If there's one feature you'll find on almost any affiliate site, it's a product comparison chart. Seriously, I think a requirement for joining the Amazon Associates affiliate program is that you are able to create product comparison tables.
But despite their ubiquity, most people still laboriously create their product tables using page builders, custom HTML, or a table plugin like Excel or TablePress.
In this tutorial, I will show you an alternative solution which is a great option if you are using an affiliate site powered by WooCommerce.
You will learn how to create dynamically generated, searchable, filterable and sortable tables. Best of all, you will have full control over the information you display in your Affiliate Product Table.
Not only will this save you time, it will make things better for your visiteurs (and a better experience means more conversions!).
How to Create an Affiliate Product Board on WooCommerce
For this guide to work, you will need two plugins:
- WooCommerce - this is what you will use to manage your various affiliate products.
- WooCommerce Product Table - this is what you will use to display these affiliate products in a filterable, sortable and searchable table.
I will assume that you have both plugins installed and activated before starting the guide.
That is, while I'm going to show you how to add an affiliate product to WooCommerce, I'm not going to show you how to set up a store WooCommerce. If you need help, you can check out this comprehensive guide.
Step 1: Add your affiliate products to WooCommerce
Many people think that WooCommerce is just a solution to sell your own products. But it actually includes basic functionality for selling external affiliate products - no adjustments required!
To add your first affiliate product, go to Products → Add new in your dashboard.
The important thing is to find the Meta box of product data and change the type of product in External / Affiliate:
Then fill in the information for:
- Product URL - this is the URL that leads directly to the product.
- Button text – WooCommerce will display a button to link to where the visitor can purchase the product, rather than an Add to Cart button.
- Price - It is not mandatory . And if you link to Amazon, be sure to enter a static price, as it against Amazon Associates policy to have inaccurate prices ( which is probably due to the fact that Amazon is changing prices ). For other affiliate programs, you shouldn't have a problem.
Along with the affiliate specific information, you will also want to fill in general product details like:
- Title
- Description
- Image
- Etc
Once you've published your affiliate product, you can verify that the product page displays a button with a call-to-action to buy from an external store:
Now all you need to do is repeat the same process for as many affiliate products as you want to add.
I recommend using a Category or Tag to divide the products by subject, as it will come in handy later if you want to create multiple affiliate product tables for different subjects.
Step 2: Configure WooCommerce Product Table Shortcode
In order to display a table of affiliate products, you will use the WooCommerce Product Table plugin shortcode.
Although you can still manually edit the shortcode per table, the plugin allows you to configure the shortcode's default functionality by accessing WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Product Tables (Product Table):
We will focus on the settings that most apply to creating an Affiliate Product Table.
In the area of Design Table, you can configure a custom design for your table if you wish:
Or, you can always stick with the plugin's default style.
Going down a little, you can choose which information to display in columns in your table. Personally, I think the default setup is pretty solid. It will display:
- Product Image
- first name
- brief description
- Price
- Add to cart button ( direct link to affiliate store )
If you don't plan to display prices, you can remove the price column. Also, you can remove the short description as it can make your board a little cluttered if you have long descriptions.
Likewise, you can add additional columns to display more information. This Help article contains a complete list of potential columns.
These are really the only two things that you must consider. While you can always change the other settings to suit your taste, I think the defaults are pretty good for most uses.
Step 3: Insert WooCommerce Product Code
Now that you have configured the defaults, you can insert your affiliate product table using the shortcode [ product_table ] (without the spaces).
The only thing you need to add to your shortcode is a parameter to indicate the specific products to include (otherwise, the shortcode will show every available WooCommerce product, which might not be what you want).
To do this you can use tag = "Tag_name" ou category = "Category_name" .
For example, here is an example of using the shortode:
And this is how it looks on the interface:
Some points to note in this table when you build your table:
- The table will use the button text you enter when setting up your affiliate product. So you can use the same text everywhere, or make them different like in my example.
- If you don't enter a price, it will appear empty. For this reason, you should probably use pricing or not use pricing on all of your affiliate products.
4 Step: (Optional) Include Sidebar Filter Widgets
An interesting thing you can do with WooCommerce Product Table ( and can not do with other product comparison table solutions ) is to display filter widgets on the sidebar so that your visiteurs can interact with your array of affiliate products.
It's not necessary - but I think they make your board a lot more usable.
To add them, go to Appearance → Widgets and slide on the different widgets " Product Table layered Nav Filter« .
Once you do this, your visiteurs will be able to filter affiliate products.
To finish
This tutorial will not work for every affiliate site, as it depends on using WooCommerce to manage your affiliate products.
But if you use WooCommerce or have the option, you should know that this is a great way to display a more usable and flexible array of affiliate products.
And because it's dynamically generated, any new affiliate products you add to WooCommerce will automatically show up on the corresponding boards, which is much easier than having to manually edit static tables every time you want to add. or update a product.
