How to Add Product Designers to WooCommerce
Do you want to let your customers design the products by themselves? If yes then, you have landed on the right article. Today we’ll show you how to add product designers to WooCommerce which allows customers to do so.
But before we dive into that, let’s better understand what product designers are and why you may want to add product designers to your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin with the basic idea of product designers in short.
What are product designers?
Whether it is a T-shirt, cups, bags, phone cases, notebooks, or any other items many people want these products to be personalized. That’s why Print on Demand (POD) is quite popular these days.
To help the customers to achieve their personalized products, many online businesses use a product configurator also known as a product designer. A product designer is a tool that the customer can use to customize an existing product according to their wishes and ideas. They can add lettering, change the colors, choose or upload any images according to their taste.
The shop itself only provides the basic product which can be adapted by the customers according to their wishes. But with the help of product designers, customers can bring their creativity to the product.
We hope this gives you an idea of product designers. Now, let’s have a look at some of the reasons why you may need to add product designers to WooCommerce.
Why add product designers to a WooCommerce store?
Above, we have seen that product designers are great tools to add to our WooCommerce store.
Undoubtedly WooCommerce is one of the leading platforms for a full-fledged online store. In order to offer customers a larger selection and more options, product designers can be a good addition to your WooCommerce store.
By integrating product designers in a WooCommerce store not only you’ll be accommodating the customers but you’ll also be providing a wide range of design options that the tool brings with it. Although only a limited selection of products is available, the customer ultimately has countless options for changing the product to their wishes and ideas.
Therefore, it is recommended to change your basic products into customizable products. So that your user gets individualized products in the easiest way.
By now, I hope you have understood the importance of product designers. Now let’s move on to the next step and add product designers to WooCommerce.
How to add product designers to WooCommerce?
The easiest way to add product designers to WooCommerce is by using a dedicated product designer plugin. You can find both free and premium plugins in the marketplace to integrate a product customizer to any WooCommerce store. And the best part is you don’t need any programming experience to use such plugins.
So let’s take a look at a couple of the best product designer plugins and how we can use them to design our WooCommerce products.
Zakeke Interactive Product Designer for WooCommerce
Zakeke Interactive Product Designer for WooCommerce allows you to integrate a product customizer into your store. Whether you sell apparel, print goods, merchandising, mobile cases, promotional gifts, or any other product, Zakeke allows your customers to customize the product. Products can be customized by changing or adding text, logos, images, and clip arts.
Not only that, the personalized products can be viewed in a live 3D. Since it is also a responsive plugin, your customers can use the product customizer from their mobile devices.
Key Features
- Access to over 140 million high-quality images
- View a 3D model of the customized product
- Includes more than 50 images filter and editing tools
- View lives changes
Price
You can download the plugin for free but you’ll have to upgrade to the premium version in order to connect the store with Zakeke. The starter plan starts at 6.99 USD per month.
Fancy Product Designer
The Fancy Product Designer is one of the best-selling premium product designer plugins in Codecanyon. You can change any products into customizable products so that the users can design the product themselves. Compared to other product designer plugins, this plugin has extensive design options in the front end which enable the customer to create the desired product quickly and easily.
Not only that, even with already extensive features, you have the option of adding additional addons to the functions. With the extra addon, you are more flexible in calculating the final price depending on the elements for the product created by the user.
Key Features
- Multiple media sources
- Allows integration with major multi-vendor plugins
- Color selection Panel
- Users can draw their own designs and use them
Price
Fancy Product Designer is a premium plugin that starts at 69 USD with 6 months of support and future updates.
These are some of the plugins with which you can easily turn your basic products into customizable products in WooCommerce. Now, let’s see step by step how to do so.
For this tutorial, we will be using the Zakeke Interactive Product Designer for the WooCommerce plugin since it is beginner-friendly. To use it, firstly we have to install and activate the plugin.
But before we begin, we highly recommend you to set up WooCommerce following all the steps and use compatible WooCommerce themes so that there won’t be any issues while following this guide.
Step 1. Install and Activate Zakeke Interactive Product Designer for WooCommerce
Let’s start and install the plugin. To do so, go to your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugin>Add New.
Now you’ll be redirected to the Add Plugins page. Here, type ‘Zakeke Product Designer‘ in the plugin search box. Once the result is displayed, click on Install Now, and following that click on Activate button.
With this, you’ve successfully installed the free version of the Zakeke Interactive Product Designer plugin. However, to connect the Zakeke with your WooCommerce store you have to purchase a plan that fits your requirement.
To purchase the premium version, you can visit the official plugin page or you’ll come across a step during the setup of the plugin where you can choose your desired plan. Then, you’ll have to install the plugin manually to your WooCommerce website.
Step 2. Connect Zakeke with WooCommerce
After installing and activating the plugin, you can find a Zakeke Product Designer on the left-hand side of the WordPress dashboard menu. Then, click on the added menu and click on the ‘Connect’ button.
Now, you’ll be given two options to integrate Zakeke into your WooCommerce. You can either log in if you have an existing account with Zakeke or you can sign up if you are a new user.
To sign up, all you need is your personal details like name, email, and set up the password. After you have added all of the required details in the field click on the ‘Create Your Account‘ button.
After that, you’ll be asked to allow access to create, view, and manage various actions on your WooCommerce store. Click on the Approve button.
Upon clicking that, you’ll be redirected to a page where you can choose a pricing plan or try the plugin for free for up to 14 days.
Also, remember that besides the Starter plan, if you choose any other plan then an additional 1.9% transaction fee will be charged on every sold product.
Step 3. Add Customizable Product
Finally, you can create and configure the product. For that, click on the Start to use Zakeke button.
You can either add a product from your store or select the option print-on-demand service.
For this tutorial, we’ll add the product from our demo store.
Next, you can see all of the products from your store. Select the product you want to configure. Make sure that you have already added the product to your online store beforehand.
You can upload different images of the same product from a different angle like the backside to create variations. After uploading the images, click on the Set Print Area button or Edit print area.
Here, you can set measurements for the design area with the help of a ruler. For the designs, you can choose several shapes like squares and circles for the print area. Once you are done with the print measurement, click on the Save button.
You can also set the measurements for variation of the products. Here we’ll skip the variation part and click on the ‘I don’t offer variations, go to the preview‘ button.
Upon clicking the clicking, you’ll reach the Review page. Here you can preview your product with all of its details. You can publish the product to your store or save the product as a draft.
Step 4. Setting The Print Methods
Next, you can set print methods by choosing various customization options for printing.
To set the print methods go to your Zakeke plugin dashboard. Select Printing Methods from the column and then click on the Add button.
Here you can choose between file format, file types, select various resolutions, several text effects, and so on.
In the end, you can select the products where the printing methods will be applicable. Make sure to click on the Save button.
Step 5. Using the product designer in WooCommerce
Now that we have added the product and set up the printing method let’s take a look at how we can design the product.
Simply select the product and depending on the theme you are using you can see the Customize button beside the product.
Upon clicking the Customize button, this will lead to a product designer interface where customers can design the product with text, images, fonts, styles, and colors.
Once the customization is done, they can share the design to various social platforms, save the design or download the design in PDF format or just add the product to the cart.
After that, customers can preview the final product and checkout as they would do with other regular products.
Bonus: Display product images in WooCommerce checkout
We have already presented you with one of the easiest ways to add product designers to WooCommerce. After customizing the product, customers can get a preview in the cart and also during the checkout.
Even though the product images of customizable products are displayed at the checkout, that’s not the case for regular products. Only product titles are displayed at the checkout.
This can be inconvenient for customers to verify if they have got the right products or not just with the product title.
That’s why as a bonus, we’ll provide this guide to adding product images to WooCommerce checkout.
The easiest and the quickest way to display product images in checkout are by using a snippet code. Let us assure you that you don’t need any coding knowledge for this method.
But we strongly recommend you create a full backup of your website and use a child theme because we’ll be editing the core part of the theme. You can either create a child theme with codes or you can use any of the child theme plugins available.
Now, let’s go ahead and open our functions.php file. For that go to Apperance>Theme Editor>functions.php.
Here, you can copy the following code add paste the snippet at the end of the functions.php file and update it.
add_filter( 'woocommerce_cart_item_name', 'quadlayers_product_image_checkout', 9999, 3 ); function quadlayers_product_image_checkout( $name, $cart_item, $cart_item_key ) { if ( ! is_checkout() ) { return $name; } $_product = apply_filters( 'woocommerce_cart_item_product', $cart_item['data'], $cart_item, $cart_item_key ); $thumbnail = $_product->get_image(); $image = '<div class="quadlayers_product_image_checkout" style="width: 50px; height: 50px; display: inline-block; vertical-align: middle;">' . $thumbnail . '</div>'; /* Above you can change width, height, and alignment of the image to however you want*/ return $image . $name; }
And that’s it. After updating the file, you can preview the checkout page.
This snippet adds a product image to the checkout page in inline style. Similarly, you can display the product image in various other styles. If you want to learn how to do so, check out this guide to make your checkout page user-friendly.
Conclusion
So this is how you can add product designers to your WooCommerce store. They can be very useful to your customers to design the products by themselves.
To summarize, the easiest way to add product designers is by using a plugin. While there are several tools and many plugins, using a product configurator by Zakeke is one of the best options.
Also, we have provided a brief guide to displaying product images at the checkout. Similarly, if you want to customize your checkout page, we have a detailed guide to editing the WooCommerce checkout page using a variety of methods. You can even use plugins like Checkout Manager for WooCommerce and Direct Checkout for WooCommerce to do so without using any codes.
So can you add product designers to WooCommerce now? Did you follow our guide? Let us know about your experience in the comment section.
In the meantime, if you want to read more of our WooCommerce blogs then here are some articles.