Introducing Brands

We’re excited to announce a major enhancement to WooCommerce. The popular Brands functionality, previously available only as a premium plugin, will now be integrated into WooCommerce core. This change allows us to provide an essential ecommerce feature out-of-the-box and opens up new possibilities for developers and store owners alike.

Starting with WooCommerce 9.4, to be released October 21, 2024, all functionality previously offered by the WooCommerce Brands plugin will now be part of WooCommerce core, and available to use for free.

What’s included?

The new Brands feature lets you create and manage brands for stores and assign them to products, similar to Categories. With brand short-codes, widgets, and blocks, you can create dedicated brand pages, display brand details on product pages, and help shoppers navigate stores using brand-specific navigation menus. Additionally, you can now limit coupon use to specific brands.

Technical implementation

Brands are implemented as a custom taxonomy, similar to product categories. This allows for seamless integration with existing WooCommerce hooks and filters. Developers can extend and customize Brand functionality using familiar WordPress taxonomy functions and WooCommerce product data management APIs.

Enabling the feature

Although we are adding this feature n WooCommerce 9.4, it will be initially disabled for all users. To enable Brands in a store, add the following snippet to the functions.php file of your active theme or via a plugin like Code Snippets:

add_action( 'init', function() {
    update_option( 'wc_feature_woocommerce_brands_enabled', 'yes' );
    update_option( 'woocommerce_remote_variant_assignment', 2 );
} );

The feature will be enabled for all users, starting with WooCommerce 9.6 (scheduled for December 30, 2024).

Migration guide

For sites currently using the WooCommerce Brands plugin, we’ve ensured a smooth transition path. When you upgrade to WooCommerce 9.4 and enable the core Brands feature, existing brand data will be automatically migrated. However, we recommend testing this process on a staging site first. Custom code interacting with the Brands plugin may need updates to work with the core implementation.

Known issues

To ensure a smooth transition for WooCommerce Brands plugin users, we merged the codebase as is, without changing any features or updating any flows. A list of open issues about this feature can be found here.

Testing the feature

The feature is now part of the official beta testing in the WooCommerce 9.4 beta, and can be enabled by the above snippet. We highly recommend testing this feature on your staging environment.

We’ve kicked off a GitHub Discussion for this topic, and we look forward to learning about your experience with this feature and any feedback you share with us.