Using Attributes and Variations

A further thought – is there a way to created “nested” variations? Example – 4 major variations (one for each of the print categories) and 4 types of paper in each major print category and be able to select any variation without creating a product for each major group of fine art prints.

Here’s the problem: If this were a coat, for example, you would select color, size, and whatever else. Logically, this is a series of “ands:” size + color + length or whatever. What I need is Category 1, or 2, or 3, or 4. How can I do that?

I’m not sure what the difference is between your two examples here. Can you explain what you mean?

A further thought – is there a way to created “nested” variations? Example – 4 major variations (one for each of the print categories) and 4 types of paper in each major print category and be able to select any variation without creating a product for each major group of fine art prints.

You would need a separate plugin for this. I don’t know of any plugins from us, but there are some third party options available. This is one such option.

Well, let me try again
Lets start here: We are fine art photographers and we want to sell prints.
Not everyone can afford or wants to afford an expensive print.
We have four different classes of prints each a different price. They are called Graphite, Onyx, Obsidian, Black Opal. If you want to buy a photo of a waterfall, you can select 4 different papers (metallic, gloss, etc.) in each of the four different classes of prints. And, on top of that, you can select different sizes.
Initially, I set up Woo so that each class of print was a separate variation. Made sense to me.
However, when I do that, Woo expects one option (paper type) to be selected for each class or group of prints. I’ll check out the plugin

Oh, I see. Yes, I think the conditional product options might be what you’re looking for. There is also the Composite Products plugin that might work. That is more for building product kits, where you have multiple products and certain rules about which products are required with which others, which are mutually exclusive, which are part of a certain category that the user needs to choose one of, etc.

You could use this for your store, and have each attribute type be a different “product,” but keep the attributes/variation products hidden from the catalog so people couldn’t buy them individually and could only buy them as part of a composite product in the right combination to make an actual print with the desired properties. I’m not sure if that made sense, but Composite Products would be worth looking into as well.

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved. Feel free to start a new thread if you have any further questions!