PepperStreet recently built a new website for Rosehill Contract Furnishings. It needed a massive overhaul of the entire way the backend functioned, especially WooCommerce.

So we took a look and decided that WooCommerce was fundamentally the right tool for the job we just needed to pimp it up and to pimp it up we needed extensions, lots of them and good ones. So PepperStreet took a lot of time and we tried multiple plugins to achieve the functionality backend and usability front end that was required.

This post is a detailed review of those plugins we decided to use on the site, what they do, how much they cost and what we think they added to the Rosehill site. Someone once said social media can be a force for good if you use it well. If you say something make sure it is meaningful or useful to someone else. PeppersStreet’s good deed for the day is to share our research and experience of these plugins with anyone who uses WooCommerce.

Product Filters for WooCommerce

https://woocommerce.com/products/product-filters/

Cost : $79.00

This plugin allowed users to filter their product listings. Many of the Rosehill categories had over 40 products in them so we could allow the user to filter these results by Price, Category, Sector (using the tag filter) and any attribute that we wanted to show. The filters allow a filter on any attribute, price, category and the conditional logic in the plugin allows you to only show these filters when they are relevant.

We used it for:

Filtering products in categories with lots of products with multiple attributes.

Great For:

Stores with a lot of products with many attributes where a client may need to search of a specific feature.

Value:

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WooCommerce Cart

https://xootix.com/plugins/cart-pop-up-for-woocommerce/

$14.00

This is a great little plugin that shows a responsive mini cart on the site. It just enhances the default functionality. You can easily access the basket and with the pro version update quantities, add in up sells and style it to fit the site easily. It’s just a nice piece of functionality.

We used it for:

Easily showing the contents of the basket to users and allowing them to edit their basket without being redirected to the basket page.

Great For:

Any size store with any number of products just a nice piece of UX

Value :

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Woocommerce Custom Product Addons

https://acowebs.com/woo-custom-product-addons/

$49

This really is the governor off all the plugins we used, it is so powerful it blows any other similar plugin out of the water. We used it to replace the WooCommerce gravity forms add-on. This was originally used to allow conditional logic to be used in the case of product add ons. So if you have a chair in 3 colours, Red, Blue and Green but you also want to add a cushion to that chair but only in Green and Red as it’s not available in Blue you need conditional logic.

Gravity Form is currently the only other plugin that appears to be able to handle conditional logic although there are multiple plugins which allow you to have product add-ons per say. The problem with Gravity Forms is that it’s clunky, limited and every single product needed it’s own form. You couldn’t compile forms.

Enter Acowebs Custom Product Addons plugin. You still need to create forms (there is no way around this it appears) but forms are added to products and you can add multiple forms. So I created a Fabric Set. It had Standard, Premium and Treated Fabrics. Dependent on which you choose you get a series of Fabric Ranges, for example select Treated and you are shown Range 1, Range 2 and Range 3. Select Premium and you are shown Range 4, Range 5 and Range 6. Now dependent on the Range you then select you are shown the actual fabrics within the range (up to 50 fabrics per range). The conditional logic allows us to display a single 50 fabric range rather than 500+ available fabrics.

In addition to the powerful conditional logic I can now assign this Fabric form to multiple products. Meaning if I update the fabric ranges I update it once not on 300 product forms individually which was the case with gravity forms.

Now I can create a second form for say Wood Finish on a chair. Again, using conditional logic. I might apply my fabric form to 300 products but only need the Wooden Options on 50 products. So I simply apply the Wood form to just 50 products. It’s brilliant.

The plugin allows you to set up a variety of fields, selectors, image groups, check boxes, date fields and allocate a price per option or a global price for the field.

This plugin duplicates a lot of native WooCommerce functionality which is covered by Addons and Variants it’s power lies in the conditional logic which allows you to display addons based on selection made.

We used it for:

Customising complex products with multiple options that also required the use of conditional logic.

Great For:

Any store with products that need conditional logic.

Value :

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WooCommerce Product Add-ons

https://woocommerce.com/products/product-add-ons/

$49.00

This is a brilliant extension from WooCommerce. It essentially does the same job as the Custom Products Add On from Acoweb but without any conditional logic. For the Rosehill project we used both plugins. The Acoweb plugin whilst powerful was also clunky and needed forms to be created and assigned to products. The WooCommerce Product Addon plugin works on the product page itself and is easier to manage on a product by product basis.

You simply can add fields. So for example you can add a checkbox to allow people to purchase an extended warranty. Give it a price £10 and when checked that options is added to the product cost when placed in the basket.

Other options are drop menus which include images or text, radio buttons, text. You can create global add on fields which you can then apply to entire categories or even all products and then edit globally.

Why not use variations? Because variations can quickly become very cumbersome to manage. Take a chair from Rosehill. 3 different sizes, 4 different wood finishes, 6 different colours for the seat and the option to add arms or not. 3x4x6x2 is 144 variations all of them the same price. What we did was set up 3 size variations. Then the add on fields allow the user to select a wood finish, a colour and check a box to add arms or not. It’s a much simpler process for the user and much easier for Rosehill to manage. Because there is no conditional logic in these choices we used the WooCommerce Product Addon extension to deliver the functionality.

We used it for:

Customising products with multiple options without creating 100’s of variants.

Great For

Products with lots of options that don’t need to be variants.

Value

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WooCommerce Variation Swatches and Photos

https://woocommerce.com/products/variation-swatches-and-photos/

$99.00

This extension allows you to replace the native WooCommerce dropdown fields on your variable products with colour and image swatches. It’s a really nice piece of functionality that massively enhanced the user experience on Rosehill. When we were selling an office chair with 3 different back styles, the technical language was BASIC, INSERT or WINDOW which means not a lot to most people, but this extension allowed us to replace the drop menu and technical language with an image allowing the user an instant view of what the options were.

We used it for:

To display images rather than technical descriptions of product variants.

Great For

Usability on any products whose descriptive text is not blindingly obvious and can be displayed in image or colour format.

Value

5 stars

Advanced Post Types Order

https://www.nsp-code.com/

$35.00

We purchased the advanced version of this plugin. What it allowed us to do was re order the products dependent on a specific category. So for example we could easily order the all the chairs, Chair 1, Chair 2, Chair 3 etc. However the problem was that this order was fixed in every category. So if Chair 1 appeared in Stacking Chairs and Wooden Chairs it would always be number 1 in the list. What Rosehill required was that in the Stacking Chairs category it came first but perhaps in the Wooden Chairs category it was 6th.

We used it for:

Reordering category list pages so specific products were displayed at the top on certain categories but not others.

Great For

Larger stores with products which sit in multiple categories.

Value

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WooCommerce Custom Product Tabs Lite

https://www.skyverge.com/product/woocommerce-custom-product-tabs-lite/

FREE

This little plugin extends the WooCommerce eCommerce plugin by allowing a custom product tab to be added to product view pages with arbitrary content, which may contain text, html or shortcodes. However it is just a single tab but it’s free.

We used it for:

Adding in technical specifications for products

Great For

Basic additional tab on a per product basis.

Value

It’s FREE

Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce

https://yikesplugins.com/plugin/custom-product-tabs-pro/

$29.99

This little plugin allows you to create multiple tabs per products but best of all you can create global tabs which you can add to any/all products and then edit globally. This is great for generic information such as delivery or safety which applies to all products. You can assign tabs individually or in bulk or assign them to a category or tag. And as you can create multiple tabs you can easily manage different information tabs across quite a large site.

We used it for:

Creating global tabs that could be applied to multiple products and edited globally

Great For

Adding in multiple extra tabs to products and specifically global tabs across many products.

Value

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WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing

https://woocommerce.com/products/dynamic-pricing/

$129

This one is an expensive plugin BUT powerful. You can configure bulk discounts for each product in your store by creating a table of quantities and discount amounts. Choose from fixed price adjustments, percentage adjustments or set a fixed price for the product.

You can also set discounts dependent on the user role. You can set the discounts up for any variation of specific variations. You can even set dates for the bulk discount to be applied within. The special offer options allows you to offer a discount when conditions are met. Buy 3 get 1 free. Buy 2 get the second half price etc.

It’s way more powerful than I can explain here we only used it in it’s simplest format to offer bulk discounts on multiple purchases.

We used it for:

Bulk discounts. E.g Buy 10+ and get 5% off but 20+ get 10% off.

Great For

Any type of advanced discounting beyond a simple sale price.

Value

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WooCommerce Min/Max Quantities

https://woocommerce.com/products/minmax-quantities/

$29.00

A useful extension allows you to define minimum and maximum quantity which can be purchased of a product. In the example of Rosehill there were products which the user could only purchase with a  minimum order of 4. Also you could only purchase them in multiples of 4, both of these requirements were met with this plugin.

You can also define whether or not variations count towards the minimum quantity or not. In our case you could buy any 4 different colours of chair as long as the product count was 4 or multiples of 4.

We didn’t use the maximum values but I imagine it would be useful if you had something on special offer and wanted to restrict it’s purchase to say 10 per user.

You can also set Minimum or maximum order values for the basket. So a user will be unable to checkout unless the order value meets the threshold.

We used it for:

Setting minimum quantities for specific products and also setting multiples for specific products e.g some products can only be purchased in multiples of 4

Great For

Anyone selling products in multiples.

Value

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WooCommerce Product Enquiry Form

https://woocommerce.com/products/product-enquiry-form/

$49.00

The product enquiry form extension adds an extra tab to each of your product details pages. The tab displays a reCAPTCHA protected form which visitors can use to enquire about any specific product.The store manager receives the emails and can then respond to the user directly.The product enquiry form is a great extension for stores selling complex, unique or expensive products which a customer may wish to know more information about before checkout.

We used it for:

Adding a product enquiry form to every product as Rosehill products are very complex and customisable we wanted users to be able to contact Rosehill easily and ask for help.

Great For

More complex products or expensive products that someone may want to have further information about.

Value

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WooCommerce Subscribe to Newsletter

https://woocommerce.com/products/newsletter-subscription/

$49.00

Allows you to add a Newsletter Signup checkbox to the WooCommerce checkout which integrates with your mail client. Currently MailChimp, MailPoet and Coampaign Monitor are supported.

We used it for:

Getting users to sign up for an email marketing newsletter.

Great For

Building your mailing lists.

Value

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WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers Pro

https://woocommerce.com/products/sequential-order-numbers-pro/

$49

The WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers Pro plugin allows your store to have sequential, rather than random, order numbers. Additionally, you can customize your order numbers by setting a starting number, order number length, and custom prefixes and suffixes. Instead of your order numbers looking like 15, 16, 37, and so on, they could now be WT-01000-UK, WT-01001-UK.

Rosehill asked for bespoke order numbers that fitted in with the offline orders the business took and this extension fulfilled that requirement nicely.

We used it for:

Setting up a prefix for all order numbers created in WooCommerce.

Great For

Stores who have on and offline business that may want to control order numbers from woocommerce.

Value

If you need it then it does the job!