New! Introducing the ultimate WooCommerce Product Options plugin
While you can use variations to add basic options to WooCommerce products, this is very limited. As a result, today we've launched a brand new plugin: WooCommerce Product Options. It's the ultimate way to add any type of extra options to your WooCommerce products.
Nearly all WooCommerce store owners need to offer some sort of product options for their customers to choose from. This might be a choice of sizes or colors. It might involve product customizations, such as adding a text message or uploading a file. It could be a series of checkboxes allowing customers to add extras to a product.
Launched today, we've designed WooCommerce Product Options to be the best plugin on the market for adding extra options to your products. It's completely flexible and has everything you need - whatever you're selling.
Keep reading to learn why you need a product options plugin, and why WooCommerce Product Options is the best. Or just watch this video to see it in action:
3 reasons why product options are better than variations
When you want to add extra product options to WooCommerce, the obvious solution is to create a variable product. However, there are several reasons why variations aren't suitable for most types of product option:
- You can only display variations as dropdown lists. When you add options as WooCommerce product variations, each set of options (e.g. size and color) is displayed as a dropdown. That's sometimes ok, but it's not a particularly visual way to display options. For example, customers prefer to click on color swatches to select a color. Or if you're selling extra options then you might want to display a list of checkboxes rather than variation dropdowns.
- Variations are a nightmare to create and manage. That's because you have to create a separate variation for every possible combination options. Each variation has its own price, image, stock settings, etc. Before long, you're wasting time editing hundreds of variations for a single product!
- You can't use variations for customizable products. And finally, there are some types of extra product option which are literally impossible to sell using variable products. Imagine you're selling custom printed t-shirts. You can't use variations to allow customers to add a text message or upload an image to their order.
The solution: The best WooCommerce Product Options plugin
As you can see, variations are pretty limited. And even worse, they're difficult and time-consuming to manage.
Instead, it's better to add extra options using the WooCommerce Product Options plugin. Install it to bypass all the problems with variable problems:
- Display product options in any way you like. You're not restricted to displaying extra product options as dropdowns. While dropdowns are available, you can also present them as checkboxes, radio buttons, clickable images, word clouds, text boxes...... the list is endless. As a result, you can choose the style that fits best with the type of options you're selling. You don't have to compromise based on limitations of the software - instead, the software adapts to the needs of your business.
- Much easier to create and manage. Adding product options to WooCommerce is completely different from creating product variations. There are 2 ways in which the process is fundamentally different than creating variable products:
- You add groups of options globally, instead of per product. You then select which product(s) or categories to display these options on. It's much quicker than adding the options from scratch for every product.
- There's no need to create combinations of options yourself, as the plugin does it for you. For example, let's say that you're selling a burger with 3 crust options (each with a different price), plus 5 optional extra toppings which cost $2 each. With variable products, you would have to create a variation for every possible combination of crusts and toppings, each with its own price. With WooCommerce Product Options, all of this is calculated automatically on the fly.
- Sell customizable products. Unlike with product variations, you can create options where customers can add their own information. This includes text input fields, paragraph fields, and even file upload fields.
Additional benefits of using a product options plugin
And there's more! Using WooCommerce Product Options instead of product variations opens the door to lots of advanced features.
For example, instead of just having a set price for each option, you can choose from a range of pricing options. This includes increasing or decreasing the cost of the product by a certain percentage when an option is selected. You can also choose the logic of price changes, which gives you much more flexibility.
In addition, WooCommerce Product Options lets you show and hide options using conditional logic. This is much more sophisticated than using product variations. For example, if you're selling burgers then you can add a 'Customize my burger' tick box. When customers click this, a range of additional options (e.g. extra burger toppings) appear. This is better than displaying the options all the time because it keeps the page uncluttered for customers who don't require them.
Why have Barn2 built a WooCommerce product options plugin?
If there's one thing that our plugin customers love, it's adding extra options to their WooCommerce products. For years, we have added support for the official WooCommerce Product Add-Ons extension to our plugins. For example:
- Our WooCommerce Product Table plugin customers wanted to be able to choose add-ons from the 'Buy' column of the product table.
- WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering customers wanted to show additional options (such as pizza toppings or a note about dietary requirements) in the food order form.
- WooCommerce Quick View Pro wanted product add-ons to work within the product lightbox.
In response to this demand from our customers, we have integrated our plugins with Product Add-Ons. However, this solution has never been ideal because WooCommerce have often made major changes to the Product Add-Ons plugin, forcing us to redo the integration with no prior warning. It is also a very limited plugin and doesn't have all the features that our customers need. For example, it's not very easy to use and doesn't have advanced features like conditional logic.
That's why we have built our own product options plugin. WooCommerce Product Options has all the features that we know our customers want. It works perfectly with our other plugins, and we can guarantee that they will always remain compatible in future. It's also super-easy to use and built with user experience in mind.
Where to get the plugin
I hope you agree that the new WooCommerce Product Options plugin is the best way to add extra options to WooCommerce products. It's available now - I'd love to hear what you think of it!