How do I manage multiple attributes?

  • Im not sure how to go about this. In my store I have 17,000+ products. There can be many attributes, but the attributes all depend on what type of product it is.

    For example, in my fishing reel category, there are Type: Spinning or Casting; Hand: Right handed or Left handed, etc.

    Then in the flashlight category, there is Bulb Type: LED or Other, Case Material: Plastic or Metal. And many, many more.

    All told there are probably 80 different attributes that can possibly be attached to an item. This makes it impractical to import every single attribute for each product.

    So my question, is attributes the way to group these? Or should I be doing something else such as taxonomies, custom fields, etc?

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  • I’m going out on a limb here and assuming you’re talking about a WooCommerce attribute, please correct me if I am wrong. I don’t know too much about WooCommerce, but from the brief reading I’ve done, you’re on the right track using attributes. An attribute pertains to multiple products, while a custom field is a little more specific. A great example I saw today was in regards to clothes, colour and size are attributes, but price would be a custom field.

    Thread Starter markh28

    (@markh28)

    OK, yes you are correct. The problem I am struggling with is importing all these attribute values. In the csv file, each attribute needs 3 columns. So 80 x 3 = 240 columns, times 17000 records makes a file that is 35MB and too large to upload.

    I also want a way to filter these on the shop page. But all the filter widgets I have seen, you need to specify a specific attribute to filter on. So in theory I would need 80 widgets on the shop page, one for each attribute, and any given item only has 3 attributes usually. It really seems like I am going about this all wrong. Does anyone have any suggestions?

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by markh28.
    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    It’s silly to specify all 80 attributes for each item when it probably only uses 3 or 4 of them. But of course variable CSV fields means more complex scripts to both generate and import the data. The data could also be chunked into multiple files so each file only contains a few thousand products.

    Because of the vast number of possible filter fields available on the main shop page, it’d be a good idea to suppress the filters on that page, only show filters on subsequent product category lists. The main shop page would mainly be a list (or grid) of product categories. Picking a category serves as the first filtering pass.

    I’m not sure what widget you are trying to use, but if it can only work with one attribute it sounds like the wrong widget. Ideally you need a widget that extracts all the possible attributes in the current product query and offers a selectable list of attributes for further filtering. If such a widget does not exist, maybe you could find one that’s similar and adapt it to your needs. For example, with the list of attributes, loop through them and do the single attribute widget output for each attribute. As long as you assign a new name for any altered widget code and place the altered code in your own plugin or child theme, you’ll be fine.

    If there are still too many choices, then like the main shop page, it’s too early for that fine a filter and coarser filtering is in order first, maybe by sub-categories.

    hi @markh82

    I am facing the samme problem
    did you find any solutions?

    tx!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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