How to sell wine online with the WooCommerce Product Table WordPress plugin

Collection of wines on a counter.

Building a successful online store requires designing it around your specific niche. If you want to run a wine or beer store, for instance, you need to optimize your WooCommerce site to showcase your drinks perfectly. This means finding the right tool to sell wine online with WordPress and WooCommerce.

Fortunately, the WooCommerce Product Table plugin offers the perfect solution. It adds the layouts you need to sell wine and other alcoholic drinks from a user-friendly one-page order form.

A GIF of a wines product table.

In this post, we’ll talk about why WooCommerce Product Table is a smart way to create your wine store. Then we’ll walk you through the process of setting up your shop and start selling wine online in minutes. This simple method works equally well for selling wine, beer or any other type of food or drink. Let’s jump in!

Why WooCommerce Product Table is the perfect way to sell wine online

If you want to improve the way you display products in your WooCommerce store, you can’t go wrong with WooCommerce Product Table. This handy plugin helps you add a table listing out your wines, and summarizing their key features in an easy-to-scan format. Customers can sort and filter the table to find what they need quickly, and even place orders without leaving the page:

WooCommerce Product Table is an ideal way to sell wine, beer or spirits online. Building a successful online wine store requires designing it around your niche.  the unique requirements of your niche. For example, you’ll be selling a lot of drinks that are quite similar, distinguished only by attributes such as brand, year, or region. This means you need to find a way to organize all your wines clearly, and make it easy for customers to choose their favorites and order.

Fortunately, WooCommerce Product Table simplifies this process dramatically, since you can:

  • Include search, sort, and filter functionality, which means customers can use the product table to quickly find the wine they want.
  • Display product attributes right in the table, so people can see important information about your wines at a glance.
  • Add images, helping each variety or brand of wine stand out. Wines sell best with small thumbnail images, and WooCommerce Product Table offers the perfect layout for this.
  • Enable customers to make their choices quickly, and check out right away using convenient add-to-cart buttons.
  • Encourage customers to buy multiple bottles of wine through bulk discounts and multi-select checkboxes.
  • And to make your list of wines even more effective, you can add WooCommerce quick view and show extra information in a product lightbox.

See the WooCommerce Product Table plugin in action!

At this point, you’re probably wondering how much work it is to start selling wines online with WooCommerce and WooCommerce Product Table. Fortunately, it's easy to set up and you won't need to hire a developer. Let’s walk through the process of setting it up and using it to sell wine online.

How to sell wine online using the WooCommerce Product Table WordPress plugin (in 4 steps)

Before we get started, there are a few things you’ll want to take care of if you haven’t already:

  1. Set up a WordPress website for your wine shop.
  2. Install the WooCommerce plugin, and add each wine as individual products.

At this point, your wines will appear in the default WooCommerce layout which is not suitable for selling wine online. The next step is to transform your store into a customer-friendly wine shop! Keep reading and I'll tell you exactly how to do this.

1. Add age confirmation features to your store

In a moment, you’ll start creating your product table. First, however, you’ll want to add a few age confirmation features to your site. Since you’ll be dealing with alcohol, you need to make sure you aren’t unintentionally selling to minors.

There are a few ways to ensure that your clientele is of legal age to purchase alcohol products from your WooCommerce store. Read through each option, and choose the one that best fits your needs:

  1. Hide your entire WooCoommerce wine store behind age verification First, you can require age verification before people are even allowed to enter the e-commerce areas of your site. The WooCommerce Private Store plugin is perfect for the task , letting you require that visitors enter their age before accessing the store pages. (Your other pages such as the homepage, blog and other standard pages remain available for everyone to view, which is important for your SEO/search engine optimization.)
  2. Keep your store public, and add an age verification popup If you'd rather not hide your store from public view, then you can add a WordPress age validation popup plugin such as Age Gate. This will ask customers to confirm their age before they enter the store.

For even more security, you can also add an age confirmation feature to your checkout page. Using a custom field, you can ask customers to enter their age when making a purchase. To do this, you’ll need WooCommerce’s Checkout Field Editor extension:

The Checkout Field Editor WooCommerce extension.

Now that your WooCommerce wine shop is properly protected, let’s talk about how to display your wine products.

2. Install the WooCommerce Product Table plugin

The first thing you’ll need to do is purchase the WooCommerce Product Table plugin, and then install and activate it.

Buy WooCommerce Product Table Now!

When you buy the plugin, you’ll receive a license key. To enter that key, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings in your WordPress dashboard. Go to the Products tab, and then choose the Product tables subsection. Paste in your key, and click on Save Changes at the bottom of the page:

Adding your license key for WooCommerce Product Table.

Don’t leave this page just yet. It’s time to start setting up your product table and choose how it will list your wines and beers.

3. Set up a basic product table

First, you’ll want to decide what information about your wines to include in the product table. You can do this in the Columns section of the settings page:

Setting up columns in WooCommerce Product Table.

Simply list out all the columns you want to appear in your table, separated by commas as in the above example. Here's a full list of columns that can be included in the plugin’s documentation.

To sell wine online with WooCommerce, we’d suggest including (at the least) the product name, as well as a featured image, description, price, and add-to-cart option. You may also want to include a categories column to help organize your wines.

We’ll come back to these settings in a moment. First, let’s see what the product table looks like so far. Save your changes, and then navigate to Pages and create a new page. The next step depends on whether you're using the Classic Editor or Gutenberg:

  • Classic Editor - Click the 'Insert Product Table' toolbar button. This adds a [product_table] shortcode to the page.
    toolbar button
  • Gutenberg - Add the [product_table] shortcode to a 'Shortcode' block.
    WooCommerce Product Table Gutenberg Block

This will add a [product_table] shortcode to your page, which will list your wines using the settings you just customized. If you preview it now, it will look something like this:

An example of a basic wines product table.

Or if your page doesn't have a sidebar, then the table of wines will fill the width of the page.

This is a great start, and now you’ll probably want to personalize the table further. So save this page as a draft, and return to the Product tables settings in the WooCommerce tab.

4. Add key features to your wine shop product table

There are a ton of options and features you can add to your product table, and we encourage you to read up on all the choices available. Right now, let’s focus on the settings most crucial to your up-and-coming WooCommerce wine store.

First, you may want to display extra information in your table about product attributes, so users can quickly tell the difference between the various wines and make easy selections. Attributes themselves are added through WooCommerce, and can be found and created in the Products → Attributes tab of your WordPress dashboard:

The product attributes screen in WooCommerce.

To add an attribute as a separate column in your table, you can include it in the list under Default options > Columns. Just make sure to preface the attribute name with the att: tag (for example, att:color or att:year):

Adding attributes to your product table columns.

Now, your product table will be a little more comprehensive:

A product table displaying attributes.

In addition, your visitors will often want to quickly search through your product table for wines that meet specific criteria. You can make this easy by adding filters. The WooCommerce wines product comes with 2 types of filters which customers can use to refine the list of wines:

  1. Filter dropdown menus that will appear above the table and enable customers to refine the list by product category, tag, attribute, and so on.
  2. Filter widget which appear in the sidebar of the page where you're listing wines in a product table. These are added via the 'Widgets' page in the 'Appearance' section of the WordPress Dashboard.
  3. And for even more advanced filters, you can use WooCommerce Product Table with a compatible AJAX filter plugin.

To add filter dropdowns, go to the Filter dropdowns section, and select Show based on columns in table:

Creating filters in WooCommerce Product Table.

If you view your list of wine products now, you’ll see the new dropdown filters immediately:

A wines product table with drop-down filters.

You can also select the Custom option to determine exactly which columns can be filtered and which can’t.

At this point, you have an informative and fully-functioning WooCommerce wine store up and running. Customers can use it to view all the wines and beers you offer, search for specific varieties, and make easy purchases. Of course, you can continue to tweak your product table as much as you like! For example:

  • Encourage customers to buy more by choosing the 'checkbox' add to cart button style. They can quickly tick multiple wines and add them all to their cart together.
  • Add a sidebar to your page and add the WooCommerce Cart widget. Customers can see the contents of their cart and edit it alongside the list of wines.
  • Speed up your product tables by enabling the lazy load and caching options.

Bonus feature #1 - Sell ongoing wine subscriptions

There’s one more feature you may want to add to your wine store – subscriptions. Many customers will enjoy getting the same wine bottles or boxes delivered at regular intervals. This is a smart way to get recurring revenue from your store, keep customers loyal, and increase your average customer lifetime value.

Doing this will require another WooCommerce extension, aptly named YITH WooCommerce Subscriptions:

The WooCommerce Subscriptions extension.

With this tool, you can create whatever subscriptions you like, and enable customers to set up recurring payments. Then, it will simply inform you whenever a new order needs to be shipped. It's a fantastic way to increase the revenue from your WooCommerce wine store.

Bonus feature #2 - Speed up your wine shop with WooCommerce quick view

When you're selling wine in WooCommerce, it's best to keep customers on the list of wines. People tend to buy multiple wines at once, so you don't want to take them to a separate page for each wine. After all, they might not find their way back to the wine list!

WooCommerce Product Table Quick View Magnifying GlassIf you want to show more information about each wine than will neatly fit in a product table, then quick view is the answer. The WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin is designed to work on its own or with WooCommerce Product Table. It adds quick view links or buttons to the table.

There are lots of reasons why quick view can improve your WooCommerce wine shop:

  • Show extra information without taking customers to a separate page.
  • Choose what information to show in the quick view lightbox. For example, this might be multiple product images (e.g. a glass of wine, the bottle, and a wine crate), the short description, reviews, and add to cart buttons.
  • Select variations and quantities directly from the lightbox.

Bonus feature #3 - Use bulk discounts to sell more wine online

By default, WooCommerce has a set price for each product. Given the high delivery costs associated with selling wine online, customers like to stock up on wine and buy a few months' worth in a single order. Volume discounts are a great way to encourage them to buy more wine from you.

You can easily set this up using the WooCommerce Discount Manager plugin. This lets you automatically calculate volume discounts based on the quantity in the customer's cart. It can also display a table of quantity-based discounts on the product page, encouraging people to buy more.

Conclusion

If you want to sell wine online, you’ll need to design your e-commerce wine store thoughtfully. What's more, you’ll want to find a way to show off your wines in the best light, and make ordering as simple as possible. The WooCommerce Product Table plugin enables you to do both of these things, and much more.

To set up a store where you can sell wine online, follow these five steps:

  1. Add age confirmation features.
  2. Install the WooCommerce Product Table plugin.
  3. Set up a basic product table.
  4. Add key features to your wine shop product table.
  5. Enable customers to purchase subscriptions.

Do you have any questions about how to sell wine online using WooCommerce Product Table? Let us know in the comments section below!

2 Comments

  1. Does Woo Commerce or Product Table have an ability to tie into our stores inventory data base? I am looking for some program that has an inventory feature or compatibility.

    • Hi, Will.

      WooCommerce Product Table (A) pulls the exact same WooCommerce products data (B) directly from your site's WordPress database. So to display product data from your store's inventory database (C) in the product tables on your site (A), what you would need to do is find a way to integrate your store's dbase (C) to WooCommerce itself (B) on your site.

      That is, A = B, so to get A = C, you need to implement B = C.

      That being said, I suggest that you contact WooCommerce support about how you can integrate your dbase with WooCommerce.

      I hope this makes sense and helps point you in the right direction.

      Alternatively, you can also consider importing your store inventory into WooCommerce manually, which will then be automatically inherited by WooCommerce Product Table. For details, please see: How can I import products to the table?

      Should you have any other questions, you can get in touch with us quicker via our dedicated Support Center.

      Best regards,

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