Composite Products: How to Choose Multiple Products Under One Component
Today, we are going to look at a cool Composite Products feature which is one of the easiest to miss.
Out of the box, Composites do not allow multiple products to be purchased under a single Component. However, this is possible using the Product Bundles extension. Let’s see how!
For this example, we will be adding an Accessories Component to an existing Composite Product — the Full Frame DSLR Kit that you can find in the documentation of the extension.
The Kit consists of 3 Components: a Camera, a Lens and a Memory Card. Customers simply configure their own Kit by selecting a product for every Component.
The Accessories component that we are going to add includes a few items that customers can optionally select and purchase together along with the other parts of their DSLR Kit:
- a bag,
- a backpack,
- a protective SLR camera cover and
- two more accessories used for sensor cleaning.
This is what our Full Frame Kit with Accessories looks like:
Full Frame Kit with Accessories.
The Accessories component was configured by following these steps:
- Using the Product Bundles extension, we created a new product Bundle called Full Frame Enthusiast Kit Accessories, and then added all products we wanted to appear in the Accessories component inside this Bundle.
- The visibility of this product was then set to Hidden, to prevent it from showing up in the catalog — or in any search results.
- Finally, we created a new Accessories Component and added this newly created Bundle as its only Component Option.
Here’s a look at our newly created Composite in the Dashboard:
Here’s how the Canon Full Frame Kit with Accessories Composite was configured.
See the new product that we just added in the Accessories Component Options? That’s a Bundle! It contains all products that now appear under the Accessories Component. Here’s how we configured it:
Configuring the Full Frame Enthusiast Kit Accessories Product Bundle.
Want to learn more about Product Bundles? Check out its documentation!
Found this helpful? Let us know in the comments section below 🙂
Hey,
Is it possible to add quantity input fields beside each product inside the bundle? So if I had
product A -> input qty
product B -> input qty
and so on…
Currently it is limited each quantity that is specified in the bundle element
Damian
Hey Damian,
This is not possible at this time, but we are planning to add this feature in one of the upcoming releases.
Thanks for the feedback!
Hey Manos,
Love the plugins. I followed this exactly using Composite Products and Bundled Products, but when I view the finished product, the Composite Components dropdown menu still shows up with options for “Select an option… | None | Accessories”. How were you able to remove that dropdown from this demo so it just lists the bundled items, “Add (blank) for $20.00”?
Thanks!
Hey J,
Thanks for the kind words – there are still lots of improvements planned for both of them!
It sounds like the component where you have added the bundle is marked as optional? To turn it into a static component (no component options shown), it should not be “optional”.
Thanks! That took care of it.
Hi, first of all: great plugin.
For my shop purpose, I need to add grouped product to the composite product because the buyer should be able to choose the amount of items in the group… with bundled product the buyer can not choose how many items he went.. do you know how I can make this work? It is possible with customization? Kind regards
Hi Frederik,
Product Bundles will add support for user-defined quantities (min/max) in the next release 🙂
Hi Manos,
Thanks for pointing out ‘Composites do not allow multiple products’ as I couldn’t find this on the WooThemes documentation.
I have a scenario where there is an option for a ‘create your own gift basket’; where the stage one would be the container i.e. small gift basket or large gift basket. Option two would allow products to be added but due to the size it couldn’t be unlimited so there would need to be a fixed parameter such as total weight. The total price would need to be calculated from the items added.
The small gift basket may allow only 60kg and say spread between 7 items.
Question for you: Would it be possible to modify composite products / bundled items to achieve this? How else could it be achieved?
Thanks,
Dan
Hey Dan,
This sounds more like a good case for using the Mix and Match products extension as your “starting point”. MnM currently allows you to define a fixed container weight (say, 7 items), which you can fill by selecting the desired quantities from a list of products.
The “catch” here is that you need to restrict the final configuration based on weight, apart from item count.
If you need to have all this integrated inside a Composite product, you can use the free Min/Max Items mini-extension for Product Bundles, which allows you to define min/max item count constraints in Bundles, similar to Mix ‘n Match.
Hi Manos,
I’ve read your interesting post, I’ve bought the plugin, and now I have a lot a doubts. I would like something like this: a kit when you can choose a shirt from 5 types, each type has sizes, a short from 3 types with size, a pair of shoes, etc. I would like two selection dropdown: the first is the type (product), and the second the size. Can I do this whith this plugin?
Thanks in advance,
Angel
Hi Mano,
I finished my set up. The plugin definitely can do what I wanted. Thank you for the information.
Best regards,
Angel
Hello Angel,
I would be very thankful if you could please share a URL to your result. I am developing a new site with those plugins and a very particular UI, and any ideas will be very helpful for me. Thank you!
Hi,
I wonder if it’s possible to add optional accessories to simple products or products with variations. I do have the product bundle plugin.
Or do you advise another plugin for this solution?
Kind regards,
Ronald
Hey Ronald,
This is not possible directly, but you could achieve what you are looking for by saving the product as a Composite/Bundle and adding the mandatory/optional items you need in there. Composites include a Base Price option, which makes it really easy to just save a Simple product as a Composite and add optional Components under it.
Hope this helps!
Hi thank your for this clear post. I have set this up in the way you described, and it works, with one important caveat. When in the shop I add products from the bundle, they don’t show their price, and don’t add the price to the total. (I did use per item pricing). They basically become for free, which is not my intention :-). If I just look at the bundle separately from the component, they have prices, and adding them adds to the total price. So the prices disappear when I put it in the component.
Any ideas would be highly appreciated.
Hey Pieter,
Make sure Per-Item Pricing is also checked in the Composite product options. If the Composite is not priced per-item, the entire contained Bundle will be basically sold “for free”, as part of the flat-priced Composite.
Hope this helps – if you are still having an issue with this, please open a ticket with WooCommerce support!
Hi, can you help deciding which plugin(s) should I use for my project ?
I’m selling automation products, and I’d like to offert clients to configure their own starting pack.
I tried using “Composite Products” but you can only choose one product in each step.
Here a small exemple of what I have :
STEP 1 : choose the automation box => you can select 1 of the 3
STEP 2 : choose the sensors => there’s a lot of sensor’s types, you should be able to select (for exemple) 3 temperature sensors and 2 motion sensors
How can I achieve that ?
PS : Sorry for my bad English
Hey Pierre,
I would recommend creating automation boxes as separate Composite Products, and use a landing page/product to get your customers to choose one between them. There might be more ways to achieve the same end result, but some might require custom coding. It is difficult to provide any detailed advice or help without knowing your exact requirements – unfortunately this blog is probably not the best place to discuss complex pre-sales enquiries, so it might be a good idea to seek hired dev help or experiment with the available extensions using the online documentation as a guide and/or ask for help from Woo support.
Manos,
Is there anything we can do to get this functionality back in 2017? Something seems to have broken and I can’t get any of the bundles to show up on the composite product page.
Hey Geoff,
We haven’t had any similar issues reported via our help desk. Are you running the latest versions of both? We are using both products in a variety of test cases during day-to-day development as well. Haven’t seen anything weird.
If you have tried the usual debugging procedure without success (switch to default WP theme or Storefront, deactivate all plugins other than WooCommerce, Product Bundles and Composite Products), please get in touch with us and we’ll take a closer look!