WooCommerce Product Table Review: Create Filterable Tables from Products

Do you need a simple but flexible way to create searchable tables of your WordPress WooCommerce products?

I’m a big fan of product comparison tables for giving your visitors an easy to use method for comparing multiple products against one another.

There are a number of quality table plugins out there. But if you specifically want to create responsive, mobile-friendly product tables for your WordPress WooCommerce store, the aptly named WooCommerce Product Table WordPress plugin from Barn2 Media lets you quickly create filterable, sortable product tables in a much easier manner than more general-purpose table WordPress plugins.

Much like the Posts Table Pro plugin from Barn2 Media that I reviewed, WooCommerce Product Table plugin is based on shortcodes, which you can now easily configure via a user-friendly interface.

What’s really nice is that your customers can also search, filter, and sort your tables in a variety of ways (that you control) so that they can quickly find the specific information that they need.

All in all, I enjoyed my time playing around with the plugin and found it to be easy and intuitive to use. Keep reading for a more detailed look at how this plugin makes it easy for you to create product tables for your site.

What Does WooCommerce Product Table Do?

As you can probably glean from the name, WooCommerce Product Table makes it easy for you to create a highly customizable filterable/sortable product table views (or lists) on your WordPress website.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about:

You have detailed control over the specific information that you display in your tables. You can customize columns, filters, functionality, and lots more. And you can choose to display products as per your wish. You can also choose to display all of your products, specific products, and specific categories easily from the options.

Your visitors can look further by searching, filtering, and sorting to find the specific product that they need by selecting the product attributes.

Once visitors find a product that they like, they can add it to their cart directly from your table.

Beyond that, every single table is, of course, fully responsive and mobile-friendly.

Why Is That Helpful?

I can see the WooCommerce Product Table being helpful for all kinds of WooCommerce stores. The developers specifically mention it as helping:

• Wholesale stores
• Product catalogs
• Order forms (we have a post on creating a WooCommerce order form)
• Restaurant orders

But really, the sky’s the limit here. You could use the plugin for everything from completely replacing your storefront (for more of a catalog approach) to quickly displaying specific products inside blog posts.

WooCommerce Product Table Review: Hands-on Look

Note – when I originally wrote this review – my main criticism of this plugin was that it lacked any type of user-friendly shortcode builder. As of WooCommerce Product Table 1.8, that criticism is no longer valid. In addition to a user-friendly shortcode configuration options, the plugin has also added some other new features, like style options.

As a result, I’ve updated this section of the review to reflect the plugin’s new, more user-friendly tool for building shortcodes. I’ll also leave the original review so you can see some different examples of various configurations.

After installing and activating the plugin, you have a few different interfaces for working with the plugin:

• Settings – this area lets you configure a number of defaults for your shortcode that you previously had to set up using shortcode parameters manually. Basically, this is the big usability improvement I mentioned in the intro to this section.
• Widgets – WooCommerce Product Table includes four widgets that help your visitors filter and navigate your product tables.

Beyond that – you’ll still insert your WooCommerce tables using a shortcode (you just won’t necessarily have to fiddle with individual shortcode parameters).

Configuring Your Table Style

To get started with WooCommerce Product Table, you’ll want to head to its settings area first:

There, the first thing that you can do is choose the design for your table.

You can either opt to go with the default design. Or, if you choose Custom, you’ll be able to add your own styling. You get enough styling options to customize the table layout and table design in terms of borders, font, background color, etc without making any HTML or CSS changes manually.

This is another new addition which eliminates the need to do things with custom CSS – good stuff! (You are, of course, still free to add custom CSS if desired).

Configuring Your Shortcode Defaults

Next up, you’ll want to actually configure the defaults for your shortcode. You can always manually change these for each individual shortcode, but this interface is much more user-friendly than requiring you to always manually use shortcode parameters like the earlier version of WooCommerce Product Table did:

Most of these options are fairly self-explanatory like description length which is nothing but the length of the short description displayed in the products list. But one area that deserves a closer look is the Search filters option.

When enabled, these let you choose which filters are available to users:

Further down the page, you can also configure more Advanced Options:

One neat thing here is the AJAX add to cart button – this lets visitors add an item to their cart from the product table without requiring a page reload. Further, you can enable the Lazy Load option if you have a store with a large number of products. The Lazy load uses AJAX to speed up your website’s loading time.

Inserting A WooCommerce Product Table On Your Site

With the old version of the plugin, you would’ve had to have created a lengthy shortcode with lots of parameters to create a good-looking table.

But with the new plugin, all you need to do is use the basic shortcode:

And you’ll see a fully configured table on the front-end (according to the settings you chose):

All in all, the process is significantly simpler in this new version.

Below – I’ve left the original hands-on review section because it still gives you a good look at how the plugin functions. Just remember that you’re no longer reliant on shortcode parameters – you can now do everything in the examples below using the plugin’s human-friendly interface.

Using the Basic WooCommerce Product Table Shortcode

While the functionality in this section is still accurate, the new version includes a more human-friendly way to configure your table (detailed above).

For the absolute quickest way to create a product table with the plugin, you can use the base table shortcode anywhere in your site and the table along with the product data will be displayed there.

The base shortcode is this:

[product_table]

It renders a table with four different columns for:

• Name
• Summary
• Price
• Buy (Add to cart button)

All of this information is pulled straight from your WooCommerce product info – you don’t need to enter anything manually.

You can also see that, even with the basic shortcode, your visitors can still search and sort the table.

Using Some Basic Parameters to Add More Functionality

While the functionality in this section is still accurate, the new version includes a more human-friendly way to configure your table (detailed above)

The base shortcode provides a functional, enough product table. But most of the time, you’re going to want to be able to go farther and at least include images in your tables.

Thankfully, that’s super easy to do with some shortcode parameters. You can even specify the exact size of your images.

To keep the same basic columns but add an image column that displays an 80×80 px image, you can use the following shortcode:

[product_table columns=”image,name,description,price,add-to-cart” image_size=”80×80″]

If you parse out what the shortcode is doing, you’ll see that it’s accepting two parameters:

• One that specifies which columns to include (five columns in the parameter equals five columns on the front-end)
• One that tells the plugin what image size to use

Unfortunately, I can’t go through every single parameter in this review. There are a ton of them. You can configure everything from more columns, different add to cart styles, product variations, custom taxonomies, and lots more. And you can even use custom fields in your tables if needed. You can easily create custom fields and display them in columns form in a table.

Further, you also can choose to only display specific sets of products, instead of every single product at your store.

You can view a full list here. And below, I’ll show you some of the neater things that you can do.

Add New Filters to Your WooCommerce Product Table

While the functionality in this section is still accurate, the new version includes a more human-friendly way to configure your table (detailed above)

By default, the table includes a search box, but no specific filters. If you’d like to give your visitors some more options above the table, you can use more parameters to add those to your table.

To let users filter by every column for which filters are available, you can use a blanket filters=”true” parameter like this:

[product_table columns="name,categories,tags,price" filters="true"]

As you can see, your visitors can choose from drop-downs to filter your table. What’s nice is that the filtering is AJAX – that is, no page reloads needed for your visitors to see the results.

If you don’t want to turn on every available filter, you can also use parameters to enable filters on an individual basis instead of the blanket “true” from my example.

Changing Column Widths for Your Product Table

While the functionality in this section is still accurate, the new version includes a more human-friendly way to configure your table (detailed above)

In the real world, you might want a bit more control of your column’s widths than the plugin’s automatically generated widths.

Thankfully, it’s easy to change column widths using the widths parameter. You can set widths as pixels, percentages, or let the plugin automatically calculate the width. You can also mix and match all three options as needed.

For example, to go back to my table from above, I could use the following shortcode to set the image column as a fixed 80px, the description as 10%, and let the plugin automatically calculate the widths for the remaining three columns:

[product_table columns="image,name,description,price,add-to-cart" image_size="80x80" widths=”80px,auto,10,auto,auto”]

Ok, using 10% as the description width isn’t very aesthetic – but it’s a good example of how flexible the plugin is in this regard!

If you’re wondering how the plugin knows which column to apply each width to, the order of the widths that you enter simply matches up with the order of the columns.

Showing Different Product Variations in Your WooCommerce Product Table

While the functionality in this section is still accurate, the new version includes a more human-friendly way to configure your table (detailed above)

If your WooCommerce site has variable products, you might be wondering how you can make that work within the WooCommerce Product Table. Thankfully, Barn2 Media didn’t forget about displaying variations.

You have three different options for handling product variations:

• A drop-down list for variations of products
• Separate rows for each product variation
• Only show variations on the actual product page

To choose your option, you need to, you guessed it, use a shortcode parameter.

For example, here’s how you can use the drop-down method (and what it looks like on the front-end):

[product_table columns="image,name,description,price,add-to-cart" image_size="80x80" variations="dropdown"]

Using the Included Widgets to Give Visitors More Control

Beyond the huge variety of shortcode parameters that the plugin offers, it also includes four different WordPress widgets that you can use to give your visitors more control over sorting and filtering your product tables. These widgets are part of the plugin and are not required to be installed as separate addons.

Currently, the plugin gives you four widgets for displaying:

• Price filter
• Active filters (as defined by your shortcode)
• Average rating filter
• Attribute filter (you can customize its functionality)

Here’s what those widgets look like on the front-end:

Three of the widgets are plug and play – that is, you just need to drag them over to start using them.

The only one that you need to configure is the attribute filter. There, you can choose which attributes to actually filter by, as well as some basic functionality:

Moreover, Products Table plugin comes with WPML plugin compatibility which means that you can use the leading WPML plugin to translate your product table into various languages.

How Much Does WooCommerce Product Table Cost?

WooCommerce Product Table pro version costs $119 for a single site license, $209 for up to 5 sites, and $429 for up to 20 sites.

With that, you get thorough documentation, as well as a year of updates and support. You’re also signed up for automatic renewals after your first year, though you can cancel that if desired (you just won’t receive support and updates past the first year).

Final Thoughts on WooCommerce Product Table

WooCommerce Product Table worked flawlessly for me in playing around with it. Yes, it’s a bit of a niche use. But if you need to create tables from WooCommerce products on your WordPress website, this plugin is absolutely going to save you a ton of time. It’s also incredibly flexible and gives you a ton of different ways to change up your tables.

Like Barn2 Media’s Posts Table Pro, the only area where I think it could be made more accessible is some type of graphical interface for building tables. Personally, I had no problem using the shortcode parameters (and if you’re a developer, you definitely won’t have any issues – it’s well documented).

But I do think someone who isn’t a developer or power WordPress user might struggle a bit with the shortcode system.

Barn2 Media listened! You now have a user-friendly method to create your tables, rather than relying solely on shortcode parameters. So my one criticism no longer exists.

All in all, if you need to create tables for WordPress products, save yourself some time and frustration by using WooCommerce Product Table instead of trying to hack one of the general purpose table plugins to meet your needs.

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