How to easily set up extra product options on your WooCommerce website: 2023 guide

Have you been looking for a solution to let your customers add extra product options (personalization) to the products they order on your WooCommerce website? Do you want to offer them a way to add information about their order, or simply offer them customization options? Good call.

WooCommerce is the most popular platform for e-commerce stores, and rightly so, as it comes with brilliant features out of the box that enable businesses to set everything up without hassle. But like every platform, it also has certain limitations. For example, it does not offer all the product customization and personalization capabilities that you might want for your store. That means you are likely to run into problems on how to set up your own products in a way that fits them best. 

Thankfully, there are multiple WooCommerce custom fields plugins you can use to add custom product options like checkboxes, a dropdown list, text fields, and more on your website! In this article, we will explore the most popular WooCommerce custom fields plugins, help you understand how they work, and look at the steps needed to customize your products and add extra product options for customers.

What are extra product options?

Maybe you haven’t encountered this term before. It refers to fields that allow personalization and customization options, which can be crucial for online businesses. There are 2 types of custom fields in WooCommerce: 

• Product detail fields allow you to add more details about an individual product; 
• Product input / addon fields let customers personalize the product before they purchase it by inputting text or selecting various options.

You’ll find various terms online describing the same thing:

• Custom product fields
• Product addons
• Product options
• Forms

These are different terms referring to the same subject: input fields on your product pages. We’ll be using a mix of those terms in this guide but will most often refer to them as WooCommerce extra product options.

Why should you offer personalization (extra product options)?

It’s easy to understand why these custom fields can be a real game changer for your store. Lots of customers are looking to customize the products they buy, whether you sell pizzas (which toppings does the customer want?) or personalized jewelry (with engravings, etc.). In other words, by offering personalization options, you will increase your sales and conversions and improve the user experience for your customer, all while building a long-term relationship with your customers. 

An example

Let’s say you want to make your store more customer-friendly by offering gift wrapping. Your customers will appreciate having this option on special holidays like Valentine’s Day or for important personal events like birthdays and anniversaries. The most straightforward approach for that type of feature is a checkbox, as we discuss in more detail later in this article.

WooCommerce’s limitations for extra product options

You probably see how valuable the addition of various product options can be, but how do you implement it? Unfortunately, WooCommerce only provides limiting functionality for product options. You would need to use the built-in variable product type and then set up variations. Variations don’t offer a lot of features: no conditional logic, no advanced features, and they look like basic dropdown lists.

If you want more powerful features, you’ll need to look at a plugin to fill this gap.

You can read more about when to use a plugin for product options in WooCommerce as opposed to using their built-in variation options.

Comparing product options plugins

There are various plugins you can add to your webstore in order to add custom fields and offer personalizations to your heart’s content. That’s where the next question comes in: which plugin should you choose? Obviously, you want value for your money, and you want to be sure that the quality of the plugin lives up to your expectations.

We have listed some of the most user-friendly and high-quality plugins to make the decision easier for you: 

1. Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

When the creators of Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce chose the word ‘advanced’, they knew what they were talking about. This plugin provides a wide variety of possibilities to add extra product fields, such as checkboxes, file uploads, dropdowns, image swatches, color swatches, text boxes, radio buttons, and other fields to create unique product fields.

Looking for more? You can also add fields that appear or disappear depending on the values of other fields (using conditional logic). And of course, it’s also possible to implement fields that change the final product price.

We have ranked this plugin in the top position for a few reasons: 

• It is simple to use, versatile, and dependable, perfect for non-coders and business owners. 
• It enables you to create an endless number of product fields, each with its own set of options. 
• The plugin has a great feature set to support even the most complex product setups.
• The plugin gets regular updates, and the team reply quickly to support requests.
• It is fast and leaves a very minimal footprint on your site.

A yearly subscription to Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce starts at $59.

2. WooCommerce Product Add-Ons

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons is a popular addition to many WooCommerce stores. It allows you to add various options to your site, like text input boxes, choosing from dropdowns, checkboxes, etc. Extra options can be added globally or per-product. 

The advantages of this plugin are:

• It’s sold by the authors of WooCommerce.
• They’ve been around for a while, so it has been thoroughly battle-tested.
• It gets regular updates to maintain compatibility with various other plugins.

We do find this plugin lacks in terms of features and field types. Before using the plugin, check if it can do everything you need it to do.

A yearly subscription to Product Add-Ons starts at $49. 

3. WooCommerce Extra Product Options

This is another plugin that offers a wide range of extra option custom fields for your WooCommerce product page. You can apply conditional logic to display fields, add product variations with different prices, add checkboxes, radio buttons, date picker fields, etc. It also allows you to choose a specific style for the forms that you create and to place the fields according to your liking.

The advantages of this plugin are:

• It comes with a lot of features.
• It is sold at a one-time cost, making this the cheapest option available.
• At the time of writing, the plugin has sold more than 30,000 copies, so this is a very popular option.

While the plugin is certainly the most feature-rich, it also comes with a disadvantage: it loads a lot of extra code on your site that you may not need. The plugin’s footprint is big, so pay attention to site speed when trying out this plugin.

A lifetime license (with 6 months of support) starts at $39.

Verdict

In this guide, we will use Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce. While it’s not the cheapest option available, it is feature rich, fast, and does not bloat your site. In our opinion, that’s worth an extra $10!

We’ve written a detailed comparison, with proof, on how this plugin compares against some other addon plugins. You can read the plugin comparison here.

Installing Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

In the rest of this article we’ll guide you through the steps to add extra options to your product pages. We’ll start with enabling the Advanced Product Fields plugin on your WooCommerce website.

Installing and activating the plugin is done in 3 easy steps:

1. Download the plugin:
   After purchasing the plugin, you will be redirected to your Studio Wombat account. Once you’re logged in, you can download the plugin. Head over to the Plugin Downloads section and click the download button on the right. This will automatically download the latest version.
   
2. Install the plugin:
   To install the plugin, go to your WordPress admin dashboard → Plugins → Add new → Upload Plugin. Next, choose the zip file you downloaded in the previous step and click Install Now.
   
3. Add your license key:
   You are at the final step before you can use the plugin. All you need to do now is activate the license key. Your license key can be found in the License Keys section of your Studio Wombat account.

Adding your first field to a product page and changing the final product price

Global vs local product fields

In Advanced Product Fields, there are 2 ways to add a field to a product page:

1. Via the menu WooCommerce → Product Fields: this allows you to create global fields. You create the fields once and assign them to multiple products in one go (bulk). This saves a lot of duplicate work.
2. Via the Edit Product screen of your product: this allows you to add fields only to that particular product. We call those local fields.

In this guide, we’ll add our fields directly to the product via the Edit Product screen. If you’d like to create global fields instead, the process is very similar.

Creating your first extra product option

As an example, let’s create a pizza product where customers can choose to add extra toppings. Some of those toppings will add an extra price to the base product price. For example, adding beef will increase the pizza’s total price with $1.50.

The ideal field type for this will be a list of checkboxes. Here’s an example of what we’ll create:

Follow the steps below to add checkboxes to your product:

1. Navigate to WooCommerce → Products, find the product you’d like to add the fields to and click Edit.
2. Scroll to the Product Fields section and click Add Your First Field.
   
3. You’ll notice a default field appears in the editor:
   
4. Change the Type setting to Checkboxes and edit the Label setting to “Extra toppings”. The label is a title that appears above the field on the product page. That label is also used on the cart, checkout, and order pages.
5. Scroll down to the Options setting and click Add Option. In this section, you define the actual checkboxes in the list. Each topping will have its own checkbox. For now, only add an option label. This label will appear next to the checkbox.
   

When you’re done, save the product by clicking Update. Visit your product page and notice the extra topping options.

Add additional costs to your product options

In many use cases, selecting extra product options should change the final product price. Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce makes it very easy to increase or even decrease (give discounts) the product’s total cost based on selected options.

In our example, each topping increases the final product price with $1 or $1.50. Let’s configure that now!

1. Navigate back to WooCommerce → Products and edit the product.
2. Scroll to the Custom Fields section and open the field we created earlier.
3. Scroll to the Options section.
4. For each topping that should increase the price, set the Adjust Pricing setting to Quantity Based Flat Fee. In the Pricing Amount field, you can set how much the extra cost for that topping is.

When you’re done, your settings should look something like this:

Save your work and visit the product page. Notice how each option now has a pricing label next to it.

Powerful product pricing structures

The setup above is sufficient for our use case, but there’s a lot more you can do in terms of pricing. Here are a few examples:

• Flat fee pricing: a flat fee is a fixed price surcharge not influenced by the product quantity. A popular example here is gift wrapping.
• Quantity based flat fee: this is a fixed additional cost which will be multiplied by the product quantity. Say a user buys a pizza with a $1 extra topping. If your customer buys 3 pizzas, you want to increase the topping price 3 times (for each quantity), totaling $3.
• Formula based pricing: Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce also allows you to create more complex pricing structures through formulas. Read more about formulas here.

Here’s a list of all pricing options available. Whether you want to charge a flat fee or create complex pricing schemes with matrix tables, this plugin’s got you covered!

Add a dropdown field to the product page

Customers with a dairy allergy will likely not want classic cheese on their pizza. In this scenario, an extra option to select the type of cheese would be great! Let’s create a simple dropdown field where the user can select the type of cheese they want.

1. Navigate back to WooCommerce → Products and edit the product.
2. Scroll to the Custom Fields section and click Add a Field.
3. Similar to the previous field, change the field type to Select List and edit the label to say “Type of cheese”.
4. Similar to the previous field, go to the Options setting and add the options that will appear in the dropdown list. The final setup should look like this:
   

Add conditional logic to extra product options

Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce can easily show or hide options based on values from other options. This is often referred to as “conditional logic”.

Our example has 2 fields now: Extra Toppings and Type of Cheese. Wouldn’t it be great if the Type of Cheese setting is only shown when the customer selects “Cheese” as a topping?

1. Scroll back to the Custom Fields section and in your Edit Product screen.
2. Open the Type of Cheese field created earlier and scroll to the Conditionals setting.
   
3. Click Add New Rule Group and you’ll notice the default rule appears.
   
4. Change the rule type to Value is equal to and select Cheese in the list next to it. This is what the final rule looks like:
   

That’s it! If customers select Cheese as extra topping, the Cheese Type field will be shown. In other cases, it will be hidden.

Conditional logic concepts

There are 2 concepts you should learn about conditional logic:

1. A rule group is a group with 1 or more conditions. All conditions in the group have to be true before the field will be shown (this is called an AND relationship).
2. You can add multiple rule groups. Only one rule group has to be true before the field is shown (this is an OR relationship).

The system of conditional logic sounds more complicated than it is. It is very powerful and enables you to create complex forms while providing a great user experience.

Wrapping up: product customization is a no-brainer

Adding extra product options to WooCommerce can be a total game changer for your business. A lot of customers are looking for products they can tweak until they’re perfect. Creating customizable shopping experiences also helps you build trust, generate sales, and earn the loyalty of repeat customers.

This is part of the strategy of differentiating yourself from your competitors. If you want to outshine them, you need to offer unique selling points. One of those could be offering customization options to your customers.

As we have shown, the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin is the fastest, most convenient, and all-in-one solution for adding custom fields. This plugin offers great value for money, is easy to use, and contains a wide array of useful features.

Ready to take your webstore to the next level and create a smooth experience for your customers? Discover how the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin can help you do just that.