Posted on Leave a comment

Can my WooCommerce site be a catalog?

In the first instalment of series of posts “Can my WooCommerce site do…”, I’m going to look at something that comes up often and sometimes inadvertently.

What happens if you want to showcase a product but don’t want people to purchase it? If this is for your whole store, I recommend looking at the Catalog Visibility Options extension we offer on WooCommerce.com. This has a great range of functionality for making your site into a catalog, including removing the actual e-commerce functionality. [edit to clarify – With my scenario, the cart will still appear on the menu and be visible if people navigate to /cart, or /checkout, or whatever the pages are set as.]

For one-off products, the answer is simple – don’t set a price for the product at all.

I have a product set up for this, the Catalog Product. This is a standard simple product where the price hasn’t been set at all, and this only uses the core WooCommerce plugin.

You can see the setup of this in this gif:

catalog_product_blog_gif.gif

(Direct link: https://d.pr/hVQCl8 )

What you get is a great set up for showcasing a product using only the core WooCommerce plugin. I have chosen to tweak it slightly using the great Storefront Powerpack.

I mentioned that this happens inadvertently and we see people asking “why can’t my customers purchase this product!” the reason is what I have done – no price has been set. (If you want a “free” product, enter what that price is – 0, zero. Like in my Free Download product.)

What if you want to set up a pre-order, have a product “available” but not ready to ship? Take a look at Pre-Orders for that.

Thoughts? Does this help explain things a bit better? Is this useful?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.