How to add custom product options in WooCommerce

Are you looking for a way to customize your WooCommerce store and add custom options to products?

With custom options, you can improve your store’s shopping experience and simplify ordering for your customers significantly.

For instance, you want to give your customers the option to build their own PCs by selecting parts such as CPU, RAM, storage, processor, etc. The best way to approach this is by adding custom options to your parent product.

With options, your customers will be able to select PC parts and place an order for a PC with custom configuration rather than finding and adding individual parts separately.

This can significantly improve the shopping experience on your WooCommerce store.

In this guide, we will learn how you can add custom product options in WooCommerce. Since adding custom options is not possible with WooCommerce alone, we will use the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate to add options seamlessly.

Let’s take a look at this in more detail.

What are custom product options in WooCommerce?

Adding product options to your WooCommerce products can help your customers personalize their orders exactly the way they want.

Let’s understand this with the help of an example.

If you are selling pizza from your store, you might want to give your customers the option to build their own pizza. In this case, ideally, your customers should be able to choose the type of bread, cheese, pizza size, as well as toppings.

In addition to letting customers select their preference for Pizza, options can help you automatically calculate the final price by factoring in the additional costs for extras and additions.

Another good example is a cake shop. While ordering a cake, a customer should be able to share the message they want to be written on the cake (such as “Happy Birthday, Dad!”) along with selecting the size, flavor, design, etc.

This is only possible by adding custom product options. By thoughtfully setting up custom options, you can let your customers build their cake and choose options like size, color, message, and flavor right when they place an order.

Adding these custom options can immensely improve the customer shopping experience on your website. And in turn, you can receive all the details related to the order in one go. This eliminates the need to contact the customer again to collect order-related details to process the order.

How do options differ from variations?

Although it might initially sound the same, product options are quite different from product variations.

WooCommerce core can add product variations and display multiple options on the product page. While they might sound similar, WooCommerce variations are limited and can restrict you in many ways.

• Variations are set or pre-defined. This means you can only display a limited number of variations for each product.
• Since Woocommerce variations are pre-defined, you need to think about all combinations in advance. This might lead to narrowing down your store and limiting customization options.
• You only get the option to display WooCommerce product variations in dropdown lists. Dropdowns are not suited for all use cases as they lack visual representation.
• You cannot accept any custom message. For example, if you are selling custom engraved bracelets, you cannot add a field with variations to request text with WooCommerce variations.

If you truly want to build a flexible product page and allow customers to place orders as they wish, you can only do it by adding custom options. 

While WooCommerce is a powerful tool for selling products online, it does not come with the option to add order customization options apart from basic product variations.

With the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, you can add functional and useful custom options or fields to your product pages. With around 20 different field types, such as radio buttons, text fields, and checkboxes, you can create more functional product pages on your store in minutes.

Different product option types

Now that we understand the difference between options and variations, let’s check out the different options types you get with the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin.

There are around 20 custom options you get with the  WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin. You can add these options to any product and enable customization options instantly. Let’s check out some of the product options you get with the plugin.

Text field 

In addition to collecting string or simple text data from your customers, you can limit the minimum and maximum characters your customers can enter. Also, you can charge customers an additional fee for each character they enter on the go.

Radio buttons

With this option, you can give your customers an option to choose a single option from a list of alternatives. For example, pizza bases. Since there can be only one pizza base, you can give users the option to choose the base of their choice with radio buttons.

Checkboxes

This field lets users select multiple options for the same product. For example, users might want to select multiple toppings on their pizza. With the checkboxes, users can select different options, and you can also add an additional charge for each option if applicable.

If you like, you can display radio buttons and checkboxes as text swatches (buttons).

Select field

The Select field is the standard dropdown option with a few advanced options to help you make your product page more visually appealing.

File uploader

With this option, users can upload files to help process their orders. For example, if you are running a t-shirt printing business, you can use this field to allow users to upload graphics while placing orders.

Color picker

With this option, customers can select the exact color they want for their product. This is ideal for businesses and products where color perfection is important, such as paints, designs, etc.

You can easily add these options to any product in minutes. While these are some of the popular fields, you also get more advanced customization options with the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin.

Advanced custom options

If you have specific needs for your products, here are some advanced fields you can use on your WooCommerce products to make the shopping experience easy.

Product fields

Some products can be a bit complex to sell as they require other products in the store to be a part of another product. For this, the product fields option will help you add existing products in your store as addons for another product. Here’s an example for you. If you are selling bicycles on your eCommerce store and want to give users the option to build their own bikes, you can add bike parts such as tires, seats, and handlebars as options.

This is even better as you can still sell those products separately to customers who only want a particular part.

Calculation field

Most products have variable pricing where the price needs to be calculated based on weight, area, or any other parameter. For those products, you can use the Calculations field to let customers calculate the price for their custom order while checking out.

For example, if you are selling glass sheets for windows, your customers will need to enter the exact dimensions while placing the order. Additionally, the price will change depending on the size of the window, and you can display this easily with the calculations option field.

Swatches and image layer options

One of the challenges with giving users the option to build their own products with custom options is that users can’t visually see the change in products with their selection.

But Image Layers and Swatches make this a cakewalk.

With image layers, firstly, you don’t need to add an image for each possible combination, and secondly, your customers can see the changes they are making on the go.

The WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin comes with loads of custom fields to help you customize your WooCommerce store, but you also get options to maximize these options.

Useful features to help you create custom WooCommerce options

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin is loaded with features that can make your store management a breeze. Here are some prominent features that can help you maximize custom options for your WooCommerce store.

Dynamic pricing custom options

Since you’ll add custom options to your products, you’ll probably need to adjust the pricing depending on the selections. To make this easier, all custom fields have in-built pricing options to help you change the total pricing. Even for the text field, you can charge per character input. This can be useful for jewelry businesses, gift shops, etc.

The plugin also factors in the prices of two different fields. For example, if you are selling pizza with options to add extra cheese and toppings, the price will automatically update to show the final price, including the price for extra cheese and toppings.

Create options with conditional logic

When you add multiple options or option groups to a single product, it can become a bit overwhelming for customers.

This is where you can add conditional logic to make the options less intrusive. With conditional logic, you can hide and show fields depending on the selection by users.

Here’s an example. While ordering a bracelet, customers can choose to add custom engraving to the bracelet by clicking on the “Add Engraving?” checkbox. This will reveal the text field where users can enter the text they want to engrave on the text field.

Grouping product options and layouts

Another useful feature when it comes to product options is the possibility to create product option groups. By creating option groups, you can batch multiple custom options or fields in a single group.

You can also display groups in different views, such as a lightbox, steps, tabs, or an accordion. This can be specifically helpful to simplify complex product option groups.

In this example, you can see how customers can configure their bicycle by selecting bike parts such as frame, seat, and handlebar. Although there are loads of custom options, they look organized because they are strategically divided in tabs.

These are just some noteworthy features of the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin that makes the option fields and overall experience of adding custom options a cakewalk.

Video: How to add custom product options in WooCommerce

This video will help you understand and create custom options for WooCommerce products:

Tutorial: How to create custom options for a pizza product in WooCommerce

Let’s see how you can use the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin to add options to your eCommerce store. For our tutorial, we will create a new pizza product for a WooCommerce store.

Here’s a live example of how our product will look like.

Before we start, make sure you have the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin installed and activated on your website.

To install the WooCommerce Product Addons plugin:

1. Locate and download the plugin zip file from the purchase confirmation email.
2. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and go to Plugins > Add New > Upload.
3. Upload the plugin zip file you downloaded and activate the plugin.
4. Once activated, enter the purchase license key.

Now that we have everything set up, let’s start creating the pizza builder.

Step 1: Create a new product

If you don’t already have a product in your store that you want to customize and add custom options to, let’s start by creating the product – Pizza.

Add a new product by clicking on Products > Add New. Give your product a proper name and enter all other necessary details such as image, description, price, etc.

Step 2: Add custom product options

In the ‘Product Data’ section, click the ‘Product Add-Ons’ tab. Now, create a new group and give it a name.

Now click on the ‘Add Field’ button and give your first field a name. We’ll create a ‘Pizza Size’ field.

Since a customer will only choose one option for pizza size, we will go with the radio button option for this custom field.

Select the ‘Radio Group’ option from the dropdown list and add labels for pizza sizes.

If you want to add additional charges for larger sizes, you can mention the additional charge in the price field.

We will also add three more radio groups for crust, sauce, and cheese. You can simply repeat the steps to add new fields, give them suitable names, and add charges if applicable.

Let’s add another field type in the same group. This time, we will add a toppings field. Since users might want to add more than one topping to their pizza, we will use checkboxes.

Click on the ‘Add Field’ button and select ‘Checkbox Group’ as the Field Type.

Add individual options in the checkbox group, such as Pepperoni, Olives, Mushrooms, etc. You can also add a fee for each topping by adding the price next to each option.

Similarly, you can add other custom fields too. For our tutorial, we have added a total of 7 custom options.

• Size – Radio group
• Crust- Radio group
• Sauce – Radio group
• Cheese – Radio group
• Toppings – Checkbox group (displayed as swatches)
• Extras – Checkbox group
• Delivery – Select 

You can add multiple options depending on your product. 

Step 3: Publishing the product

Once you are done, you simply need to publish the product, and now your product will be displayed on the store with custom fields. It’s that easy!

You can go to the product page and test the custom options. If you want to make any further changes to the options, you can edit the fields you created in the ‘Product Add-Ons’ tab and update the fields.

Here’s what the finished Pizza custom product looks like.

Further reading

Here are a few articles you might find interesting:

• In this article, we briefly explored creating a custom pizza builder. If you want to learn about it in more detail, check out this guide on creating a WooCommerce pizza builder.
• If your shop has complex products with multiple products as part of another product, you can learn to build composite WooCommerce products.

Build custom options for products with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate

Selling customizable products is not possible with WooCommerce alone. But with the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, you can extend your eCommerce store’s capabilities and offer your customers the option to customize their orders with product options.

Along with giving users an option to customize their orders, you can simplify the shopping experience with the help of conditional logic and custom field group displays.

Don’t forget to check out the WooCommerce Product Add Ons Ultimate plugin to grow your eCommerce store. The plugin is backed by a straightforward 14-day money-back guarantee. Feel free to test it on your website and let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.