Adding Product Attributes to your Store

Adding Product Attributes to your Store

Product Attributes

Attributes are pieces of data that can add more technical information to a product and help users refine your catalog while browsing/searching.

Creating an attribute set is done in a similar way to a category (explained later). For now we’ll describe attributes and their primary benefit with a hypothetical example.

Additionally, attributes are a key component of authoring variable products

Usage scenario

Say you’re opening a clothing store, selling all the latest fashions. In this case, a top level product category will most likely be Clothing, inside of which, the majority of your catalog will reside.

Now, you could very easily create subcategories for different sizes, colors and so on, but this information is better suited as attributes. Why? Because a user can select concurrent attributes while refining their search.

Layered navigation for the genre attribute

Layered navigation for the “Color” attribute

Example: A customer is looking for all black clothing. This is as simple as selecting the “Black” attribute from a sidebar widget. As you’d expect, this will refresh the page so that it only displays clothing that’s been linked to the black attribute.

Adding attributes to your store

Setting up attributes themselves uses an interface you are familiar with. It’s recommended that you set up any attributes you will use over and over in this way. Navigate to Products > Attributes where you’ll find the following screen:

WooCommerce Attributes

Here you can quickly and easily add attributes and their terms.

You also have the option to create attributes on a per product basis. This is useful should you want to display extra information about a product that is unlikely to apply to another. For example, you may sell a one-off Japanese game to an English audience. You could make a ‘Language’ attribute for that one product and display in the product data section on the front end.

Sorting Attributes

Attribute terms can be ordered by Name, Name (Numeric), Term ID or based on a custom order you decide (by dragging and dropping the terms in the list when configuring the terms).

WooCommerce Attributes - Custom Sort

WooCommerce Attributes - Numeric Sort

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