# Woocommerce - best way to set up product (variants)



## T-Shirt.co.uk (Aug 31, 2010)

Hi, 
General woocommerce noob question here. 

Like most tshirt shops my site will have lots of variants - tee styles + colours + size all sharing the same design. Apart from size I would ideally need colour and style to change image for the users so they can see what they are buying! 
So what's a good way to do this without 
1) me having to manually upload it 50 images per product! 
2) loading loads of image alternatives and slowing down page speed. (maybe woocommerce is already clever enough not to do this?) 

Thanks!


----------



## STPG Press (Jul 6, 2015)

What benefit do you see in having so many variants? Do you think it will actually boost sales?

It likely won't. If people are buying shirts from you for your wit and design, 50 different colors (or 10) won't matter. Even if there's a 2 percent uptick in sales, you're costs are going to skyrocket.

Why not offer black, white, gray; or maybe Red, Green and Gray?

SIMPLIFY.


----------



## NoXid (Apr 4, 2011)

I have dark ink designs that go on light shirts and light ink designs that go on dark shirts. Athletic Gray / Ash Gray is the most popular light colored shirt. Black is the most popular color, period.

That said, I have some designs that require a specific color of shirt in order to make sense, like Red for a Bernie Sanders take on the classic Che shirt.

_That_ said, I carry 7 colors of my main styles ... which is more than can actually be justified by sales. YMMV.

If you have local access to shirts (and thus don't have to carry inventory yourself), then the only real downside to offering color options is the pain in the butt of creating and maintaining your listings.

I do not know how variations are setup on Woo. It seems every platform does it a bit differently, which makes it even more of a pain to maintain across multiple platforms (Etsy, eBay, my own URL).

I've gotten lazier (smarter?) with my latest designs, and offer them only on black. As mentioned above, it is the design that sells. Having only Athletic Gray or Black shirts won't get in the way of sales, unless the _design_ requires a specific color to make sense.


----------



## aldorabancroft (Nov 18, 2014)

Why don't you onstall any t-shirt designer plugin in your website which can help customer to design thier t-shirt by them. 

Nowadays there are lots of t-shirt deisgner softwares are available on market which can help you to increase your customer base and business.


----------



## mgparrish (Jul 9, 2005)

aldorabancroft said:


> Why don't you onstall any t-shirt designer plugin in your website which can help customer to design thier t-shirt by them.
> 
> Nowadays there are lots of t-shirt deisgner softwares are available on market which can help you to increase your customer base and business.


How does that answer the OP's question?

Nothing like hijacking a thread to self promote albeit indirectly.


----------



## Radiation72 (Jun 23, 2015)

I'll chime in here as I just went through this with wooCoomerce. 
(WC) WooCommerce uses two items called 'Attributes' and 'Variations' 
Attributes are items like 'Size', 'Color' 'Design'
Variations are all the different subsets of your attribute.. Such as Small, Medium, Large, XL, 2XL for the Size Attribute
Here's where it gets ugly.
In my shop I have 15 different designs.
I offer the items in 9 different colors shirts and 5 sizes as listed above. 
Each product entry required me to create 45 different variations tin order to a) allow a customer to select the option they wanted, b) allow me to charge a bit more for the 2XL sizing and c) allow me to change the image shown to the color of the shirt when selected. 
the 45 entries come from 9 colors and 5 sizes (9 x 5 = 45)
As you can imagine, with 15 different design options and different shirt styles for men/women/youth/infants, we're looking at over 5400 different variations which meant over 5400 entries in the database and to slow down the site.. 
Not very efficient but I was new to Wordpress/WC so that show I did it.
I'm currently changing all my products from Variable products to simple products. 
Each product just allows the customer to select the size.
I then use a plugin to control the shirt color, design color and shirt size. Way easier to manage from an admin standpoint and loads alot quicker as the selections are done with AJAX so options are loaded as needed not all at once when the page is called.
Hope that makes sense and helps.


----------



## T-Shirt.co.uk (Aug 31, 2010)

STPG Press said:


> What benefit do you see in having so many variants? Do you think it will actually boost sales?
> 
> It likely won't. If people are buying shirts from you for your wit and design, 50 different colors (or 10) won't matter. Even if there's a 2 percent uptick in sales, you're costs are going to skyrocket.
> 
> ...


Thanks for this. I like the "less is more" philosophy. 

My original thinking was from the point of view of having higher conversion rate but maybe too much choice is also not optimal for that.


----------



## T-Shirt.co.uk (Aug 31, 2010)

NoXid said:


> I have dark ink designs that go on light shirts and light ink designs that go on dark shirts. Athletic Gray / Ash Gray is the most popular light colored shirt. Black is the most popular color, period.
> 
> That said, I have some designs that require a specific color of shirt in order to make sense, like Red for a Bernie Sänder s take on the classic Che shirt.
> 
> ...


Thanks for taking the time to reply. 
Similar to my above reply I just want happy customers. 
(I had to Google YMMV but get it now!)


----------



## T-Shirt.co.uk (Aug 31, 2010)

Radiation72 said:


> I'll chime in here as I just went through this with wooCoomerce.
> (WC) WooCommerce uses two items called 'Attributes' and 'Variations'
> Attributes are items like 'Size', 'Color' 'Design'
> Variations are all the different subsets of your attribute.. Such as Small, Medium, Large, XL, 2XL for the Size Attribute
> ...


This is what I was looking for - thanks for sharing your experience. 
By having so many "simple products" though is that a different product page (url) for each of them? Or do you have one per design and users can see all variants from that page? 
If you are OK to share your store URL? I would love to check how the user experience is. 

Thanks again.


----------



## Biverson (Oct 20, 2014)

Radiation72 said:


> I'll chime in here as I just went through this with wooCoomerce.
> (WC) WooCommerce uses two items called 'Attributes' and 'Variations'
> Attributes are items like 'Size', 'Color' 'Design'
> Variations are all the different subsets of your attribute.. Such as Small, Medium, Large, XL, 2XL for the Size Attribute
> ...


Mind sharing what plugin you're using? 

To OP: With Attributes you can automatically load variations but you're limited to the amount generated (can't remember as I haven't done that in awhile). I'd do that but the kicker is then uploading pictures for each shirt can take forever. I setup online stores for schools, sports, etc and use the Product Add-on plugin. It allows you to add customizable options to each products, and then those customizations can have prices for add-ons etc. This makes setting up variables like size, color, and if they want their name and number on the back really simple and quick. Only problem is the picture won't change within the page depending on what options they choose. Don't intend to self promote but if you want to check it out my site is idoshirts.com and go to online stores.

I'd be interested to see what everyone else is doing with Woocommerce. 

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk


----------



## InkedUpShirts (Jan 19, 2017)

T-Shirt.co.uk said:


> Hi,
> Apart from size I would ideally need colour and style to change image for the users so they can see what they are buying!
> So what's a good way to do this without
> 1) me having to manually upload it 50 images per product!


You can use a "catch all" variant for that. In my case, I have two colors that I want to show when selecting variants. Men's 2XL is a bit higher price, so that needs it's own variant, but other than that, the set-up would look something like this (screencap) Edit_Product_‹_Inked_Up_Shirts_—_WordPress.png • Droplr

Of course, that doesn't work well at all if you need stock management for the sizes too.

Also, you don't need to upload 50 images per product. You can just use the same image again.



T-Shirt.co.uk said:


> 2) loading loads of image alternatives and slowing down page speed. (maybe woocommerce is already clever enough not to do this?)
> 
> Thanks!


Again, no reason to use more images than colors. Database queries can get out of hand though, but as of WooCommerce 2.4 if there are more than 20 variations, they are loaded via AJAX so as to not put too much load on the server when loading the product page. See https://woocommerce.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/improving-the-variations-interface-in-2-4/


----------

