WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce WordPress platform that accounts for more than 23% of the total number of eCommerce websites over the world. This platform helps users have online stores with common managing tools such as creating a cart, shipping management, order management, payment, order, tax, etc.

Although WooCommerce provides many features and tools, it just adapts to the basic needs of an online store. If your product contains special but WooCommerce unsupported information, you have to use an extra tool to add custom fields. In this article, we will use Meta Box to help you do that.

What is Meta Box?

Meta Box is one of the top-notch plugins that help users create and configure custom fields for your WordPress website.


Meta Box has a free version in WordPress.org

If you just use the plugin above, you have to code yourself to have the desired custom fields.

But if you don’t want to code, a free UI from Meta Box - Online Generator is a solution. On the other hand, you can buy another extension from Meta Box, which is Meta Box Builder to have a UI to create custom fields in the back end.

We will give you all the instructions to use both in this article.

Create Custom Fields for WooCommerce using Meta Box

The first method: Create Fields using Online Generator

Step 1: Create Necessary Fields

Go to this link to create and configure the information for your needed fields.

First, move to the Fields tab and create the fields you want:

move to the Fields tab and create the fields you want

In area 1, find the type of fields you need to create, click the type of field you want, then a corresponding field will appear in area 2 for you to name and edit information.

Just choose the field type with the number of fields you want here!

Next, go to Settings tab and fill in the general information.

go to Settings tab and fill in the general information

Here, pay attention to the Post types. You can select Post or Page, or both are okay. Anyway, we have to correct this information on the code in the next step, so it doesn't matter what you choose.

Finally, click the Generate Code button below to get the code of the entire meta box and the fields you just created.

Step 2: Adding Code of The Fields to Website

Traditionally, to add fields to your website, in this step, you'll only need to copy the code you just received from the Online Generator tool into the functions.php file in your theme directory.

However, these are the fields for posts or pages. Products on your website are often different post types (for example, ‘product’), so if you want these fields displays in a post that is marked as ‘product’ post type, you need to correct that code a bit.

 Adding Code of The Fields to Website

 

In the marked position in the above image, replace (‘post’, ‘page’) with the post type name of your product. For example, I will edit to (‘product’).

Right after you change and save the file, you will see the created field display right under the post having the post type as a product.

The second method: Create Field Using Meta Box Builder

First, you need to install Meta Box Builder. After installing, you will have an interface to create custom fields right in the admin dashboard.

Find the menu Meta Box > Custom Fields and choose Add New to add custom fields for your website.

Create Field Using Meta Box Builder

In the interface to create custom fields, name the field group in position (1), and then the Meta Box will automatically create the corresponding ID (2) or you can edit it yourself. Next, choose the field type that you want by clicking Add Field (3) and selecting the field type in (4) or using the search bar.

the interface to create custom fields of Meta Box Builder

And then a corresponding field will show up for you to correct and fill in the information. Note that some fields may have more or less information to enter than others.

a corresponding field will show up for you to correct and fill in the information.

Repeat the manipulation (3) and (4) until you completely create all the fields you want.

Finally, move to the Settings tab and select the name of the post type that you want to display these fields in the Post types section.

the Post types section

Here, the post type of my product articles is Product, so I also choose Product in Post types.

Don’t forget to click Publish to save all the fields that you just created.

Now, return to the product information editing page (post type is Product), you will see the custom fields you just created display there.

the product information editing page

Displays The Value Of a Custom Field in Frontend

Add the following code to the functions.php file of the theme:

add_action( 'woocommerce_product_meta_end', 'extra_info' );
function extra_info() {
    echo "<div class='extra-info'>";
    if ( $meta = rwmb_meta( 'text_1' ) ) {
        echo '<div>' . __( 'Guaranty: ', 'twentytwenty' ) . $meta . '</div>';
    }
    if ( $meta = rwmb_meta( 'color_1' ) ) {
        echo '<div class="color">' . __( 'Color: ', 'twentytwenty' );
        foreach($meta as $value) {
            echo '<span style="background:'. $value .'"></span>';
        }
        echo '</div>';
    }
    echo "</div>";
}
  • woocommerce_product_meta_end ': is the hook of WooCommerce. This hook specifies the position to display the value of the field you are adding. You can refer to a few types of hooks with visual locations description here to find a hook that matches the position you want to place information.
  • 'text_1' and 'color_1': are the IDs of the custom field created above
  • 'Guaranty:' and 'Color:': are the prefixes I added to display along with the field value
  • 'twentytwenty': is the name of the theme I am using

Note: My 'color_1' the field has multiple values, so I need to use the loop to call out all the values. In other information fields that only have a unique value, you can use the code as the 'text_1' field.

After that, the values of the field I added display like this:

Displays The Value Of a Custom Field in Frontend

The color section of the product here is temporarily not shown, so I added some CSS to style this part.

.extra-info {
    display:flex;
    flex-flow: row wrap;
    margin-top: 10px;
}
.extra-info div {
    width: 100%;
    margin-top: 10px;
}
.extra-info span {
    width:40px;
    height:40px;
    display:inline-block;
    border:1px solid;
    margin: 0 10px;
}
.color {
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
}

My information looks quite okay. Here is the result:

The result after setting dis[lay the value of custom field

Final Thought

As you can see, by using both WooCommerce and Meta Box, you can add any type of information for any product you want. This work can become a lot easier with the help of Meta Box. Wish you a quality and great online booth with well-informed products.

You may also like this: How to Create Variable Products in WooCommerce.

13 thoughts on “Add Custom Fields for WooCommerce Using Meta Box

  1. Hi! Thanks for this guide, it's really useful. I have a problem when I tried to show the custom field in the product page. The options appears in the admin section when you edit a product, but in the public prodct page the value of the $meta variable is NULL. What i am doing wrong? Thanks in advance!

  2. Hello.
    Is there anyway to create a form and add information to chart adding custom data to a WooCommerce Order, and of course insert those into Cart Object?
    I mean , from front end in a single product meta .

    Thank you

  3. This worked out great for our eCommerce store but an update removed the fields. Is there a method that prevents that?

    1. Alex, if you pasted the code into your themes functions.php file, then yes, it'll get overridden with updates.
      You need to research how to add a "child theme" to your site, so you have a different functions.php, which will never get overridden by updates to the original theme.
      It's easy to do, just search "how to create a child theme in wordpress" ... sometimes popular themes have a standard child theme already made by someone, so search that out for your theme first.
      Cheers

  4. The screenshots are outdated, the online generator look completely different (different tabs, fields etc.), so the first part of the guide in completely useless. Please update.

  5. Hi,
    Thank you for this Guide..
    Is there a possibility to insert this own field with Oxygen Builder?

    Because there is no WordPress theme at Oxygen..

  6. Is it possible to add custom fields to WooCommerce Product Variations? I want to add a custom lead time for each variation.

    1. Currently, it is not possible to create custom fields for variations. But it is an interesting idea for the development team to support this.

  7. Does anybody know how to add the custom fields and the values to the cart, checkout and to also email them when the order is placed?

    1. You can contact WooCommerce support to ask for a/some hook, then you can add a callback function to that hook to show field value, which is associated with the product by ID.

  8. Hello There,

    Thanks for sharing such amazing and informative content. Really helpful and I think you have covered all the points for WooCommerce.

    Really great content.

  9. Hi

    I am completely customizing the single product page via a child theme. So, rather than adding via functions PHP the code to add the additional field output, I can just add the output to my child theme woocommerce file right?

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