Using the unique product identifier function
Setup Unique Product Identifier fields in WooCommerce
Unique Product Identifiers (UPIs) are essential to differentiate your products in the global market. They not only uniquely distinguish your offerings but also facilitate matching search queries with your items. These identifiers are provided by the manufacturer, meaning if you’re selling the same product as another retailer, you’ll share identical UPIs. Common types of UPIs include Brand, GTIN (UPC, JAN, EAN, ISBN), and MPN.
WooCommerce doesn’t inherently support the addition of UPIs to your products. Typically, this requires an additional plugin. However, given the importance of UPIs across numerous channels, we’ve integrated this functionality into our plugin. This means you won’t need to install a separate plugin to handle UPIs – our solution takes care of it all.
Third-party UPI plugins
For those looking to enhance their WooCommerce site with Unique Product Identifiers (UPIs) using external plugins, our Product Feed Manager offers seamless integration with many such plugins. This guide will walk you through the process of incorporating UPI fields from third-party plugins into your product feeds, ensuring comprehensive compatibility and functionality.
Utilizing Compatible Plugins:
- Several plugins are available that introduce UPI fields to WooCommerce, and many are directly compatible with our Product Feed Manager. Once installed, the data from these UPI fields will appear in the source dropdown menu within the product feed editor, ready for use.
Incorporating Unsupported Plugins:
- In instances where you might be using a plugin not directly supported by our feed manager, there’s still a straightforward method to link the UPI data to your product feeds:
- Identify the Meta Key: The crucial step is to determine the ‘meta_key’ used by your third-party plugin to store UPI data in the WordPress database.
- Locate the Meta Key:
- Add a UPI value to a new product within your WooCommerce store.
- Access your site’s database, navigating to the ‘wp_postmeta’ table, preferably using a database management tool like phpMyAdmin.
- Organize the entries by ‘meta_id’ in descending order to easily locate the most recent entries.
- The ‘meta_key’ at the top of this sorted list should correspond to the UPI field added to your product.
- Apply the Meta Key: With the ‘meta_key’ identified, construct a filter string using the format ‘%meta_key%’, where ‘meta_key’ is the prefix of the actual key you’ve found. Enter this string into the “third-party attributes” field on the plugin’s settings page.
Adjusting Plugin Settings:
- After entering the filter string, it might be necessary to manually search for how the attribute appears in the source list, as this can differ between plugins.
Note:
While our Product Feed Manager strives to offer extensive support for third-party plugins, the vast diversity of available plugins makes universal support challenging. The “third-party attributes” feature is designed to bridge this gap, allowing for the integration of virtually any plugin data into your product feeds.
By following these steps, you can effectively integrate UPI data from both supported and unsupported third-party plugins into your WooCommerce product feeds, enhancing the richness and accuracy of your product listings across various marketing channels.