If you're a photographer, learning how to sell photos in WooCommerce gives you a simple, affordable way to connect with customers and potential clients and grow your online revenue. Having your own online store makes you look more professional and ensures you don't have to pay a commission to a third-party just to sell your photos.

WooCommerce is a great solution for selling photography because it includes all the features you need to manage, display, and deliver your photos. However, while the core WooCommerce plugin includes all the basics, you'll want to use some add-ons to more effectively sell photos on WooCommerce, which is a big part of what we'll cover in this post.

Specifically, you'll learn how to more effectively display your photos in an easy-to-browse table layout, and you'll also learn how to restrict access to your photography, which is especially important if you're doing any kind of client-specific work.

Here's an example of what you'll be able to create by the end of this post:

Sell photos on WooCommerce with a table layout

Two plugins to help you sell photos in WooCommerce

In this tutorial on how to sell photos on WooCommerce, you'll see two plugins play big roles on your photography WordPress site.

WooCommerce Product Table

First, there's the WooCommerce Product Table plugin. This plugin lets you display your photos in an SEO-friendly, customizable table layout, rather than the default WooCommerce shop layout. You can control exactly which product details to display, and also add other helpful features, like sort and filter options.

This table approach has a few big benefits for WooCommerce photography websites:

  • Larger images - rather than relying on tiny thumbnails, a table photo gallery layout lets you display larger images without forcing people to click through to the single product page or open a lightbox gallery. This creates a much more efficient experience for people to browse lots of photos.
  • More details - you can display relevant photo details - like resolution or file format - without forcing people to visit the single product page. You can also let customers choose their preferred variation.
  • Bulk add to cart - shoppers can use checkboxes to select all the photos they want and bulk add them to their cart for an easier checkout or client proofing process.

WooCommerce Product Table works with physical products, digital products, and any WordPress photography theme.

Check out a demo of a WooCommerce photography store built with the WooCommerce Product Table plugin.

WooCommerce Protected Categories

Second, there's the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin, which lets you restrict access to categories of photos. This is great for professional photographers who don't want the public to have access to some or all of their photos. Some of the benefits here are that you can...

  • Use passwords to restrict access, which means you don't have to force people to create a WordPress account just to browse photos.
  • Create different passwords for different categories, which lets you create a private area for each individual client.
  • Automatically redirect shoppers to different categories of photos based on the password they enter.

What kinds of photos can you sell on WooCommerce?

There are a lot of different types of photos you can sell on WooCommerce, and the exact approach that you use to set up your store should depend on what type of photos you want to sell.

For example, if you want to sell event photos, you might want to keep your photos private and only for people who attended the event. On the other hand, if you're selling stock photos, you probably want to keep your store public.

Here are some common types of photos and the best way to approach how to sell photos on WooCommerce for each type:

  • Stock photos - you can use WooCommerce Product Table to create easily-browsable lists of images. You'll also want to use filters to help shoppers find the stock photos they need.
  • Editorial images - you could either create a public store or restrict access to specific clients with WooCommerce Protected Categories.
  • Client-specific photos - if you're selling any type of client-specific photos (events, portraits, school photos, etc.), you'll want to pair WooCommerce Product Table with WooCommerce Protected Categories to create private client areas.
  • Digital art prints - you can use WooCommerce Product Table's features to display variations right in your table. For example, you can let people choose different image resolutions.

How to sell photos on WooCommerce: Step-by-step guide

Next, let's get into how to sell photos on WooCommerce using the methods we've discussed above.

First, you'll learn how to use WooCommerce Product Table to display your photos in a customizable list view. If you want to sell photos publicly, that might be the only WooCommerce extension you need.

Second, if you have a use case where you need to make some or all of your photos private, you'll also learn how to use WooCommerce Protected Categories to restrict access to your photos on a category-by-category basis.

Finally, we'll also share some general tips for selling photos on WooCommerce, including how to add sidebar filters, add a product quick view feature, and bulk upload images as WooCommerce products.

1. Set up WooCommerce and add photos as products

If you haven't already, you'll want to start by installing the free WooCommerce plugin from WordPress.org and running through the setup wizard. Then, go to Products → Add New to add the first photo that you want to sell.

Fill in all the details, paying special attention to the Product data box (like marking your photos as digital downloads). Also, make sure to use the featured image uploader to add your photo:

Add photos as WooCommerce products

If you want to sell variable photos - like different resolutions or file formats - you can choose Variable Product from the drop-down. You'll be able to display these variations in your table layout in the next step.

Make sure to repeat the process for all your photos. If you have hundreds or thousands of photos that you want to sell, we'll share a method to bulk upload photos as products later on.

2. Display photos as a shopper-friendly table

Once you've added your photos as WooCommerce products, you're ready to display them with WooCommerce Product Table. Here's an example of what you'll be building:

Sell photos on WooCommerce with a table layout

If you haven't already, purchase the plugin and then install and activate it at your store.

Then, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product tables to configure the plugin's settings.

While it's good to consider all the settings, there are a few key choices to make when using the plugin to sell photos on WooCommerce.

Configure columns and image sizes

First, use the Columns settings to control what information to display for each photo in your table. You have a range of options, but a good starting point for a WooCommerce photography store is something like:

Image,name,price,buy

If you want to display additional information about each product, you can add columns for categories, tags, attributes, and even custom fields.

Below that, choose the image size that you want to use, as well as whether or not to open an image in a lightbox. You can either enter exact dimensions in pixels or choose from the default WordPress theme thumbnail sizes:

WPT column settings

Configure add to cart settings

Further down, you can use the Add to cart column settings to control:

  • Bulk add to cart functionality.
  • How to handle product variations. For example, you could add a drop-down selector to let shoppers choose a variation.
WPT add to cart settings

Add search and filter options

Below that, you can use the Table controls section to add product filters. For example, you could let visitors filter by a photo's categories or tags. You can also add a search box if desired:

WPT filter and search options

The filters that come with WooCommerce Product Table are pretty useful for selling photos online. For even more advanced filtering, you can use it with the WooCommerce Product Filters plugin. This adds a wider range of filters, including image-based filters, color swatches, and more.

Display front-end table

Then, to create your front-end table layout, you can add the [product_table] shortcode anywhere on your site:

Sell photos on WooCommerce with a table layout

By default, the plugin will display all your photos, but you can use include and exclude rules to select specific photos if desired. For example:

[product_table category="nature"]

You can use the shortcode multiple times with different include rules, which lets you create separate tables for different types of photos.

Finally, if you want to add more filter options, WooCommerce Product Table also includes dedicated Ajax filter widgets that you can add to your sidebar to let visitors filter the table by price or product attributes:

WooCommerce Ajax filter widgets for photos

You can add these widgets by going to Appearance → Widgets.

3. Hide photos/create client-specific areas

If you want to restrict access to certain photos and/or create client-specific areas, you can use the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin to privately sell photos on WooCommerce.

Once you install and activate the plugin, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Protected categories to configure its settings.

Here, you can choose whether or not to still display hidden photos in your public-facing store. If you're selling client-specific photos, you probably want to disable this because you don't want private image thumbnails appearing on your main store page.

You can also control the password entry page, which is where shoppers will log in:

Add to cart options

Then, go to Products → Categories and either...

  • Edit an existing category that you want to restrict access to.
  • Create a new category that you want to restrict access to.

For example, if you just photographed a wedding, you could create a dedicated category just for that wedding party.

Then, use the Visibility settings at the bottom to restrict access. You can either add a password or restrict access to specific users or user roles:

WooCommerce Password Protected categories to sell photos

Once a visitor enters the password, they'll be taken straight to the associated category of photos, which creates a great user experience.

More tips for how to sell photos on WooCommerce

Beyond WooCommerce Product Table and WooCommerce Product Categories, there are also some other helpful WooCommerce photography plugins to help you sell photos on WooCommerce.

Add a product quick view

If you want to display more product details and even larger images without forcing visitors to go to the single product page, you can consider adding a product quick view to your photos' table layouts.

The WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin integrates with WooCommerce Product Table to let you create a user-friendly quick view feature complete with product details, gallery images, variations, and more:

WooCommerce photos quick view example

Use Product CSV Import Suite for bulk photo uploads to WooCommerce

If you need to upload hundreds or thousands of photos as individual WooCommerce products, the Product CSV Import Suite plugin is a great way to save time. It'll let you bulk upload photos as WooCommerce products and configure the proper product details (like adding all the photos from a wedding to that wedding party's dedicated category).

Learn how to bulk import photos as WooCommerce products.

Automatically add an image watermark

If you're concerned about image theft, you can use the YITH WooCommerce Watermark WordPress plugin to automatically add a watermark to your product featured image. To remove the watermark, visitors will need to purchase the image.

Case study on how to sell photos on WooCommerce: Photo Studio TNK

WooCommerce photography website with client login plugin

Photo Study TNK is a wedding photography studio run by Thierry in Paris, France. Thierry uses WooCommerce to sell photos directly to his clients by using WooCommerce Product Table to display his photos in a list view.

He also adds each client's photos to a dedicated category and then uses WooCommerce Protected Categories to ensure that clients can only see their own photos.

Get started with selling photos on WooCommerce today

With WooCommerce Product Table and WooCommerce Protected Categories, it's easier than ever to sell photos on WooCommerce.

You can create a more user-friendly way for people to browse your photos via WooCommerce Product Table's table layout. And if you need to restrict access to photos on your WordPress website, you can use WooCommerce Protected Categories to create different protected categories and automatically send visitors to the right category after they enter the password.

Pick the approach that works best for you and you're ready to sell photos on WooCommerce today!

Ever wondered how to turn off a WooCommerce store? There are many scenarios where online store owners might need to temporarily disable WooCommerce. For example, around the holiday season, due to a staff shortage, or simply because the products they sell aren’t available or on backorder.

In such cases, it’s a good idea to have a simple way to temporarily deactivate WooCommerce and let customers know when it’ll open up again. Ideally, you’d want to be able to use a plugin to do this instead of disabling your entire WooCommerce store or messing around with code. For example, a WordPress maintenance mode plugin takes your whole site offline - bad idea! Just disable WooCommerce while leaving the rest of your WordPress site live.

WooCommerce Private Store to disable WooCommerce demo

By using the right plugin to disable WooCommerce, you can automatically hide all the links to your shop pages. The best part is that you won’t even have to edit any content or re-configure menus and widgets.

With this in mind, in this article, we’ll explain three different ways to temporarily disable WooCommerce. We’ll cover how to:

  • Temporarily remove your entire WooCommerce store from your public-facing website. This is often referred to as "WooCommerce temporarily disable shop".
  • Hide specific categories only from your ecommerce store or disable the WooCommerce Shop page.
  • Temporarily hide the checkout page with a WooCommerce disable checkout plugin.

Along the way, we’ll also explain which solution is best for different scenarios.

3 ways to temporarily disable WooCommerce shop

Before we jump into the tutorial, let’s take a step back and quickly learn about the two options for temporarily disabling a WooCommerce shop.

Method #1: Use WooCommerce Private Store to temporarily disable WooCommerce

The first method involves using the WooCommerce Private Store plugin to temporarily disable or hide your WooCommerce store. It's perfect for anyone searching for how to turn off a WooCommerce store or disable the shop.

Using Private Store as a WooCommerce temporarily disable shop plugin is particularly useful for ecommerce store owners who:

  • Are sick or on leave. For example, a WooCommerce store vacation plugin is useful around the holiday season, for maternity leave, or travelling. When you finish the Woo store vacation, just make it public again!
  • Need to temporarily close the store because they’ve run out of inventory or if products are on backorder.
  • Are short on staff and can’t complete customer orders on time.

Simply put, this is the best method for anyone wanting to know how to turn off WooCommerce store. Once you’ve installed the WooCommerce Private Store plugin to your WordPress site and followed the tutorial, it’ll hide your entire store from your public-facing website. It will disable the WooCommerce shop page and all your other store pages such as the products, categories, and so on.

If visitors try to access your online store either by going to it directly or searching for it on Google, they'll be redirected to a different page depending on how you configure the plugin's WooCommerce settings page.

WooCommerce Private Store demo store login page

That said, you’ll still be able to access it (from the front-end and the back-end) by entering a password. As well as the password protect option, you can unlock your hidden store for logged in users or roles. This is a great option for online store owners that would like to temporarily disable the WooCommerce shop for regular customers but would like wholesale buyers to be able to make purchases. For example, it's perfect as a WooCommerce store vacation plugin.

Method #2: Use WooCommerce Protected Categories to hide specific categories and their products

The WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin lets you hide one (or more) categories within your online store. In other words, instead of disabling your entire WooCommerce shop, you can simply disable specific categories and all the products within those categories.

This is a practical option for online store owners who:

  • Are running out of stock on certain product categories but would like to be able to continue selling other products.
  • Are restocking a particular category of products and need to temporarily disable those category pages from their public-facing website.
  • Have decided to pause the production of a category of products.
  • Wish to make certain product categories private and available only to select members/users.

WooCommerce Protected Categories to disable WooCommerce demo

With the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin, you’re able to protect specific categories in three different ways:

  • Password protection.
  • Making them available to certain user roles.
  • Allowing specific users to access them.

This way, you can disable specific categories from your WooCommerce store while still making them available to certain users. Make them public again on your chosen end date.

Method #3: WooCommerce disable checkout

The other two methods focus on disabling the entire WooCommerce store or a complete category. Alternatively, you might want to disable checkout options or turn off ordering for specific products.

A WooCommerce disable checkout plugin is useful for ecommerce business owners who: 

  • Have run out of stock or paused production of certain products but would like to be able to nudge customers to buy other products. 
  • Are facing a problem with a merchant or logistics and want to pause orders temporarily.

While you can disable checkout using code, it can easily get tricky and cause your site to break. Another way you could technically disable checkout for individual products is by using the External / Affiliate Product option available in default WooCommerce. This feature was built to enable store owners to showcase products on their site that customers will have to purchase on a different site. For instance, you can promote an Amazon product on your website but to purchase the product customers have to go to the Amazon product page. 

While this feature can be modified to allow you to disable the checkout page, that’s not what it was created for. It could also easily break your product variations which would require troubleshooting. That's why a WooCommerce disable checkout plugin isn't necessarily the best solution.

The best way to temporarily disable checkout or turn off orders for a product is to:

  1. Hide the price of the product, which in turn removes the add to cart button
  2. Mark the product out of stock

A better option: Display lead times and allow backorders

The problem with disabling ordering for specific products is that - by definition - no one can buy them! It’s better for business if you continue accepting orders for products that will come back in stock. The important thing is to clearly communicate with your customers so that they know there will be a wait.

You can easily achieve this by setting the stock status of the product to ‘On backorder’, and showcasing lead times. You won’t have to say no to sales!

How to temporarily disable a WooCommerce shop using plugins

Depending on whether you activate WooCommerce Private Store or WooCommerce Protected Categories to your online shop, some or all of your WooCommerce pages will immediately disappear from your public-facing website. Keep in mind that the rest of your WordPress site (your homepage, blog pages, galleries, etc.) will remain public.

In addition to this, your WooCommerce store will remain accessible to administrators and store managers from the WordPress admin area. They will also be able to access the store from the front-end as usual by entering the password or logging into a user account – depending on how you decide to set up the plugin.

The key benefit of using either WooCommerce Private Store or WooCommerce Protected Categories is that they simply hide all the links to your shop pages. This includes the main shop page, category pages, and single product pages. This way, you won’t have to edit any content on your site or mess around with menus and widgets. It’s the easiest way to WooCommerce temporarily disable shop.

Method #1: How to turn off WooCommerce store with the Private Store plugin

Once you have WooCommerce Private Store set up, it will automatically hide all WooCommerce-created pages from your store. This includes the account page, shopping cart links, checkout pages, main shop page, and product pages.

Assuming you already have an ecommerce store, here’s how to temporarily disable WooCommerce shop:

WooCommerce Private Store

  1. Get the WooCommerce Private Store plugin. Download the plugin files and copy the license key from the order confirmation page or the email notification receipt.
  2. Log in to your WordPress admin panel and head over to Plugins → Add New.
  3. Click the Upload button and look for the plugin files you downloaded.
  4. Install and activate the WooCommerce Private Store plugin to your WordPress website.
  5. Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Private Store and paste your license key.
  6. From the same screen, you can configure other plugin settings, as well. For example, you can:
    1. Set a Store Password if you’d like to let administrators and store managers access it from the front end.
    2. Set a Login Redirect URL to redirect users to another page (such as your homepage) if they try to access a store page.
  7. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen to proceed.

That’s it! Your entire WooCommerce shop should be hidden.

To take things further, you can place your login form somewhere on your WordPress website. For example, on a dedicated login page or in a sidebar widget. All you have to do is paste the shortcode: [store_login] on the page or sidebar. This will automatically generate a login form based on the WooCommerce Private Store settings page. This way, administrators and store managers can easily access the shop from the front end while it's temporarily disabled.

WooCommerce Private Store to disable WooCommerce demo

It's an easy way to close your WordPress store until you're ready to start selling again. It basically lets you disable the WooCommerce shop page.

Method #2: How to use WooCommerce Protected Categories to hide specific categories and their products

Once you’ve installed and activated the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin, it’ll give you the option to hide specific categories from your WooCommerce store. It also hides all of the sub-categories and products that fall under those categories.

Here’s what you need to do to temporarily deactivate or disable specific WooCommerce categories:

WooCommerce Protected Categories

  1. Get the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin. Copy the license key from the order confirmation page or the email notification.
  2. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and head over to Plugins → Add New.
  3. Click the Upload button and look for the plugin files on your computer.
  4. Install and activate the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin to your WordPress website.
  5. Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Protected categories and paste your license key.
  6. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen to proceed.
  7. Go to Products → Categories from the admin panel.
  8. From the Product categories screen, you can:
    1. Edit an existing category that you’d like to temporarily disable from your WooCommerce shop. Alternatively, you can create a new category, as well.
    2. Scroll down to the Visibility section and select the Protected option or the Private option depending on your preferences.
  9. Click the Add new category button to proceed.

That’s all there is to it! The category (and all subcategories and products that fall under it) should be temporarily disabled.

WooCommerce Protected Categories to disable WooCommerce demo

You can repeat these steps to hide as many categories as you’d like.

Method #3: How to hide checkout page by turning off orders

To turn off orders and essentially disable checkout, you’ll need to remove the price of the product. 

Default WooCommerce doesn’t give you the option to hide product prices. You could use code to hide the prices of specific products, categories, etc.  However, that comes at the risk of breaking your site as it involves editing and adding code snippets to crucial website components like your child theme, functions.php file etc. 

That’s why we recommend using a plugin. Our in-depth tutorial to hide WooCommerce product prices explores multiple ways to hide prices including:

  1. Hide prices from logged out users using WooCommerce Wholesale Pro
  2. Showcase product in table format (without prices) using WooCommerce Product Table
  3. Show a quick view of products without prices using WooCommerce Quick View

Once you’re hidden the price of your product,  you can also mark it out of stock. For this you can follow these steps:

  • Open the WordPress Dashboard, and go to the product you want to mark out of stock. 
  • Navigate to the ‘Product data’ section and click on “Inventory”
  • Here you can change the “Stock Status” to ‘Out of stock'.
  • Make sure to click on ‘Update’ once done. The product is now marked out of stock! 

Hiding the product price and marking it as “out of stock” is not the only way to deal with products that are out of stock. If you are in the middle of restocking products then showing lead time is a better idea as it’ll help you make a sale if customers decide to place a backorder. 

Products out of stock? Don't disable your store - show lead times instead!

Show expected availability date out of stock product WooCommerce

In the previous sections, we assumed that disabling your WooCommerce store is the best way forward. However, it's worth thinking about whether there are any alternatives to hiding it completely. This depends on why you want to disable WooCommerce.

Some people decide to temporarily close their online store due to stock availability. For example, if your products are out of stock or you have lead time issues, then you might want to take them offline until the products are ready to despatch again.

If this is your reason for disabling WooCommerce, then there's a better option. Taking your store offline can affect your SEO because your shop pages aren't consistently available to search engines. It can also lead to missed opportunities because potential customers can't find your products.

How to add product lead times

As an alternative, you can use the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin to show when the products will be ready for dispatch.

This handy plugin lets you set a global lead time that will appear on all your product pages, or show lead times on specific products. This is much better than disabling ordering for out of stock products.

You can choose which stock statuses to show lead times for. For example, you could show lead times for 'Out of stock' or 'On backorder' products only, instead of taking them offline. This way, you can stop orders in WooCommerce temporarily.

You can also choose what text to display alongside your lead times (e.g. 'Waiting time', 'Available on 1st July', etc.). The plugin even has a dynamic lead time feature where you select the date when the product will be available, and the remaining waiting time is automatically displayed on the website.

If you're tempted to disable WooCommerce because of lead time issues, then it might be better to keep your store online and display the expected lead times instead. That way, customers (and search engines) can still see your store, while making an informed decision on whether to wait. This also enables you to accept backorders!

If you need to disable WooCommerce for any other reasons, then you're probably better off using the other methods discussed above.

Where to get the plugin

Traditionally, the only way to disable WooCommerce was to either deactivate the WooCommerce plugin from your WordPress website or mess around with your functions.php file. However, if you want to know how to temporarily disable WooCommerce shop, we recommend using a plugin.

More specifically:

It’s worth mentioning that both WooCommerce Private Store and WooCommerce Protected Categories are compatible so you can use both plugins together, as well. Both plugins allow you to configure WooCommerce to stop orders.

Do you have any questions on how to temporarily disable WooCommerce? We’re happy to help so let us know in the comments section below.

WooCommerce featured products allow online store owners to showcase specific items on their website. It’s a great way to draw attention to the best-selling products, products that are currently on sale, or products you’d like to promote.

WooCommerce featured products in a table layout

With WooCommerce, you can showcase featured products in different parts of your online store – on sidebars, above the fold on your sales page, and even in blog posts. It also makes it incredibly easy to toggle featured products on and off.

With this in mind, in this article, we’ll explain how you can set and add featured products in WooCommerce and display them in a neat, front-end table layout. Before we begin, let’s quickly take a look at some different scenarios where you might want to add featured products to your online store.

Setting WooCommerce featured products lets you easily boost product visibility on your website. As a result, you’re able to effectively run all sorts of marketing campaigns and ultimately increase sales.

Aside from this, here are some more reasons why you might want to add featured products to your online store:

  • Special offers To promote items that you’re offering at a discount. This is also great for running marketing campaigns, selling bundled products, or just about any other kind of limited time offer.
  • Getting rid of old stock Online store owners that need to get rid of old stock buried in their online store can use the WooCommerce featured products option to showcase them on their store’s front page, or using sidebars.
  • High-conversion products WooCommerce featured products also make it easy for online store owners to put their best-selling products front and center. This is a great way to get products in front of customers and skyrocket sales.
  • Certain types of products are in demand at different times of the year If you sell seasonal products – such as shorts and jackets, recreation items, or back to school products – then you might consider using WooCommerce featured products to showcase items that are seasonally high in demand.

As you can see, there are countless scenarios where you might need to set and add featured products to your online store. Before we jump into the tutorial, let’s quickly step through some examples of businesses that might need to feature products on their online store.

The neat thing about featured products in WooCommerce is that just about any type of online store can benefit from them. This includes both digital products and physical goods.

Use case scenario: Graphic or digital art

If you sell graphics, digital art, mockups, templates, or any other type of digital product, you can use the WooCommerce featured product option to increase product visibility. This is also a great way to showcase your best-selling products.

Packreate example

Take a look at how Packreate features some mockups and a 3D PSDs on their site’s home page. It immediately entices visitors to check out the featured items.

Use case scenario: Apparel

If you own an online store that sells apparel, using the WooCommerce featured products option is a must. Whether you’re trying to promote products on sale or quickly sell out seasonal items, setting them as featured products will help capture visitors' attention.

Reformation example

Here’s an example of how Reformation does it. See how they’re promoting an item from three different product categories, along with a Sale: up to 70% off message on their homepage.

The main difference between selling physical products and digital products online is shipping and delivery. Physical products need to be shipped to customers, whereas digital goods can immediately be made available for download (either directly through the online store or via email).

By now you should have a good understanding of what types of online stores would need to set and add WooCommerce featured products. Next, we’ll walk you through a quick tutorial explaining how you can set featured products in WooCommerce without having to mess around with code.

The good news is that setting and adding featured products in WooCommerce is incredibly easy. In addition to this, you can easily toggle between featured products, in case you need to change things up week after week.

Assuming you already have a WooCommerce store set up with some products added to it, here’s what you need to do to set and add featured products in WooCommerce to your online store.

Add and set featured products

With WooCommerce, there are two main ways to set featured products – through the product page and from the All Products screen.

When you’re adding new products to your online store, you can use the Featured option under Publish settings to mark products as featured products in WooCommerce.

Set featured products from the edit product screen

Another way to set featured products in WooCommerce is by marking them in the product listings.

Set WooCommerce featured products by toggling star icon

All you have to do is navigate to Products -> All Products from the admin panel and click on the star icon for each product you’d like to feature.

Switch featured products around

If you sell seasonal products or need to get rid of inventory quickly, you might need to switch featured products around frequently. The easiest way to do this is from the products listings screen (i.e. Products -> All Products).

When you hover over the star icon, it will tell you if the product is featured or not. Simply clicking on the star icon lets you toggle it on and off.

Increase (or decrease) featured product visibility (less flexible option)

There are a few different ways to display WooCommerce featured products on your online store. The option you decide to go with depends on your specific needs, the types of products you sell, and how many of them you’d like to feature on each page.

For example, you can add this shortcode to any WordPress page or post you’d like to add WooCommerce featured products to:

[featured_products per_page="12" columns="4" orderby="date" order="desc"]

This shortcode would display all 12 of your featured products in a grid layout (4 columns and 3 rows). It would look something like this:

Featured products shortcode preview

The problem with this approach is that some of your featured products might not be immediately visible to customers. If you need to showcase lots of WooCommerce featured products on your online store, you might instead consider using the WooCommerce Product Table plugin.

Display WooCommerce featured products in a table layout to increase visibility (more flexible option)

Once you have the WooCommerce Product Table plugin installed and activated to your WordPress website, you can simply use the term option with the [product_table] shortcode to any page or post you’d like to display the featured products in WooCommerce on.

For example, you could add the shortcode:

[product_table term="product_visibility:featured"]

to your page or post. It would look something like this on your site’s front-end:

WooCommerce featured products in a table layout

Conclusion

Setting and adding featured products in WooCommerce is a great way to draw attention to specific items, increase visibility, and boost sales. By listing featured products in a table layout, you can easily showcase multiple featured products in a neat front-end table layout with search, sort, and filter options.

What different types of products are you thinking of listing as featured products? Let us know by commenting below!

Shipping is an essential part of most e-commerce businesses. The right shipping options can affect whether customers complete their purchase, or abandon their cart and shop elsewhere.

If you’re running a WooCommerce online store, then there are many shipping options available - right out of the box. You can configure WooCommerce shipping zones, shipping methods, shipping options, and shipping classes.

With this in mind, in this article, we’ll explain how you can configure WooCommerce shipping settings for your own online store. We’ll also introduce you to some advanced options that further improve the customer’s shopping experience.

You'll learn how to:

Let's get started!

What you need to know about WooCommerce shipping

WooCommerce is a powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress that comes with several shipping options and settings out of the box. Before we jump into explaining how you can configure these settings and offer shipping through your online store, let's take a step back and see what each option means.

  • Shipping zones are the geographical areas that carriers ship products to. Generally speaking, these range from Zone 1 to Zone 8 (for shipments in the United States) and can also be defined by a region (for example Northern Ireland). This allows carriers to measure distance in groupings of zip codes (rather than miles) from where the package will be shipped from.
  • You need to assign shipping methods to each shipping zone you create. This lets customers know how you'll ship their order to them. Out of the box, WooCommerce lets you choose from one of three shipping methods i.e. flat rate, free shipping, local pickup.
  • The shipping options settings page in WooCommerce lets you configure general shipping settings related to calculations and shipping destinations. From here, you can choose to show (or hide) the built-in shipping calculator or decide to hide shipping costs until customers enter their address.
  • Online stores that sell products of various sizes (e.g. furniture stores that sell sofas, table lamps, ottomans, and carpets) might need to group similar-sized products together. This way, they can charge a higher shipping rate for larger products and a lower rate (or free shipping) for smaller products. WooCommerce's shipping classes options lets store owners create shipping classes and charge different rates for different shipping classes.

In addition to this, there's so much more you can do with WooCommerce to make it easier for customers to understand how you handle and charge for shipping. For example, you can use the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin to display an estimated shipping time for each product – more on this later.

WooCommerce shipping zones

Log into your WordPress website and navigate to WooCommerce → SettingsShipping to get started.

The first screen you’ll see shows a quick overview of the WooCommerce shipping zones your online store ships to. The first thing you need to do is add a shipping zone. For those unfamiliar, a shipping zone is a geographical region where you ship. This could mean a continent (such as South America) or a specific country (for example, Brazil).

WooCommerce shipping zones settings

Click the Add shipping zone button to get started. Give the new zone a name and choose the regions that fall under this shipping zone. You’ll also be able to restrict the region to specific postal codes by clicking the Limit to specific ZIP/postcodes link, which is useful if you’re looking to offer local pickup or local delivery.

Add a new shipping zone

When you’re done, click the Save changes button to proceed.

WooCommerce shipping methods

Now that you’ve created a shipping zone, the next step is to add and configure the shipping methods. From the same screen (i.e. WooCommerce → SettingsShipping → Shipping zones) click the Add shipping method button under the Shipping methods option to get started. You'll see a pop-up window with shipping methods to select from.

Add a new shipping method

WooCommerce comes with three shipping methods out of the box. These are:

  • Flat rateThis is a useful option for e-commerce sites that need to ship products to different shipping zones. For example, if you sell wholesale products through WooCommerce, you might need to charge customers in higher shipping zones more for getting their orders to them versus customers that are closer to your warehouse or fulfillment center.
  • Free shippingIf you sell subscription boxes or mix and match products locally, you might want to offer free shipping. This shipping method is also suitable for online store owners that bake the cost of shipping into their products to entice customers with Free shipping! messages.
  • Local pickupIf you're building a WooCommerce restaurant online ordering system, you might want to offer a local pickup option for people wishing to collect their meals from the restaurant.

Note: In some cases, you might need to offer a combination of shipping methods. For example, following our restaurant example, you might also set shipping zones to charge different delivery costs based on the customer's distance from the restaurant.

Once you've selected a shipping method, click the blue Add shipping method button to proceed.

You can add each shipping method more than once, which enables you to offer customers more options. The only problem is that your customers will be able to view all the shipping methods you create from their shopping cart. The cart contents will only affect the shipping prices that customers see. One way to refine this is by sorting through available shipping methods. You can do this by dragging and dropping the shipping methods into place. This way, you can decide the order in which customers see them.

Flat rate

The flat rate shipping method lets you charge a fixed shipping rate. Here are the available options to you for configuring its settings:

Set flat rate shipping options

  • Method title. Choose which payment method customers will see.
  • Tax status. Choose if the shipping method is taxable or non-taxable.
  • Cost. Fill in the cost of shipping the entire order. You can also use [qty] and [fee] parameters to charge custom shipping rates.

For example, you could add 5 + (1* [qty]) - [cost] which is $5 plus $1 for each product in the shopping cart. Or 10 + [fee percent = “5” min_fee = “2” max_fee = “5”] - [cost] which is $10 plus 5% of the total order, but no less than $2 and not greater than $5.

Free shipping

This is a special shipping method that can be triggered with coupons and minimum spend thresholds. By going into its settings, you can add in a custom title and set the free shipping condition. You can choose to set Free shipping requires... to:

Set free shipping options
  • N/A. Use this if you’re looking to offer free shipping to all of your customers.
  • A valid free shipping coupon. Create a coupon that enables customers to get free shipping. You can create coupons by navigating to WooCommerce → Coupons from the dashboard.
  • A minimum order amount. Enter the number of money customers would have to spend to receive free shipping.
  • A minimum order amount OR a coupon
  • A minimum order amount AND a coupon

Bear in mind that customers can use coupons even if the minimum order for free shipping has been set.

Local pickup

You can use this shipping method to let customers pick up orders themselves. You can add a custom title, set the tax status, and add in an optional additional cost for local pickup.

Set local pickup options

WooCommerce shipping options

From here you’ll be able to configure the general options related to shipping.

Configure front-end shipping options

The main options you need to configure are:

  • Enable the shipping calculator on the cart page Make sure this checkbox is ticked if you want to enable customers to calculate shipping costs based on shipping zones. (However, remember that customers actually need to see shipping costs before adding products to the cart. We'll talk about this in the next section.)
  • Hide shipping costs until an address is entered Tick this option if you want customers to view the shipping cost only after the order summary is generated.
  • Shipping destination Choose which address for the default shipping address. You can choose the customer's shipping address or the billing address as default. Alternatively, you can force all orders to ship to the customer's billing address.

Display shipping options on the product page

In the previous section, you learned how to enable a shipping calculator on the cart and/or checkout page. That's what you can do with WooCommerce as it comes. However, it doesn't actually reflect the needs of your customers, who need to know the shipping options before deciding whether to add products to their cart.

You can solve this problem by installing the WooCommerce Shipping Calculator plugin:

This useful plugin adds a shipping calculator to the location of your choice on the product page.

Having a shipping calculator on the WooCommerce product page is much better for user experience than hiding this information until customers get to the checkout. It completely eliminates the problem of customers abandoning their cart due to unexpected shipping costs. Customers can see the options where they need them and make an informed decision.

A product page shipping calculator also helps to avoid disappointment for customers in locations you don't ship to. That's because they can see that you don't ship to them before committing to buying the product.

WooCommerce shipping classes

Shipping classes are especially useful for online store owners who sell products of various sizes. Shipping classes can be used to group similar types of products. In addition to this, you can also configure some shipping methods (such as flat rate shipping) to provide different rates to different shipping classes.

WooCommerce shipping classes screen

Click on the Add shipping class button to get started. Next, enter the Shipping class name, Slug, and Description.

Add a new shipping class

Now that you’ve created the shipping classes, the next step is to assign shipping classes to products.

Assigning shipping classes to products

To assign shipping classes that you’ve created to products, navigate to Products → All Products and open the product you'd like to assign a shipping class to in the edit product screen. Next, scroll down to the Product data section and click on the Shipping tab.

Assign products to shipping classes

From here, you can set the Shipping class option to one of the shipping classes you created. Click the Update button to proceed.

Note: If you sell variations of the same product, you'll be able to assign separate shipping classes to each variation. You can do this by heading over to Variations from the Product data section.

Add shipping classes to product variations

Assigning shipping classes to products in bulk

You can also set the shipping class for multiple products all at once.

Navigate to Products → All Products and select all of the products you'd like to assign to the same shipping class. From the Bulk Actions dropdown, choose Edit and click on the Apply button.

Bulk assign products to a shipping class

Set the Shipping class value (under Product data) to whichever shipping class you'd like to assign. Finally, click the Update button to proceed.

Setting shipping class costs for flat rate shipping

Once you've added some shipping classes, you'll see a Shipping class costs section under Flat rate settings. It should look something like this:

Advanced flat rate shipping settings with shipping classes

From here, you can configure:

  • Shipping class costsThere is a separate field reserved to add in a shipping cost for each shipping class. You can enter an additional cost here for specific shipping classes.
  • No shipping class costOnly use this in case you’re using Per class calculation (we’ll talk about that next).
  • Calculation type When you’re calculating the shipping cost for shipping classes, you can go with one of two options:
    • Per class. The cost of shipping will be the total costs for each shipping class added up.
    • Per order. Of all the products in the shopping cart, the most expensive shipping class will be applied.

3 plugins for advanced WooCommerce shipping

There are several plugins and extensions out there that let you control your shipping options. Here, we'll dig deeper into three of the most popular (and most useful!) offerings.

WooCommerce Lead Time

WooCommerce Lead Time Plugin

Out of the box, WooCommerce doesn't let you add an estimated shipping time for individual products. This is important as it lets customers know when they can expect to receive their order or when it will be available for purchasing.

Thankfully, with WooCommerce Lead Time, you can display the estimated number of days it will take to restock a product in your inventory. This allows customers to make an informed buying decision and can make a big difference to conversion rates.

WooCommerce lead time displayed on the front-end

This is especially useful for online stores that:

  • Sell made-to-order products or handmade goods
  • Sell products that have long lead times or waiting times (like furniture)
  • Don't always have all items in stock or for products that are out of stock

Buy Plugin

WooCommerce Shipping

WooCommerce Shipping (powered by Jetpack) is a free extension that lets you add discounted shipping rates and print shipping labels directly from the WordPress dashboard. You can use this extension to print discounted USPS shipping labels. If you need a way to access additional carriers (including DHL, UPS, FedEx, and USPS), consider using Shippo instead. This is the easiest (and most cost-effective) way to print labels.

Buy Plugin

Table rate shipping plugins

Many online stores sell products of variable sizes and weights. For this reason, flat rate shipping isn’t always the best possible solution for them. They need a different (more advanced) way to calculate shipping costs. This is where a Table Rate Product Shipping plugin comes in. This WordPress plugin by YITH offers a convenient way for store owners to create and set rules for calculating advanced shipping costs.

Rules can be set based on:

  • Weight
  • Number of items
  • Number of items by class
  • Price
Table Rate Shipping settings screen

This gives store owners the flexibility to create rules like:

  • If the weight of all the products adds up to be anywhere between 1 lbs and 5 lbs, $15 will be added to the shipping cost.
  • If the order contains more than 5 products, add $10 to the total shipping cost.

Buy Plugin

Conclusion

Setting up WooCommerce shipping for your e-commerce website is a great way to enhance your offering while remaining profitable. All you have to do is configure options for shipping zones, set shipping methods and classes, and assign products to the right classes.

Once you've set up the default WooCommerce shipping options, you can install the best plugins to supercharge shipping in your store:

Do you have any questions on how to set up WooCommerce shipping for your online store? We're happy to help, so let us know in the comments section below!

Have you ever built a WooCommerce store? If yes, then pat yourself on the back! With a 22% market share among the top 1 million e-commerce websites, WooCommerce is the clear frontrunner.  Nearly 3 million sites use the WooCommerce Plugin and its add-ons. So if you own a WooCommerce store, you’ve definitely made a wise choice.

Now, what would you do if your WooCommerce site was down for 3 hours? Just think about the time, dedication, and hard work that went into creating and maintaining it. Not to mention the loss of potential customers and revenue!

And what if data was permanently lost? You would lose order information, transactional details, and so much more!

It is therefore absolutely imperative to have security measures in place. Moreover, the threat of vulnerabilities like hacks, malware, and human error will always be at large. It is always best to employ a concrete backup process - one that specifically suits a WooCommerce store.

How important are backups to a WooCommerce site?

Woocommerce backup plugins

Having a regular WooCommerce backup process ensures that you have access to the latest data from your site in the event of a website crash or data breach. Ensuring robust data privacy is another crucial aspect, as backups often contain sensitive customer information and transaction details, making it vital to choose a secure and reliable backup solution for your WooCommerce store. If such an issue occurs, the backed up data can be quickly restored, making sure that your downtime is short and does not impact your business adversely.

Normally, a daily backup is sufficient for regular websites. But that is not adequate for a WooCommerce website. If your store crashes and your last backup was taken 12 hours ago, then you stand to lose any new orders, sign up information, posts, comments, etc. that occurred during that time.

WooCommerce websites need real-time backups that trigger a backup every time a change occurs on your site. This way, no matter what happens to your store, no matter when your store goes down, you have all your data stored safely and therefore lose nothing.

Now that you are aware of the importance of taking real-time backups for WooCommerce stores, let’s take a look at the best way to do just that. Primarily you can:

  • Use the backup service of your web host
  • Take manual backups
  • Automated backups using WordPress backup plugins

Let’s evaluate each of these backup methods in detail and decide which is the best.

Web host backups

Every web host provider offers a backup solution for the websites that they are hosting.

You can check with your web host provider if this is a free or chargeable service. For cheaper hosts, you need to upgrade to a higher plan to access backups of your site. Managed WordPress hosts such as Kinsta offer access to backups and one-click restores as standard.

You can configure your site's backup settings from your web host account. Depending on the hosting provider, this may be a complex or a user-friendly process.

Remember to check whether the hosting provides real-time backups. As we discussed earlier, regular backups are not ideal for WooCommerce stores.

Manual backups

If you don’t want to depend on your web host provider and would rather take the backups yourself, these are the typical steps to follow:

  1. Connect to your WordPress web server using an FTP tool and download all your WordPress website files.
  2. Create a backup of all your downloaded website files on a destination folder.
  3. Create a backup of all your database files either from the database management panel of your WordPress account or by using the phpMyAdmin tool.

To perform manual backups, you need to either have the necessary technical knowledge yourself or seek professional assistance from a WordPress backup expert (which really defeats the purpose of taking manual backups).

Besides, taking manual backups is a very long and time-consuming process. On top of that, if you are managing multiple WooCommerce websites with large volumes of data, manual backups may not be a practical solution. After all, it can take quite some time to create just one backup. As a result, taking real-time backups manually is out of the question.

The best WordPress and WooCommerce backup plugins will help you take real-time backups without you having to lift a finger.

The best WordPress and WooCommerce backup plugins

WordPress backup plugins offer an easy and efficient way of taking a backup of your WooCommerce store. Available at very reasonable subscription prices, backup plugins are easy to install (just like any other WordPress plugins) and do not require any extensive technical know-how to execute the backup process. Choosing the right WooCommerce backup plugin, however, can be a challenge.

To save you the effort, we've compared 3 of the best WordPress backup plugins for your WooCommerce store.

1. BlogVault

BlogVault

Powering over 400,000 WordPress websites around the globe, BlogVault is a reliable WordPress backup plugin. With a success rate of over 99.8% for automatic website recovery, BlogVault is trusted by thousands of single-site owners, developers, and agencies. The backup plugin offers the convenience of scheduled and on-demand backups along with the real-time backup feature.

Listed below are the WooCommerce-specific features of the BlogVault tool:

  • Takes a comprehensive backup of WordPress database and files including web pages, installed plugins/themes, user comments, published posts, website settings, and user details.
  • Uses an incremental backup method that is used to sync only the new changes on your website with the existing backup data.
  • Takes real-time backups where BlogVault stores even the minutest changes made on your WooCommerce store any time of the day.
  • Puts zero load on your website as BlogVault stores backups on its own dedicated servers, ensuring your site’s performance is not hampered.
  • Comes with an independent dashboard so that if you can’t access your WordPress admin, you can restore the site from BlogVault dashboard.

Pricing: Basic paid plan starting from $7.40 per month

2. BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy

Available since 2010, BackupBuddy from iThemes is popular for being the first backup plugin for WordPress websites. Used by over half a million WordPress websites across the globe, BackupBuddy has simplified the entire website backup process with its centralized BackupBuddy dashboard.

Listed below are the WooCommerce-specific features of the BackupBuddy backup tool:

  • Offers both scheduled and real-time website backups.
  • Complete backup of all WooCommerce website files, including web pages, posts, user comments, dashboard widgets, images, plugins/themes, and much more.
  • Stash Live feature that periodically takes a snapshot of your website.
  • Availability of a safe and secure off-site backup storage facility.
  • Suitable for backups of multiple WordPress websites.

Pricing: One-year subscription plans priced at $52 (for one site) and $129 (for unlimited websites)

3. VaultPress

VaultPress

VaultPress is a WordPress backup and malware scanning tool that has been designed and built by Automattic. This backup tool is bundled as part of the popular JetPack plugin, so you will need to install JetPack first to use VaultPress. In addition to website backups, VaultPress has a security scanner tool that can be used to detect any malware or malicious activities on your website.

Listed below are the WooCommerce-specific features of VaultPress:

  • A centralized and independent VaultPress dashboard that lets you perform backups and malware scanning efficiently.
  • A calendar view on the VaultPress dashboard that lets you see real-time activities on your WordPress website.
  • Offers real-time syncing of your website data.
  • Complete website protection from a variety of security threats, including hackers, web host failure, online viruses, and user error.
  • Complete backup of all website data, including the posts, user comments, media files, and dashboard settings.

Pricing: Premium plans priced at $3.50 per month.

In conclusion

As a WooCommerce store owner, you can choose to perform your website backups manually or through the use of backup plugins.

Manual backups require a lot of technical expertise and can be very time-consuming. On the other hand, WordPress backup plugins are easy to use and offer result much faster.

Irrespective of the backup process you use, taking real-time backups of your e-commerce website is crucial to ensure zero loss of data and, of course, and your complete peace of mind.

As a business owner, you might offer bookable events or appointments which customers need to book ahead of time. While WooCommerce doesn't support bookings straight out of the box, you can easily achieve this with the right plugin. Keep reading to discover the best WooCommerce booking and WooCommerce appointment plugins, and how to use them.

As online booking and appointment scheduling becomes increasingly popular, WooCommerce has emerged as a go-to platform for selling bookable products. A wide range of WooCommerce booking plugins are available, and it can be difficult to choose the right one.

To fully leverage the power of WooCommerce for bookings and appointments, it's essential to install a suitable booking calendar plugin that meets your specific needs. With so many options available, choosing the right one can be a daunting task. That's why we've compiled a list of the best WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugins to help you make an informed decision.

In this article, we'll provide an overview of the top WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugins and a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up and use the best ones. Whether you're a small business owner, a freelancer, or a large enterprise, this guide will help you find the perfect WooCommerce bookings plugin. You'll discover plugins for:

Displaying WooCommerce Bookings in a WooCommerce Product Table

But first, let’s quickly take a look at some of the different types of businesses that can benefit from a WooCommerce booking plugin.

Does WooCommerce have a booking system?

While WooCommerce is a powerful e-commerce platform with numerous features, it does not have a built-in booking system. This means that if you want to offer appointments, reservations, or rentals on your site, you'll need to use a plugin that provides this functionality.

Fortunately, there are many great booking plugins available for WooCommerce, such as YITH WooCommerce Bookings and the others featured in this article. They allow you to create bookable products with different pricing options and availability settings. Booking and appointment plugins like these are perfect for businesses that need to manage appointments, tour bookings, or other time-based services.

By using the right plugin, you can easily add bookable products to your site and provide your customers with a seamless booking experience.

What is a WooCommerce bookings plugin?

Before we start, it's important to think about what a WooCommerce bookings plugin actually is. This may seem obvious, but it's really not. That's because there are so many different types of events which you might want to take bookings for.

Put simply, a WooCommerce bookings plugin is any plugin which lets your customers book some sort of event online. This can be broken down further into two main categories:

  • WooCommerce appointment booking plugins.
  • Event booking plugins.

While both WordPress appointments booking plugins and events booking plugins are designed to enable users to schedule and book activities, there are some key differences.

WooCommerce appointment bookings

A WooCommerce appointments booking plugin is typically designed for businesses or individuals who offer services that require pre-booking. This might include consultations, meetings, or sessions with clients.

A WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugin allows customers to select a specific date and time for the appointment. This might be based on live availability, or the service provider can then confirm or reject the booking manually.

The bookable WooCommerce appointments plugin may also include features like calendar integration, email notifications, and payment processing.

Event bookings

On the other hand, an events booking plugin is designed for businesses or individuals who host events for multiple people. Common examples include training courses, conferences, workshops, or concerts.

The WooCommerce event tickets plugin allows customers to register for the event, select a ticket type, and make payment. The plugin may also include features like event calendars, customizable registration forms, and ticket management tools. It can help manage complex ticketing structures, track ticket sales, and ensure the smooth operation of events by managing capacity and seating arrangements.

Should I use an appointments or an events plugin?

As you can see, the decision of whether to use a WooCommerce appointment bookings plugin or an events plugin depends on the type of activity you're offering. The above definitions might help you to choose the best type of WooCommerce bookings plugin for your WordPress site. However, it's often difficult to apply general definitions to your exact situation.

To help you even more, here are some guidelines to help you choose which type of plugin is best suited for your needs:

Use a WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugin for:

  • Services that require one-on-one interaction: If you offer services that require a one-on-one consultation, such as legal or medical consultations, coaching, or personal training, a WooCommerce appointments plugin would be more suitable.
  • Activities that require a specific time and date: If you offer activities that require booking at a specific time and date, such as hair appointments or massages, an appointments plugin would be a good fit. This also applies to hotel booking websites and sites like Airbnb that rent out a particular space.
  • Businesses with limited capacity: If you have a limited number of staff or time available to offer your services, a WooCommerce appointments plugin can help you manage your schedule more efficiently.

Use an events booking plugin for:

  • Events with multiple attendees: If you're hosting an event that requires ticket sales for multiple attendees, such as a conference or a music festival, an events plugin would be the better option.
  • Activities with multiple sessions: If you're hosting an activity that has multiple sessions, such as a course or a workshop, an events plugin would be more appropriate.
  • Activities with different ticket types: If you're offering different ticket types for your activity, such as VIP tickets or group discounts, an events plugin would be a better choice.

In summary, a WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugin is best for one-on-one services or activities that require a specific time and date. In contrast, an events booking plugin is better suited for events with multiple attendees, sessions, or ticket types.

The rest of this article will cover both types of "WooCommerce bookings plugin". Each time, I will make it clear whether the plugin is suitable for taking bookings for appointments or events. That way, you can choose the right plugin for your needs.

What type of events can I use a WooCommerce bookings plugin for?

In the previous section, we established that there are different types of WooCommerce bookings plugins for appointments and larger events. To help to explain this, let's look at some popular use cases for each type of plugin.

Any business that requires bookings, appointments, or reservations of any sort can use a WooCommerce bookings plugin. Here’s a look at some of them, divided into the two categories.

Popular use cases for WooCommerce appointment bookings plugins

I recommend a WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugin to sell the following examples of bookable product. These all focus on selling individual bookable products and time slots, rather than events for larger numbers of people.

Selling rental products

If you run a business that rents out products such as cars, boats, Christmas trees, or rooms and apartments then you’ll need a WordPress booking plugin. This will help you to better manage booking products, customer bookings, and reservations.

This way, you won’t have to maintain a manual, paper-based booking system or collect payments in person. Instead, customers will be able to use an automated reservation platform to learn about your products and the available time slots. They can use your website to book their desired product, and pay online.

Selling appointments and booking slots

A WooCommerce bookings plugin can help doctors better manage their patients’ appointments, and track any cancellations in time to squeeze in more patients. In addition, customers will no longer have to respond to emails or phone calls to book appointments in WooCommerce.

Similarly, personal service professionals such as wedding photographers, gardeners, and birthday decorators will also be able to fulfil client needs and requirements more efficiently.

Various types of product that may require a date picker

Online teaching businesses can also benefit from using an online booking system to complement their online learning website. You’ll be able to hire teachers who could each set up their available hours to teach students.

A WooCommerce bookings plugin lets you create all sorts of bookable products including university courses, cooking classes, guitar lessons, or even dance instructions. Either set a price and charge your clients a flat rate or by the hour.

You can also use a WooCommerce bookings plugin to let customers choose a date and time for any other purpose. For example, if you sell gifts direct to the recipient then it makes sense to let customers choose the desired delivery date.

Popular use cases for WooCommerce event bookings plugins

A WooCommerce event tickets plugin is a useful tool for businesses and organizations that sell tickets to events. This includes concerts, sports games, theater productions, and other live events. Here are three examples of popular use cases for a WooCommerce event tickets plugin.

Music festivals and conferences

Music festivals and conferences often have a complex ticketing structure that includes different ticket types for general admission, VIP access, and other premium services. A WooCommerce event tickets plugin can help manage these complex ticketing options and make it easy for customers to purchase and receive tickets. The plugin can also help manage the capacity of the venue, preventing overselling or underselling of tickets.

Sporting events

Sporting events can have a similar ticketing structure to music festivals and conferences, with various ticket types available for different seating areas and access levels. With a WooCommerce event tickets plugin, customers can easily purchase and receive their tickets online. At the same time, venue managers can track ticket sales and manage the availability of seats.

Theater productions

For theater productions, a WooCommerce event tickets plugin can help manage the sale of tickets for multiple showings or performances. The plugin can also help manage the capacity of the venue, prevent overbooking or double-booking. It also makes it easy for customers to select their preferred seating arrangement.

Online events

And of course, not all events take place face-to-face these days! You can also use a WooCommerce events plugin to take bookings for online events such as webinars. Or perhaps online appointments such as Zoom consultations.

What are the top WooCommerce booking plugins for appointments?

Ok, so now we've looked at the different types of WooCommerce bookings plugins. We've divided them into two categories based on whether you're selling places for appointments or events.

Now it's time to find the best plugins for each type of booking! Here, we’ll step through the most popular WooCommerce bookings plugins and highlight their key features. I'll also provide a full step-by-step setup tutorial for the best plugins on the list. That way, you'll have everything you need to get started with WooCommerce bookings and appointments.

1. WooCommerce Product Options

woocommerce product options

Before we get into the fully featured WooCommerce bookings plugins, I'm going to give you a simpler option. That's because in WordPress (and life in general!), it's generally best to go for the most user-friendly solution that meets your needs. This keeps your website lightweight and makes your life easier 😌

The simplest way to add WooCommerce bookings and appointments to your site is to use the Product Options plugin. This easy-to-use plugin lets you quickly convert any WooCommerce product into a bookable product. You simply need to add a date field to the product. This can be either a calendar with date picker, or a date and time picker.

Key Features:

Here are some features of the date field in the WooCommerce Product Options plugin. Together, these can enhance your online store for bookings and appointments:

  • Add a calendar field to any WooCommerce product or variation, so customers can select a date and time for their booking.
  • Disable past dates or future dates in the calendar to only allow bookings for available dates.
  • Prevent same-day bookings by marking the current day as unavailable.
  • Disable specific weekdays, such as weekends, if you don't offer bookings on those days.
  • Set the field as required to ensure customers select a date before adding the product to their cart.
  • Change the date format to match your preferences or your customers' needs.
  • Enter minimum and maximum date limits, manually or dynamically, to control the earliest or latest available dates for bookings.
  • Mark specific dates as unavailable, such as when you have other bookings or are on holiday.
  • Use conditional logic to dynamically show or hide the date field based on other options the customer selects.
  • Add an extra fee to the product when the customer selects a date, with multiple date picker fields available to charge different fees depending on the date.

By using the WooCommerce Product Options plugin's date field, you can create a more streamlined and customizable booking experience for your customers. And even better, you can do this without the need for a full WooCommerce bookings plugin.

WooCommerce Product Options comes with a full money-back guarantee. This lets you try it risk-free before committing to a more complex WordPress appointment plugin.

Limitations:

I started this section by saying that WooCommerce Product Options offers a simple way of selling bookings and appointments. If you simply need a way to add a date calendar to a product, then that's all you need. Why over-complicate things?

However, while the WooCommerce Product Options plugin provides a lot of flexibility and customization for adding booking options to your online store, there are some features that might require a full bookings plugin to achieve. It's worth considering whether you need these extra features. For example: 

One such feature is the ability to set different pricing options based on the date or time of the booking. While the WooCommerce Product Options plugin allows you to add an extra fee for a selected date, it doesn't provide the ability to create complex pricing structures based on a combination of dates, times, and other criteria. You can achieve this by adding multiple date fields to a problem (e.g. one for weekdays and one for weekends), each with different pricing. However, that may not meet your needs.

You may need centralized booking features such as a central page in the WordPress Dashboard listing all bookings. You don't get this with WooCommerce Product Options, which just adds the booking information to the usual 'Orders' page in WooCommerce.

Lastly, a full bookings plugin may be necessary if you need to manage your bookings and availability across multiple channels. Similarly, you may need a plugin that integrates with third-party booking platforms like Outlook Calendar.

While the WooCommerce Product Options plugin provides a great solution for adding booking options to your WooCommerce store, it may not be enough if you have more complex booking needs. If that applies to you, then skip to plugin #2 on our list.

How to add a simple booking calendar to any product

Next, I'll explain how to use WooCommerce Product Options to add a date field to any simple or variable product.

  1. First, get the plugin and install it on your WordPress site.
  2. The setup wizard will open, prompting you to activate your license key.
  3. At the end of the setup wizard, click the button to start creating product options.
  4. In Products → Product Options, either create a new options group or edit the default one. Click 'Add Option'.
  5. Select the 'Date' option type and fill in the information about it.
WooCommerce product add-ons date picker field

2. Amelia

Amelia WordPress booking plugin

Amelia is a robust WordPress booking plugin designed to create a flexible booking environment tailored to your specific business needs. With its intuitive and user-friendly interface, Amelia integrates seamlessly with WordPress-powered business websites, as well as e-commerce websites built on Woo (WooCommerce). It enhances efficiency, customization, and overall booking experience, as it helps track and manage various types of appointments and events.

What sets Amelia apart is its extensive feature set, including appointment reminders, two-way calendar sync, online payment processing, packages of services, the cart feature for booking multiple services, and support for recurring appointments.

Key features

Centralized appointment management directly from your WordPress website, from the admin area for you, and from the employee/user front-end cabinets for others (so they don't ever have to log in to your WP Admin).

  • Seamless integration with Woo (WooCommerce).
  • User-friendly booking form for clients.
  • Flexible appointment scheduling, available 24/7.
  • Online payment processing in case you decide to use it without WooCommerce.
  • Appointment reminders to reduce no-shows.
  • Two-way calendar sync with the calendar of your choice for accurate scheduling.
  • Support for packages of services to offer bundled options.
  • "Shopping cart" option that allows your clients to book multiple services before checking out.
  • Ability to schedule recurring appointments.
  • Customization options to match your brand identity.
  • Extensive integrations include Google Calendar, Google Meet, Zoom, Elementor, Divi, WooCommerce, and more.
  • Dashboard for business owners and managers to track key performance indicators (KPIs).

3. YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce

YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce plugin

YITH WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments helps you create a simple and easy-to-use booking system for your WordPress business website. This WooCommerce booking plugin supports all sorts of e-commerce sites built on WooCommerce and lets you create various types of bookable products with different pricing options.

Key features:
  • It enables you to easily manage bookings for apartments, rooms, and other living facilities by setting their daily or hourly booking rates.
  • You’ll be able to set the minimum and the maximum number of days available for booking by individual visitors.
  • You can set to approve reservations as soon as the customer confirms it or require approval from the admins.
  • You can set the maximum period until when customers will be allowed to cancel their bookings.
  • It enables you to manage appointments and bookings for services such as nail salon, physiotherapy sessions, or beauty parlors and sync your booking dates with Google Calendar.

4. BookingPress

BookingPress Plugin

BookingPress is a useful appointment booking plugin for Woocommerce. It simplifies the whole process for service-based businesses. With BookingPress, you can create booking forms, set up availability and prices, and handle payments on your website.

BookingPress has a major benefit - its flexible and customizable booking system. You can access premium add-ons at no cost, and it works with over 17 payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, Square, Mollie, WooCommerce, Razorpay, and more.

While a free version of BookingPress is accessible on the WordPress.org platform, it is advisable to opt for the premium version of BookingPress. This unlocks its full capabilities and comprehensive feature set.

Key features
  • Award-winning responsive design.
  • 40+ premium add-ons which are free to use.
  • Fully customizable to meet the needs of individual businesses.
  • The Advanced staff dashboard is available for staff members to manage their schedules and appointments.
  • Custom booking fields with conditional hide/show options.
  • Advanced reports and analysis for better business management.
  • WhatsApp, Email & SMS notifications.
  • Invoice feature with PDF support.
  • Fully customizable booking forms and customer panels.
  • Cart facility for multi-booking.
  • 24/7 customer support.

5. Sales Igniter WooCommerce Bookings

Sales Igniter WooCommerce Bookings Plugin

Most WooCommerce Bookings plugins merely add a calendar to your product page, and then a backend page where you can see a table of your bookings. But what about all the other needs of your rental business store? For example, you need a way to edit your orders and rental dates, a way to see day by day visually for a month what your inventory is, a way to track what has been checked out and checked in.

Sales Igniter WooCommerce Bookings & Tours designed to solve these problems and more. It comes with many exclusive features not found anywhere else.

  • Admin POS Calendar integration
  • Multiple calendar types
  • Check-out and check-in inventory tracking with RFID / barcode scanning
  • Support for booking composite products / variable / bundled products
  • Rental security deposits

6. WooCommerce Bookings

WooCommerce Bookings plugin

The official WooCommerce Bookings extension enables your visitors to book appointments and reservations online – without making any phone calls. This way, you don’t have to mark dates on your calendar or maintain a paper-based booking system. Instead, your website will manage your bookings and online payments automatically.

Key features:
  • You can define set options like fixed time slots for a guided tour or an appointment or let your customers choose a time that suits them best.
  • It lets you set the minimum and the maximum number of participants allowed in a session. So, for example, you can choose to hold one-one-one appointments or allow multiple visitors to reserve a class.
  • You’ll be able to control how appointments are confirmed and cancelled on your WordPress website.
  • It allows you to send reminder emails to your customers when they make a reservation when it is confirmed, and the day before the booking date.
  • You can use a calendar to keep track of all your bookings and automatically sync all your booking dates with Google Calendar to view them on the go. This will work in your timezone.
  • WooCommerce Bookings also integrates with WooCommerce Product Table - ideal for listing bookable products in a searchable, filterable table view. More on this later.
  • Use WooCommerce to add payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, credit card, and so on.
  • Integrates with multilingual plugins like WPML for multi-language sites.

Tutorial: How to get started with the WooCommerce Bookings plugin

Want to know "How do I set up appointments in WooCommerce?" In this section, we'll walk through step-by-step instructions to help you get started with WooCommerce Bookings.

Installing WooCommerce Bookings

The WooCommerce Bookings plugin works seamlessly alongside WooCommerce allowing you to create bookable products. Assuming you already have WooCommerce installed on your WordPress website, here are the steps you need to follow to install WooCommerce Bookings:

Get the YITH WooCommerce Bookings plugin's zip file. Next, log in to your WordPress website and head over to PluginsAdd New and click the Upload Plugin button.

Install the WooCommerce Bookings plugin

Upload the plugin's zipped file and click Install Now to proceed. Activate the plugin to your website.

You'll notice that a new menu item in the side menu bar, Bookings. This is where you'll be able to create new bookable products and configure different settings related to accepting bookings. Next, we'll show you how you can begin creating a bookable product using WooCommerce Bookings.

Creating a bookable product

One of the reasons why WooCommerce Bookings is an incredibly popular booking solution in the WordPress space is because it's incredibly intuitive. The plugin lets you create bookable products in the same way you'd add new products in WooCommerce. The only difference is in the product's configuration settings. Here's what you need to do to get started:

Head over to Products -> Add New from the WordPress admin panel. Add in product details (such as the product name, description, and featured image) and set categories and tags as you normally would.

Add new product screen in WooCommerce

Next, scroll down to the Product data section. From here, use the dropdown menu next to where it says Product data to set the product as a Bookable product. If you're selling a virtual bookable product (such as an online course, training program, classes, or services), click the checkboxes next to the Virtual and Downloadable boxes, as necessary.

Virtual product checkbox in product data section

At this stage, you'll notice that the Product data section has been updated to reflect configuration settings for bookable products. Next, let's quickly step through these settings.

Booking duration

The Booking duration option lets you decide between a fixed block of or customer-defined blocks of:

  • Fixed block of. With this option, you'll be able to restrict customers and clients from booking outside of fixed slots. For instance, if you're setting up a website for a salon, you might need to set a fixed duration of 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the services you offer. You can set fixed blocks of minutes, hours, days, and months.
Fixed block of option
  • Customer defined blocks of. If you need to let customers set their own blocks, select this option. This way, you'll be able to set the duration and let customers select the number of blocks they'd like to book with you. With this option, you'll also be able to specify the minimum and maximum duration (in terms of days and hours) for bookings.
Customer defined blocks of option

Note: If you set the Booking duration in Day(s) for Customer defined blocks of, you'll also be able to enable calendar date range picker to make it easy for customers to select a start date and end date on the calendar.

Calendar display mode

You can use this option to set the calendar to always be visible or to be displayed when customers click.

Required confirmation

If you check this option, the booking request will be sent but the payment will not be processed until the admin confirms the appointment. Once the admin reviews and approves it, the booking request will be confirmed and the payment will be processed.

Can be cancelled

This option enables you to choose whether you’d want to enable customers to cancel their bookings after they are confirmed. Disabling this option will no longer let them cancel bookings after confirmation. If you select the option to allow booking cancellation, you can determine the period before it can be cancelled. For example, if you want to let customers cancel bookings up to two hours before their appointment, you'd configure the Booking can be cancelled until option as follows:

Option for cancelling booking

Setting up the costs

With WooCommerce Bookings, you can also set up pricing for each block you create by heading over to the Costs tab under the Product data section. You can choose to display prices on the sales page of your website or in a front-end table layout -- more on this later. Here's a look at the different options available to you for setting up costs for bookable products:

Base cost

This is a one-off cost for the booking as a whole. You can set this as the booking fee or the signup charges. This cost will be charged on every booking made regardless of the block cost. It's important to keep in mind that the base cost doesn’t depend on the block cost. In other words, even if a customer books more than one block, the base cost will remain the same for that booking.

Block cost

Here you’ll be able to set the price of a single block. The price per block multiplied by the number of blocks booked is the total cost of the booking.

Display cost

This is the price that’ll be shown to the users on the front-end regardless of the block cost and the base cost. This is great for when you'd like to display costs as, say, Starting from $9.95! Leave this option blank to have the cost automatically calculated for you.

Range

These fields will enable you to add more customizations to your booking costs. This is especially useful for when you are looking to offer customers a special discount for a limited time. For instance, if you offer a discount from August 5th to August 7th, you might configure the range as follows:

Option for setting costs based on a range

This will set the block cost for services at $9.95 from August 5th to August 7th.

Configuring available booking slots

WooCommerce Bookings also lets you set up availability rules for each block you create by heading over to the Availability tab under the Product data section. Let's step through the different setting options available to you. I'll focus on the most important, and you can also do other things like add a buffer time between each booking time slot.

WooCommerce Bookings availability settings tab
Max bookings per block

Max booking per block denotes the maximum number of bookings that are available for the same block. Let’s look at an example to better understand this. Let’s say you employee three nail experts who can offer manicure services at the same time i.e. in a bookable block.  For this, you'd enter 3 as the Max bookings per block value.

Minimum block bookable

In this field, you can enter the minimum amount of time in the future for which the appointment can be booked. For example, if you set this to 2 weeks, customers will be able to book appointments with you up to 2 weeks before the day of the appointment.

Maximum block bookable

This option lets you specify the maximum period in the future for which customers will be allowed to make bookings. This is especially useful because you don’t want to let them book a few months or a few years in advance!

All dates are

This option lets you specify all the dates that are available by default. You can choose to set all the dates as not-available by default, as well.

Check rules against

You’ll be able to set the bookings system to check the rules for all the blocks that are booked or only the first block of the range of blocks being booked.

If you choose All the blocks being booked, the rule will be checked against every single block that the customer books. If a customer books 3 blocks simultaneously, all the blocks will be checked for availability individually and booking will be confirmed only if all three are available. However, if you specify the starting block only, the rule will check only for the availability of the first block.

Range

You can use this option to specify the range for availability according to your requirements. Just click Add Range and set custom availability. For instance, if your salon will remain closed over the first week of September, then you can create a range for the unavailability of those days. This is also useful if you want to make weekends un-bookable.

Option for setting availability based on a range

Of course, there are many other settings you can configure with WooCommerce Bookings such as sending custom email notifications or SMS notifications. You can even use the Follow-Ups plugin to send custom emails for each bookable product. This is handy if you want to send directions or 'what to bring' instructions to people before their appointment.

7. WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments

WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments lets you convert any type of  WooCommerce product into a bookable product. It's great for taking bookings for time, accommodation, or events.

Key Features:

  • Sell bookings by the minute, hour, day or month.
  • Choose how many bookings to allow per time slot.
  • Set minimum and maximum booking durations.
  • Allow users to edit and cancel bookings, within a minimum period before the appointment.
  • Allow all bookings or enable admin approval.
  • Built-in email notifications and reminders.
  • Create more advanced booking forms with additional fields for customer information.
  • Syncs with Google Calendar.
  • Built-in staff management.
  • Advanced pricing rules and options.

8. Bookly

Bookly plugin

Bookly is a useful WooCommerce booking plugin that offers seamless integration with WooCommerce. It lets your customers book appointments for all types of businesses including spas and massage, law consultancy, car repair, beauty, and private clinics.

Key Features:
  • It helps you save time by eliminating your manual scheduling system. It automates the entire booking process. This enables your customers to quickly book their appointments even on weekends.
  • Bookly is easy to set up and lets you start receiving booking requests almost instantly.
  • You’ll be able to include several employees in the booking schedule, enabling them to charge different rates and show their available time slots.
  • You’ll be able to add an unlimited number of business services to your booking page and categorize them for easier management.
  • It offers integration with Google Calendar which lets you organize multiple calendars of all of your employees or staff members.

9. WooCommerce Appointments

WooCommerce Appointments plugin

WooCommerce Appointments is a popular WooCommerce booking plugin that enables you to easily schedule and reserve bookings on your WordPress business site. It’s an ideal solution for companies that want to focus on their core business activities and leave the appointment scheduling tasks to the software.

Key Features:
  • It is easy-to-use, fast to install, and doesn’t require any coding skills or staff training.
  • Its two-way Google Calendar sync feature lets you automatically synchronize bookings from your website with the Google Calendar and vice versa.
  • You’ll be able to assign multiple employees to appointments, manage their calendars individually, and enable them to log in and display their available times.
  • You can schedule appointments for multiple days for your customers or offer extended durations using add-on fields. Similarly, you’ll be able to extend duration by minutes or hours.
  • This WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugin lets you determine the number of times visitors can schedule an appointment in advance. This way they won’t be able to book an appointment a few months (or a year!) in advance.

Best WooCommerce bookings plugin for events

The six plugins featured above are perfect for taking bookings for individual appointments and time slots. However, they're less useful for selling tickets to larger events. For example, they don't have the features that you need to sell event tickets, such as a central calendar for viewing multiple event dates at once. They're also quite limited in terms of selling different ticket types and options.

We have just one top pick for using WooCommerce to sell tickets to multi-person events - The Events Calendar. This is easily the best WordPress events plugin. I'll tell you all about it next.

Introducing the Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is really a whole suite of popular WooCommerce bookings plugins for taking bookings for events. It offers a range of tools for managing and promoting events on a website. The suite includes several plugins, such as the core Events Calendar plugin, the Events Calendar Pro add-on, and other useful extensions. The Events Calendar is an ideal choice for businesses and organizations that host events and need a reliable and customizable platform to manage and promote them.

One of the key features of the Events Calendar suite is its ability to take bookings for events. You need the Event Tickets add-on for this. Whether you're hosting a small workshop or a large-scale conference, the Events Calendar makes it easy for customers to book and purchase tickets for your event. They can choose the number of people and place group bookings.

Backend management

Events Calendar plugin integrates with WooCommerce, which means that it can handle complex payment processing and booking scenarios. This includes recurring events and multi-day events.

In addition to its booking capabilities, the Events Calendar also offers a range of other features, including a customizable calendar view, event listings, location management, and support for various event types. It has a sidebar widget for listing events and displaying the calendar throughout your site. The plugin is also fully responsive and optimized for mobile devices, ensuring that customers can access and book events on the go. It has several built-in design templates to choose from.

The Events Calendar plugin suite is an excellent choice for businesses and organizations that need a comprehensive tool for managing and promoting events on their website. Its booking capabilities, combined with its other useful features, make it an ideal solution for a wide range of event types and sizes.

Is the Events Calendar a free plugin?

There is a free version of the Events Calendar on wordpress.org. This lets you display events on your WordPress site. However, the free version doesn't come with booking functionality.

To take bookings online, you need paid add-ons such as Event Tickets. This adds full booking management features to your site, plus WooCommerce integration for selling tickets.

Showcase bookings in a table layout

With the default WooCommerce shop page layout, customers will have to click through to single product pages to be able to book products or appointments. This doesn't make for an intuitive shopping experience.

Instead, you can display all bookable products (along with real-time booking availability, pricing, and other product information) in a quick one-page order form. The front-end table will also display a booking calendar against each product in a column. You can do this by combining two plugins as follows:

Here's what you need to do to get started:

Step 1: Install and activate WooCommerce Product Table

Get the WooCommerce Product Table plugin. You'll find your license key in the confirmation email.

Next, head over to Plugins → Add New from the WordPress dashboard and upload the plugin’s zipped file to your site. Click the Activate button.

Activate your license key in the plugin setup wizard. You can also use the wizard to configure the product table settings.

You can modify the bookings table to make it look the way you want it to appear on your site's front-end. At the bare minimum, you'll want to set Columns. This will let you decide which columns to display in the table layout. For example, you can add columns for the bookable product image, name, description, plus a buy column which will contain the booking calendar and add to cart buttons.

Here's a complete list of available columns for WooCommerce Product Table and a detailed explanation of the different options available.

Important! Make sure you do not tick the 'lazy load' option in the WooCommerce Product Table setup wizard. WooCommerce Bookings only works with non-lazy loaded tables.

Step 2: Create your bookings and appointments page

By now, you've installed and activated the WooCommerce Product Table plugin to your WordPress website and configured its settings. Next, we'll create a bookings and appointments page for customers to book products and appointments.

Navigate to PagesAdd New from the WordPress admin panel and create a new page for accepting bookings and appointments. Your customers and clients will be able to use this page to select view bookable products, see pricing and special prices, book slots, and add bookable products to the cart.

Once that's done, simply add the shortcode [product_table] to the text editor. This will create a single bookings table on your site's front-end. If you offer different types of services, you might consider creating a separate table for each type of service. You can do this by using the shortcode [product_table category="category-slug"]. (This also works for different product types.) This will display all bookable products from the relevant category.

Click the Publish button and preview the page on your site's front-end. It might look something like this:

Preview of WooCommerce Bookings integration with WooCommerce Product Table

Is WooCommerce booking plugin free?

You may be wondering, "What is the best free booking app for WordPress?" While WooCommerce is a free plugin, none of the booking extensions featured in these articles are. Instead, they are paid add-ons that you need to buy separately to add booking functionality to your WooCommerce store. Unfortunately, we're not aware of any free plugins with the features and quality that you need to take bookings on your website in a robust, reliable way.

As with most things in life, you get what you pay for. Investing in a premium booking plugin like YITH WooCommerce Bookings or WooCommerce Product Options is a smart move. They're the best way to take bookings on your website in a way that is both reliable and easy to use.

Bonus tip: Sell extras with your bookable products

Add date picker to WooCommerce product for training course product

A WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugin makes it easy to sell appointments or other bookable time slots in WordPress. You can increase your average income per booking by selling extras at the same time.

For example:

  • If you're selling massage appointments then you may want to offer optional extras, such as skincare products or massage oils.
  • Similarly, if you're selling training courses then you could sell a training handbook and lunch.
  • Even if you don't want to sell extras, you may wish to collect extra information from customers such as any special health needs or dietary requirements.

You can do all this by adding the WooCommerce Product Options plugin. As we saw earlier, WooCommerce Product Options comes with a date field which you can use to convert any product into a bookable product. However, you can use it to add extras to your bookable products even if you're using a different bookings plugin such as WooCommerce Bookings.

WooCommerce Product Options also has compatibility with with WooCommerce Product Table, so the extras for each bookable product will appear in the Buy column of your product tables. That way, customers can select a date from the booking calendar, choose extras and enter extra information directly from the list of products.

Related: The best WooCommerce Product Add-Ons plugins (and how to use them).

Which is the best WooCommerce bookings plugin?

Having a robust WooCommerce bookings plugin allows you to easily accept, manage, and track customer and client bookings directly through your WordPress website. You can create bookable products the same way as you would in WooCommerce. Once you've created bookable products, you can set costs and availability and start accepting bookings right away!

These are our top recommendations for WooCommerce bookings and appointments plugins:

  • WooCommerce Product Options - Use this if you want a very simple way to add a date picker to any product, without the added complexity of a full bookings plugin.
  • YITH WooCommerce Bookings - Use this if you want a fully featured bookings plugin complete with online availability and more.
  • Events Calendar - Alternatively, use this if you want to sell events rather than bookings.

And remember, whichever bookings plugin you choose, you can use WooCommerce Product Options to add extra options to your bookable products. That way, you can collect extra information from clients as well as earn more money by selling upgrades and extras.

What are some of the features you look for in a WooCommerce booking plugin? We'd love to hear from you so let us know in the comments section below!

Are you looking for ways to increase your conversion rate? Many e-commerce businesses fail because they don't have an effective WooCommerce checkout page editor. Do you want to get the most out of your customers? Then you need to customize your WooCommerce checkout page, it's as simple as that.

An efficient checkout page is essential for any e-commerce business. The default WooCommerce checkout is basic and limiting when it comes to customization options. This article will reveal the best plugin to help you learn how to customize WooCommerce checkout pages.

Creating an attractive and user-friendly WooCommerce checkout page is necessary for customer retention and increases conversions significantly. This article will walk you through the basics of customizing the WooCommerce checkout page. This will help improve customer experience, reduce cart abandonment rates, and boost sales simultaneously!

Why is customizing the checkout page important?

Setting up your online store can be challenging on its own. You need to figure out the most effective way to showcase your products. Between this and running marketing campaigns, store owners sometimes overlook learning how to customize the WooCommerce checkout page.

Customizing your WooCommerce checkout page is essential for the success of your e-commerce store. A well-designed checkout page makes it easier for customers to complete their purchases. This will help you eliminate any friction that could lead them to abandon their cart.

Further, a customized WooCommerce checkout page helps build trust. Customers can see you are serious about protecting their data and providing a secure shopping experience.

A well-designed checkout page.

Improved user experience is just one benefit of customizing WooCommerce checkout. You will also:

  • Make it easier (and faster) for your customers to make a purchase,
  • Increase their trust in your e-commerce store, and
  • Encourage customers to buy more from you.

With this in mind, we’ll review some of the different ways you can customize the WooCommerce checkout page. We’ll show you how to add extra checkout fields. Also, you will learn how to create a one-page checkout with a searchable product table at the top.

Before we begin, let’s explain why you should customize the WooCommerce checkout page and how it can benefit your business.

The benefits of having a customized WooCommerce checkout page

The UX design of any WooCommerce checkout page is important for customer satisfaction and e-commerce success. Creating a tailored custom checkout page can make all the difference in how they experience your store.

Using a WooCommerce checkout page editor allows for adding additional features to enhance the user experience. These features include social media log-in, address auto-complete, and more.

You can also help increase customer trust by ensuring your customers know their data is secure. Do this by adding an SSL certificate to your website and displaying a secure checkout logo on the page.

As an online store owner, your goal is to deliver a seamless shopping experience to your customers. One way to achieve this is by creating a frictionless checkout process.

Here are some of the key benefits of learning how to customize the WooCommerce checkout page:

Make it easier for customers to make purchases (Increase conversion rate)

Customers who navigate a lengthy purchase process are more likely to abandon their shopping cart. A single-page checkout will help increase conversions by reducing customers' steps to complete their purchases.

Encourage customers to buy more

Customizing your WooCommerce checkout page allows your customers easily add multiple products to their shopping cart. It also makes it easier for them to choose product variants without clicking through to the single product page.

Make sure added products are set for a default checkout. There the user can review and confirm their products, use a coupon code if applicable, and choose payment options of their preference.

This way, they'll be more likely to buy more of your products, enabling you to increase your average order value.

Ensure a safe transaction process

Ensure your customers feel safe when shopping online - implement a secure, trusted payment gateway to guarantee their contact and billing details are secure! Customizing the WooCommerce checkout page also helps improve customer loyalty.

You can add features such as account registration, guest checkouts, and order tracking to make it easier for customers to shop with you again.

Collect actionable data

Customizing the checkout page can also help you to capture more useful customer data. This data can be used to segment customers, target them with personalized emails, and improve customer retention.

You can add custom fields to WooCommerce that ask for specific information, such as the customer's birthday or preferences regarding products and services. Customer segmentation data helps to create a more personalized experience for each customer and ensure they are only presented with relevant products or services.

These features provide a better shopping experience and help build trust. Build brand loyalty by allowing customers to easily view past purchases, update their information, and track orders.

Now that we know the benefits of learning how to customize the WooCommerce checkout page, we will provide instructions on customizing the WooCommerce checkout.

Personalize the WooCommerce checkout page by adding custom fields

The WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor checkout manager plugin lets you easily customize the form fields. No custom CSS code is necessary for additional options (such as placeholders) on your WooCommerce checkout page. You can both add additional fields and remove fields to set up your own custom checkout fields.

Investing in the checkout field editor plugin allows you to customize the checkout page to meet your exact needs. This can further enhance your brand presence and speak volumes to the customers about the quality your WooCommerse shop offers.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you can add, move, edit, or remove any field from your WooCommerce checkout form. It lets you modify the WooCommerce checkout required fields, including their type, position, label, placeholder, and more.

To do this, head over to WooCommerceCheckout Fields to add new fields or start editing.

WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor plugin

From here, you'll be able to edit three different sets of WooCommerce checkout fields:

  • The payment fields and billing fields sections of the checkout form.
  • You can edit the shipping fields, such as the delivery address if shipping is enabled.
  • Order notes or other order details allow the customer to provide specific instructions on the delivery, etc.

In addition to this, you can add different types of custom fields to your checkout form, including:

  1. Text field, password field, and text area input fields
  2. Select and multi-select options
  3. Radio buttons and checkboxes
  4. Date picker fields
  5. You can also specify the field name and labels.

Keep in mind that this process is not a one-time project. With time you will gain more insight into what your customers are interested in, and you can take this to your advantage while adjusting the customization elements and field types.

In the next step, let's look at ways to implement it in your own WooCommerce-based WordPress site.

Streamlining the WooCommerce checkout to enhance the user experience

You can improve your conversion rate and increase sales by making it easier for customers to add information, place orders, and complete transactions. Consider removing any unnecessary fields from your WordPress theme that can complicate the customer checkout process.

You can also simplify the checkout process by adding a single-page checkout feature, allowing customers to review and confirm their order on a single page without switching between different pages.

Add custom fields to the checkout

With WooCommerce, out of the box, it's not possible to add or remove form fields from the checkout form. There's no option to do this using a drag-and-drop form editor or point-and-click options. It can be a huge limitation for some online store owners.

For example, if you're selling digital goods (like e-books, PSDs, or other downloadable resources), you don't need to collect some customer details, like shipping information. If you leave the field in, customers might be confused about why you're asking for their billing address for a digital product!

Conversely, you might need to customize the WooCommerce checkout page to add an extra field or two. For example, if you're selling customized jewelry and watches, you'd need an add-on custom field to let customers enter the words or phrases they'd like to have engraved. If you're taking restaurant food orders, then you might want a checkout field for the customer to enter special dietary information. Most importantly, adding a discount or coupon code field to the checkout is one of the most important elements potential customers are interested in, as it can increase their purchase value.

Divide the checkout form into multiple steps

Depending on the types of products you sell, consider dividing your checkout form into multiple steps. Multi-step checkout forms make it easier for customers to complete the checkout form for two main reasons:

  • They group similar fields together, making the form look shorter.
  • Customers are less likely to miss a field or make errors which minimizes potential frustration.

This is a great way to simplify checkout and deliver a frictionless shopping experience.

Create a one-page checkout with a searchable product table

One page WooCommerce checkout pluginOne of the easiest (and most effective) ways to simplify checkout is by allowing customers to select products and variations, add them to the cart, and checkout from the same page. Essentially, it optimizes the order process and speeds up the buyer’s journey.

Of course, the number of clicks is a significant factor here. If customers have to click through several pages to add products to their cart and place their order, their likeliness of completing the transaction drops significantly.

You can speed up the customer journey by listing your products on the same page as the WooCommerce checkout. This will improve the customer's shopping experience, increase your sales, and improve conversions.

Add payment options to WooCommerce checkout

One of the most important elements of a successful checkout process is offering customers various payment options. By doing this, you can make it easier for customers to complete their purchases without leaving your site.

You can add multiple payment options using the WooCommerce payment gateways extension and include various popular payment options such as PayPal, Stripe, and Amazon Pay.

Make the checkout page mobile friendly

Optimizing the WooCommerce checkout page for mobile devices is important, as they account for over half of web traffic. Create a mobile-specific checkout page that is easy to navigate and has an appropriately sized display is recommended.

Design elements to keep in mind

Like any good customer experience element, design plays an important role in checkout. The checkout page should be easy to use and aesthetically pleasing. Remember to keep the same branding elements on the checkout page to keep a consistent look.

The background color of your website should be solid so it does not interfere with images and product descriptions. Font consistency is equally important.

Also, try to keep the design simple and organized. Too many elements on the page can make it hard to read and understand. Minimize distractions by removing unnecessary text or images that could interfere with the customer’s focus.

You can also add a progress bar to show customers how far along they are in their orders. This can help customers better understand what action needs to be taken next and how far along they are in the payment gateway.

Theoretically, these elements are easily understandable, but putting them into practice is another thing. In the following sections, you will learn how to update the purchase process making it user-friendly.

How to create a one-Page checkout with a customizable product table

The customized table largely depends on product selection. With WooCommerce, you have two main options when it comes to creating a one-page checkout:

Option 1: For listing a handful of products

With the official WooCommerce One Page Checkout plugin, you can create a single-page checkout for your online store without requiring code tweaks. This can save time when you need to edit the WooCommerce checkout page.

In addition, it lets you position the checkout form directly under your product tables on the cart page. If you're looking for a way to let customers modify product quantities from the checkout form, we'd recommend using this great plugin to create a one-page checkout experience.

This extension has several product layout options allowing you to list products above the checkout form. However, these options are limited. For example, it doesn't allow you to showcase dozens of products, add filters, or even a search box to the product listing section.

The benefit of such a checkout page template is that it will not allow unnecessary fields in the checkout flow. This is a great option for listing a few products, but you will probably need a different single checkout solution if more products need to be showcased.

Option 2: For listing dozens of products

The official One Page Checkout plugin is only really suitable for listing a few products on the checkout page. If you want to list dozens of WooCommerce products on the checkout page, we recommend using the WooCommerce One Page Checkout plugin with WooCommerce Product Table.

The WooCommerce Product Table allows you to list your products much more sophisticatedly. More specifically, you'll be able to:

  • Add search, sort, and filter options to make it easy for customers to find exactly what they're looking for.
  • Display product variation dropdown menus directly in the product table.
  • Choose which columns you want to show and hide.
  • Make it easy for customers to add multiple products to the cart in one go.

All of these options will be integrated directly into the one-page checkout form.

You'll need a WordPress website with the WooCommerce plugin installed, and a few products added. Once you have everything in place, here are the steps you need to follow to add a one-page checkout page to your WooCommerce site:

Step #1: Install and activate WooCommerce product table

Get the WooCommerce Product Table plugin and install it on your website. Once that's done, head over to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product Tables and enter your license key.

WooCommerce Product Table license key

Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen to proceed.

Step #2: Configure the WooCommerce product table settings

From the same screen, you can set up your product table any way you want. Here are a few quick tips to help you create an enhanced WooCommerce one-page shopping experience for customers:

WooCommerce one page checkout options

  • Leave the AJAX cart checkbox for the Add to cart behavior option unticked. This way, whenever customers add products to the shopping cart, the page will reload, showing the one-page checkout below with the correct products.
  • Make sure that the Quantities option is ticked to allow customers to purchase more than one product (or variation) at a time.
  • Set the Add to cart button option to Checkbox only or Button and checkbox to allow customers to add multiple products to cart at once. This adds a clear multi-select option, enabling customers to add many products to their cart simultaneously.
  • Set the Variations option to either Dropdown lists in the add to cart column or Separate rows in the table (one per variation) if you want to showcase variable products in the product table. This allows customers to choose product variations from within the order form instead of clicking through to the single product page.

Additionally, you can prevent customers from leaving the one-page order form by clicking through to the single product page. You’ll need to enter none for the Product links option to do this. Doing so will disable all links to single product pages.

WooCommerce product table link settings

Finally, we recommend keeping the number of Rows per page as low as possible to enable customers to easily see the checkout form under the product table without having to scroll for too long.

Rows per page

If the number of products exceeds the number of rows, page links (pagination) will be displayed under the table, allowing customers to view more products.

Step #3: Create the checkout page

Now that we've configured the WooCommerce Product Table plugin, all that is left is to create the page you'd like to add the WooCommerce product list and one-page checkout to.

To begin, head over to Pages > Add New and create a new page.

Here's what you need to do:

Add a few instructions on the top of the page for customers. For instance, this could be a friendly line that tells them to pick their products, add them to the shopping cart, and scroll down the page to checkout.

Next, add the WooCommerce Product Table shortcode to the page i.e.[product_table]. You can add this to the Shortcode block if you're using the Gutenberg editor or directly to the text editor in case you're using the classic WordPress editor.

List products on WooCommerce one-page checkout

This way, all your products will be listed in the product table.

You can configure the WooCommerce Product Table options to customize the table. Be sure to check out the plugin’s documentation for in-depth instructions.

Finally, you’ll need to add a shortcode below the product table shortcode(s) to display the checkout form. You can do this by creating a new shortcode block and adding [woocommerce_one_page_checkout]to it.

When you’re done, your WooCommerce order form page will look something like the image below on your site’s front end. Customers can choose items at the top. Then, they'll get an order review and checkout form below, where they can enter their customer details and choose payment methods.

Here's a screenshot of how it might look:

One-page checkout with product table

Alternative method: Set up a popup one-page cart and checkout process

Another way to customize the checkout page is by using a popup checkout plugin to set a single-page cart and checkout page for faster order processing.

As mentioned above, the checkout process for any ecommerce store needs to be seamless, and having a one-page checkout mechanism makes it perfect for this. You can either do this by listing the checkout form underneath your products, as described earlier, or by adding a popup checkout.

WooCommerce Fast Cart makes the checkout process for any store as swift as possible. Customers can easily review their cart, enter their mailing details, and complete the payment from a single page.

WooCommerce popup checkout page

The plugin is super easy to get started with as well. Here's a simple tutorial on how you can set it up.

Install and activate WooCommerce Fast Cart on your website. If you don't have the plugin, you can get it here. Once the plugin is activated, you'll be redirected to a setup wizard. Enter the plugin license keys and follow the wizard to set up the plugin.

Once you are done, and the settings are saved, WooCommerce Fast Cart will get triggered when a customer adds a product to their cart or initiates the checkout process.

WooCommerce Fast Cart - Display the WooCommerce checkout directly in the fast cart

You can always return to the plugin settings page and change how the fast cart functions and behaves.

If increasing conversions and reducing cart abandonment is one of the primary goals, we highly recommend giving WooCommerce Fast Cart a try. You can also see it in action on the plugin demo page.

In the event that you are experiencing difficulties with our written step-by-step guides, make sure to check out our YouTube channel, where you can find video tutorials for your plugins.

Using a plugin vs code customizing the checkout page

Custom checkout templates will easily personalize all aspects of your online store, from the content tab, conditional fields, and checkout stage elements to the branded cart button. There are virtually no elements that can't be customized.

Knowing how to customize the checkout page in WooCommerce can give your online store a meticulous advantage against competitors. It can greatly increase conversions and ensure customers have a smooth order experience.

Doing the customization on your own is often a meticulous and time-consuming task. On the other hand, using plugins provides you with safe and tested ways to customize and optimize the WooCommerce checkout page. These plugins provide a range of features to help you create the checkout page that best suits your store's needs.

It is important to remember that the UX experience should flow easily, where the customers can navigate the website and understand what further actions should be taken to complete a purchase. Using simple language reduces the chance of the customer abandoning their purchase.

Changing text on the WooCommerce checkout page

Changing the text on the WooCommerce checkout page is important because it gives businesses greater control over the customer experience. For example, you can customize the call-to-action (CTA) to encourage customers to complete a purchase or solicit feedback on the product they are buying.

Using language specific to the business and its products allows ecommerce sites to personalize their checkout page and communicate core messages. Changing text also enables you to highlight company-specific features, such as discounts or brand values, which may be beneficial and influential for customers making purchase decisions.

There are a few ways to change the text on your WooCommerce checkout page in a few different ways. First, you can edit the default text fields directly within the WooCommerce settings. This is the most straightforward approach, allowing businesses to update existing text or add additional fields quickly. For more advanced customization, you can use a plugin that enables altering specific elements on the page.

Avoid using jargon

Focusing on microscopy when it comes to the words used on the checkout page is important for any ecommerce business. Using language that customers can quickly understand will help prevent confusion, reducing the chances of cart abandonment and incomplete purchases.

Avoid using industry terms such as Card # or CSC when it comes to jargon. Instead, opt for simpler words like “Card Number” and “Security Code” instead. This often confuses users when entering data for validation. So make sure to use simple action verbs that are easy to understand, such as “Submit” or “Continue.”

How to manually customize the WooCommerce checkout page with code

You can manually override and edit your checkout template if you're a developer familiar with PHP files and JavaScript. Do this by using custom code and editing the WooCommerce checkout page. However, it's important to note that this cannot be done without a developer's help.

To insert additional content into your checkout template, you can edit the functions.php file for your store's child theme and use WooCommerce's built-in checkout hooks.

By default, WooCommerce offers 9 action hooks on your checkout page:

  1. woocommerce_before_checkout_form
  2. woocommerce_checkout_before_customer_details
  3. woocommerce_checkout_billing
  4. woocommerce_checkout_shipping
  5. woocommerce_checkout_after_customer_details
  6. woocommerce_checkout_before_order_review
  7. woocommerce_checkout_order_review
  8. woocommerce_checkout_after_order_review
  9. woocommerce_after_checkout_form

You can use these hooks to insert your own content or fields.

For example, to insert content or display fields before the customer details fields, you could use this code snippet:

add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_before_customer_details', function() {
echo '<p>Content you want to display before customer details fields</p>';
});

To simplify managing these code snippets, you can use a free version plugin like Code Snippets rather than adding them directly to your functions.php file. In practice, these steps can be handy when adding another shipping address or payment method to the WooCommerce checkout page.

Things to keep in mind

WooCommerce doesn't offer the best shopping experience out of the box. Depending on the types of products you're selling, you might consider learning how to customize the WooCommerce checkout page to:

  1. Make it easy for customers to choose the products they want to purchase easily.
  2. Quickly find the products they're looking for and add multiple products to cart in one go.
  3. Select products and variations, add products to cart, and checkout from a single page.
  4. Display extra fields or hide irrelevant fields to improve conversions.

A WooCommerce checkout page editor plugin can be used to customize your checkout page without any coding knowledge. Regardless of the method you choose, it's important to ensure that customers understand the checkout process. This way, they can complete their purchases quickly and easily.

With plugins like Checkout Field Editor, WooCommerce One Page Checkout, and WooCommerce Product Table, you can customize the WooCommerce checkout page in no time! The experience is similar to using any page builder. And as a result, you'll be able to increase your sales and boost conversions.

What strategies do you use to deliver a better online shopping experience to customers? Do you have any other questions on how to customize the WooCommerce checkout page? We’d love to hear from you, so let us know by commenting below!

The best WooCommerce product add-ons plugins (and how to use them)

If you need to sell personalized products or provide additional options when adding products to the cart, then WooCommerce product add-ons are essential. You’ll be able to add an unlimited number of options to your products, using a range of add-on fields. But which is the best product add-on plugin?

WooCommerce extra product options file upload
Create a wide range of add-ons with with the WooCommerce Product Options plugin

In the world of e-commerce, offering customers a variety of options is a critical component of success. One of the best ways to do this is by using product add-ons. In this blog post, we will explore the best WooCommerce product add-ons plugins available and how they can enhance your e-commerce store.

We'll dive into why product options are essential for your business. Customers appreciate the ability to customize their purchases to meet their individual needs, and product add-ons allow you to offer them precisely that.

We will also guide you through the process of adding add-ons to your products. You'll learn how to set up product options and add-ons, choose the type of product option and add new options. We'll also look at how to add pricing and rules and configure add-on settings. We'll do this using Product Options - our recommended WooCommerce product add-ons plugin. Finally, we will share some other add-ons plugins that are worth considering.

By the end of this post, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to leverage the power of WooCommerce plugins to enhance your e-commerce store, increase customer satisfaction, and drive sales.

Let's get started!

What are WooCommerce add-ons?

WooCommerce add-ons are additional features or options that can be added to a product on an e-commerce website powered by WooCommerce. These add-ons can be anything from gift-wrapping options, extended warranties, personalized messages, or additional accessories for a product. They provide customers with more choices, allowing them to customize their purchases to meet their specific needs and preferences.

With WooCommerce add-ons, merchants can easily add product options and allow customers to select the specific variations they want, such as color, size, or material. This feature not only improves the overall customer experience but also increases the chances of making a sale as customers are more likely to purchase a product that meets their individual needs and preferences.

WooCommerce add-ons provide merchants with a simple and effective way to offer more choices and customization options to their customers, resulting in increased customer satisfaction, and loyalty.

Why do you need WooCommerce add-ons?

As e-commerce continues to grow, it has been increasingly important for you as an online business owner to provide customers with an exceptional shopping experience. One way to do this is by offering customizable product options through WooCommerce add-ons. WooCommerce Product Options is an extension that allows you to add custom options to your products, giving your customer more flexibility and control over their purchases.

So, why do you need WooCommerce add-ons, especially WooCommerce Product Options? First and foremost, offering customizable options can significantly increase customer satisfaction. Customers appreciate the ability to personalize their products to meet their unique needs, and adding product options is an easy and effective way to offer this feature. Customers can simply add any additional requests or preferences using their shopping cart button and proceed to the checkout page.

Moreover, WooCommerce add-ons can improve your sales and revenue. By allowing customers to customize their purchases, they are more likely to make a purchase that fits their specific requirements. This not only increases the likelihood of a sale but also encourages customers to spend more money on your website.

Brown shopping bags in a rowWooCommerce Product Options offers a wide range of features that can help you tailor your products to your customers' needs. You can add custom text fields, dropdown menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, date bookings, color pickers, date pickers, and more. This means you can offer a variety of options, from color and size to custom engraving and personalized messages.

Creative ways to use WooCommerce product add-ons

Here are a few creative examples of how you can use WooCommerce product add-ons to enhance your WooCommerce store and improve your customer experience:

  1. Add a special note to a pizza delivery box: With WooCommerce product add-ons, you can allow customers to add a personalized note to their pizza delivery box. For example, they may want to write "Happy Birthday, John!" or "Congratulations on your new home!" This small addition can go a long way in making the customer feel valued and appreciated.
  2. Custom engraved watches or jewelry: If you sell watches or jewelry, WooCommerce product add-ons can be used to offer custom engraving services. Customers can choose to have their name or initials engraved on the back of the watch or jewelry item, using a font of their choice. For instance, please engrave ‘MM’ on the back of the watch using the Cinzel font.
  3. Additional notes for placing orders at a restaurant: If you run a restaurant or cafe, you can use WooCommerce product add-ons to allow customers to add additional notes to their order details: For example, they may want to specify "No peanuts" or "Extra olives" on their pizza. This feature ensures that the customer's order is prepared exactly as they want it, leading to greater satisfaction and repeat business.
  4. Add-on services for products: Another way to use WooCommerce product add-ons is to offer add-on services for your products: For instance, if you sell the camera, you can offer an add-on service that includes a free version one-hour photography tutorial for beginners. This adds value to your product and can entice customers to make a purchase.
  5. Gift wrapping options: Lastly, offering gift wrapping options can be an excellent way to attract holiday shoppers. With WooCommerce product add-ons, customers can choose to have their items gift-wrapped and add a personalized message to the recipient. This service can differentiate your store from competitors and provide a memorable shopping experience for your customers.
WooCommerce related products add-ons
An example of product add-ons created using the WooCommerce Product Options plugin (our recommendation)

Key benefits of using WooCommerce product add-ons

WooCommerce product add-ons offer a wide range of benefits for you to enhance your store's functionality. In this section, we'll explore some of the key benefits of using WooCommerce product add-ons.

By taking advantage of these benefits, you can differentiate your store from competitors, drive more sales, and ultimately, grow your business. There are loads of reasons to add WooCommerce extra product options as add-ons instead of variations:

  • Easy to add and manageProduct add-ons are much easier to work with than variable products. Instead of creating a variation for every possible combination, you add each add-on individually. The best product add-ons plugins do all the work for you.
  • Flexible display optionsVariable products only display the options as dropdown lists - how boring! The best add-ons plugins for WooCommerce come with loads of built-in style options. These include checkboxes, radio buttons, text fields, file uploads, clickable product images, and more.
  • Custom products You’ll be able to offer customized product options to your customers such as monogrammed jewelry, customized goods (like t-shirts or mugs), and personalized gift hampers or chocolate boxes.

What features should I look for in the best WooCommerce product add-ons plugin?

When it comes to WooCommerce product add-ons, there are numerous plugins available on the market, each with its own set of unique features and benefits. It's essential to find the right plugin that suits your business needs and goals. However, with so many options to choose from, selecting the right one can be a daunting task.

While some plugins offer basic custom field types, others are more advanced, providing a plethora of features and functionality. However, a plugin that is overly complex may pose a steep learning curve and be challenging to use for merchants. The best WooCommerce product add-ons plugin should strike a balance between functionality and usability, offering a broad range of features while being simple to set up and use.

It's crucial to keep in mind that different businesses have different requirements when it comes to WooCommerce product add-ons. A smaller online store may not require an advanced plugin, while a more prominent retailer may need a more robust solution to handle a high volume of traffic and orders. Therefore, it's vital to consider your business needs and select a plugin that offers the right balance of functionality, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness.

Here's a rundown of the essential features to look out for:

Plenty of product customization options

One of the best WooCommerce product add-ons options, text input, allows you to let customers request personalized products. For example, your customers might want ...

  • Custom bowling balls with a unique print.
  • Ask you to add a sports logo to the t-shirt they just purchased.
  • Request a hand-written greeting card.

... and all of this is possible with the text input add-on option.

For example, if you offer services then the text input option lets clients request that their graphic design files be delivered to them in a specific format, e.g. as a PSD. And if you run a jewelry monogram business, your customers might ask you to monogram their initials on a bracelet.

Similarly, you can make it even easier for customers to customize products by providing a dropdown list of options. For example, if you give customers the option to fill their gift hampers with crinkle-cut paper, you could also let them choose what color the crinkle-cut paper should be using the dropdown add-on option. The pre-defined options might include RedPurple, and Yellow.

This is also perfect for service-based businesses that create custom, printable products for their clients. The customers may ask you to deliver the printed products directly to their shipping address or send them a downloadable version to their email address. Both options can be provided using a predefined dropdown i.e. Ship to address and Email a downloadable file.

As you can see, there are loads of different ways to use product add-ons. That's why the best WooCommerce add-ons plugin needs a wide range of styles to choose from.

Adjust prices

Depending on the type of business you’re running, you might need to charge customers additional fees on each transaction. For example, you might charge a premium for shipping and handling, or a percentage-based fee for providing services over time.

For example, the WooCommerce Product Options plugin lets you choose from a range of useful product price options:

WooCommerce Product Options Extra Add-Ons
WooCommerce Product Options comes with a choice of add-on styles and price types

As well as adding a flat fee to each item, you can change the add-on price based on quantity or increase/decrease it by a certain percentage.

You can charge a flat fee regardless of how many products a customer orders. This could be incredibly useful for service-based businesses. For example, if you’re selling washing machines or air conditioners, you might consider charging a flat fee on every purchase which covers installation charges.

Alternatively, you can charge a quantity-based fee. This is generally more useful than a flat fee because you can multiply the price based on the quantity selected.

Similarly, you can charge based on a percentage of the total order value. For example, you might need to charge a percentage fee for shipping and handling. The further away the product needs to be shipped, the more it’ll cost you for transporting it. For this reason, you might consider charging customers a higher percentage of the customer’s total shopping cart value based on their shipping address.

Custom prices

Providing customers with the option to name their own prices can be a powerful tool for your online store. This feature allows customers to set their own price for a product or service, offering greater flexibility and transparency in the buying process.

One ideal use case for custom pricing is collecting tips at a restaurant or accepting donations for a charity. Giving customers the option to add an extra amount to their purchase as a gratuity or donation can increase customer engagement and loyalty, while also benefiting a worthy cause.

If you're someone who regularly organizes fundraisers or works closely with local charities, implementing a custom pricing add-on option in your e-commerce site can be an effective way to support the cause while boosting sales. This approach not only shows your commitment to the community but also allows customers to support a cause they believe in.

Moreover, the custom pricing add-on option is also suitable for businesses that offer personalized products or services. By allowing customers to set their own prices, merchants can offer a more personalized experience, building trust and long-term relationships with their customers.

WooCommerce charity donation choose amount
Use the WooCommerce Product Options to let customers name their price

For example, you can do this using the 'Customer Defined Price' add-on in WooCommerce Product Options.

Conditional logic

Conditional logic is a powerful feature that helps you create a more customized and personalized experience for your customers when using a WooCommerce product add-ons plugin. With conditional logic, you can set up dependencies for your product add-ons and display relevant options to your customers based on their selections.

For instance, if you offer installation services as an add-on option, you might want to display additional fields for customers to select, such as their city and a request to dispose of the packaging. However, you wouldn't want to clutter up the page with these options for customers who don't require installation.

The solution is to use a WooCommerce product add-ons plugin that supports conditional logic, like WooCommerce Product Options. By using conditional logic, you can make the 'Your city' and 'Please dispose of the packaging' fields conditionally dependent on the installation box being ticked. This way, only customers who require these options will see them, making the checkout process smoother and more efficient.

Using conditional logic can help you create a more streamlined and personalized shopping experience for your customers. With a plugin like WooCommerce Product Options, you can easily set up and customize conditional logic rules to suit your needs. By doing so, you can increase customer satisfaction and boost sales in your online store.

WooCommerce Product Options furniture assembly fields
Tick the Installation & Assembly box and related product options magically appear below!

File upload add-on fields

WooCommerce product add-ons plugins offer a wide range of options that can enhance your e-commerce store. One of these useful features is the file upload fields. It allows customers to upload files directly to your website, which is then sent to the admin via an order confirmation email.

This feature is particularly helpful for businesses that require customers to submit files for review or editing. For example, a graphic design company can use this feature to allow customers to upload images or design files that they want to be edited. Similarly, an editing and proofreading company can use file upload fields to accept document files that need to be proofread and corrected.

By offering file upload fields as a product add-on option, you provide a convenient and secure way for customers to submit their files. Additionally, it streamlines your business process, allowing you to work on the submitted files promptly and accurately. It's a win-win for both you and your customers!

WooCommerce print on demand POD business card printing
Using the WooCommerce Product Options plugin to sell business card printing, including a file upload field

Translation options

In today's global economy, it's more important than ever to have an e-commerce site that is easily translatable into multiple languages. This is especially true if you want to reach customers in countries where English is not the primary language. Fortunately, many WooCommerce product add-ons plugins offer easy translation options.

One such plugin is WooCommerce Product Options, which is compatible with popular translation plugins like Weglot and WPML. This means that any product add-ons you create can be easily translated into any language supported by these translation plugins.

For instance, if you have a product add-on that allows customers to select a specific color, you can easily translate the color options into the language of your choice. This not only helps to improve the user experience for non-English speaking customers but also makes it easier for you to market your products to a global audience.

To illustrate the importance of translation, let's consider an example of a product page with add-ons that have been translated into Spanish. A customer who speaks Spanish can easily understand the product options and make a purchase, which ultimately leads to increased sales and customer satisfaction.

WordPress Multilingual with the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons plugin

Minimum and maximum quantities

Controlling the quantity of each add-on is an important aspect of a robust WooCommerce product add-ons plugin. Setting a minimum and maximum quantity for add-ons ensures that customers don't buy too much or too little of an item. This feature is especially crucial if you're selling products that are limited in quantity or if you want to prevent customers from adding an excessive amount of an add-on.

The best WooCommerce product add-ons plugin provides different options for managing the minimum and maximum quantity of each add-on. For example, the WooCommerce Product Options plugin offers two ways to set the quantity:

  • Min/max quantity - This applies to fields like checkboxes and clickable images. Set a minimum and maximum quantity to control how many the customer should select before adding the product to the cart.
  • Min/max character count - This applies to text input and paragraph field add-ons. If customers are providing text with their order, then it makes sense to make sure they don't write too much or too little.

By having this feature, you can have better control over the number of items sold and prevent any inventory or production issues.

WooCommerce extra add-on fields with images, swatches and text field
If you're offering gift wrapping, use a maximum character count to ensure the gift tag message is the right length

WooCommerce Product Options - the best add-ons plugin

As you've probably already gathered, the WooCommerce Product Options plugin is easily the best add-ons plugin on the market. That's because:

  • It's ridiculously easy to use. There's a visual drag-and-drop interface to create product add-ons. You don't even need to read the documentation! (Although it's there if you need it.)
  • Lots of add-on styles. It comes with all the add-on styles and designs that you expect. This includes more advanced ones like file uploads, text fields, and clickable image and text labels.
  • Advanced features. You also get more advanced options that not all product add-ons plugins include. For example, it comes with conditional logic and minimum/maximum quantities. You can also pre-select add-ons and choose which add-ons are required fields.
  • Plugin compatibility. While WooCommerce Product Options displays add-ons on the single product page, you're not limited to that. Since it's a Barn2 plugin, you can use it with other Barn2 plugins to display add-ons in other parts of your store. We cover this in the section on displaying product add-ons, later.

How to add product add-ons to your store

Next, I'll provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to create add-ons for your products. We'll use WooCommerce Product Options as our chosen plugin. Either watch the video or follow the written instructions below.

  1. How to add extra options to WooCommerce
    Start by installing the WooCommerce Product Options plugin.
  2. In WordPress, head over to Plugins → Add New → Upload and click on the zipped file you downloaded.
  3. Click the Install Now button and hit Activate.
  4. After completing the plugin setup wizard, click the button to start creating product options.
  5. Edit or create a product options group.
  6. Start by choosing whether to display it globally or on specific products or categories.
  7. Next, click 'Add Option' and add as many add-ons as you like. It's all very straightforward.
  8. Finally, preview one of the products that you have enabled add-ons. Depending on how you configured both the plugins, it might look something like this:
Displaying WooCommerce add-ons in the WooCommerce Product Table

In the above example, you can see:

  • Pepperoni Pizza has both the radio buttons option and the checkboxes option.
  • Pizza Fiorentina has the checkbox option.
  • Pizza Margherita has the text input option.
  • Calzone has two quantity selector options.

How to display product add-ons in your store

Women with shopping bags on an escalator

Used alone, WooCommerce product add-ons plugins just display the extra options on the single product page. That's fine for some products, but not others.

If you sell the sort of products that customers will want to add to cart from your main shop pages, then you can quickly achieve this. The trick is to use WooCommerce Product Options with a compatible plugin that displays product add-ons elsewhere in your store.

Using the best WooCommerce product add-on plugins alongside other display plugins is a unique approach that your competitors probably aren't doing. This gives your store the edge!

Display add-on options in a product table

WooCommerce custom product fields in table

The WooCommerce Product Table plugin officially supports WooCommerce Product Options. It replaces your usual store layout with a searchable order form builder view, complete with a 'Buy' column. The Buy column contains everything that customers need to add products to the cart without leaving the page. And you guessed it - this includes the product add-ons!

By using product tables with a WooCommerce product add-ons plugin, you’ll be able to display all sorts of WooCommerce products (with variable products and add-on options) in a dynamic, one-page table layout. This way, your store’s buying user flow will go something like this:

  • Customers land on the one-page table layout and use the search, sort, and filter options to find exactly what they’re looking for.
  • Next, they choose the product variation(s) they’d like to purchase.
  • They select from the available product add-on options.
  • Finally, they add the product to the cart and continue browsing products from the same screen.

The key benefit here is that customers don’t have to click through to single product pages to choose the right product variation and select available product add-ons. It’s the best WooCommerce product add-ons solution for online stores!

The benefits

Here’s a look at some of the key benefits you get by using WooCommerce Product Table with WooCommerce Product Options:

  • It can help increase conversion rates and boost sales.
  • You’re able to deliver a better shopping experience to your customers.
  • It improves the usability of your online store.
  • It simplifies the buying user flow.

Here’s a preview of what the best WooCommerce product add-ons solution – integrating WooCommerce Product Table with WooCommerce Product Options – looks like on the front end:

WooCommerce Product Table with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons

Customers can select pizza sizes using a dropdown list (product variations) in addition to various add-on options including Crust Styles using radio buttons and Extra Toppings using checkboxes. Additionally, customers can also use the text area under Any special requests. Type your message here: for special requests.

Show product add-ons in a quick-view lightbox

If you sell products that typically have lots of personalization options - like clothes, jewelry, food, or gift items - then it's worth displaying product add-on options in a quick-view lightbox. That's because the add-on options take up a lot of space in a product table view, or on the single product page. A quick view plugin solves this issue.

WooCommerce restaurant order form with extra options

WooCommerce Product Options integrates seamlessly with the WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin, allowing you to display product details in addition to extra options. It works by adding 'Quick View' buttons to your shop pages. Instead of accessing the single product page, customers view the product in a quick-view lightbox. They can learn more, select add-ons, and add to the cart - all from the handy lightbox.

For example, if you sell t-shirts and hoodies, you could include add-on options for Choose Your Extras (using checkboxes) or Add a Custom Message (using text input fields).


Other product add-ons plugins - Free vs pro

Finally, let's look at some other free plugins vs. premium versions of WooCommerce product add-ons plugins.

Extra Product Options (Custom Addons) for WooCommerce (Free)

Elevate your WooCommerce store with Extra Product Options (Custom Addons) by ThemeParrot. Our plugin offers an extensive range of customization options, including checkboxes, dropdown menus, and text fields. Say goodbye to product variation limitations and provide tailored choices for your customers.

The dynamic pricing feature empowers you to set individual prices for specific options, enabling flexible and personalized pricing strategies. You can provide competitive prices while optimizing your store's profitability with this tool. Creating an intuitive and seamless layout for your product options is now simpler than ever.

The plugin offers effortless section positioning, ensuring that customers can navigate effortlessly and make informed choices. It not only enhances the user experience but also results in higher conversion rates and increased customer satisfaction.

With regular updates and dedicated support from ThemeParrot, your Extra Product Options plugin remains compatible with the latest WooCommerce versions. Unlock your store's potential today by trying the free version to experience the remarkable features that enhance your online shopping experience.

YITH WooCommerce Product Add-Ons (Free)

The YITH WooCommerce Product Add-Ons enable you to increase your customers’ shopping cart order value and let you save time by managing additional options simultaneously.

You’ll be able to create groups of options and use them for all the items, as well as for specific categories in your online shop. You can also select dependency between options so that a dropdown option is shown only to customers that select the one that depends on it.

For instance, let’s say you own a candy store and a customer wants to purchase a 2-pound chocolate sculpture. You offer variations in milk, nuts, and dark chocolate and also give customers the option to have a phrase carved on it – at an additional cost. The YITH Product Add-ons let you add a text field where your customers can enter a custom phrase or select a predetermined phrase using a checkbox or radio button on the single product page. Predetermined phrases are great around the holiday time when people might want holiday greetings carved into chocolate such as Merry Christmas or Happy Easter. By offering these options, you’ll be able to increase your conversion rates and boost sales.

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons (Paid)

With the official Product Add-Ons plugin from woocommerce.com, customers can customize products as they shop through your e-commerce store.

You can offer several options using dropdown menus, checkboxes, sample images, and text fields. Additionally, you’ll also be able to use multiple pricing methods such as flat fees, percentage fees, and quantity-based pricing to sell your products. This helps boost sales and increases conversion rates.

This plugin is very popular, but it lacks the advanced features of the best WooCommerce product add-ons plugins like WooCommerce Product Options. For example, you can't set minimum or maximum quantities for your product addons for WooCommerce. You also can't add conditional logic to show and hide add-ons based on user selection. That's why it may not be the best option, even though it's the official extension on woocommerce.com.

Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

The Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce is an adaptable and feature-packed product add-ons plugin that can greatly enhance the functionality of your e-commerce store. With this plugin, you can easily add a plethora of additional product options that go beyond the basic fields offered by WooCommerce. From various text boxes, dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, images, and color swatches, to number fields, this plugin offers an extensive range of product options that you can use to provide your customers with a highly customizable shopping experience.

Using the Advanced Product Fields plugin, your customers can easily select their preferred options and add them to their shopping cart, making it easy for them to customize their orders and tailor their purchases to their specific needs. With such a high level of customization, customers are more likely to feel satisfied with their purchases, which can translate into higher customer loyalty and increased sales.

In addition, the Advanced Product Fields plugin is highly intuitive and easy to use. You can quickly set up WooCommerce custom product addons options, specify pricing rules for different product variations, and create product bundles and add-ons. This plugin also offers advanced conditional logic features that allow you to show or hide specific fields based on certain criteria, which can help you create a more streamlined and intuitive user experience for your customers.

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate (Paid)

Add-Ons Ultimate allows your customers to personalize your products. You can add over 16 different field types to your product page. This includes checkboxes, radio buttons, text inputs, and select fields. The Pro version allows you to add advanced fields, like child products, so you can even use other products in your store as add-on fields.

Add-Ons Ultimate allows you to display your add-on fields using conditional logic if you wish and you can create fields per product or globally. You can assign prices to your fields and even create calculations based on user inputs. It has an advanced file uploader, which is supported by several extensions for even more powerful features. The plugin is easy to use for non-technical people and developers alike.


How to choose the right WooCommerce product add-ons plugin

Finding the perfect WooCommerce product add-ons plugin can be a daunting task. Especially with so many options available on the market. However, by following these simple steps, you can narrow down your search and find the plugin that meets your needs.

Identify your needs

It's important to take the time to identify your goals and requirements in choosing the right WooCommerce product add-ons plugin. This will help you filter your options and focus on plugins that offer the specific features that you need.

To get started, take some time to consider what you want to achieve with your product add-ons. Do you want to offer your customers the ability to customize their orders with additional options? Do you need a plugin that supports different languages to cater to a multilingual customer base? Or perhaps you're looking for a plugin that can provide upsell opportunities to help boost your sales?

By understanding your goals and requirements upfront, you can streamline your research. As well as save time by focusing on plugins that align with your needs. This will help ensure that you find a product add-ons plugin that meets your requirements. And also delivers the best results for your e-commerce store.

Research and Compare

It's important to do your research and carefully consider your options. You need to ensure that the plugin you choose aligns with your goals and provides the functionality you require.

Once you have a clear idea of your needs, it's time to start researching different WooCommerce product add-ons plugins. Keep in mind several factors, such as compatibility with your theme and other plugins, ease of use, and pricing.

To make an informed decision, make a list of the top contenders and compare them side-by-side. Visit their websites, read their documentation, and look for demos or videos that showcase the plugin's capabilities. You can also check out customer reviews to see how other users are finding the plugin's functionality and support.

Read Reviews

Customer reviews can be an invaluable resource for making an informed decision. Reviews offer a glimpse into real-life experiences with the plugin, including its strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance.

It is essential to take the time to read through both positive and negative reviews. Look for detailed reviews that explain why the reviewer liked or disliked the plugin. As well as how it performed in different scenarios.

You can find reviews on the plugin's website, WordPress plugin repository, or independent review sites. In addition to reading reviews, you can also look for user ratings to get a sense of user satisfaction.

However, it's important to note that not all reviews may be genuine, and some may be biased or even fake. Therefore, it's crucial to consider the source of the review and use your judgment to assess its credibility.

Consider the price

Price is an essential factor to consider when selecting a WooCommerce product add-ons plugin. Some plugins offer free versions with limited features, while others charge a one-time fee or recurring WooCommerce subscription.

Consider your budget and how much you are willing to spend on the plugin. Keep in mind that the cheapest option may not always be the best choice. It may lack essential features or have limited support.

By considering all these factors, you can make an informed decision. As well as choose the right WooCommerce product add-ons plugin that meets your specific needs and budget.

Enhance your e-commerce store with WooCommerce product add-ons

WooCommerce product add-ons are a valuable tool for online stores looking to enhance customers' shopping experience. By using add-ons such as WooCommerce Product Options, WooCommerce Product Table, and WooCommerce Quick View Pro, merchants can create more customized and personalized product pages that cater to their customers' specific needs

Throughout this article, we have explored the key benefits of using product add-ons. As well as the ability to offer custom pricing, personalized products, and more. We have also discussed how to choose the right WooCommerce product add-ons plugin. This includes identifying your needs, researching and comparing options, reading reviews, and considering the price.

We encourage you to try out the recommended WooCommerce product add-ons plugins. As well as experiment with different customization options to find the best fit for your business. With the right add-ons, you can create a more seamless and intuitive shopping experience for your customers. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.

In today's highly competitive e-commerce market, customization and personalization are essential to stand out from the crowd. By leveraging the power of the WooCommerce product add-ons plugin, you can take your online store to the next level.

What sort of add-on fields do you use to offer personalized products to your customers? Let us know by commenting below.

Out of the box, the default WooCommerce shop page showcases products in a grid layout. The shop page is an integral part of your online store – after all, it’s the page your customers will interact with most.

For this reason, you need more control over its design in order to create an intuitive, user-friendly layout that's suited to your specific business and delivers value to your customers. You need a custom WooCommerce shop page to increase your conversion rate - and sales.

Custom WooCommerce shop page

In this post, we'll walk you through a quick, step-by-step tutorial about how to use product tables to customize the default WooCommerce shop page. Before we jump into the tutorial, let’s quickly explore the WooCommerce shop page.

What is the WooCommerce shop page?

The WooCommerce shop page serves as a placeholder for a post type archive to display products. A post type archive displays a list of all posts under a particular post type, tag, or category. In this case, it would be the Products post type to display WooCommerce products.

Behind the scenes, the shop page may be rendered differently as compared to other pages on your online store. If you use SEO plugins on your site, they might have specific settings for custom post type archives. You’ll need to use these same settings to control the WooCommerce shop page.

The exact layout and appearance of the default WooCommerce shop page depends on your theme. In most themes, it looks something like this:

The products are listed in a grid layout with some basic information about each one. This typically includes a large image, the product name, price, and maybe star ratings from reviews. It doesn't include product options such as variations, or the ability to choose a quantity and add to the cart.

The default shop page may be full-width, or it may have a sidebar where you can add filter widgets etc.

As you can see, the basic WooCommerce shop page can look great without any customization work. However, while it's well suited to some types of products, it's completely inappropriate for others. If it's not the best way to showcase the types of products in your store, then you will need to customize the WooCommerce shop page.

Customizing the default WooCommerce shop page

When it comes to customizing the default WooCommerce shop page, there are several different ways to achieve a completely unique look and feel. However, you'll have to do this using HTML and CSS or a pre-designed template file – more on this later. As for the actual customizations, there's no limit to what you can do! For example, you could tweak the default layout, add custom fields, include product filters, show exclusive offers, and much more.

That said, it's important to keep in mind that you want to implement a design and layout that suits the types of products you're selling. Ideally, your custom WooCommerce shop page should:

  • WooCommerce product variations dropdown pluginEncourage prospective customers to browse through more products.
  • Make it easy for customers to find exactly what they're looking for.
  • Simplify the purchasing process and make it more intuitive and user-friendly.

One way to create a high-converting WooCommerce shop page is by showcasing your products in a searchable, sortable table layout with filter options. You can do this using the fully customizable WooCommerce Product Table plugin.

This is an ideal solution for online store owners who sell products in bulk (wholesale sellers), customizable products (like pizzas, chocolate boxes, or gift hampers), products that have lots of specifications (such as hardware goods, kitchen counter, or laptops), and products with variations or add-on options (like clothes, shoes, and personalized gifts).

Two ways to redesign the WooCommerce shop page

Many online store owners choose to replace the default WooCommerce shop page with an interactive, front-end product table created using the WooCommerce Product Table WooCommerce plugin.

You can do this by following one of two methods:

  • Add the product table to the default WooCommerce shop page.
  • Replace the default shop page with another page that contains a product table (this could be a landing page or your home page, for example).

You can’t delete the default shop page from your WordPress site because it powers other WooCommerce pages, like the checkout and shopping cart. This is why it must exist and remain selected in your WordPress site's WooCommerce settings. Instead, you want to restrict people from accessing your main shop page and instead direct them to another page containing the product table. You can do this by using the free Redirection plugin.

Additionally, you may have noticed that when you empty your WooCommerce shopping cart, a Back to shop button shows up on the WooCommerce cart page linking to the main (default) WooCommerce shop page. If you direct your customers from the shop page to the product table page using the Redirection plugin, then the shop page won’t be accessible to them. In this case, you don’t have to change the Back to shop link. However, if you absolutely must remove the link, you can do so by editing the code.

How to build and customize your WooCommerce shop page

The WooCommerce Product Table plugin allows you to list your products in a dynamic, front-end table layout.

It has an option to enable the product table layout on your main WooCommerce shop page, replacing the default layout in your theme. Or if you prefer, then you can use a simple shortcode to insert product tables onto any page of your WordPress site.

We’ll take a look at how you can add a WooCommerce-friendly product table layout to different pages in your online store, including:

  • The main shop page.
  • The product category and the product tag archive pages.
  • The custom product taxonomy archive.
  • The product search results page.
  • Any other page on your site.

Step #1: Install and activate the WooCommerce Product Table plugin

Get the WooCommerce Product Table plugin and install it to your WordPress website. Next, head over to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product tables to enter the plugin’s license key.

WooCommerce Product Table license key

Step #2: Add product tables to the default WooCommerce shop page and category pages

Still on the WooCommerce Product Table settings page, find the 'Table display' section and choose where you want to use the product table layout:

WooCommerce add product table to shop and category pages

Select 'shop page' to use the product table layout on the main WooCommerce shop page. 'Product category archives' will enable product tables on all your product category pages, product tax archives, and product search results.

Save your changes, and your default WooCommerce shop page, category pages, and any other pages should now display product tables on the front-end.

Step #3: Configure the product table

Read through the other options on the WooCommerce Product Table settings page, and use them to configure your product tables. These options will be used on all the pages where you have enabled product tables (e.g. the WooCommerce shop front page).

When you're done, it might look something like this:

Custom WooCommerce shop page

Alternate option - shortcode method

If you don't want to enable product tables globally in your WooCommerce shop, then you can use the shortcode method instead.

Simply add a [product_table] shortcode wherever you want to insert a product table.

You can modify the shortcode to display different products and give each table a unique look and feel on the front-end. Do this using any of the 50+ shortcode options.

Bonus: Using filter widgets on the shop page

WooCommerce Product Table offers a number of built-in product widgets that can be added to any widgetized area (such as sidebars or footers) on your website. However, these widgets can only be used for enhancing product tables on regular WordPress posts and pages. What this means is that they won’t work for product tables that are added directly to the default WooCommerce shop page or category pages.

Filter products by widgets in WordPress

To add these filter widgets, you’ll have to use the built-in WooCommerce filter widget and not the dedicated product table widgets. You can find these widgets by heading over to Appearance → Widgets from the WordPress dashboard. The widgets you can use in the WooCommerce shop pages begin with Filter Products by ... instead of Product Table.

WooCommerce Product Table Filters

Alternatively, you can add even more advanced filters by using WooCommerce Product Table with the Product Filter plugin. This gives you even more filtering options which can appear above the products on the shop page, or as widgets in the shop sidebar. Here's an example of what your supercharged shop page filters might look like:

WooCommerce Product Filters Table Integration

Bonus - Listing categories as well as products on the shop page

If your WooCommerce shop has lots of categories, then you might want to list these on the top page - instead of just listing all the products in a table.

To do this, go to Appearance → Customize → WooCommerce → Product Catalog. Change the 'Shop page display' option to 'Show categories & products'. This will list all your categories in a grid layout at the top of the WooCommerce shop page, with a product table listing the products underneath.

Bonus - Allow customers to check out directly on the shop page

no image popup cart page
A website using both WooCommerce Product Table and Fast Cart on the shop page

So far, we've learned how the WooCommerce Product Table lets you create a custom shop page layout which is better for conversions. It achieves this by making it quicker and easier for customers to find products and add them to their cart.

However, that's only half of the story.

The other half is the final part of the purchase process. That is, reviewing and completing an order. And that's where the WooCommerce Fast Cart plugin comes in.

WooCommerce Fast Cart adds either a popup cart or a floating cart icon to your custom WooCommerce shop page. Customers use this to review their order, enter their details, pay and check out - without ever leaving the shop page. It's a much faster way to complete an order, and therefore can help to reduce abandoned carts.

How to use WooCommerce Product Table with Elementor (or other page builders)

Instead of customizing the default WooCommerce shop page, you can also create an entirely new shop page using a page builder like Elementor. Here, we'll show you how you can use WooCommerce Product Table with Elementor - with the Storefront theme - to create a unique shop page for your online store.

We'll assume you already have both WooCommerce Product Table and the Elementor page builder installed and activated to your website.

Step #1: Create a new page and edit it using Elementor

Create a new page or post (or select an existing one) and edit it using the Elementor editor. You can do this by clicking on the Edit with Elementor button.

Edit page using the Elementor page builder

It should look something like this:

Elementor page builder preview

Step #2: Add the WooCommerce Product Table shortcode to a text editor or shortcode widget

You can also add a product table to different Elementor widgets. Here, we'll show you how you can add a widget to a text editor widget and a shortcode widget.

Text editor widget:

Adding the WooCommerce Product Table shortcode in Elementor

Click and drag the Text Editor widget over to where it says Drag widget here. Next, click anywhere inside the widget and add the product table's shortcode [product_table].

This is great for when you want to add some text (such as instructions) or images (for visual appeal) above or below the product table. Here’s what it might look like on the front end:

WooCommerce Product Table preview on the front-end

Shortcode widget:

Adding the WooCommerce Product Table shortcode in Elementor using the shortcode widget

You can also use the shortcode widget if you’d simply like to display the product table on the front-end (i.e. without any instructions or images).

WooCommerce Product Table preview on the front-end

Step #3: Configure the WooCommerce Product Table settings

To configure the WooCommerce Product Table plugin's settings, navigate to the WooCommerce → SettingsProductsProduct tables from the WordPress dashboard.

WooCommerce Product Table settings screen

Here, you’ll see an extensive list of configurations for your WooCommerce product table. You can select the information you want to display in the table, add variables and filters to it, and much more. When you’re done making changes, simply save the settings and you’re done!

If you are willing to boost your sales, the you should start promoting your WooCommerce store products on Google Shopping center or Facebook Dynamic Ads. Here is a great guide to help you learn all about generating proper WooCommerce product feed for promoting on Google and Facebook. Read the guide here.

Create your custom WooCommerce shop page

The default WooCommerce shop page offers a number of useful features for online store owners. However, it's not the best solution for all types of online stores. By optimizing your shop page’s layout, you’ll be able to enhance your online store's visual appeal, improve usability, increase sales, and boost conversions.

We recommend using the WooCommerce Product Table plugin to replace the default shop page layout with an intuitive, user-friendly table layout that allows customers to:

  • Search, sort, and filter products to find what they're looking for, quickly.
  • Add multiple products to cart in one go.
  • Select product variations without having to click through to the single product page.
  • View more products per page in a neat and organized way (with complete product information).

Do you agree that customizing your WooCommerce shop page's layout and design will help you simplify the purchasing process? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!