How to configure multi-step products in WooCommerce

Offering product personalization options for your products can help you boost sales and increase the average order value (AOV). In fact, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers some sort of personalized experience for their customers.

And while offering product personalization is already an effective strategy, you can get even better results with multi-step products—where customers customize items gradually, unlocking new options as they go. This user-friendly approach avoids overwhelming choices and ensures relevance through conditional logic. Compared to standard personalization, this advanced method creates a smoother experience, boosting conversions and customer satisfaction.

Since WooCommerce’s default product customization options are quite basic and limited, you will have to use a plugin to create multi-step products for your online store.

In this post, we’ll cover the full benefits of multi-step products in WooCommerce and then introduce you to the best plugin for creating them on your ecommerce site, WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate. Finally, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide for creating your first multi-step product!

Introduction to multi-step products

Before we jump into creating multi-step products, it’s important to understand exactly how they work.

Multi-step products are products that let customers configure multiple options to create a bespoke, personalized product. For example, a customizable shoe from Nike lets buyers customize each part of the shoe and create a unique, one-of-one product.

Creating multi-step products on your WooCommerce site helps create a more simplified customization process and shopping experience for your customers. Instead of configuring all aspects of a product at once, they can make choices in a linear fashion, which is far less overwhelming.

Multi-step products can be useful for businesses that offer food deliveries, require users to fill out booking forms, or let customers customize products from the product page. For example, an online pizza shop can let customers select their base crust before displaying the sauce and toppings selection options.

Similarly, online stores that offer customizable apparel products with lots of extra options can divide and display all product customization options into “steps” so it doesn’t overwhelm shoppers.

Benefits of multi-step products

Let’s take a closer look at some of the major benefits of using multi-step products on your WooCommerce site:

• Increased customer engagement. Multi-step products make the shopping experience on your online store more interactive and enjoyable for customers. As a result, it helps increase customer engagement and satisfaction.

• Higher conversion rates. With a more simplified and efficient customization process for your WooCommerce products, it makes it easier for customers to make purchases. This can lead to a boost in sales and improve your ecommerce store’s conversion rate.

• Reduced product returns. Multi-step products allow you to offer a clear and easy-to-use customization process for your WooCommerce products. This can help reduce the number of product returns due to incorrect or unsatisfactory customizations.

• Increased average order value. Multi-step products offer the best way to display additional premium add-on options or product customization features for ordinary products. This encourages customers to spend more when shopping on your online store and helps increase the average order value.

Choosing the right multi-step configurator plugin

WooCommerce by default only offers basic product customization options when setting up custom products on your online store. You can use the product variations feature to create variable products that let your customers choose pre-made product variations.

While this can work for products that only come in pre-made variants, it doesn’t offer nearly enough options for letting customers personalize their orders.

In order to build a multi-step product configuration process for your WooCommerce site, you will need to use a plugin. Let’s talk about some of the key factors to consider when choosing a multi-step configurator plugin for your WooCommerce site:

• Wide range of customization options. You want to go for a plugin that lets you offer a wide range of customization options for your WooCommerce products.

• Easy-to-use, aesthetic display. The product creation process should be simple and easy to use, both for store admins and customers. A solid multi-step product configurator will let you quickly add personalization options and customize them to offer an aesthetic display on the front-end of your site.

• Straightforward product configuration. Ideally, you want to use a product configurator that makes the product setup process simple and doesn’t require you to code.

• Compatibility with your other plugins and themes. For multi-step products to look good on the front-end, you want to make sure the plugin of your choice is fully compatible with your theme settings and other important plugins.

• Competitive pricing. You want to choose a solid multi-product configurator that offers a wide range of features at a competitive price.

Introducing WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate

The WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin offers an all-in-one solution for setting up multi-step products on your WooCommerce site.

The plugin offers various customization options such as the ability to add 16 different add-on field types including checkboxes, dropdown fields, file upload fields, text fields, and even color swatches to your WooCommerce products.

The robust plugin lets you build dynamic multi-step products using conditional logic so you can display fields based on other field values. For example, only display step number two when customers are done making selections in the first step.

The WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin also lets you add other products in your add-on fields so it’s easier to configure product bundles, offer gift boxes, and display product upsells or cross-sells on the same product page.

You can also use color and image swatches to create a more immersive product configuration experience for your customers on the front-end. This way, shoppers know exactly what they’re purchasing, and makes it easier to visually differentiate between multiple product customization options.

In addition to all of these great features, WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate also lets you organize extra options or fields into groups. This can help streamline the customization process for your customers and encourage them to complete their purchases.

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate offers a basic plan, but to unlock the full potential of the plugin and the full feature set, you’ll want to opt for the Pro version. One of the major advantages of getting the Pro version for multi-step products is that you have more layouts that you can apply to groups.

Let’s take a look at some of the field group layouts you can get with the Pro version of WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate:

Accordion

The accordion layout lets you display field groups into dropdown fields. This way, shoppers can “open” or click on the dropdown field they want to make customizations to first.

Steps

The steps layout is a great way to divide and split up the customization process for your products into multiple steps.

Customers can move on to the next step by clicking on the “Next step” button once they’re ready to make the next set of customizations.

Tabs

The Tabs layout makes lets you display multiple field groups or product steps in separate tabs or sections.

Setting up multi-step products with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to set up multi-step products with the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin.

For this, you will need a WordPress site with the WooCommerce plugin installed along with some products added to your site. You’ll also need WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate to set up customization options for your products and display them dynamically on the front-end of your online store.

Step #1: Download and Install the plugin

Once you get the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, navigate to Plugins → Add New and upload the plugin’s ZIP file.

Click on the Install Now button and then Activate this plugin to continue. Once the plugin is installed and enabled, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Product Add-Ons and click on the Licence link from the top.

Enter the license key given to you at the time of purchase and click on the Activate this license button to continue.

Step #2: Setup a multi-step product

Navigate to the Products page from the WordPress admin panel to select any product you want to customize or create a new product by clicking on the Add New button.

After setting up basic product details, click on the Product Add-Ons tab under the Product data metabox to add extra options.

Click on the Add Group button to create a group of fields or a “step” for customizing your product. For instance, if you want to offer customization for your apparel products in three different steps such as “Design, Size, and Shipping Options”, you will have to set up three groups with relevant fields.

Now click on the Add Field button to start adding fields to each “step” or group that you want to add for your customizable product.

After giving your field a title, select the type of extra option you want to showcase for your product using the Field Type dropdown menu. For example, if you want to display specific design options, you can display them in image swatches or display a color selector to let users choose a color.

Depending on the field type you choose, you can click on the Add Option button to add specific choices for each field. You can even add individual prices for specific design options and display images so it’s easier for shoppers to make decisions. Similarly, you can also display a file upload field to let customers upload a graphic or logo on the t-shirt for an extra charge.

You can add as many fields to each group created for the product, and make fields Required, if you’d like. For example, customers must select the design of their choice as well as the size before they proceed to the checkout page. For this, you can select the Required Field? checkbox option when adding field values or options.

Once you’re done adding various fields and setting up multiple field groups or “steps” for a multi-step product, you can click on the Update button to save changes.

At this stage, the plugin will display all field groups on the same page at once. However, you can set up conditional logic rules to display the next “steps” or field groups once customers are done selecting customization options from the previous step.

In addition to this, the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin also lets you display fields and groups in various layouts.

Using the Display groups as dropdown field, you can pick from multiple layout types including Accordion, Lightbox, Steps, as well as Tabs. Ideally, you want to choose the one that best suits your product and the extra options it offers.

Step #3: Add conditional logic rules

To set up conditional logic rules for your multi-step product, click on the Add Condition button to get started.

This will let you display or hide fields based on certain values such as the choices consumers make in the “Design” step or the “Size” step. For a multi-step product, you want to hide the next step until the customer has made a selection in the previous step.

For instance, we can leave the first step as is and add a condition to the second step. We can set up the conditional logic rule in a way that only displays the field group or the set of fields in a “sep” when a customer makes a selection from the previous fields.

Similarly, you can create a conditional logic rule to display the last step once customers are finished with the first two. This makes it easier for WooCommerce store owners to create multiple product creation paths all within a single product page. In addition to this, you can also apply conditional logic rules to specific fields within your field groups or steps.

For a better understanding of the powerful functionality of the plugin, you can go over the documentation on conditions.

Step #4: Preview

Now when customers first land on the multi-step product’s single product page, they will have to first make their selections to view the other customizable options.

This helps create a more refined shopping experience and makes it easier for shoppers to make informed purchase decisions without getting overwhelmed with a lot of customization options.

Boost customer satisfaction with multi-step products

Setting up multi-step products on your WooCommerce site is a great way to encourage sales and improve the user experience. It also helps reduce the number of order returns on your online store due to incorrect customizations and increases average customer spend.

While default WooCommerce doesn’t let you create multi-step products, you can use a dedicated plugin like WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate to do so. This robust plugin is the best solution for setting up multi-step products on your online store due to its wide range of customization features, ease of use, compatibility with other plugins, and competitive pricing.

Ready to start configuring multi-step products on your WooCommerce site? Get started with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate today.