #2: Configure WooCommerce Product Table settings

Head over to WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Product tables and scroll down till you reach the Table content section on the settings page.

In the Columns option, make sure to not add the add to cart column. This is because we want to create a product catalog without cart buttons or e-commerce features. You can use other columns instead, such as image, name, description, reviews, and price. For this, you would simply add image,name,description,reviews,price to the Columns option. If you’d like to hide prices from the front-end, leave out the price column.

Click the Save changes button at the bottom of the screen to continue.

Note: If you include an add to cart column in the product table, customers will see an error message if they try to use the Add to Cart button to add products to their shopping cart.

The key benefit here is that customers can view important product information – including product name, description, and reviews – at a glance. The product table also lets them:

• Search for specific products.
• Sort by columns.
• Filter by product categories, tags, attributes or custom taxonomies.

For further information, they can simply click through to the single product page. You can use the product table plugin to display custom buttons (such as Learn More buttons or Request a Quote buttons) that take customers to single product pages, your contact form, or a WooCommerce request form.

Additionally, you can use advanced settings to display specific products (or specific product categories) only in the table layout. It also gives you the option to create an exclusion list for products or an exclusion list for product categories.

Step #3: Create a new page for the product catalog

Finally, go to Pages > Add New to create a new page for your product catalog. Add the shortcode [product_table] to the WordPress text editor. Alternatively, you can use the Insert Product Table dashicon from the text editor toolbar to insert the shortcode.

Click the Publish button and preview the product catalog on the front-end. Depending on the WordPress theme you’re using, the WooCommerce Product Table plugin will generate a catalog-style table layout that looks something like this screenshot:

This way, customers can see your WooCommerce products listed in catalog mode, without an option to buy. Once they click on a product, they will be redirected to the single product page. Alternatively, you can choose to redirect them to a custom URL.

The YITH plugin automatically removes all add to cart buttons from single product pages. What this means is that customers won’t have the option to add products to cart from the product table or from the single product page. However, they can view all product details from individual product pages.

This is especially useful for stores and e-commerce sites that want customers to:

• Create a wishlist or gift registry.
• Place orders over the phone or Skype.
• Purchase products from their retail store.
• Use the contact form (or an inquiry form) to request a quote. You can use Gravity Forms to create all sorts of forms that work seamlessly with the WooCommerce catalog mode plugin and WooCommerce Product Table.

The great thing about the WooCommerce Product Table plugin is that it’s incredibly flexible and you don't need to mess around with any HTML or CSS code. For example, if you want to create a catalogue mode for specific user roles only, you can pair it up with the WooCommerce Private Store plugin. You can use this to hide product price and add to cart option from, say, unregistered users.

How to use quick view with YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode

WooCommerce Quick View Pro works perfectly with YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode. There's no need for any extra setup instructions. Simply install both plugins as usual. Once you have enabled catalog mode using the YITH plugin, the add to cart buttons will no longer appear in the quick view lightbox.

Alternative option - Use a wholesale plugin with 'Hide Price Until Login'

So far, you've learned how to use the YITH WooCommerce Catalog plugin to disable purchasing in your store. Before we finish, I'll tell you about another plugin that lets you put your shop in catalog-mode for logged out users only.

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro is designed for e-commerce websites that sell to wholesale buyers as well as (or instead of) the general public. It has a 'Hide Price Until Login' feature which puts the store into catalog mode for all logged out users. When they log into their account, the prices become visible and people can purchase the products.

It's an excellent alternative to the YITH plugin if you're creating a wholesale store.

It's time to get started!

Used together, these plugins provide everything you might need for a WooCommerce catalog. WooCommerce Product Table lists products in a catalog-style layout, with search and filters to quickly help customers find what they need. WooCommerce Quick View Pro provides extra information and speeds up the buying process even further. The YITH WooCommerce Catalog plugin disables online ordering for some or all of your products, putting them into read-only catalog mode.

I'd love to hear how you use WooCommerce product tables and/or quick view with catalog mode. Please tell me about your website in the comments below.

YITH Catalog ModeProduct TableQuick View