You might sell fruits and vegetables based on weight, export products in boxes that involve dimensions in shipping, purchase dry fruits and nuts in bulk for resale or other business purposes.
So WooCommerce stores that sell groceries, FMCG, packaging boxes, shipping products know how product dimensions like weight, height, length, width play a crucial role.
But with hundreds and thousands of products, WooCommerce weight based inventory management becomes cumbersome. Especially, the search filters and bulk edits which are needed the most, traditional WooCommerce falls short here.
But not anymore. All that will change in one switch, for a lifetime. That’s why this article is here to bail you out from that cumbersome inventory management. Stay till the end.
Managing products by weight, length, height, width
For managing product variations that have defined attributes in terms of weight, height, width and other product dimensions, it becomes easy to locate them and make edits, whether for a single product or in bulk.
How would you locate a 500gms green apple package of 15*15*15 inches without the dimensions among your inventory? You get my point right.
Also, for calculating shipping rates for your products, it’s very important that you mention the weight and dimensions. Incorrect dimensions may lead to inaccurate shipping costs. And shipping by weight may not be possible by carriers.
Clearly, having inaccurate or no product dimensions and weight can create problems and you should avoid it at all times. So let’s see how to correctly manage WooCommerce inventory based on weight and other dimensions.
Why not to set weight and other dimensions using default WooCommerce?
You can enter the Edit product page under WooCommerce and move to the Product data section where you can see the Shipping tab on the left. Here, you enter the weight and dimensions of the product. Here you can also select the Shipping class and assign it to the product.
However, going to each product to set dimensions is a huge pain. It’s time-consuming as well. Moreover, the search filters are also not that good that can help you make quick edits, anytime.
For managing products, updating stock based on weight, bulk edit products for prices and other tasks, you need to look beyond the traditional WooCommerce way.
You need robust solutions that can help you out with all these. And that solutions are Bulk Variations Manager and WooCommerce Smart Manager.
How to create products based on weight and price variations?
To create any product variant, you need to create attributes first. And then go to WooCommerce > Products and start creating product variants and set prices.
For five to ten products, this won’t take much time. But to create hundreds and thousands of product variations based on attributes and price them, doing it for each product is the last thing you want to avoid.
We suggest using the Bulk Variations Manager plugin. You need to create weight and other dimensions as attributes and then create variations quickly based on it. You can also price these variations using differential pricing.
You can come up with hundreds of variations like these within minutes using the Bulk Variations Manager plugin.
- Red apple 250gms – $1
- Red apple 500gms – $1.5
- Red apple 1kg – $1.8
- Green apple 250gms – $1.2
- Green apple 500gms – $1.7
- Green apple 1kg – $2
and so on…
Get Bulk Variations Manager plugin
How does Smart Manager help manage inventory by weight and other dimensions?
If you have already created product variations, you can use Smart Manager to manage your entire WooCommerce store using an Excel-like spreadsheet with ease and peace.
All your products data, along with the weight and volume dimensions (length, width, height), shipping class will be listed in one place. If you can’t see them, simply enable those data columns. Here’s how.
Locating all Dell laptops above 1.5 kg, apple varieties under 1kg, editing prices for ovens exceeding 20 inches in length, changing the quantity of all product boxes of the same height…think of any operation and Smart Manager will get it done for you quickly.
But it’s biggest USP is the Bulk Edit or Batch Update feature. 20K+ users rely on Smart Manager daily to manage their WooCommerce store and accomplish hours of work within a few clicks (and a few seconds).
Learn more about Smart Manager
Inline edit weight and other dimensions
Want to increase or decrease height? Add a product with dimensions directly? Want to change the price, quantity, dimensions of the product? Smart Manager’s Inline edit feature allows you to make edits in the spreadsheet directly.
Powerful search to locate inventory based on weight and other dimensions
As mentioned at the start about the green apple example, you can use the powerful advanced search of Smart Manager.
You can come up with ‘n’ number of conditions and get all your desired products and edit them.
- Locate all products above a certain weight
- Find products having length above X and below Y
- Locate products having width and height
and others…
You can also club multiple conditions to locate products.
Go to Smart Manager > Products dashboard. Click on the Advanced Search toggle. Enter the conditions as shown. Your desired results will be in front of you. Then make inline edits or bulk edits as explained below.
Bulk edit products based on weight and other dimensions
The plugin provides six options each for bulk edit for each of these dimensions – length, weight, height, width.
- set to
- increase by number
- decrease by number
- increase by %
- decrease by %
- copy from (copy field-value from any other products in the store)
Let’s say you want to find all microwave ovens having lengths above 20 inches but heights less than 15 inches. And then set the weight as 20 kgs and increase the price of these products by 10%.
- Go to
Smart Manager > Products dashboard. - Use the
Advanced Searchtoggle to locate the products. Enter the conditions in the slide-over panel as shown in the above figure. - Click on
Search. Your desired products will be shown. Now select the products. If you want to update all the products in the search result, then simply check the checkbox in the header row of the Smart Manager spreadsheet / grid. - Click on the
Bulk editoption. It will open up a slide-over panel. - Select weight from the first dropdown, choose
set tofrom the second dropdown and enter 20. - Enter conditions to increase the price as shown.
- Click on
Update.
That’s it.
Export based on weight and other dimensions
If you want to generate stock reports of physical products based only on weight and volume dimensions, you can do that with Smart Manager.
Simply disable all the columns, keep only the dimensions-specific columns and click on Export. All your products’ data with the dimensions will be exported. You can refer to it whenever you want to. You can also export based on search filters.
You can even create & save a ‘Custom View‘ of the same columns and then give access to this ‘dimensions‘ dashboard to selected user roles. Learn more about custom views.
Other Smart Manager benefits
Not just weight and other dimensions, but you can manage orders, coupons, subscriptions, bookings, blog posts…any WordPress post type and custom fields quickly with Smart Manager. It’s fun and time-saving!
Inline edit, bulk edit, advanced search, CSV export, add and duplicate…it’s all there for all post types.
Conclusion
If you have a WooCommerce store that has dozens of products, Smart Manager is a life-saver.
Not just weight, but other attributes and anything you want to manage better and faster – price, orders, coupons… Smart Manager won’t fail you!