The product settings tab in Woo Commerce
helps you set a myriad of settings, how
you measure and weigh products, how
products are displayed, how you track
inventory, and even how downloadable
products work. Let's get started then
with the product settings in this video.
Hovering over Woo Commerce, select
settings, then the products tab. You'll
see four sub menus here, and we begin on
the first one called general. We've
broken this video up into chapters,
though, so feel free to use those to
navigate this video. We start with the
measurement section. Here you can set
the unit of measurement you prefer for
the weight and dimensions of your
products. Choose from kilog, g, pounds,
and more in the weight unit drop down.
Then from choices like centime, meters,
or yards under the dimensions unit drop
down. The next part here is the reviews
section. You can start by enabling
ratings on reviews, meaning a star
rating can be left with a review. If you
enable ratings on reviews, you'll have
three more check boxes appear. With
those, you can then require ratings for
a review to be left, show verified owner
labels for reviews, and finally, you can
only allow reviews from verified owners
of that product. This means only someone
who has bought that specific product can
leave a review for it. Let's save our
changes before moving on. Next up, let's
head into the display submen. The
settings here are all about how your
products are shown in your online store.
At the top is a very important, if not
vital, setting, your shop page. You need
to choose a page for your products to
appear on. If you don't, how will anyone
buy anything? If you've already gone
through our onboarding wizard when you
installed Woo Commerce, then it most
likely created and set this for you
already.
With that taken care of, you can next
set how your shop page displays products
and or categories. Under shop page
display, you can show products, show
categories, or show categories and
products. The options are similar but
slightly different. Under default
category display, when a customer is
viewing a category page, you can show
products, show subcategories, or show
subcategories and products. Set those
two to your preferences. And let's keep
going.
Next, set how products are sorted under
default product sorting. Your choices
being default sorting, which uses both
any custom ordering first and then name
of the product, then popularity by
sales, average rating, sort by most
recent, and sort either by price
ascending or descending. To wrap up this
section, there are a couple of check
boxes for the add to cart behavior.
First, you can redirect users to the
cart page after they add a product to
their cart. This is a great option, say
for a store that doesn't have a large
product catalog. If your customers
aren't meant to add a lot of products
when they are shopping, you can enable
this and quickly send them to the cart
page to encourage them to check out. If
your store is on the opposite end and
wants to encourage users to add a lot of
products to their cart, then considering
enabling Ajax on the add to cart
buttons. This will add a product to your
customers cart without taking them away
from your shop page, meaning they can
shop quickly without interruption.
Moving into our final part, the product
images section is very important, so pay
attention. You'll want the settings here
to match the image sizes your theme
wants to use. If you currently have
images that appear blurry or out of
whack in some way, we have a dock in
video ready to help you fix those. So,
what do you do with your product images
and these three image sizes? Let us
explain. First, there is a new image
gallery that we should talk about. If
your theme has added support for this,
then when your customers are viewing a
product, they can first navigate through
the images with the arrow keys on their
keyboard. They'll also see a new image
zoom effect if they hover over the
product image. This is a great way to
zoom around and see the fine details of
your product. Selecting the magnifying
glass will then open the image up in a
light box. The images uploaded as the
product image and to the product gallery
can be rotated through. And you can also
make this full screen. Not to mention,
this image gallery works fantastic on
mobile, too. With this new image
gallery, you'll want to upload the
highest resolution image you can get.
For example, when viewed full screen on
a 15-in display, the light box shows it
at 911 pixels by 9001 pixels. The
original image you upload is what's
used. So, we'd recommend you take a look
through your analytics. You can often
find the most common screen resolutions
in your stats. That information will
help you know what the original
resolution needs to be before you upload
any product images. Now, back to our
product images settings. At the top of
the catalog images is the size used on
your shop page or any product archive
page. Essentially, any page showing a
grid of products will use this image
size. The single product image is what
you see when viewing a single product.
The image you set as the product image
when creating or editing a product is
used here and as the catalog image.
Finally, the product thumbnails are the
size of the thumbnails that show up
beneath your single product image. The
images you upload to the product gallery
are what show up here. Remember, select
save changes before moving on.
Now, let's head into the inventory
submen. If you don't track inventory,
these settings will be no use to you,
and you can leave this disabled. Use the
link to skip right ahead to downloadable
products if you'd like. If you do track
your inventory, then stay here. First,
be sure to enable stock management. This
will then allow you to manage stock per
product and set quantity levels when
creating or editing your products. Next,
set how long WooCommerce should hold
stock for unpaid orders. This is set in
minutes. Our example is 7 days or 10,080
minutes. Once the time limit has been
reached, any unpaid orders will
automatically be cancelled. You can also
leave this blank to disable it. Next,
you can enable low stock notifications
and out of stock notifications to be
sent via email to the notification
recipient field below. We assume most
stores want to know when products are
low or out of stock. This notification
makes it easy for you to stay on top of
your stock levels. Related to those
settings, set your low stock and out of
stock thresholds. The thresholds are
what triggers the notifications we just
covered. Coming into the home stretch,
choose to hide or show out of stock
products in your store and a stock
display format. The stock display format
has three choices. Always show the
number of items in stock, only show
stock when it's low, or never show stock
amount. Select save changes before we
move on.
Finally, you have the downloadable
product submen. These settings are made
up of the file download method and
access restriction settings. We have
specific resources for these settings if
you need more information. And if you
have downloadable products, you'll want
to be sure you understand your options
for your store.
Under the file download method, there
are three choices. Force download serves
files via PHP and protects against
direct linking. However, if you have
large files or an underpowered server,
you may experience timeouts using this
method.
XXL redirect/x send file is the most
reliable choice. It offers great
download performance and protects the
download from your customers sharing it
with others. Redirect only. This uses a
separate download link that redirects to
the actual file. It's the least secure
in terms of users sharing the download
link. Finally, with access restriction,
you can require users to be logged in to
download their purchases. Just note that
this doesn't apply if you allow guest
checkout. With guest checkout, a
customer will receive a download link in
their order email to access their
purchased file. Lastly, you can grant
access to downloadable products after
payment. This means as an order is
processing, they will have access to
their purchased download. Select save
changes and you're done. That's all for
the product settings. There was a lot we
covered here, so kudos for making it to
the end. And as always, thanks for
watching.