Block-based Product Creation Experience

Our product management has served us well but hasn’t kept pace with the expectations of our users. We want WooCommerce to be at the cutting-edge of ecommerce experiences, so we started a project to rethink the product creation process.

We’ve developed a new product management experience utilizing the Blocks API, for a more customizable product creation and editing process. It uses blocks, templates, and patterns to lay out the form, making it simple and highly extendable. For the most part, extending and registering blocks for the new product editor is the same as the block and site editors on WordPress, with some minor differences.

The new structure will help the editor grow together with the store. No matter how many plugins are installed, they all have a relevant space on the screen. We want to make the experience easier for users, help them find features more efficiently, and create a framework for more flexibility.

The new editor is available as a Beta feature, supporting all the core product types (simple, variable, grouped, external/affiliate) and traits (physical, virtual, downloadable). If you edit unsupported product types, you will be redirected to the existing editor. Support for additional features is in development.

The new product editor experience is currently available under the New product editor feature flag in WooCommerce settings. To try it out, enable this feature in WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features and navigate to Products > Add New. Please note that currently, the editor only supports simple and variable physical products.

This experience is being released incrementally under a feature flag, starting with WooCommerce 7.8, released on June 13, 2023

The feature flag was auto enabled for a sub-set of new stores* as part of WooCommerce 7.9, released on July 11, 2023

The initial iteration of variations management support was released with WooCommerce 8.2 (October 10, 2023). We slightly increased the subset of new users exposed to the new experience in this release. 

The Virtual and Downloadable options were introduced in WooCommerce 8.4 (December 12, 2023). The subset of new users exposed to the new experience was slightly increased in this release. 

In WooCommerce 8.5 (January 9, 2024), we released the support for External/Affiliates and Grouped products. We also slightly increased the subset of new users exposed to the new experience.

The Linked Products features (Upsells and Cross-sells) and the Product Type selector were released in WooCommerce 8.6 (February 15, 2024).

_{*stores that are created on or after July 11 with usage tracking enabled}

Resources

The new product editor experience is currently available under the New product editor feature flag in WooCommerce 7.8 settings. To try it out, enable this feature in WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features and navigate to Products > Add New. Please note that currently, the editor only supports simple products.