WooCommerce video gallery plugin: Sell videos or add video to products

WooCommerce video gallery plugin: Sell videos or add video to products

Discover the easy way to embed, stream and sell videos on your WooCommerce store. We'll do it with the best WooCommerce video gallery plugins.

Are you looking for a way to showcase or sell videos on your WooCommerce store? There are several ways that you can use videos on your store:

  • Creating a WooCommerce video gallery - Display preview or promo videos on your main shop pages to grab visitors' attention. This is a great way to boost sales of any type of product, whether you're selling videos or something else such as clothing.
  • Selling videos with WooCommerce - You can also use WooCommerce to sell actual video products, which customers can then download or watch online.
WooCommerce sell videos plugin
An example of a WooCommerce video gallery

Keep reading to learn how to use WooCommerce video gallery plugin to display videos on your shop pages, as well as how to sell videos in WooCommerce. Customers will be able to watch a video preview for each product without leaving the page, and add the product to their cart right from the same gallery.

I'll also provide some tips on other ways to display video in WooCommerce, such as in a "Quick view" product lightbox, or in a dedicated "Video" tab on the product page.

WooCommerce Product Table lets you display all or some of your WooCommerce products as a flexible grid/table. You can control exactly what information displays in your table including add to cart buttons and - you guessed it - product videos.

The advantage of a table view is that your customers can watch videos for multiple products on one page - there's no need for them to keep going to the individual product page. You can do this by adding embedded video players directly to the product table on the shop page. This is ideal for WooCommerce video streaming, as customers can view the video directly on. your website.

Similarly, your shoppers will also be able to select variations and add products to their carts right from the video gallery - again, no multiple tabs or page reloads required. Whether you're selling videos with WooCommerce or just want to use video to promote other types of product, it's a more convenient approach for visitors.

Below, we'll show you how to set up this WooCommerce videos plugin. After that, I'll show you some extra ways to display video in WooCommerce, and also how to sell video products.

Step 1: Add video to WooCommerce products

To get started, you need to add an embedded preview video to the individual products that you want to display with WooCommerce Product Table. This is how customers will stream the video online.

The process is the same whether you're selling videos with WooCommerce or just adding video to a regular product. You do have some choices for where and how you add the video, though.

First off - how.

The easiest way is to just embed a video player from YouTube or Vimeo. If you don't want YouTube branding, you can pay for one of Vimeo's unbranded plans, or a service like Swarmify. This can seamlessly import and serve YouTube video but with an unbranded player.

Finally, you can always use the self-hosted WordPress video player shortcode, though there are some good reasons not to.

Now, the where.

If you're not already using the Product short description field, that's the easiest spot to add your video. In fact, that's what we'll do for this example. All you need to do is embed your video in the text editor using normal WordPress oEmbed functionality. This is incredibly easy - simply paste the URL of your video from YouTube, Vimeo or similar.

woocommerce add video to product

But if you're already using the short description field for something else, you can also create a custom field to embed your videos using a free plugin such as Advanced Custom Fields.

Finally, add videos to all the products you want to display with the WooCommerce video gallery plugin.

Step 2: Create a product table for your WooCommerce video gallery

Once you've added video to the relevant products, you need to configure WooCommerce Product Table to work as a video gallery plugin.

Install the plugin and then go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product tables.

While you should look at all the plugin's settings to see what interests you, if you want to create a WooCommerce video gallery, we definitely recommend that you configure these settings as a minimum:

  • Columns - Make sure to include the summary or the custom field that you added to hold your video. And if you're planning to add quick view to your video gallery, then you should also add a quick_view column. Learn more about columns.
  • Add to cart column - Configure how you want your add to cart button to function, including variations.
  • Lazy load - If you have lots of products with WooCommerce videos, you might want to enable lazy loading for performance reasons.
  • Shortcodes - Make sure to check this box so that your embedded WooCommerce video players load properly.
WooCommerce sell videos

This page sets the plugin's defaults. You can also always override those defaults, or add additional options, by directly using shortcode parameters.

Step 3: Add the video gallery to WooCommerce

Now, you just need to choose where in your store the WooCommerce video gallery will appear. There are two ways to approach this:

  1. Tick the relevant boxes on the plugin settings page to show the product table layout on your main shop and category pages.
  2. Use the [product_table] shortcode to add WooCommerce video streaming galleries to other pages.

If you decide to use the shortcode method, then you can list WooCommerce products by their:

  • Category
  • Tag
  • Post ID
  • More

For example, if you have a category called "video" then you can target it like so:

[product_table category="video"]

But if you only added video to a few products, you could also directly target them by post ID, tag, or lots of other conditions.

Once you have set up the video gallery in WooCommerce, it will look something like this:

woocommerce video gallery plugin example

Can I embed video playlists?

If you want to show more than one video per product, then you can embed entire video playlists into the WooCommerce video gallery. You can easily do this using the video playlist shortcode that comes with WordPress itself.

WooCommerce video gallery with playlist
WooCommerce audio and video gallery containing an audio file, a single video, an audio playlist, and a video playlist

Use the following instructions to add a video playlist to any of the fields you're displaying in the product table:

  1. Click the 'Add Media' button.
  2. Choose the 'Create Video Playlist' button on the left.
  3. Upload and select the videos you wish to include in the playlist.
  4. Click the 'Create a new video playlist' button on the bottom right.
  5. On the next screen, add any captions for each video and change the settings as required.

Creating video playlists in Gutenberg

At the time of writing, the above instructions only work if you're using the classic WordPress editor and not Gutenberg. Hopefully Gutenberg will add a video playlist button in future. In the meantime, you can create video playlists by adding the following shortcode to a Gutenberg 'Shortcode' block:

[playlist type="video" ids="12345,23456,34567,45678"]

Replace the ID's with the actual ID of each video you wish to include in the playlist. You can find these by going to the 'Media' section of the WordPress admin, clicking on a video, and looking at the URL at the top of your browser tab. For example, if the URL ends /wp-admin/upload.php?item=12345 then you need to add the ID 12345 to the shortcode.

Add WooCommerce videos to a quick view lightbox

So far, you've learned how to create a WooCommerce video gallery with embedded video players in the main product list. You can use the widths option in WooCommerce Product Table to choose how much space the video player column takes up. However, videos inevitably require a fair amount of vertical space. If you want to list products in a more compact way, then it might be better to show the videos in a quick view lightbox for each product:

WooCommerce video streaming in lightbox

Using WooCommerce quick view is better than just adding video players to the single product page. That's because you don't want to take customers to a separate page for each product - that slows things down and takes them away from the main product list. By watching sample WooCommerce videos and adding to the cart from a quick view lightbox, the customer remains on the same page. This stops them from getting lost and encourages them to add multiple products to the cart.

Here's how to set it up:

  1. Sell video in WooCommerce quick view lightbox
    Install WooCommerce Quick View Pro.
  2. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Quick view, enter your license key and choose your quick view settings. Make sure you enable the short description, as this is where you've added the video players. You can choose whether or not to show other sections such as the product images or add to cart buttons.
  3. Add quick_view to the list of columns on the Product Table settings page (WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product tables).

And that's it!

Add a video tab to the product page

Add video tab to WooCommerce product page

And finally, let's think about where else you can display video on the WooCommerce product page. One way to do this is to add a dedicated 'Videos' tab, which allows you to display video without cluttering up the page layout. You can do this with the WooCommerce Product Tabs plugin, which lets you add extra tabs to the product page.

How to stream videos on WooCommerce

We have already touched on WooCommerce video streaming, but I want to make sure it's totally clear before we move on.

Steaming videos involves allowing people to actually watch the video on your website. They don't download it - they watch it in an embedded video player embedded on the website.

This means that you can use several of the methods that we already discussed to enable video streaming:

Whichever method(s) you choose, it's very straightforward to add video streaming to WooCommerce. Just host the videos on any streaming service such as Vimeo or YouTube, and paste the URL wherever you want them to appear on your WordPress site.


How to sell videos on WooCommerce

Above, you learned how to create a customizable WooCommerce video gallery. However, what if you're specifically looking to sell videos on WooCommerce?

In that case, the same basic steps apply for creating the video gallery, but you'll want to go about creating your WooCommerce products a little differently.

That is, in the example above you learned how to display videos in a gallery as a way to showcase a product. Now, you're going to learn how to make the video the product itself.

Can you sell videos on WooCommerce?

Most people think of WooCommerce in terms of selling physical products that are shipped to the user. However, it's equally well-suited for selling virtual or downloadable products.

This means that you can sell videos on WooCommerce whether you're selling physical videos to post, or virtual videos to stream online or download.

Types of video you can sell with WooCommerce

You can use WooCommerce to sell absolutely any type of video. This includes:

  • All video genres - fiction, nonfiction, films, movies, educational video.
  • Any type of video - animations, commentary, drone footage, behind-the-scenes event coverage, how-to video tutorials, interviews, presentations, promotional product videos, stock footage, motion graphics and presets, After Effects project files, Apple Motion or Cinema 4D templates, Flash elements files, video overlays and textured, Premiere Pro templates, social media video templates, video effects and transitions.
  • All video file types - MP4, WEBM, AVI, QuickTime, WAV, and many more.

Whatever sort of video you want to sell online, keep reading to discover the best way to do it.

Setup instructions

The basic steps to sell video in WooCommerce are as follows. I'll be focussing on selling videos for streaming online or downloading, but you can also sell physical videos to post to the customer:

  1. Upload the video file somewhere accessible.
  2. Mark products as Virtual and Downloadable.
  3. Add video file to WooCommerce product.

Let's go through them in detail…

Step 1. Upload video file somewhere accessible

To get started, you'll need to upload the video file itself to a place where visitors will be able to download it.

For a small file, you can just upload it straight to your server via your WordPress Media Library.

However, if you have larger files, or if you're planning to have a ton of downloads, a better option is to use a dedicated storage service like Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces. These services are affordable, reliable, and lower the burden on your site's server.

Step 2: Create a virtual, downloadable product

Next, create a new WooCommerce video product:

  1. Go to Products → Add New. 
  2. Add the product title - this will usually be the WooCommerce video name.
  3. Type a main description of the video. This will help with the SEO of the video product page by being crawled by search engines.
  4. Choose any categories or tags for the video. Customers will be able to filter by these to find specific videos.
  5. In the 'Product data' section, make sure to check the boxes for Virtual and Downloadable:
    WooCommerce video gallery to sell video

Step 3: Add download or streaming link

After you tick the 'Downloadable' box in Step 5 (above), you should see a new Downloadable files section appear in the General tab of your WooCommerce video product.

If you want customers to download the video they bought, then fill this in as follows:

  1. Click the Add File button and insert the download link for where the video is saved. As we discussed in Step 1, this might be in the WordPress Media Library or it might be on a third party video host like Vimeo.
  2. Add a download limit and expiry date if required.

Alternatively, you can allow people to stream the video online instead of downloading it. To do that, simply enter the URL of wherever they can stream the video. This might be a hidden page on your WooCommerce site containing the embedded video. It might also be a link to a third party video hosting site such as Vimeo.

Once you're finished, Publish the video product as you normally would.

Sell video with WooCommerce

Step 4: Add custom fields to WooCommerce video products (optional)

When you're selling video online, there might be extra fields of product data that you need to display about each video. For example, perhaps your WooCommerce video gallery needs fields for resolution, video length etc.

You can easily add custom fields using a free plugin like Advanced Custom Fields or Easy Post Types and Fields. Simply use your chosen plugin to add as many fields as you like to the 'Products' post type. You can then use WooCommerce Product Table to display them as extra columns in the video gallery.

What happens when customers purchase a video product?

When someone purchases the video from your WooCommerce store, they receive an email containing a unique link to download the video file.

For best results, combine this method for selling videos with the earlier section of this tutorial on how to create a WooCommerce video product gallery. That way, customers can watch the embedded video preview directly on your shop pages, and then purchase the full video.

What about piracy?

With the example above, even people who didn't purchase a video would still technically be able to download it if someone shared the link with them.

Now, digital piracy is something you're never going to stop, so a lot of store owners will just live with that and focus on finding more paying customers.

But if you are concerned and want to at least make it harder for people to share the download links, you can use the Download limit and Download expiry options to limit access:

WooCommerce sell video online

Just be aware that these restrictions might frustrate some legitimate customers who want to download a file multiple times or in the future.

And that's it - you just added a user-friendly WooCommerce video gallery to your store. You also learned how to sell video online in WooCommerce, either for download or streaming.

Not only can visitors browse videos for multiple products without leaving the page they're on. They can also add products right to their carts for a smooth, friction-free checkout process.

The WooCommerce Product Table plugin makes it easy to add video to your shop pages. Get it today and start promoting your products with video:

Have any other questions about how to use a WooCommerce video gallery plugin? Leave us a comment!

2 Comments

  1. is it possible to play the video instead of downloadlink in the order?

    • Hi, Henk.

      Yes, it is - albeit doing so would change the way that you sell the product. Instead of setting up the video file as a downloadable product in WooCommerce, you would instead need to publish the video as an unlisted or private video via a streaming service (e.g. on Vimeo or Wistia). Then embed it on a page or post type on your site which you would restrict access to via a membership plugin (such as WooCommerce Memberships) that allows you to control/grant content access to the different pages or posts on your site. You would then sell a membership as a stand-alone product — create a product for the membership, then tie the plan to that product (which is access to the restricted page/post with the video embedded on it) to sell it.

      I hope this makes sense and helps define the difference between selling a video as a downloadable product and as one that you can watch/stream from a page with controlled/restricted access. Should you have further questions, please contact us at our Support Center so we can get back to you much quicker.

Please share your thoughts...

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *