Variations do work, but it’s a lot of work. As an example, where I work we have a client that has products that are very customisable. Some of them come in a chioce of 8 sizes, 16 main colours, 8 secondary colours and with or without 3 different accessories. In all that makes over 3,000 variations for a single product – and they have somewhere around 100 products just the same. There’s a few that have more. I think the record that they have so far is one product that’s got around 12,000 variations.
The biggest tip that I could give you is that if you want to go this way get to know the CSV import/expoort functionality of Woocommece as that is a massive time saver.
Ive just done a similar website that had 500 products x 40 variations. So that was a 20,000 line CSV import with WP All Import Pro plugin. Took a very long time but, yes it worked in the end.
The client is happy to manage the file upload/product catalogue maintencance via CSV file, so thats not an issue, but waiting 1-3 full days for an import to complete isnt a great option.
A lot of the “Round Rings” in this example, would all use the exact same list of Diamonds available. So it would almost need to be a way to have a “product addon” that would have filterable options, at the single product level.
Most filters i can find, are at the product-archive level unfortunately.
You can always look at the Product Add-Ons extension. That might help out.
Apart from that, there’s no easy way to do it. They want things to be customisable, they have to put up with the problems that come with it.
(Oh, and as a note, if a 20,000 line CSV takes 1-3 days to import, get a new host with better resource allocations. I’ve updated a ~500,000 line file on our clients site, and it only took a couple of hours. Use the WooCommerce CSV import/export plugin. It really is a whole lot better for that application.)
Thanks @catacaustic – Ill take a better look in to the import/export plugin (i liked the simplicity of field mapping in WP All Import).
Ive come across a solution, but it uses their product database, if i could use my own CSV, and their filter, it would be perfect: https://www.transpacific-software.com/blog/integrating-woocommerce-with-diamond-data-from-rapnet-or-idex
The live filter:
http://woocommerce.transpacific-software.com/?post_type=selectsetting
If anybody comes across a plugin offering the filter and multi-step functionality of the previous link, that would be appreciated.
