Product Category Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Display Subcategories of the Current Product’s Parent Category

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a WooCommerce user sought a dynamic solution for displaying product categories on product pages. They wanted to use the [product_categories] shortcode to display subcategories but faced a challenge: the parent category ID (parent="3470") was not consistent across all products.

The goal was to automatically determine the parent category of the current product and display its subcategories without manually setting the parent ID each time. This approach is especially beneficial for stores with complex category hierarchies or a large number of products, where manual updates would be impractical.

By utilizing custom PHP code and WooCommerce functions, it’s possible to create a dynamic shortcode that adapts to each product’s category structure, enhancing both user experience and store management efficiency.

WooCommerce: Product Category Counter Shortcode

In WooCommerce, product category counters are the small numbers you see next to category names. These numbers indicate the total number of products within that specific category. They typically appear on shop and archive pages where product categories are listed.

In the past, we’ve seen how to remove the WooCommerce product category counters from the shop page.

Today, we’re looking at a way to add them on the product category page, wherever you wish – in the title, inside the description, in a second description, in a custom block. All you need is a simple shortcode. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: “Bulk Edit” > Remove Categories @ Admin Products List

Go to WordPress Dashboard > Products, select more than one product, and then go to the Bulk Actions dropdown and choose “Edit“.

You’re now presented with a simple yet effective bulk edit window, where you can do basic product fields editing such as changing the price in bulk, assign the same tag in bulk, set a sale price percentage in bulk, and so on. You can even assign one or more categories to the selected products.

But wait – it seems you cannot remove product categories from all selected products, which is a bummer! Well, I’m not sure if this is a WooCommerce choice, but honestly it’s such a basic thing that I’m surprised there is no bulk edit option for that.

So, let’s fix this. Let’s add a custom select dropdown with a list of product categories – whenever a category is selected, this will be removed from all checked products. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Redirect Specific Category To Product Page

Especially when you have many WooCommerce product categories, it may happen some of them have a single product. Although this is a rare scenario, let’s see how easy it is to redirect customers directly to the single product page in case you don’t want them to see the category page first. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Get Total Sales By Product Category

It’s easy enough in WooCommerce to get/calculate product sales. What’s difficult, on the other hand, is calculating the total amount of sales for a specific category, because there is no core function that already does that.

Why sales by category – you may ask? Well, to me, that’s a very important metric. For example, I sell both consulting and non-consulting products on this same website, so it’s important for me to keep track of category sales year-on-year, especially when my goal is reducing 1-to-1 client work while increasing scalable product sales such as courses, plugins and memberships.

In this quick tutorial, we will first get the “WooCommerce orders that contain a target product category”, and after that we will loop through the array to calculate the total sales for that specific category. Sounds difficult? No worries – just copy and paste the snippets below.

WooCommerce: Get Variation IDs By Product Category or Tag

We can get products belonging to a product category or product tag very easily. What’s much more difficult is getting single variations based on a product category or product tag, as variations… don’t have a category or tag, which belong to its “parent” variable product instead.

In this post, we will define a function that you can reuse in your custom code whenever you need to get all variation IDs based on a given product category or product tag. You can then loop through the array and return whatever info you need. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Get Product Parent Categories

Whenever we need to do custom WooCommerce work, remembering how to get “things” is the most time-consuming task. So, a Google search often helps us find the right and quickest solution.

For example, it’s easy to “get the current product’s categories“, but how can we get the “parent product categories” only? In today’s snippet we will see how this can be achieved in 7 lines of PHP. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Exclude Category from Search Results

We’ve already seen how to only display products from a single category on the Shop page. Today, we’ll do something similar, but we’ll target the search result.

Code is somewhat similar to the example I linked to above, so it will use once again the “pre_get_posts” filter in order to modify the query before products are returned on the screen. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Override Product Category Page Title

This is an interesting WooCommerce customization – as you know WordPress menus and widgets read whatever product category name and display it in the frontend.

Let’s say your product category title is “Tables”. This will show up in the navigation menu if you have set it up that way, in te breadcrumbs if you have any, in the sidebar category widgets, and as a title on the single product category page.

This is great and all, but what if your product category name is “Red Round Tables By Whatever Brandname“? As you can imagine, displaying this in a sidebar or navigation menu may be a little too much, while it’s fine to use it as a H1 on the single product category page for SEO reasons and enhanced readability.

So, the question is – how do we define an “alternative” product category name, so that this can be used on the product category page as custom title, while using the default one for other smaller locations such as menus and widgets?

Well, this is how it’s done – enjoy!

WooCommerce: “Sale” Category (Automatic)

You can use a shortcode or block in order to display the WooCommerce products on sale. However, what if you wanted a proper “product category” called “Sale” – and where you didn’t need to manually assign this category to each product?

Basically, how do we display all the discounted products in a custom category called “Sale”, without doing any manual work?

Here’s a super quick tutorial. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Display Product Categories @ Shop

We already saw how to show product categories in the Cart, how to display a category in the Shop page, but we never talked about showing ALL the product’s categories in the Shop / Category / Tag / Loop pages.

On top of that, we’ll also study the wc_get_product_category_list() function again, which is a super useful shortcut to get all the categories for a given product. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Split Shop Page By Category

Well, this is gonna be a big one for you. When you start having lots of products and lots of product categories, the shop page becomes either messy or unrepresentative, because it may show just the latest 16 products on page 1 when you have dozens of categories and a much wider range of products…

As usual, there are plugins for that – first one that comes to mind is Nested Category Layout by Skyverge – but today I wanted to see how doable it was to code it, and how many lines of PHP were required.

So, if you wish to switch the WooCommerce shop page display from “products” to “a given number of products for each parent category”, here’s the fix. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: How to Bulk Edit Product Categories

Using WooCommerce product categories is one of the best ways to help your shoppers find what they need quickly and improve their experience at your store.

As a store owner, organizing products into categories will improve product discovery and business efficiency by helping you analyze sales and customer buying patterns better. Moreover, it’ll give a structure to your online store, which is a critical aspect of SEO and can help you rank higher in search results.

These points make a strong case for creating product categories in your store – the good news is that it’s also fairly simple to do this with WooCommerce.

However, the real struggle begins when you have to edit these categories – adding new products, removing items or overwriting them into a new one for example.

Performing these actions on one or two categories may not hurt, but editing a large number of them individually can be a challenge.

Luckily, there are multiple ways you can bulk edit your product categories to save on time and boost efficiency.

In this article, we’ll dive into how you can edit product categories en masse using WooCommerce’s default settings. For more advanced editing options, it’s best to go for plugins – so, we’ll also explore some great plugins you can use for this purpose.

Let’s begin!

WooCommerce: Product Category Price Range

WooCommerce variable products display a price range by default, which goes something like this: $MIN-$MAX. Now, wouldn’t it be nice, on the Shop page or Category Widget, to show the price range for each category?

Well, as usual this is a customization that can apply to certain online businesses only, so hopefully you’re one of them. Either way, this is yet another chance for you to learn PHP applied to WooCommerce. Enjoy!