Adding New Terms to Existing WooCommerce Variable Cost Products

Posted on by Leon

A couple of weeks ago, I revived an old blog post of mine from the distant past of 2012: Creating variable cost products in WooCommerce. You can find that article here. But in it, I said I would come back and explain how to add additional terms to existing products, and that’s what I’d like to do today.

Let’s Define the Problem

Before I dive into the details, I want to fully explain the problem I’m trying to solve.

I have an existing variable cost item. As with my example before, I’m going to go with Cookies, since all of my recent experience comes from the Love Plus Flour bakery my daughter owns and operates.

I had 3 flavors (sugar, chocolate chip, and oatmeal raisin) and 2 quantities (individual or a dozen). I also had pickup days as a variation, but that didn’t affect pricing.

BUT…

My daughter needed to add an additional pickup day – Sunday.

She also developed a new cookie flavor: Brownie Chocolate chip.

So I need to add an additional term to my “Cookie Pickup” attribute as well as to my “Cookie Flavor” attribute.

Process Overview

Before going step by step, here’s the high-level sketch of what we’re going to be doing:

  1. Add new terms to the Cookie Pickup and Cookie Flavor
  2. Add the new terms to the Attributes listing on the product
  3. Create variations for the new Cookie Flavor/Cookie Quantity combination
  4. Update those variations with pricing, pictures, etc.

So here we go:

Add new terms to the Cookie Pickup and Cookie Flavor

  1. In the Admin panel, go to Products, Attributes
  2. On the right side of the screen, find the attribute you need to add to (in this case, “Cookie Flavor”)
  3. Click “Configure Terms”
  4. Add the name and slug of the new attribute
  5. Click “Add new <attribute”

Add the new terms to the Attributes listing on the product

NOTE: If you are a “open lots of tabs” kind of person (like me), and you already had the product open, you’ll need to save, update, or refresh the product page before doing this. Otherwise it won’t have the new attribute information loaded.

  1. Edit the product
  2. Scroll down to the Product Data area
  3. Click “Attributes” from the left-hand list
  4. Hover over the attribute you want to change, until you see the red “Remove” option appear
  5. Click the down-arrow next to “Remove”
  6. Click into the “Value(s)” box.
  7. You should see a list of all possible values, including the new terms you just created
  8. Click that new term to add it to the list
  9. Click “Save attributes”

Create variations for the new Cookie Flavor/Cookie Quantity combination

  1. In the Product Data area, click “Variations” from the left-hand list
  2. Next to the “Add Variation” drop-down, click “Go”
  3. This adds a new variation set to the top of the list
  4. use the dropdowns to select the specific variation you want
    1. in this case, we’ll set up two variations
      one for “individual” – “Brownie Chocolate Chip”;
      and one for “dozen” – “Brownie Chocolate Chip”
  5. Click “Save Changes”

Update those variations with pricing, pictures, etc.

  1. Hover your mouse over one of the new variations until you see the red “Remove” appear to the right of the variation
  2. Click the down-arrow next to the red “Remove”
  3. Update the variation with pricing, a new image, etc
  4. Click “Save Changes”
  5. Remember to click “Update” for the overall product as well, just to be sure all your changes are saved.