How to build a sofa configurator in WooCommerce -

Do you want to sell sofas on your WooCommerce site? Then you probably need users to select fabric, color, finish, and other aspects? Then you’ll need to create a sofa configurator product in WooCommerce.

To do this, you will need an extra plugin. A product configurator plugin (or customizer plugin) lets you sell all types of custom products such as furniture products, apparel products, posters, or wallpapers by showcasing additional form input fields on the product page.

In this post, we’ll dive deeper into how you can build a sofa configurator for your WooCommerce site.

What is a product configurator?

A product configurator is designed to offer buyers an easy way to select options and build a unique product based on their requirements.

For example, you can sell sofas and let customers select fabric or wood finish before adding the product to their cart. DreamSofa has a beautiful example of a complex sofa builder:

This way, you can deliver a unique, personalized shopping experience and increase the average order value on your WooCommerce site.

Introducing Advanced Product Fields

Sadly, with default WooCommerce, you don’t have many options that let you build a product configurator on your online store. But you can use a plugin like Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce (APF) to set up a product configurator on your WooCommerce site.

The Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin offers an all-in-one solution for setting up a product configurator on your online store, even if you don’t have any prior coding knowledge.

The plugin comes with a wide range of additional fields such as text boxes, checkboxes, image swatches, color swatches, and advanced fields such as a file upload field. This means you can create unique-looking WooCommerce products and let your customers fully personalize their product before placing their orders.

For instance, if you want to sell personalized apparel products such as hoodies and t-shirts, you can showcase an upload field and a text field to let customers personalize the product before checking out. Similarly, you can sell custom posters and let customers upload their own images to be printed on the poster.

Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

The easiest way to create a sofa configurator in WooCommerce product pages.

Find out more

Features to look for in a sofa configurator for WooCommerce

Choosing the right WooCommerce product configurator plugin is essential for delivering a good user experience. Let’s talk about some of the key features you might want to look for in a WooCommerce product configurator plugin for your site:

Automatic image zoom-in on image swatches hover. When customers are deciding between various color or design options, you want to make it easy for them to see images zoomed in from the image swatches they are deciding between. This way, customers can hover their mouse over the image or color swatch they’re interested in to get a better view.
Change the product’s featured image based on the user’s selections. Ideally, you want to make sure customers can easily differentiate between different product options and view their customizations in real-time. For this, you will need to make sure your product’s featured image changes based on the product options your customer selects. For example, if a customer chooses a specific color, the product’s feature image will display the product in that specific color.
Product price is calculated according to the user’s selections. When choosing a product configurator, you want to make sure it lets you dynamically update the final product price according to the customization or extra product options the customer selects. This way, when customers are configuring their products, the product price will automatically be calculated based on the product customization options the user has selected.
Replace the default price label with custom text. Since customizable products have different pricing requirements than regular products, it’s better to replace the default price label with a custom one. The product configurator you choose should let you replace the default price label set by WooCommerce with a custom label. For instance, you might want it to say something like “Starting from” or “As low as”.

How to build a sofa configurator product in WooCommerce

Here, we’ll show you how to build a sofa configurator product in WooCommerce using the APF plugin. Here’s what we will build:

View demo

For this tutorial, you will need a WordPress site with the WooCommerce plugin installed. In addition to this, you will also need a product configurator plugin such as the Advanced Product Fields plugin to add extra configuration fields to your WooCommerce products.

Step 1: get the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin

Get the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin and install it on your WooCommerce site. Once you get the plugin’s .ZIP file, navigate to Plugins → Add New from the WordPress admin panel and upload the plugin to your site.

Activate the plugin on your WooCommerce site. After activating the plugin, you will need to activate your license key by navigating to WooCommerce → Settings → Product fields.

Under the General tab, paste the license key given to you at the time of purchase in the License key text field and click on the Activate button to continue.

Step 2: create a sofa product

Now, with the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin installed and activated on your WooCommerce site, you can start setting up the sofa product. To do this, navigate to Products → Add New and set basic product details.

You want to leave the price field empty as all product configuration options will add to the product’s final price. Using the Price display dropdown menu, select Replace WooCommerce price with text. Use the text field below to enter a custom price label for your sofa product.

Here are some ideas:

Starting from $XXX.
Special pricing starting from $XXX for a limited time only!
Clearance sale! Prices starting at $XXX.
As low as $XXX.

Step 3: add product configuration fields

With a sofa product set up, it’s time to start adding the product configuration fields to it. To do this, click on the Custom fields tab under the Product data meta box. Click Add your first field to create your first field. You’ll notice a new field appears and the first setting is where you can set the field type.

Using the robust product configurator, you can add as many product customization fields as you need. For example, you can create an Image Swatch field to let customers select different layouts of the sofa or for showcasing fabric colors.

In our demo, we use the fields below:

Custom fields added via the product backend settings

We added these fields:

Image swatches to select the shape, fabric color, and wood finish. You can also enable zooming to show users a large sample of the fabric when hovering over the options.
A select list to choose the cussion filling.
You’ll notice we have added 3 sections with select lists so the user can choose their desired sofa size. By default, all sections will be hidden. Only the section corresponding to the selected sofa shape will be shown through conditional logic.

Are you unsure of how to further configure fields? Read the beginners tutorial to know more.

Conclusion

A product configurator is one of the best ways to let your customers easily “build” products when shopping from your online store.

You can showcase additional product configuration fields and let customers create their own unique version of the product.

We recommend using the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce as it’s the perfect solution that offers an intuitive way of setting up “buildable” products on your WooCommerce site, even if you’re not very tech savvy.

Ready to start building a sofa configurator in WooCommerce? Get Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce today!