Product variations not showing under Attributes and Filter by Attributes Widget

Hey!
When Printful pushes a product to WooCommerce it creates variations with local product attributes – not global ones that would be seen in Products > Attributes section. This is done so to avoid conflicts with a preexisting product and attributes that you might have.

Would the local product attributes–not global ones prevent Woocommerce Product Search Extension from finding the products too? I just discovered that Printul’s integration breaks when I use woocommerce variation swatches plugin.

Just my opinion but if you offer integration with a platform shouldn’t it work with the extensions built especially for that platform. The failure to work with these extensions and widgets creates major limitations on the customers’ ability to search for products on the site.

In the case of the variation swatches break on my site, it cost me two days of work because I had to delete and set up all the Printful products again. Now I’m wondering if installing the Woocommerce Product Search Extension will cost me more time fixing a problem too.
Given the impatience of most internet users, the ability to search by product attributes is a vital asset to an e-commerce store. If the customer can’t find the “orange” shirts they’re not going to scroll through your product catalog. They’ll just go to another site.

So far, my experience with Printful’s Woocommerce integration has been frustrating, to say the least. Any chance you will be addressing these issues and providing a solution?

Hey there,

Thank you for reaching out!
You asked if the local product attributes–not global ones prevent Woocommerce Product Search Extension from finding the products too?
The Printful plugin won’t necessarily work with all other plugins, which are available on WordPress, and some plugins can cause products to unsync or break the integration.

In your case, I suggest trying to use product tags for product search purposes – there are plugins that enable searching by product tags as well!

In my case using product tags will not be sufficient for search. I plan to create several products that are alphabet related. Tagging them with A B C is not going to help the customer locate all the items that match that particular tag in the color they want.
Right now I cannot even set up an attribute widget for searches, which is a feature of the Woocommerce plugin, not a separate plugin.

I’ve noticed that Printful uses a pipe between the attributes whereas Woocommerce uses a comma. Is this the reason why the plugins are incompatible and the attribute search widget won’t work? If so it seems like changing the separator for the attributes would be a simple adjustment to make to your system to help your customers improve their stores.

While on the subject of tags, for some reason only a few of the products with the same tag appear in the search. Any idea why?

Sorry please disregard the question about the pipes vs commas, I assumed that Woo used the commas since it accepts commas in CSV imports.
However I would appreciate your advice on how to improve the search capabilities for my site, the inability to use attributes for search and the limited products being shown when using tag search is a serious problem that must be resolved if I have any hope at all of operating a successful e-commerce store.

I am at the point where I have so many products set up on the store that experimenting with search plugins is not an option. If the sync breaks again, it would be well past the holidays before I could have all the products setup again. Should that happen, I would simply not use the integration at all and revert to manual orders. Not my favorite choice, but it would at least allow me to have the store open.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by mammaw95.

I contacted WooCommerce support about this problem. After checking my site, here is a copy of the email they sent to tell me what they found:

Thanks for providing access.

I’ve created a test product by duplicating an existing one. It seems that you are not setting the product attributes properly. Although the size attribute is stored normally under your Attributes, when you used it on a product, you basically created another attribute called size.

On my test product, I’ve used the size attribute that is stored in Attributes and which is also used by WooCommerce Product Search for filtering. Please check the settings for Test product to find out how to set an attribute. You need to select from the existing list already stored in your shop. Afterwards, if you choose a size on the filter, the result will only show my Test product which is correct.

In general, when you create a new attribute on a product, this attribute will exist only on this product’s scope. Even if you set the same name and the same values, it will still be a different attribute than the one found under Products > Attributes.

Apparently, this problem is not caused by another plugin. It is caused by Printful importing a color and size attribute for the products instead of simply using the ones provided by WooCommerce.

Hopefully, you will correct this problem soon. As you know, the ability to provide a decent search capability for customers is imperative for the success of an e-commerce store.

Hey there,

Sorry for the delay in our reply!
WooCommerce uses 2 attribute types, which are not the same as the individual attributes that we use – these attributes will be individual for every product.

I will forward your feedback to our team, but we do not yet have an ETA for an update to the attributes we push with our products to WooCommerce.

But you can definitely add this idea to our Feature Requests for a community vote.

Feel free to send us another message, if you have any other questions! ??

Hi Vita,

has this not changed yet? Any ETA for an update?

• This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by rosvaldas.

Hey there,

Thank you for your question!
We don’t currently plan to update the way we push attributes over to WooCommerce, but
that can certainly change in the future.
I have noted your feedback and forwarded it to our team.

Let me know if you have any other questions! ??

I just came across this thread while trying to figure out why I can’t use color swatches.

Unfortunately this is a deal breaker. I won’t be able to use printful on my store.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Fran Sanchez.

Any news about this feature ??

Not being able to use “filter by attributes” is really annoying. ??

Any update on this printful? Getting our site set up and would hate to experience the difficulties others are having if this is the case?

The way I just found to solve this is by removing the attributes that Printful creates by product when you publish your products.

Then add again the attributes but without using the pipe separator, just select each of them from the dropdown list populated with the attributes created in the Attributes section, when you add the values this way, there’s no pipe separator.

This solution is horrible because it deletes the values from every variation and then you have to select the right one for each one manually.

Hope Printful and WordPress fix this.

Hey there,

This type of update would involve a pretty prominent change to how our plugin currently works, which is why we don’t yet have any plans to change this.
Global attributes are global and have to be the same across all products to work properly, but the attributes for our products are created individually upon product push.

If you have any additional feedback, feel free to reach out to us via [email protected], we appreciate hearing from you!