Build products from the range

Pick the colours and sizes you sell in the range, choose a shape, and press Build it in my shop. You get real WooCommerce products, saved as drafts, already connected to the supplier’s codes. The stock is right from the first minute.

Three shapes, because a shop is not always variations

Choose per build. You can mix shapes across your catalogue.

One product with colour and size options. The usual answer. One page, one listing, colour and size chosen on it. A ten-colour, six-size garment is one product with sixty variations.

A product per colourway, sizes as variations. Right when each colour is its own thing in your shop: its own page, its own photograph as the main image, its own place in a category. A ten-colour garment becomes ten products of six sizes.

Plain products per colourway, no variations. For shops that drive the choosing from a product options plugin rather than from WooCommerce variations. You get a simple product per colour and let the options plugin do the rest.

The third shape wants an options plugin

Plain products with no options give a shopper a hundred loose listings and no way to choose between them. StockBoss says so when it notices you have no options plugin installed, and lets you carry on anyway. Plenty of people install the options plugin after the products.

What you get

Everything that makes the difference between a product and a stub:

• The right SKUs, matching the supplier’s codes exactly. The stock connection is correct without any matching step at all.
• Sizes in the right order. WooCommerce sorts new terms alphabetically, which gives you 3XL, L, M, S, XL, XXL. StockBoss keeps the order your supplier lists them in, which is the order they belong in. No computer can put S, XXL and 28/R back in order once that is lost.
• The photographs you chose, fetched from the supplier. See the next section.
• Weights, converted into your shop’s own unit. A supplier publishing grams into a shop working in kilograms is how you get a half-tonne hoodie.
• Barcodes, written into WooCommerce’s own GTIN field, where the supplier publishes them.
• Today’s stock, on every variation.
• Colour swatches, if AddOnBoss is installed, filled in from the supplier’s real colour values rather than guessed.

Before you press anything, the build panel’s What arrives with a build fold-out lists all of this for the style you are looking at. It counts from the supplier’s own data, so it says “every item”, “3,410 of 3,562 items”, or “none in this supplier’s data”. A supplier who sends no weights reads “none” here, instead of surprising you on the product afterwards.

Sixty variations with all sixty photographs takes about four seconds, measured on a real store.

Choose the photographs

Suppliers often photograph a garment several ways: front, back, side, a detail shot. The build panel shows each kind as a tile with a real picture on it, and a count of how many colours have one. Tick the kinds you want.

• The first ticked kind becomes the product photo. The rest go into the product’s gallery.
• The panel counts the fetch for you: “A build fetches 40 photographs, one per colour for each selected kind.”
• Each photograph is fetched once, and existing photographs are never replaced.

Leave just the first tile ticked and you get the classic one-photo-per-colour build.

Prices

The default is to leave prices alone, and that is deliberate.

The range folded from a stock file has codes and quantities in it, and no costs at all. Most wholesalers publish what is in the warehouse, not what they charge you. A default of “work it out from my cost” would quietly build sixty variations with no prices on them.

Where your supplier does publish costs, you can build a price from them:

• Multiply the cost, or add to it.
• Round to a charm price. Rounding is always upward, so a rule can never round a price below the number it worked out.
• Nudge per size, so the bigger sizes carry a little more. Applied before rounding.
• Choose the basis where your supplier quotes more than one. A shop buying by the carton prices off the carton cost, not the single.

What you choose is remembered. A shop-wide markup is typed once, not re-typed on every product. It is saved when you build rather than as you type, so a half-finished rule is never the one that runs.

Check the example line

A markup rule is easy to get an order of magnitude wrong, and the live example under the fields is what catches it. Typing 60 into a multiply box gives you very expensive hoodies, and only the example says so before you build.

SKUs

You can build SKUs to your own pattern rather than taking the supplier’s code, if your warehouse or your accounts expect a particular shape.

A SKU already in use elsewhere is left alone and reported by name. It is never taken from the product that had it.

The tray

Walking a range one product at a time and building each one is fine for three products and miserable for thirty. The tray is for the thirty.

A plus on every row queues a product with every colour it has stock in. From inside a style, the build panel queues exactly what you ticked. A bar along the bottom holds what you have queued and builds the lot in one press. It holds forty products; build those and carry on.

Build all opens a review sheet first. Forty products on one press is a lot to take on faith. So Review the build shows you what is about to happen: how many products, and how many variations in total. Each product is listed with its picture and the colours and sizes it will be built with, above the settings the whole batch shares. Read it, then confirm, and the building starts.

It runs one request per product. Twenty products in one request is a gateway timeout on ordinary hosting, and it leaves you with half a queue and no idea which half. One at a time survives, and gives you a progress bar for free.

The tray is yours and it keeps. It is a working list, so it is still there tomorrow. What builds successfully leaves the tray. What fails stays put with the reason next to it, so you can fix and retry rather than starting again.

Building the same style twice

Safe, and proven rather than assumed. On a style you have already built, the button itself says Update it in my shop instead of Build. The screen always tells you which of the two is about to happen. StockBoss finds the product you already have, by supplier and code, and updates it in place.

• No second product appears.
• A price or SKU you set is untouched. Set on creation, never moved afterwards. Your own numbering does not vanish because somebody pressed build.
• Ticking a colour you did not have adds it as new variations.
• Ticking fewer colours deletes nothing. A variation carries order history with it, and narrowing a selection is not a request to destroy anything.

What it will never do

• Set a price on a product you already had. Trade cost is what you pay, not a starting point for what you charge.
• Overwrite a swatch you chose by eye. If you picked the colour yourself, you had a reason.
• Replace a photograph. New kinds are added; nothing you have is taken away.
• Delete a variation. Ever. Deleting one takes its order history with it.