Variable SKU search customer end

Variations are not visible within the catalog alone you may have noticed. Do these SKUS **need** to be variable products?

If they were simple, searching would be easy via the default WP search.

Hi, thanks for replying. Yes these do need to be variable as i am currently putting together an office supplies site with furniture, all of which will have variations of size, colour, fabric etc. Our customers will need to be able to search for the product by sku/product code for ordering purposes. I would have gone down the route of just putting each item singularly but there will be around 10,000 product items so managing them needs to be as simple as possible. I cant see why the variable option being such a useful feature included in the plugin doesnt have any search support. Or is there a paid plugin from woocommerce that does this already ? Paying is not an issue as long as it works.

thanks
steve

Does an actual individual variation need a unique SKU, or would the parent SKU (variable product) suffice? Maybe a product example would help.

Hi, Yes here is an example.

Straight Desk H frame (from drop down menu select size)
754 x 746
1532 x 746
1786 x 746

Finish

Oak these are also drop down choices
Beech

So there will be a sku for a 754×746 beech desk ( H3B ) and a sku for oak version ( H3O ) and also the corresponding sizes also. So the 3 sizes i have given would be H3, H4, H5. The sku’s for all of these products and variations would be

H3B,H3O
H4B,H4O
H5B,H5O

A customer may need to search for one of these product codes, but because its buried in a variation, nothing comes up in the searches even if you assign each variation a sku code. The main variation only has an option for one sku code. I just need direction to getting around this, other than having to create whole ranges of individual products just so they are searchable, I hope i have explained this well.

thanks
steve

Ok, not as straightforward.

First you need a solution for searching on custom fields like _sku. https://searchwp.com/ can do this.

It cannot however search the hidden variations and show the parent.

Now, that could be written in custom code but would take a pre-query to get all matching variation IDs and then pass this to the main query. That could prove slow and possibly buggy.

The other way would be to use searchwp plugin above, and then add all child skus to the parent sku field.

e.g. H3B,H3O

etc. This would be a valid SKU and match if any part of it were searched.

Hi, Is there any reason why its been made this way as not to work ? I have seen this searchwp and still needs a large block of code to get it working. surely woocommerce have made a paid plugin ? I was hoping a plugin could sort this as i want to avoid having to rework coding and eliminate the need for fault finding should something go wrong. I know i’m being lazy but to learn to code to this level will take me a considerable amount of time and brain power, neither of which i have great amounts of :/ But thank you for your valued repsonse and time.

Thanks
steve

Search WP has a WC integration. It doesn’t require code to support product search.

Searching meta data is expensive, and I’m worried by including this in core we’d reduce performance for those who do not require it.

Sku searching within children products (I mentioned above) would be doublely expensive.

I am now very disappointed to read that only one sku really is allowed to be created and/or searched? Why is this? I have a client with inventory that (of course?) requires tracking of many variations? Isn’t the whole purpose of having sku assignment is the luxury of individual codes that describe and catagorize your product the way it is required by a company or sometimes law? -These are product codes with variations tracked individually so it can later be used for analyzing and tax purpose/etc?? Government type websites require items to be separated this way… I have noticed that woo commerce POS system/warehouse/and the new barcode app (I have all purchased) is very light on allowing any fields at all for variations such as this which are most certainly needed! Is there another way to save and categorize inventory with more variations? How can we get more fields added to the barcode area when creating sku codes?

HEMPRESS not sure what you mean. It’s 1 SKU per product.