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.
Check out the how-to video about the UPI function of the product feed manager.
Third-party UPI plugins #
There are multiple plugins available that can add UPI fields to WooCommerce and are directly compatible with our plugin. The data from these fields will be visible in the source dropdown within the product feed editor. If you’re using a plugin that we don’t directly support, you can still connect the data to our plugin by following a few steps.
It’s important to note that it’s unfeasible for us to support every third-party attributes plugin available. Therefore, we’ve included the “third-party attributes” option, designed to accommodate any third-party plugin. However, you’ll need to know the ‘meta_key’ used by the plugin to store attributes in the database.
Here’s how to locate the correct (meta)key:
- Create a new product and add a value in the custom field.
- Access your database and navigate to the ‘wp_postmeta’ table (using a tool like phpMyAdmin).
- Sort the table based on ‘meta_id’ in descending order.
- The ‘meta_key’ at the top should correspond to your custom product field.
Once you’ve identified the ‘meta_key’, you can create a filter string like ‘%meta_key%’ (just using the key’s prefix). This string should be entered into the “third-party attributes” field located on our plugin settings page. After doing so, you will need to search for how the attribute is displayed in the source list as this can vary depending on the specific plugin used.
