WooCommerce bulk order form: help your customers buy more products

The default WooCommerce shop layout isn’t ideal for bulk purchasing. This is because stores that sell products in bulk have special requirements as compared to simple online retail shops. These types of WooCommerce websites and businesses would be better off using a bulk order form that makes it easier for customers to buy more products, faster.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step tutorial to show you how you can create, configure, and display a WooCommerce bulk order form on your website’s front-end. But first let’s quickly take a look at how bulk order forms can help you improve product visibility, increase sales, and enhance the customers’ shopping experience.

What do we mean by a bulk order form?

With the default WooCommerce store page layout, you can only display three or four products in each row along with the product’s name, image, price, rating, and add to cart button.

It might be suitable for image-centric stores such as those that sell jewelry, apparel, sports gear, or home décor items but it doesn’t work well for selling products that are less image-centric. These include wholesale products, hardware goods and supplies, and electronics.

A bulk order form enables you to display products in a table layout:

In this way, you can show more products per page in a table layout along with product details and purchasing options. In addition to this, you can enable customers to set product quantities and add multiple products to cart in one go.

You can see this demo product here.

Examples of websites that might need a WooCommerce bulk order form

A WooCommerce bulk order form is perfect for anyone that wants to display more products on a single page. It lets your customers select multiple products from the same page, choose the quantities they want, and add their selection to the shopping cart.

Here are some examples of websites and businesses that can benefit from using WooCommerce bulk order forms:

• Wholesale stores. Wholesale customers usually know exactly what they’re going to buy from your store. In other words, they’re likely to spend less time browsing your product catalog. Create a wholesale order form for your products that helps customers easily add multiple products to cart in a single click.
• Restaurant sites. The WooCommerce bulk order form is perfect for creating online food ordering menus. Its table layout enables patrons to quickly compare food items and prices before deciding what they’d like to order. The best part is that it resembles a real menu that you’d see at a restaurant!
• Online grocery stores. You can use WooCommerce bulk order forms to list products along with shipping and payment options. Customers will be able to easily select the products they want to buy and submit information about when and where their order should be delivered.

In addition to this, there are other types of stores that can benefit from using a WooCommerce bulk order form. These include stores that sell hardware goods or types of products that customers typically buy in bulk like stationery items (e.g. pencils, pens, and stapler pins) and batteries. Bulk order forms also suit online vendors selling products that people tend to buy in large quantities such as pet food.

Benefits of displaying items in a WooCommerce order form

Here are some of the benefits of displaying products in a WooCommerce order form:

Single page ordering experience

A WooCommerce order form lets you display all your products on a single page. This allows customers to select the products they’d like to purchase without having to click through to multiple product pages. An example of this is a restaurant’s one-page food order form that customers can use to place their food orders.

Less time between product discovery and checkout

A WooCommerce order form enables customers to see more products at once than if you had the default WooCommerce store layout. They can select multiple items and add them to the shopping cart at once. This is particularly helpful for customers who already know what they want (wholesale buyers). Instead of going to individual product pages, they can go straight to the product order form, select products, choose quantities, and proceed to the payment page.

See product details at a glance

A WooCommerce bulk order form helps you show your products in an easy-to-read layout. You can display product details such as the product’s description, SKUs, and reviews in separate columns.

Overview of the WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin

The WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin offers a simple way to create a bulk order form, enabling you to display multiple products on the same page. Using this plugin, you can enable customers to select quantity and product variations and show specific columns on your website’s front-end in a table layout.

In addition to this, customers will be able to tick the checkboxes next to each item they’d like to buy and add them to their shopping cart in one go. It also lets you display the product tables anywhere on your WooCommerce website and create separate product tables for different product categories.

In addition to this, you can add product tables on your website using shortcodes or Gutenberg blocks.

How to create a bulk order form using WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate

WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate is a powerful plugin that helps you create bulk order forms for your online shop. Here’s what you need to do to create a WooCommerce bulk order form for your online store.

Step #1: Install and activate WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate

To get started, get the WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin and install and activate it on your WordPress site.

Next, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Product Table Ultimate > License and enter the license key in the ‘License Key’ text box.

Click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page to continue.

Step #2: Configure plugin settings

After you’ve installed the WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin on your WordPress website, you’ll need to configure the plugin settings. This determines how the WooCommerce bulk order form is displayed on your website’s front-end.

From your WordPress admin dashboard, head over to WooCommerce > Settings > Product Table Ultimate. You’ll be able to improve the usability of the bulk order form by adjusting the settings on this page.

Make the following configurations to the plugin to create a WooCommerce bulk order form.

Columns

The columns field enables you to display specific columns in the product table on the front-end. For instance, you can display the product’s thumbnail image, SKU, name, category, short description, and an add to cart button. To do this, simply enter thumbnail, sku, name, categories, short-description, add-to-cart in the ‘Columns’ field.

Add to cart column

The ‘Show quantities on add-to-cart column’ field lets you display quantity selectors in the product table. Since customers will likely buy multiple units of each product, you’ll need to show a quantity selector in your bulk order form. To do this, simply set this option to ‘Yes’.

Product source

The ‘Product source’ option lets you display specific WooCommerce products in the bulk order form. You can use the dropdown menu to view the available options namely all, callback function, categories, and tags.

Variations display

You can use the ‘Variations Display’ field to display WooCommerce products with variations. The display options for product variations include ‘Redirect to parent page’, ‘As separate rows’, and ‘As dropdowns in parent row’.

Note: If you only have a handful of products on your store, for example, if you run a small online pet food store, set this field to ‘As separate rows’ as it will increase the visibility of your product variations. Similarly, if you sell a lot of products, you should consider setting this field to ‘As dropdowns in parent row’ to save space and enhance user experience. For example, if you sell pens in different colors.

Order table by

You can change the sort order of the WooCommerce bulk order form using the ‘Order table by’ field. The available sorting options include by product ID, title, price, date, popularity, rating, and menu order.

Order

Click on the drop-down menu next to the ‘Order’ field to display products in ascending order or descending order.

Products per page

Use the ‘Products per page’ option to enable pagination and select how many products you’d like to display on a single page. If you set this field to ‘0’, pagination will be disabled and all products will be displayed on a single page. If you sell hundreds or thousands of products, it’s a good idea to enable pagination to load the bulk order form quickly.

Enable add selected button

Setting the ‘Enable add selected button’ field to ‘Yes’ will add a checkbox before each row in the product table. This will allow customers to select multiple products while browsing through the WooCommerce bulk order form and add all the selected items to their cart with a single click.

Check out the plugin’s complete documentation for more information.

Step #3: Display the WooCommerce bulk order form on the front-end

So far, we’ve set up the WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin and changed its default settings. In the final step, we’ll explain how to display the bulk order form on the front-end. There are two ways to do this:

You can display the product table on your website’s front-end using a Gutenberg block or by using a shortcode.

Whichever method you choose, you’ll have to first create a new page to add the table to. To do this, go to Pages > Add New from your WordPress dashboard and enter a title for your page.

Using a shortcode

This method of displaying a WooCommerce bulk order form on your site’s front-end involves adding a shortcode in the WordPress classic editor. Using shortcodes also keeps your content neater during the editing process.

To do this, simply enter the following shortcode in the page content where you want to display the WooCommerce bulk order form: [product_table_ultimate].

When you’re done, click the ‘Publish’ button.

Using a Gutenberg block

Another way to display a product table on your website’s front-end is by adding a Gutenberg block to the Gutenberg editor. With this method, you get a visual representation of the product table in the back-end while you’re designing your page. This enables you to easily make adjustments to the WooCommerce product table before publishing the page.

You can add your product table to a Gutenberg block by clicking the ‘New Block’ icon. Search for the ‘Product Table Ultimate’ block and the product table will automatically be added to the text editor. You can modify its parameters from the ‘Block’ menu on the right.

When you’re done, preview the page on the front-end. You should be able to see a neat WooCommerce bulk order form that will allow customers to place their orders. The WooCommerce product table should look something like this:

Conclusion

The WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin offers a simple way to create a WooCommerce bulk order form that lets you display all of your products on one page. You can also include important product details along with each product to enable customers to make informed buying decisions faster.

Let’s quickly recap the key points we covered:

• You can make it easier for customers to purchase more products faster by creating a bulk order form on your WooCommerce website.
• A bulk order form lets you display products in a table layout with purchasing options.
• It enables your customers to set product quantities and add multiple products to the shopping cart in one go.
• WooCommerce bulk order forms are ideal for creating single page ordering experiences. It reduces the time between product discovery and checkout and allows customers to see product details at a glance.

We showed how you can set up a WooCommerce bulk order form and hopefully, you’re in a better position now to take things further yourself.

Ready to create a WooCommerce bulk order form and increase sales? Get the WooCommerce Product Table Ultimate plugin!