Outsourcing tasks can make your e-commerce store more profitable. When managing a WooCommerce store, you will need to add new products regularly. Sure you can do it yourself but shouldn’t you be doing more important things? When you outsource creating products for WooCommerce, you save precious time.

Before you outsource creating products for WooCommerce, you have to get your information organized. This ensures that the task will be done properly.

Here are a few things you should prepare before handing over any WooCommerce product creation task.

Documentation

You need to have a “workspace” where can you document all the elements of the products. This can be in project management software like Asana or Basecamp or a Google doc. We at Wooassist have created a spreadsheet template that you can use for handing over product creation tasks to a WooCommerce expert. You can download it here. Just fill it with the information on the products that you want to add to your WooCommerce store.

After you have the same contractor do this for you a few times and they are starting to get comfortable with your product range, they will be able to fill out a lot of this spreadsheet themselves. You will be able to just send them the links to suppliers and competitors sites and save you even more time.

Optimizing Images for Product Pages

When selling online, having good images is crucial, since people need to see what they are buying.  Your contractor should have intermediate image editing skills.

It is best practice have uniform image sizes on your site. When you set product image dimensions in WooCommerce settings, always keep your images to that same resolution and have this written clearly on your product creation documentation. Check out this post to learn more about optimizing images for web.

Writing Persuasive Copy

If you are at all serious about selling your products online, then you should have persuasive copy. We recommend outsourcing a professional copy writer. Putting a great deal of attention to writing persuasive copy for your products will help you convert more. For creating good product descriptions, you can check out our post on how to write persuasive copy.

You can give your product creation contractor a go at creating the copy and you might be pleasantly surprised, but more than likely you will need the help of a professional. Once you find a copy writer you are comfortable with, your product creation contractor can manage this specialist saving you time.

Different Types of Woocommerce Products

In WooCommerce, there are different product types: Simple, Grouped and Variable products. If you are not familiar with these product types, you can check out the WooCommerce Documentation for Managing Products.

Simple Products

Simple products include: product name, SKU, inventory, price, sale price (if you are offering a discount), category, product tags if any, long and short product description, and any specific instructions.

Upload your images to a file sharing website and be sure to include the download link in the spreadsheet. Before you do that, make sure you use folders and appropriate file names for easy identification. There is a field where you can put the link in the spreadsheet we created. For sharing files, we recommend Dropbox or Google Drive.

Grouped Products

For Grouped Products, it becomes a bit more complex as this involves grouping two or more simple products. However, the information that you need to provide is no different from the information required for simple products.

If you are going to set the simple products as “not viewable individually”, you won’t need to provide images or descriptions for each simple product. You only need to state the product name, price and inventory for the simple products. All the other information should go to the grouped product.

If you are going to make each simple product viewable then it makes sense to outfit each simple product. And that means complete images, complete product descriptions and everything else necessary.

Variable Products

Variable Products deal with different product attributes. When sending information to your WooCommerce product expert, you should include the attributes for the product.

For example, if you are selling shoes, you can have several product attributes such as size, color or type (laces or straps). That will result in multiple variations of the product.  You need to provide information for each product variation. In some cases, different product varieties will have different prices. So make sure you include the price for each product variation. If you downloaded the spreadsheet we prepared, you just need to fill in the details.

Recommended Websites to Outsource Work

There are a lot of websites out there that provide freelance services and they have a lot of WooCommerce experts. We can recommend Elance and Upwork, formerly known as Odesk. And of course, we also highly recommend our team of WooCommerce experts at Wooassist. Our expert team from the Philippines can help you out with whatever problems you are having with your WooCommerce store.

Summary

This process takes time to develop. Clear documentation is the key, followed closely by developing a good relationship with a Woocommerce product expert. The better and more familiar your contractor is with your products the easier it will be for you to create the documentation.

It will take you longer to create these processes than to do the task yourself initially, but will save you hundreds of hours in the long run. I have 2 Woocommerce stores that sell physical products and I have not created a product myself for over 3 years. I plan on keeping it that way.