Should I be using variations to accomplish this?

Your example seems simpler than your described problem: the redwood mulch product has four grouped products, and allows you to select any quantity of any of the four, with free shipping for any and all of them.

You could emulate that very closely with a “Grouped Product” – Redwood 20 cu. ft. would be one product, Redwood 38 cu. ft. would be the second product, etc.

So, Woocommerce could very easily do just what your example does. A calculator is something else entirely, though.

Thanks for the reply. I think the solution you suggested is going to work out just fine. I was a bit worried about the SEO implications of a separate page for each bag size, but hiding the child products from search and the product catalog seems to do the trick.

On a side note (also SEO-related), do you know of an easy way to have the product pages NOT have the /products/ before the page title as part of the URL (other than using a re-write rule server-side)?

Thanks again!

Just curious, but what’s so bad about having /poroducts/ before the page title?

You should look at Settings -> Permalinks -> Optional Settings

but I think what I think you are talking about is in Woocommerce -> Settings -> Pages -> Permalinks:

Taxonomy base page Prepend shop categories/tags with shop base page (shop)

Product category slug
Product tag slug
Product base page

I was under the impression that having the /products/ before the page title in the URL would have negative implications for SEO. Typically, the farther ‘down’ the URL hierarchy keywords appear, the less weight they are given.

So, for example, https://www.url.com/products/keyword-keyword2/ would generate lower rankings for those keywords than https://www.url.com/keyword-keyword2/.

Those settings actually push things in the opposite direction (adding more levels, as opposed to removing them), changing it to: https://www.url.com/product/slug/keyword-keyword2/

The other settings affect only the category pages, it seems, and not the product pages (I think…I could be missing something).

If that is true, then Amazon.com is doing it all wrong. Have you seen their URLs?

That is for a Kindle Fire.

You may be right, I may be crazy … but I think you should just get those products up, have good descriptions written for them, with clean permalinks, a good xml sitemap, and just see how it goes.

It does seem that Woocommerce won’t allow “Custom structure” for permalinks, which was my first instinct to use.

So it seems that one way, it shows “shop” slug in the middle of the URL, and without that box ticked, it shows “product” in the middle of the URL. The category is easily gotten rid of, but not that one level of directory/structure.

So no, what I was saying was to untick those boxes if they were ticked, not to tick them when they aren’t ticked. But, it seems that with the shop slug, it just takes the place of the product slug, and only the category bit would make it a level deeper … and I wasn’t recommending that though I sometimes use it and like it since it helps me verify how things are sorting and tells me something interesting when I assign a product to multiple categories, but I don’t think most people need it.

Looking through some other people’s issues, I haven’t seen anything that will get rid of the /product/ or /shop/ part of the URL, sorry.

I think Amazon has the link weight to do whatever they want, hehe, though I bet they have a pretty expansive SEO platform. I am surprised by the obtuse-ness of their product URLs, to be honest.

In general, I think you are right, clean links and good content are much more important. I may look into editing the code to see if I can change ‘Products’ to something else (other than shop), but otherwise, I think I’ll just run with it and see how it goes.

Here is a link to one of the product pages on the staging site where we implemented this (I am pretty happy with it so far): https://www.x7tech.net/clients/groundsmart/product/black-rubber-mulch/

Thanks again very much for your help!

That is nice! I think rubber mulch is sort of conceptually gross, but the page is very clean!

I like that slider too, where’d you get that?

Thanks! It is a work in progress, but so far, so good.

That slider is called ‘Layer Slider’, and it’s awesome! It has a great UI for building. Those are the default placeholders there now, but I am eager to dive in to customizing that feature. On its own I think it is really cheap, like $15, but it came as part of the theme I’m using for that site, which was a nice bonus. I found the theme on themeforest.net: https://ignitethemes.com/themeforest/rhapsody_wordpress/

Rubber Mulch is actually pretty cool (not that I want to turn this into a sales pitch) for use as a playground safety surface or in decorative landscaping. It is super-safe for under playgrounds (better than just about anything else) and it lasts a long time while suppressing weeds and keeping pests away. It’s nice to not have to re-mulch every year. I totally get that it seems gross at first, though, because it is made from used tires. But the process they use to remove the metal and treat/color it (it involves magnets and flash freezing then shattering them – it’s pretty cool) removes any tire-related weirdness. It’s also nice to keep those tires out of landfills and fires!

Anyway, that is about twice as much as I meant to write about the product, because it’s really about the super-awesome developers making the site, right!?!